Tracing and Assessing Syrian Urban Heritage in Exile

The project  explores urban issues related to Syrian cities and its heritage before and after war. It perceives displacements and destruction as ruptures through which new opportunities and challenges arise. At this stage, and in the lack of proper documentation of the Syrian cities and their urban dynamics, the initiative relies on the travelling memories of displaced Syrians to narrate its stories. The nature of this project is experimental, using artistic means, participatory methods, visualization techniques, mapping and storytelling to communicate and articulate the different connotations and relationships between memory, place, heritage and displacement. By doing so, we ask: what urban heritage means at times of crisis? Who owns the cities? How war affected the city before and after?

This project is an attempt to unpack urban complexities in a place where it has been often neglected. Neglecting the urban is one of the reasons that has enforced cultural, ethnic, economic and political divisions. We see our role as catalysts to understand these complexities as they occurred in the past, in order to raise awareness towards their significant role in conflict reconciliations and re-building processes.