Normalizing the City: Urban Politics and the Planning of the City of Aleppo (original) (raw)
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The city of Aleppo was located within a hundred and ten kilometers of the northern Syrian coasts of the Mediterranean, neither on a fertile nor barren land. Aleppo has always been an important commercial city due to its geographical location and its historical development. Despite geographical advantages and shortcomings, Aleppo could not see Syria's role as the leading economic and political center for a long time. Aleppo remained inactive in Antakya during the classical period and Damascus in the Islamic period. Before the Ottomans, Hittites, Aramis, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and Romans ruled the city. Most of the mosques, monuments and public buildings that shaped the city until the time of the modern turnover belonged to the pre-Ottoman period. Hundreds of inscriptions on these works reminded the city dwellers that their city had a history before arriving here before Ottoman 1516. 1
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Alep, comme beaucoup d’autres villes dans le monde, est touchée par la mondialisation qui a suscité une dynamique métropolitaine ayant des effets sur l’organisation socio-spatiale de la ville. Ces effets ont connu une ampleur considérable dans les décennies qui ont précédé le déclenchement de la révolution et de la guerre, la ville se trouvant en pleine expansion avec un accroissement de population très rapide, tandis que les politiques d'aménagement mises en oeuvre ne se révélaient pas à la hauteur du phénomène avec une centralisation accrue des services et des équipements qui amplifiait l'exode rural. La présente recherche se base sur la complexité phénoménologique et prend en compte les facteurs dynamiques tels que l’interaction et l’évolution. La nouvelle lecture que nous proposons ici se base sur des principes de morphogenèse qui permettent d'expliquer la dynamique de la forme urbaine.Aleppo, like many other cities in the world is affected by globalization, which ha...
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As architects, urban planners and policy makers contemplate how best to rehabilitate the ruined half of Aleppo, one of Syria’s largest cities, they must consult far and wide – and most importantly, with the residents who once called the city home. (The publication containing this article can be found here: Reconstructing Syria: Risks and Side Effects https://adoptrevolution.org/en/reconstructing-syria-risks-and-side-effects/)
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Deciphering the palimpsest structure of a city is an effective means of discovering the processes that underlie its physical character. Aleppo in the south-eastern part of the Mediterranean basin, was built incrementally following principles that endured over a long period. Its stone-based building technology has produced such permanent urban forms that its urban landscape is a palimpsest of an urban development from an initially spontaneous settlement, adapted to regional, and later, imperial urban standards (Hellenistic and Roman-Byzantine) and finally becoming part of a local dialectical process that led the city to develop an individual urban form from Umayyad times onwards. In Aleppo, it is impossible to understand the structure of the urban fabric of the medieval Islamic and Ottoman city without taking into account the role played by the substratum of the Hellenistic-Roman-Byzantine city in its conformation.