The Legacy of Exclusion: How Post-Colonial Damascus Inherited an Urban Structure of Marginalization #4

📘 This article is part of the series "Urban Transformation – In Post-Colonial States: Damascus as a Model", which aims to deconstruct the historical and political structures of urban transformation in Damascus as a vivid case of Global South urban crises.

A historic photo from Marjeh Square in Damascus, early 1950s, showing part of the urban expansion on the slopes of Mount Qasioun and the Muhajireen district.

At the end of Chapter One, which focused on the pre-independence period, a central insight emerges: what is commonly labeled the “post-colonial period” was, in reality, a veiled continuation of an exclusionary structure that began with the 1858 Ottoman Land Code. The newborn republic did not present an alternative urban vision—it inherited a system of land, space, and administrative control and reactivated it under new nationalist slogans, leaving its core mechanisms untouched.

This article does not simply recount how informal settlements emerged as “unlicensed areas,” but rather exposes how that very label belongs to an authoritarian lexicon—one that denied peripheral populations their rights to representation, expansion, and recognition, entrenching the urban fabric as an instrument of political and social control.

As we argue here, the city is not merely about architecture or form—it is a system for producing power. To read Damascus’s topography is to read the contours of political control, networks of patronage, and structures of dependency. Post-colonialism did not rewrite public space; it preserved the colonial geography of dominance and left the ruling elite to serve as agents of this old–new project.

In this conclusion, we examine the heavy legacy left by the first chapter of urban transformation—a legacy that still governs the tempo of Damascus to this day.

1. Post-Colonialism: Structural Continuity, Not a Break with the Past

When the Syrian Republic’s flag was raised over government buildings at the end of the French mandate, nothing fundamentally changed in the city’s power geography. The same maps remained, along with spatial divisions and the deeper function they served: to maintain the city as a mirror of an unequal relationship between a fortified, dominant center and marginalized, expansive peripheries—disciplined geographically before they were disciplined politically.

In essence, the “post-colonial” period was a continuation of agency-based governance, where local elites operated the tools of control designed by the colonial power—now under national flags and rhetoric. The exclusionary structure was not dismantled; it was repurposed:

• Licensing remained a tool of selective permission and prohibition;

• Privilege continued to define access to power;

• Urban planning functioned more as a mechanism for separation and fragmentation than for participation and integration.

No real questions were raised about reconstructing the relationship between inhabitants and their right to the city. The urban belt remained intact; the radial plan unchallenged; the concept of a fortified center surrounded by voiceless peripheries left unchanged. Any such transformation would have jeopardized the very structure upon which post-colonial authority rested.

2. External Alliances and the Manufacturing of Political Blind Spots

The formal withdrawal of colonial powers from Syria was not a moment of sovereign rebirth—it was a moment of role redistribution within the agency framework. Sovereignty was not exercised as national control over urban planning and administration but was repositioned through regional and international alliances aimed at preserving authority—not the social contract.

The ruling elite secured their legitimacy not from the people, but from external actors—be they French, British, or later Soviet. Maintaining these external alliances became the primary method for preserving power, rather than building an inclusive political system.

Within this dynamic, the capital was meticulously redesigned to serve this imbalance. The city was not envisioned as a shared civic space, but rather as a stage for control—a hardened structure that silenced local voices and blocked the formation of a genuine political field.

Urban licenses and privileges became tools of domination, not instruments of service delivery. The critical question was no longer simply where people could build—but who was allowed to build, who held the power to expand, and who was permanently excluded from the game. Neighborhoods, buildings, even road networks became spatial expressions of political alliances and extensions of power maps.

"Serviced" neighborhoods were not just planned areas—they were elite sanctuaries, designed to help reproduce privilege. Meanwhile, the peripheries became storage zones for surplus populations, stripped of rights and subject to manipulation or fragmentation as needed. Public housing projects during this era—such as “popular housing” or “new suburbs”—functioned primarily as containment mechanisms, not vehicles for rights redistribution.

In this framework, urban expansion became a method for managing the margins—not integrating them. There was no real vision of the city as a living public domain—only a landscape of control, sharply divided between licensed zones with clear political and economic functions, and unlicensed zones left in a state of “managed exception,” always ready for political instrumentalization.

3. The City as a Control Network: Reading Topography as a Political Map

To read the topography of Damascus today is to read more than geography—it is to read power: the architecture of political control and the alliances that sustain it. Urban form in Damascus was never haphazard; it has always been a precise reflection of power production and spatial governance.

From the 1930s Ecochard Plan through the post-independence expansions, Damascus adhered to the logic of the “fortified city”: a small, compact, well-serviced center, surrounded by a belt of suburbs designed to absorb social pressures but excluded from the political, cultural, and economic fabric of the city.

Bourgeois neighborhoods like Malki and Abu Rummaneh were planned as elite enclaves—fortified with high-quality infrastructure, secure services, and governance mechanisms tailored to elite interests. In contrast, neighborhoods on the city’s fringes—Qaboun, Barzeh, Jobar, Qadam—were designated as spaces of labor or silent settlement, fulfilling specific functions but excluded from political or economic self-determination.

Control extended beyond zoning—it permeated space itself:

• Through a tax regime that drove the lower classes into the informal economy;

• Through administrative divisions that regulated the formal domain and left the informal to security oversight;

• Through exceptional planning that made the law a selective tool, not a universal system.

In this sense, formal space wasn’t just legally licensed—it was where political decisions were made. Informal space, by contrast, remained fluid and politically repurposable.

