Rebuilding Syria

In the 26th of June 2017 Luav "an institution specialized in the field of reconstruction" in association with UN ESCWA and other international organizations organized an international summer workshop about the post-war reconstruction in Syria, that was hosted in the school of architecture in Venice-Italy till the 14th of July, this workshop has hosted more about proximately 30 Professors and more than 2000 students all around the world, with the participation of 15 Syrian students who came either from Syria or other countries in the world, and I had the honor to participate in this workshop in the name of Institut d'urbanisme de Grenoble".

The term "Re-building Syria" was strongly amplified in the workshop because its mission was to "promote awareness of the current situation of Syria to focus the attention of the global architectural culture on the urbanization of Syrian cities and to fully reaffirm the membership of the country in the cultural heritage of humanity". even though some people think that it's too early to start the reconstruction phase, an international approach could be very helpful for the future of the country.

The preparation of the workshop took 4 months before it starts, where each professor of the 30 professors was responsible of about 60 students with the help of 2 maybe 3 teachers that are either master students or doctora students, each classroom or "Atelier" took a study case that is a city, a neighborhood or historical landmark in Syria, where these study cases had been chosen carefully according to degree of damage upon them.

The workshop lasted for 3 weeks in which we had three major steps that each one of them lasted for one week; first step is understanding the situation and analyzing the study case, next was creating proper solutions that goes with the Syrian situation, and finally the production step to expose the results in the last day of the workshop.

I worked in the atelier of a brazilian professor called Ciro Pirondi an Urbanist/Architect, and the atelier study case was a border city in the limits of Damascus called "Jaramanah". In the first week I worked as a teacher along with the professor knowing that I come from Syria my mission was to explain and answer all questions about the situation there and I did a presentation about the city of Jaramanah before and during the war.

Then in the second week I joined the other students to form a group called the group of design, where our mission was to redesign the local urbanism plan of the city with new potential architectural projects that corresponds to the needs of the city ( Educational, Agricultural and Housing). All during the second week we debate, analyzed and shared ideas about what could improve the life of the inhabitants of the city to recover from the war both in physical and psychological level. Third week was the hardest especially because we had a time limit to finish all the work in order to expose it in the 14th of July for the jury that consists of 6 members of the organizing comity to evaluate the quality of work. The final results were a 3D model of the city with our projects, graphic elements (Photos, Plans, Façades, Sections, 3D...) that illustrated the analyzes and projects of our atelier.

The 30 ateliers exposed their projects in their rooms and all together formed a big exposition about the rebuilding of Syria that was open for the public and visitors for one week, from the 14th till the 21st of July.

Maen Jamoor, Master 2 UCI (Urbanisme et coopération international). 2016/2017