Publication date: April 2021
These research papers attempt to give a panoramic picture about housing, property, and land rights in Syria. Seven focused dialogue sessions were conducted for this purpose, in addition to in-depth interviews with 40 experts in real estate affairs.
The four research papers begin by drawing a picture of the most important challenges facing the HLP file, as well as the organic interconnections between this and other files, such as the return of displaced persons and reconstruction in Syria.
The first research paper, titled: “Housing, Land and Property and Access to Documentation”, sheds light on experiences of managing real estate records in areas outside regime control, as it examines the case of six different Syrian cities that had fallen outside the control of the Assad regime, namely Daraa, Douma, Afrin, Azaz, Al-Bab and Idlib.
The second research paper, titled: “Informal Housing in Syria Harvest of Decades of Neglect”, illustrates how real estate records do not fully reflect the state of properties in those areas, drawing on statistics that indicate the discrepancy between the records and reality amount to almost 40%.
It also attempts to understand the emergence of irregular housing and how the regime’s state institutions handled this file; in particular, Land Registry Directorates, municipalities, the judiciary, and others. It seeks to analyze this problem from a political angle, showing how the Syrian regime for decades deliberately ignored the problem of irregular housing and made no attempt to solve it; on the contrary, it exploited their existence both economically and politically, to serve its hegemony over society even more.
It touches on new real estate challenges posed by issues relating to IDPs and refugees, right of return, destruction in residential areas, reconstruction and its requirements for real estate, recent irregular housing, and how to deal with all these problems at the political, legal and administrative levels.
The third paper, titled: “Syrian Regime Institutions for Real Estate Development and how they Operate”, highlights real estate legislation involved in this system and state institutions concerned with real estate affairs, from a perspective of interdependence. It discusses the real estate legislation environment and shows how multiple laws for development projects or urban reorganization, and the differing solutions and methods of interaction in each of them, gives regime institutions the freedom to pursue different practices from one place to another, and to choose the law that best serves its interests in each case.
It also presents a brief overview of each state institution of those most concerned with real estate affairs in Syria and involved today in real estate development projects, 10 institutions affiliated with 3 ministries, in an attempt to study 2 cases: Al-Haidariya neighborhood in Aleppo, and Al-Qaboun neighborhood in the capital, Damascus.
After analyzing the real estate development system prepared by the regime, it was necessary to address in the fourth research paper, titled: “Property-Related Measures in Areas Outside the Regime’s Control”, which surveys and describes regulatory procedures for all de facto authorities in northern Syria.
This research paper covers the Jazira region and the north Aleppo and Idlib regions, tracking procedures and work of institutions regulating property rights in different areas, based on who the main actor is in each area, i.e. the political authority, in order to analyze property rights procedures while taking into account the differences within a single area of control and tracing these differences back to their causes.
The paper concludes with a case study in 3 cities of northern Syria: Raqqa, Afrin and Jisr Al-Shughur.
