Cultural Landscapes: the Ancient City of Aleppo

Located at the meeting point of trans-regional commercial routes between the East and the West, when the conflict began in 2012, the Ancient City of Aleppo was the core of the Syria’s largest settlement and commercial capital city. Like many cities in Syria, its urban landscape showed a continuity of growth from the Hellenistic to the late Ottoman city, via the Roman, Byzantine and medieval Islamic urban form. Thus it represented a place of permanence for physical signs and of cultural meanings given by the overlaying of different urban and architectural cultures: the urban structure conserved marked traces of its past, within a growth which came about through the superimposition over time of forms and plans, which while strictly linked to the territorial layout, differed widely in their ‘idea’ of the city.