Development Plan Strategies of Old Aleppo City and Sustainable Development Goals: Between Theory and Practice

The Old City of Aleppo, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, has been inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1986. In the early 1990s the Aleppo municipality initiated the project for the Rehabilitation of the Old City with the German Technical Cooperation Agency (GTZ) as a partner. As part of the process, a Development Plan was issued as a general framework including ten strategies for upgrading the historical urban fabric in line with the sustainable development. Despite implementation of these strategies, the physical fabric of the Old City has continued to deteriorate, and the demographic transition has continued to increase until the escalation of the Syrian Civil War in 2011. The paper analyses the development plan’s strategies in the Old City of Aleppo, mainly those related to housing aspects. It evaluates the effectiveness of these strategies based on the concept of good urban governance that intersects with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aiming to overcome the administrative gaps to rebuild the Old City more sustainably after the Syrian Civil War.