ALEPPO, Syria - At first glance it seems an unremarkable scene: a quiet plaza shaded by date palms near this city’s immense medieval Citadel, newly restored to its looming power. Foreign tourists sit side by side with people whose families have lived here for generations.

But this plaza is the centerpiece of one of the most farthinking preservation projects in the Middle East, one that places as much importance on people as it does on the buildings they live in.

The project encompasses the rebuilding of streets and the upgrading of city services, the restoration of hundreds of houses , plans for a 17-hectare park in a poor neighborhood and the restoration of the Citadel itself .

The effort seeks to reverse a 50-year history during which preservation, by focusing on major architectural artifacts, sometimes destroyed the communities around them.

By offering an array of incentives to homeowners and shopkeepers, the new approach has already helped stabilize impoverished communities in a part of the world where the most effective social programs for the poor are often run by extremist organizations like Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood.

“The project in Aleppo is quite an exceptional model,” said Daniele Pini, a preservationist who has worked for Unesco, the United Nations cultural arm. In places like Cairo and Jordan, he said, those who would restore historic buildings and those who live in them are often at odds.

“The word ‘athar’ - ‘antiquities’ -became a horrible word because it meant preserving our houses but not our traditions,” said Omar Hallaj, the chief executive of the Syria Trust for Development.

Tensions grew with the boom in global tourism. The Old City of Damascus, for example, has in the last decade become a major draw both for the international tourist set and for Arabs traveling closer to home after September 11.

Even as the city government races to preserve its character, its courtyard houses are being converted into hotels and fashionable restaurants. Damascus has introduced incentives to keep some homeowners, but many think it’s too late.

The Aleppo plan, Mr. Pini said, “allows people to adapt the old houses to the needs of modern life.”

Led by GTZ, a nonprofit organization owned by the German government, and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, the project began with a two-year analysis of the city’s historic structures and interviews with residents.

Interest-free loans encouraged building owners and their tenants to stay. What makes the project such an auspicious model for the region is its grasp of how architecture can shape relations among social groups. The poor seem as comfortable strolling along the Citadel’s paths as the rich, which is striking given that Syria is run by the authoritarian government of Bashar al-Assad .

In a speech he gave in Aleppo two months after September 11 , the Aga Khan described his mission as creating an intellectual garden “where there would be no possibility of suffocation from the dying weeds of dogma” and “beauty would be seen in the articulation of difference.”

But how to make the final link between historic preservation and the creation of a contemporary city remains blurry. Many preservationists working here see the last 70 years as unworthy of their interest. And most contemporary architects, whose clients are almost uniformly drawn from the global elite, are out of touch with the complex political realities of the poor in the region.

The power of cities like Aleppo and Damascus is not just the beauty of historical layers. It is that the coexistence of those layers embodies a world in which every generation has the right to a voice and individual creativity triumphs over ideological difference.


NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
ESSAY