"I don't have any answers, but I do have a lot of questions," explained Lena Wimmer, architect and researcher. The questions relate to the rebuilding of Aleppo, a divided city that has suffered enormous destruction, especially since mid-2012. The damage has been especially great in the neighborhoods of the old city where intense fighting has taken place. As Wimmer noted, it is not just the buildings that have been destroyed. So too has a good deal of the trust and goodwill that once existed in Aleppo.
In thinking about how to rebuild Aleppo, Wimmer said it was important to consider not only history and culture, but also new technologies. "We shouldn't just talk about history. We should think also about how to combine the old and the new. We have a responsibility to develop ideas that will last a long time," she said. Wimmer cautioned that rebuilding Aleppo will involve painful moments. "My hope though is that there will be a fight in Aleppo as there was in Berlin," she said.
Wimmer outlined some of the challenges that residents will face when they rebuild Aleppo, starting from the clean-up itself. "What do you do with the stones," she asked. "Do you keep them, do you re-use them immediately, or do you get rid of them?" As she noted, these and other questions have been asked throughout history by residents of many other cities seeking to rebuild. Wimmer provided examples from around the world to demonstrate the many different ways that cities can be rebuilt, some more successfully than others. She pointed to Rome, for example, as a city that integrates its history well. "If you walk the streets today, you can see what happened," she said. Other cities, such as Chicago that was rebuilt after a fire in 1871, chose to keep very little evidence of the city that had existed before. And yet, this too is considered to be a successful rebuilding effort. "The city boomed after it was rebuilt," she noted. Wimmer showed what she described as some "brutal pictures" of Tokyo commenting that despite the starkness, "the city works somehow."
There are many other cities, however, in which there is widespread agreement that the rebuilding effort has failed. Beirut is one example, and is particularly relevant to the case of Aleppo. In addition to being Middle Eastern cities that are geographically quite close, Beirut and Aleppo are both cities that were destroyed in civil wars. Wimmer said that the way in which a city is destroyed has an enormous impact on the challenges of the rebuilding effort. Wimmer noted also that Beirut was an interesting case because it is one of those cities in which it was the private sector that rebuilt. "Who will rebuild Aleppo," she asked?
Wimmer went on to explain that one of the initiatives that she is involved in at the moment is to identify and support some of the skilled artisans and workers who used to work in Aleppo. "They contain knowledge that exists only in their heads that we are in danger of losing," she said. In addition to documenting this knowledge, the Friends of the Old City of Aleppo, which Wimmer co-founded with Annette Gangler, Mamoun Fansa, and Carola Simon, is also working to preserve cadastral maps that will be critical to any rebuilding effort. "We want to make these available to residents as well so they can assert claims to their land," Wimmer explained.
Aleppo Project fellow AlHakam Shaar commented that he and his colleagues would be exploring ways that they could work with the Friends of the Old City of Aleppo to put them in touch with former and current residents of Aleppo.