Hidden Threads: Reweaving a divided social urban fabric in a post-conflict zone

Abstract

As the reconstruction debate is being held in Syria to rebuild what years of conflict have destroyed, no attention is being given to the role of architecture in reconstructing what was vandalized within the social fabric. Moreover, the disregard for the social-spatial justice in the newly planned projects may create a ticking time bomb for a new conflict in such a vulnerable community. In a hope for a reweaving of what the conflict has torn in Damascus, the thesis will look at the indicators of the conflict in the past, and hidden in the urban growth of Damascus and its social colorful fabric. It will investigate how the conflict had, simultaneously, 'victimized and weaponized' the city, and how the fear could detach people from their own city and from one another. The thesis will be developed through a 'Weaving' design; as an artistic methodology, representing a metaphor of the city, and bringing multiple different and complicated aspects into one element. This Weaving will be utilized iteratively; telling the story, analyzing, deconstructing the city’s complicated layers (inputs), reading the story, understanding and exploring the complexity, concluding the relationships between the components, and extracting information; and then re-telling the stories again. A weaving toolbox with instructions is developed based on chosen tangible and intangible elements from the context analysis, which open up the possibility for this medium to be customized to fit in answering other research questions in the same framework, and for other contexts and cities. Have we lost our Damascus? Will the homogeneous organic multidimensional fabric stay torn forever? The weaving, the visual storyteller will show us, hopefully, how to reveal the hidden threads that will reweave Damascus.