Rebuilding Syria's Aleppo under fire

With barrel bombs, shells and air strikes causing yet more destruction each day, the thought of proposing ways to rebuild the war-battered Syrian city of Aleppo seems distant. Yet, that is exactly what the Aleppo Project aims to do.

The project at the Central European University’s Centre for Conflict, Negotiation and Recovery (CCNR) in Budapest, Hungary aims to bring together Syrian citizens and researchers to plot the reconstruction of the historic city, much of which lies in ruins after more than five years of civil war.

The four-person team, headed by Professor Robert Templer, conducts public opinion surveys, maps destruction, examines historical precedents for rebuilding war-ravaged cities and seeks to envision ways to implement an inclusive reconstruction process in the future.

The project invites Aleppo’s citizens - those still in the city and those displaced from it - to participate through providing information about destruction in the city, as well as by submitting blogs and reflections on their memories of and hopes for the city. The researchers work on documentation, public opinion and policy papers.

AlHakam Shaar, a 29-year-old research fellow for the project, originally hails from Aleppo, but he left shortly before fighting reached the city in 2012 to pursue his PhD.

The goal of the open collaboration is to also draw the involvement of Aleppo residents and Syrians from elsewhere “to look at the past and try to collect the memories that, if not captured, would be lost,” he told Al Jazeera. “But we are also trying to capture some vision for the future.”

The Aleppo Project is now working on an interactive mapping programme that will allow users to upload to a database, including text, titles, names of places and photographs. The CCNR also offers a course to 20 graduate students at the Central European University.

Another research fellow on the project, Armenak Tokmajyan, whose family is of Armenian descent and comes from Aleppo, explained: “If you imagine that one or two people in every neighbourhood tries to document the damage in their area and upload to our software, we’ll have an incomplete but good understanding of the damage in the city.”

“Then in the future, when they want to start reconstruction, having these images gathered in one place will help to recreate a vision of the historical buildings.”

While Aleppo’s cultural and architectural heritage was already widely documented long before the war, the thrust of the Aleppo Project is to at once track the destruction and gauge the opinions, hopes and desires of Aleppo’s residents in order to contribute to the future reconstruction of a more inclusive city.