The Cultural Meaning of Aleppo: A Landscape Recovery for the Ancient City

The Cultural Meaning of Aleppo documents the history and morphology of the Ancient City of Aleppo through the urban structures and characteristic courtyard houses and open spaces. It outlines the urbanistic development of the city and focuses on the urban heritage, addressing the initiatives to reconstruct and rehabilitate the urban landscape. The book argues in favour of the safeguarding and rehabilitation of the architectural heritage to protect the cultural memory of the inhabitants of Aleppo, despite of the destruction of architecture due to the recent war. It maps a future reconstruction that focuses on cultural continuity, tradition and the re-establishment of a crucial social memory. Through a capillary documentation of the palimpsest of Aleppo – the peculiar characteristics of its courtyard houses and the neighbourhoods of Bayyada, Bab Quinnesrin and al-Farafra – this is a theoretical and practical handbook for architects, urban planners and restorers alike. Through this analytical discussion of the city’s urban fabric, it introduces the concept of the cultural urban landscape acting as a 'cohesive territorial organism', nourished by different cultures, in which contrasting scales of land, city and neighbourhood are interconnected in a fractal state. With a focus on retaining the uniqueness and diversity of this residential typology, which bore witness to the rich cultural history of Syria and the Middle East as a whole, the book maps a future reconstruction that focuses on cultural continuity, tradition and the re-establishment of a crucial social memory.