Investment in People: Damascus Is Not a Real Estate Project

Damascus, the book says at its outset, is a memory that walks, a city washed by the Barada and breathing from Qasioun, whose future has come to be measured by the square meter and whose development has shrunk to towers and a hotel. Civilization, it argues, begins with the human being behind the façade: belonging, memory and identity cannot be imported or ordered from a catalog, and Damascus can be modern without becoming a copy of Dubai, New York or Tokyo. In short sections it names what deserves investment instead: the child who reads, the mother, the Damascene carpenter, stone mason, calligrapher and coppersmith, affordable homes, water, trees and shade, and the old buildings that carry the memory of generations. It then turns to architects, warning that blue skies and happy children are easy to add to a rendering, and to investors, asking what a project left around it, and it presents itself as a call for wiser investment that builds the hotel and the school, welcomes the investor and protects the resident. The closing pages address Damascus directly, asking it to stay alive and remember its children, so that each of them can look at the city and say: this is my city, and I have a place in it.