Damaged Natural and Built Heritage: Landscape Design Against Amnesia

The Aleppo Battle has modified settlement patterns, urban processes and land uses, and has damaged a very stratified landscape, which carries in its fabric thousand years of urban history. Post-trauma design is not just removal or amnesia. It can also be aimed at recalling narratives of the local history, features and culture, as well as of memories of the recent destruction. It can help to fight the cultural amnesia of a hasty reconstruction or to mitigate conflicts of the returning population. Moreover, it can give back to the local residents their own identity, their own memories trough the recovery of their urban spaces. This paper aims at presenting possible narratives for the design of the open spaces of some of the most damaged areas of the Ancient City of Aleppo. These projects, which have been developed at the Landscape Architecture Studio of the School of Architecture, Polytechnic University of Bari, are aimed at reconstructing the identity of the urban landscape and through the recovery of the open spaces of the most damaged areas, by presenting possible scenarios for their future layout, which are based on the relationship between public urban spaces, recent or past urban memories, morphological traces and imprints of the past, and need for reconciliation of the local urban society.