Aleppo After War: The Municipal Vision Before 2011 and Why Urban Recovery Should Not Start from Scratch

Post-war Aleppo is often framed through destruction, legal constraints, and the technical demands of reconstruction. This article challenges that assumption by re-reading Aleppo’s pre-2011 municipal vision as an analytical resource for post-war recovery. The study adopts a qualitative interpretive methodology based on municipal archival material, including the City Council work programme, strategic planning presentations, project documents, and materials related to the City Development Strategy, Madinatuna initiative, the old city, Bab Antakiya, and major public-space and service initiatives. The analysis followed three steps: identifying repeated municipal priorities and planning concepts; organizing them into thematic axes; and interpreting flagship projects as spatial expressions of a broader municipal vision. To assess post-war relevance, the archive is also read against evidence of damage, displacement, urban functionality, and heritage loss. The results show that Aleppo’s pre-2011 municipal vision can be reconstructed through six interrelated axes: strategic urban development and managed growth; the old city as a living urban fabric; urban repair in the city centre; mobility and accessibility; culture and social development; and development partnerships and international cooperation. The findings reveal that these axes formed a partially integrated municipal urbanism rather than isolated projects, while flagship interventions such as Bab Antakiya, the Green Path, the river corridor, and the Citadel surroundings materialized this logic. The study also finds that this vision remained institutionally vulnerable because of political centralization and limited municipal autonomy. It concludes that post-war recovery should build on critical continuity rather than reconstruction from scratch.