Marota City: Neoliberalism and Wartime Urban Restructuring in Syria

Abstract

The main interest of this paper is to understand how wartime urban reconstruction in Syria has facilitated the acceleration of processes of accumulation by dispossession through wartime urban development, deepening the same structures of inequality that originally fueled the uprisings. Rather than seeing “reconstruction” as separate from warfare and trying to understand how a modern and luxurious development project such as Marota City became possible despite the war, this paper finds it more useful to reverse the question and ask instead how the war context may have facilitated the realization of the neoliberal vision for the city that the Marota project embodies. Chapter one historicizes the contemporary Syrian crisis by tracing the evolution of Syria’s political economy and the rise of neoliberalism as an ideology and political economic strategy under Bashar al-Asad. Chapter two discusses Syria’s history of housing and urban planning policy before detailing the establishment of the legal framework underlying the neoliberal model for urban development and reconstruction represented by Marota City. Finally, chapter three discusses the rise of Syria's war economies and their impact on urban processes. This paper argues that the neoliberal urban model represented by Marota City embodies a violent social order incompatible with the concept of the "right to the city," which leaves no space for political diversity and citizen participation in political and urban decision-making processes. As the product of a violent process of "creative destruction," Marota City erases the memory of the neighborhood of Basateen al-Razi and of its inhabitants who were denied the right to exist in Syria’s emerging post-conflict social order.