Contrary to common belief, informal space was often the most controllable. Its legal fragility made it politically malleable—ready for mobilization or suppression in times of crisis, easily contained when needed. This explains why excluded neighborhoods became spaces of agitation or repression without destabilizing the regime’s structural base.

This is the essence of Damascus’s spatial strategy: producing a vast margin, then managing it not through integration, but via direct security governance—keeping the threat of dismantling ever-present as a strategic option.

In this model, geography is not neutral—it is the very language of power, written in asphalt, walls, and zoning lines.

4. Informal Settlements as a Sovereign Narrative: Between Violation and Exclusion

In official discourse, informal settlements are labeled “unlicensed housing”—as if they were mere anomalies or accidents of disorderly development. But this label is part of a deeper system of control and exclusion.

Informal areas in Damascus were never “outside” the urban plan—they were its direct byproduct, shaped by a planning regime designed for isolation, not inclusion. These spaces did not emerge randomly—they were consequences of policies that confined the formal city to narrow zones managed through licensing and privilege, pushing the rest of the population to scramble over a precarious spatial fringe, outside both legal and political recognition.

Labeling these neighborhoods “unlicensed” does not explain their reality—it erases it. It casts residents as culprits when, in fact, they were systematically excluded by a planning logic that denied them political and civic visibility.

In this system, “unlicensed housing” becomes the legal name for political exclusion. Residents of informal neighborhoods are not violators by chance—they are excluded by design, within a structure that refuses to recognize them as political actors. The law doesn’t regulate urban form—it regulates legitimacy.

These fragile zones—seemingly disordered—are in fact part of a broader system. They are zones of vulnerability in peacetime, and sites of suppression or mobilization in crisis. Always expendable, always governable.

To view informal settlements as mere byproducts of urban disorder is a fundamental error. They are deliberate outcomes of a spatial-political system designed to produce voiceless populations and unacknowledged urban territories. Not gaps in planning—but voids in representation.

Thus, “unlicensed housing” becomes a sovereign discourse—an ideological justification for the persistence of inequality, shifting blame to the marginalized rather than interrogating the policies that created them.

What results is not merely urban dysfunction, but a systematic political and social disempowerment: no link between labor and representation, between housing and recognition—only a tightly managed relationship of deprivation. Residents are allowed to exist—but denied participation.

In this way, informal settlements in Damascus are not technical phenomena but deeply political structures—among the most entrenched forms of exclusion, governed as zones of containment, not as places of shared life.

5. The Urban Legacy Before and After Colonialism: The Deferred Question of Sustainability

If the 1858 Land Code marked the beginning of land redistribution and the rise of a new ownership elite, what followed only deepened this trajectory—under the late Ottoman Empire, the French Mandate, and post-colonial regimes that simply recycled the same tools under national branding.

The question never asked was: how can one build a livable, just city with fair spatial and rights distribution?

Instead, separation between people and land was cemented. Urban space became subjected to licenses and privileges, and land turned into a speculative asset. Space itself became a tool of domination.

Urban transformation in Damascus never witnessed a rupture from this legacy. No revolution in urban policy occurred, no vision of the “right to the city” emerged. The planning philosophy persisted: the urban belt stayed, radial plans remained, and the fortified center continued to govern politically disconnected peripheries.

More critically, the question of sustainability was never posed:

• Can Damascus—an oasis on the desert’s edge—sustain this model of urban sprawl?

• Can its watershed support food and water needs under such expansion?

• What does it mean when Ghouta’s lands shift from food and ecological buffer to speculative urban reserves?

These questions were not overlooked—they were actively avoided. Keeping vulnerable margins intact was a strategic necessity for a regime founded on exclusion. Always available for manipulation, never granted representation or negotiating power.

Thus, the republic inherited an urban order built not on justice or participation, but on sorting and containment. This legacy continues to shape the city today. What we now recognize as the crisis of informal or "destroyed" suburbs around Damascus is not a zoning issue—it is the structural outcome of a century and a half of entrenched exclusion.

Damascus entered modernity in its worst form—not as a participatory city, but as one that planned its population before it planned its services.

The result is a heavy burden that remains unresolved:

• A city without a true social contract;

• Suburbs without integration;

• Residents without representation;

• Margins always available for dismantling and mobilization—yet incapable of asserting independent agency.

Conclusion: An Unfinished Legacy... and an Unbroken Path

Looking at the map of Damascus today reveals more than a spatial arrangement—it unveils a deep narrative of how space was governed and how the relationship between power and people was disfigured.

Post-colonialism did not liberate urban space—it repurposed a structure shaped in the late 19th century. The maps remained unchanged; only the flags above government offices were swapped.

Urban transformation was embedded in a governance model that made the city a command center and the peripheries mere zones to be managed—not partners in decision-making.

Informal settlements are not anomalies—they are the most truthful expression of this structure: residents excluded from the right to the city, confined in tightly sealed administrative voids, swinging between extortion and repression.

What appears today as a housing crisis is, in truth, a political outcome. Understanding this crisis requires dismantling the system that linked land to privilege, housing to control, and urbanization to monopoly.

This is the unresolved legacy of Damascus’s first chapter of urban transformation—a legacy whose chapters are still being written.

In the next article—the first of Chapter Two in the series—we will continue to trace these contradictions. We’ll see how, in the 1950s, this structure erupted in the form of a raw class and social conflict, when the illusions of spatial control collided with the lower classes' desire for representation and participation. Damascus’s peripheries began to tremble—not from natural earthquakes, but from social ones.