This book provides indispensable and interdisciplinary insights into the revitalization and redevelopment of urban centers in war-stricken conflict regions, such as Aleppo in northern Syria. This contribution explores innovative, cutting-edge toolkits for academicians, digital building technologists, engineers, architects, archeologists, (urban) planners, land policy advisors and legal scholars. The compendium not only analyzes strategies and shortcomings of implementation guidelines drawn by donor organizations, development agencies and political actors, but also explores possibilities for initiating functioning and sustainably resilient networks that can establish capacity-building platforms for recovery and reconstruction. Although the work focuses on a city in Syria, it holds lessons, toolkits and instruments for other areas in the region and beyond.

'Every time gardens welcomed us, we said to them,Aleppo is our aim and you are merely the route.' Al-Mutanabbi Aleppo lies in ruins. Its streets are plunged in darkness, most of its population has fled. But this was once a vibrant world city, where Muslims, Christians and Jews lived and traded together in peace. Few places are as ancient and diverse as Aleppo - one of the oldest, continuously inhabited cities in the world - successively ruled by the Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Arab, Ottoman and French empires. Under the Ottomans, it became the empire's third largest city, after Constantinople and Cairo. It owed its wealth to its position at the end of the Silk Road, at a crossroads of world trade, where merchants from Venice, Isfahan and Agra gathered in the largest suq in the Middle East. Throughout the region, it was famous for its food and its music. For 400 years British and French consuls and merchants lived in Aleppo; many of their accounts are used here for the first time. In the first history of Aleppo in English, Dr Philip Mansel vividly describes its decline from a pinnacle of cultural and economic power, a poignant testament to a city shattered by Syria's civil war.

In this innovative historical portrait of society in the premodern Middle East, Abraham Marcus takes us on a guided tour of a past world, revealing its inner workings and throwing new light on its realities during the crucial century before the onset of modernization in the region. Focusing on the great Syrian city of Aleppo, he pieces together aspects of life ranging from business and family to disease and popular pastimes. This work of social history shows how many of the accepted notions and assumptions about what is commonly called premodern, Islamic, or traditional society are inaccurate or unfounded, and draws our attention to the intricacies of a world that may appear alien and exotic but was by no means simple, primitive, or static.

Khaldoun Fansa is an Aleppo native who was displaced by the Syrian Civil War. For many years he worked as an architect who managed restoration of Aleppo's Old City for private owners as well acting as a consultant for the Aga Khan Trust.Visit the Old City of Aleppo is Fansa's effort to keep Syrian culture alive in a difficult time and to prepare for the day when the cannons are silent and women and men of good will can begin to rebuild their city and their lives.Visit the Old City of Aleppo is a book for children as well as a book for adults who may choose to read aloud to a child. The narrative follows young Tamim and his father on their explorations of the Old City, pre civil war.Accent pages provide insights from 5,000 years of culture and history reflected in the houses, covered markets, and narrow alleyways. Aleppo was a major trading center built of Roman stone that continued to flourish in the time of Marco Polo and later served as the favored British trading route to India. Aleppo's Old city is listed as a UNESCO world heritage site.