Students: Fujan Fahmi, Patrick Jaeger
Location: Damascus
Date: October, 2009
Type: Research project, student work

Background
Damascus over time has received extensive waves of refugees, impacting in different ways on the city’s fabric. Some of the oldest refugee communities can be identified in the Palestinian settlements on the foot of the Qasioun Mountains, who fled the crusaders in the 12th century. The twentieth century saw an influx of Palestinians fleeing their homeland after the creation of the State of Israel. Yarmouk, a refugee camp established 1955 within the city perimeter has since developed into a dense urban neighborhood, resembling some of the other more traditional quarters of Damascus. Sharing a border of over 600km in length with Iraq, Syria has become host to many hundred thousand refugees since the US led war against Iraq.

Themes
At the start of 2007 UNHCR estimated that the number of Iraqi refugees in Syria exceeded 1.2 million, a huge influx to a country with a population of 18 million. This heavy number of arrivals has had an extreme effect on all facets of life in Syria, particularly on the services which the state offers to citizens. There has been a sharp increase in the cost of living and the unexpected weight of numbers has had dramatic impacts on the infrastructure and the economy. The integration though of the Iraqi refugees into the Syrian society with little conflict and virtually no outside support is generally considered as a great achievement. Jaramana, a neighborhood southeast of the city center, has transformed considerably since the arrival of the Iraqi refugees. Formerly an area occupied by Palestinian refugees, it has experienced a vast amount of housing construction and a considerable densification since the arrival of the Iraqis. Mostly self-reliant, with little support from UNHCR and arriving with a certain amount of financial means the Iraqi refugees where recognized as ideal clients for real estate developers, who quickly constructed new apartment blocks in the neighborhood, or extended existing structures. In the meantime refugee welfare organizations and UNHCR have begun constructing schools and other institutions for the Iraqi refugees. These institutions, after many Iraqis have begun to return home, are forming the nuclei of the young neighborhoods and aid in upgrading the services available to the non-refugee population.

Project
What is the urban idea of the ‘Iraqi Refugee City’? What were the processes of planning, financing, constructing and marketing the buildings? What kind of lasting effect will the presence of the Iraqi refugees have on the city? What is the relationship between the temporary emergency support for the refugees and a general strategy of upgrading?