A voice from Homs

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Marwa Al-Sabouni describes her city as being sprinkled with the 'crumbles of biscuits and cakes'.   

Hear what was done to her home - Homs - to benefit Israhell. 31 minutes at this link:  http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2016/05/lnl_20160509_2220.mp3

What role is there for architecture in a city destroyed by war?
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/architecture-in-a-city-destroyed-by-war/7405354

Is planning still important in a city that's been razed to the ground by civil war? Syrian architect Marwa Al-Sabouni thinks so. She describes life in the city of Homs, which has sustained massive destruction during the Syrian war, and reveals what she'd like it to look like in the future.

Marwa Al-Sabouni describes her city as being sprinkled with the 'crumbles of biscuits and cakes'.

Homs, where Al-Sabouni lives, has sustained the most damage of any Syrian city during their five-year civil war. Government departments, banks, clinics and markets have all shut down and almost everyone she knows has left.

I was also amazed by the destruction—layers, so many layers of destruction, endless horizons of dropping buildings.

'This war is killing the very fabric of people because on so many levels it's a civil war and people are fighting each other,' Al-Sabouni says.

'There are so many restrictions and so many security issues that prevent you from entering a place.

'For example, even entering the Old Homs ... so many land mines have exploded with people who were revisiting their destroyed homes and they were killed. It was misery over misery.

'[For] the people who found the looting at the places, there was also another stab ... electric wires, framing, ripped [from] the very structure of buildings.'

Al-Sabouni has a PhD in Islamic architecture, runs a private architectural studio and is the owner of the first and only website dedicated to architectural news in Arabic.

She recounts what it was like returning to the city after the destruction.

'I was watching people, I was watching the faces, the eyes, sometimes the foreheads where you find the drops of sweat—of angry sweat, of nervous sweat—and I was also amazed by the destruction—layers, so many layers of destruction, endless horizons of dropping buildings and how they can be very fragile.'

City planning neglected before the war

The war has left Al-Sabouni's city in ruins, but she says it wasn't a very attractive city in the first place.

'Homs was endless rows of featureless residential areas,' she says.

'The Ottoman Market was kept as it was from the Ottoman days, but it was buried and suffocated by the expansion of modern urbanisation. The souk main square, which should have been the downtown, was surrounded by high-rise blocks, and you found the souk just by accident.

'The old places that should have been cared about and should have had more attention were treated badly before the war.'

Most of the Old City of Homs was removed before the war to be upgraded by city planners. Al-Sabouni calls their creations 'ludicrous fantasies'.

'[They're] piercing the city with blocks and without any connection and any vision to it and killing the viability of the place, sometimes removing chunks of the place to replace it with an empty parking lot, which was very upsetting for people,' she says.

Urban planning as a tool of segregation

In her book, The Battle for Home: The Memoir of a Syrian Architect, Al-Sabouni writes that Syria has a long history of tolerance and diversity.

She describes Old Homs as a living museum of ancient architecture, with a Catholic church on one side facing a mosque on the other, both holding the same sentimental value.

Al-Sabouni says that same diversity was apparent in the neighbourhoods of Old Homs.

'We had Muslim and Christian neighbours living wall to wall, and back to back, and they all lived together and worked together, especially at the souk where you had no differences at all between them,' she says.

'They were living a real co-existence; you never even noticed that there is any difference between any religion in the old cities.'

It's a different story today. Al-Sabouni says new suburbs in Homs have been built based on sectarian differences relating to class and culture.

'People who are called the newcomers weren't able to mix inside the city, weren't able to live its life and enter the city, neither on the built environment level ... nor on the social and economic level, so they just lived literally on the margins,' she says.

'In the last decades we had so many social illnesses. Each group adopted a position and adopted some kind of attitude towards the others ... just dividing the society.

'You can't blame one group over the other, everybody was involved. And the built environment has perpetuated this and has enhanced this.'

What will Homs look like in the future?

Before the war, Homs was the third largest city in Syria, home to 800,000 people. Al-Sabouni believes more than half those residents have now left.

Despite the destruction and lack of services, people are trying to get back to normal life.

'People reinvented their lives on pavements, opening sheds on the pavements instead of shops. Schools have opened in apartments and sometimes universities have divided their sections into different residential apartments,' she says.

'Even clinics and hospitals have resorted to the apartment solutions—so people have resumed their lives, but with so many challenges with very much a lack of services, electricity, sometimes water.

'But people are coping with each day.'

Al-Sabouni hopes urban planning will be a priority in rebuilding a new Homs.

'I hope it will be a place for everything to flourish because, as I argue, the built environment is the stage of the society and it is the fabric of our souls,' she says.

'So if it has flourished as it should be that means also that our societies are back to their own nature and back to their shared home.'