2Cultural Heritage at Risk

I am going to talk about urban heritage at risk in zones of armed conflict. As you know, in our institution, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC), we have some experience working in postwar situations. So what I am going to tell you is based on experience, institutional experience. We started working in Afghanistan three weeks after the fall of the Taliban regime. And we know that in the urban context, the most important thing when you want to restore the urban and social context is to respond to the people’s need. We have worked in Afghanistan, in Kabul and Herat, and I have four hundred people still working there. But in this region we are considering, we have some of the longest-inhabited cities, like Aleppo, which claims to be the longest continuously inhabited city in the world. It is also a very high-risk situation. We cannot predict, in the next twenty-five years, what is going to happen from the Middle East to the Maghreb al-Aqsa and places where there are some of the most important cities for certain civilizations.

Urban cultural heritage conservation is important because it is socially relevant. It is no longer an exercise in preserving the social fabric as if it comprised museum pieces. Rather, it is a living context, an economic asset for future generations. Because all of these cities, by maintaining a living culture, are assets for future generations. The reconstruction of these cities, in our experience, is important because it is the basis for restoring economic production, it is the basis for restoring commerce, and it is the framework for life, for quality of life. I think this is extremely important. In a postwar situation, you need to rehabilitate with the aspiration to create better conditions than those that existed before.

Since 2001, we have been working in one large area of Cairo, the [al-]Darb al-Ahmar area. The people there now have bathrooms with running water, something they did not have before. Urban rehabilitation is based on responding to the basic needs of people. And it demonstrates, as I said before, how futile, how absurd, it is to discuss what comes first. Nothing comes first. These people constitute the living context.

We decided two years ago that we were going to go into Syria and start working in Aleppo. We are a Swiss entity, legally, so we went to Bern to discuss our ambitions with the Swiss authorities, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We wanted to know if we would fall under sanctions if we went to work in Syria. The director-general was very surprised. “Why did you come here? Obviously, you are doing humanitarian work. You don’t need to consult with us,” he said. “But beware of the banks. The banks are not going to consider you as a humanitarian organization, and you are going to have all sorts of problems.”

Working in historic cities is about more than restoring monuments. It requires us to deal with the urban fabric, with infrastructure, with facilities and services. And, of course, we cannot work, necessarily, with all the punctilious principles of certain conventions. Let me find a metaphor. It is like operating in a war hospital. You need to do things quickly, save lives if you can. You cannot work as a private entity. You need to work on the basis of public-private partnership agreements. So you need to make agreements with the national authorities and with the local authorities. And to be successful, you need to bring in the local population. Even in these postwar situations, local populations never think that an entity, a foreign entity, arrives with good intentions. You need to prove your good intentions. We developed a very simple system. The first things you need to rebuild are the toilets and the sanitation infrastructure. Then it is essential exhaustively to document the condition of the city. This will give us a sense of the destruction. It will also allow us to rather precisely estimate the total reconstruction of the city, at current cost. You know that the World Bank has made some estimates of how much it will cost to reconstruct Aleppo, but our estimates are completely different from those of the World Bank because they are based on real knowledge of the situation. For instance, inflation is going to be a very important factor in Syria in the next couple of years; but at the moment, with less than $100 million, you could do significant work to restore three areas of the old city, which are the priorities that we have established for this rehabilitation project. As you will see, the first thing, of course, is how you create competence. So the first thing was to create, with Irina Bokova’s support—at the time she was with UNESCO—a training course for stone masons. In fact, there were two courses. We did that at the citadel. This on-site training allows us to rebuild the things that were destroyed at the citadel.

We chose to start with the Souq al-Saqatiya, which is the area in this zone. We chose the Souq al-Saqatiya in this condition because there were 11,000 families that depend on its economy. If you translate that into individuals, the number is between 60,000 and 70,000 people who depend on the economy that takes place in the souq. We have calculated that the reconstruction of the souq will bring annually a new influx of approximately $35 million to the economy of the city. You need to keep these operations very simple because you are going to work not only with your own people; you are going to engage contractors, as we have done. We will have to work with the government, the people from the public services, to deal with utilities, water, electricity.

Then, of course, you need to work with the community to explain what the final result will be. They are the stakeholders. And it is also important because part of the deal is that the merchants themselves will pay for or work on the rehabilitation of the inside of their shops. This is not free coffee for everybody. In some areas, we found significant structural damage. But I must confess that because of the need to show quick results, we chose a segment of the souq in which the structural damage was not too severe. So immediately we can provide an image of hope and things rebuilt. Some of the areas already have been paved, painted, and cleaned. And finally, of course, work started on the roofs. I invite all of you to come to the opening ceremony on July 15.