Culturally Sensitive Urban Design: The Social Construction of “Homs Dream,” Syria

With the proliferation of context-less designs internationally stemming from beliefs around progress, development, growth, and the idea that urban design approaches easily travel and can be replicated, this paper argues that urban design might usefully attend more carefully to the local contexts in which it is practicing. Augmenting traditional proscriptive (critiquing poor practice design) and prescriptive (suggesting best practice design) approaches with new critical thinking on culture, to deliver contextually responsive design that is also culturally sensitive. We argue more must be done to analyse and explore contexts where consensual norms around planning practice are frequently absent, such as places characterised by historically embedded cultural sensitivities; emerging out of conflict; or urban informality. This case is evidenced in an exploration of the discursive construction of ‘Homs Dream,’ a development scenario for the future of the Syrian city. The paper concludes with a challenge for urban design, in both theory and practice, to continue developing new thinking at the (dis)junction between urban form and culture.

www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/uspa Urban Studies and Public Administration Vol. 4, No. 2, 2021 informality and the need for intervention to secure better conditions and quality of life have been well documented (UN, 2003), but if urban design is recalibrated it can equally learn lessons from informality and intervene in a more sensitive and appropriate manner (Black & Sonbli, 2019a).
Similar experiences can be evidenced in places with embedded cultural sensitivities (Neill, 2011). In such circumstances exogenous interests can be elevated above the "common good" of affected communities and individuals, who are not involved in a meaningful way in the decision-making process of design (de Andrés et al., 2015). Culture can indeed act as social glue in peacetime, yet divide in times of conflict or heightened tensions. Cultural sensitivity therefore becomes critical for urban design in presenting contextual interventions. Understanding of this unknown is often tackled through technocratic modernist approaches, with attitudes and approaches stemming from enlightenment beliefs around progress, development, and growth (Boano et al., 2014). Indeed Watson (2009) argues many of the Global South's formally planned cities swept away the poor in society due to design ideas being largely shaped by global north norms, with these imposed, or borrowed, ideas being ill-situated to their new context. This phenomenon is not exclusive to the Global South, with many "planned" Global North cities guilty of similar exclusion in design (see Koolhaas, 1995). The Homs case study presented in this paper seeks to clarify some of this complexity through an exploration of cultural discourses in a culturally sensitive place before conflict left the city in need of reconstruction, and subsequently elevated the role of urban design, as part of a wider multi-faceted approach, in re-building.
When there is little focus on wider contexts or theories designed to provide sensitive cultural insights, urban design projects can become an exercise in which final form dominates process, and in which market-driven approaches class society as consensual players. Allowing designs to follow fashions or "best practice" within new discourses of "new urbanism," "smart cities," and "eco-cities" without proper cultural consideration of the local place can deliver development that is exclusionary (Watson, 2013) and fails to recognise spaces not as homogenous, but rather as in a state of constant evolution (Boano et al., 2014). In essence urban design must find better ways to explore the uniqueness of place(s) and space(s).
There have been calls for new strategies to more realistically accommodate community development (Garstka, 2010) and determine the "common good" in a real political context where the balance of power between the State and its citizens is often unequal (Jenkins et al., 2007). This is further complicated by the tensions arising from actors' individual interpretations of planning policies (Black & Sonbli, 2019b) or ambiguous concepts (e.g., sustainable development). Here urban design requires new drivers of knowledge production, rethinking how to understand the city, and cultural context, in a deeper and more meaningful way, and the impacts this may have for the design process.
Planning has wrestled with similar issues. The cultural turn of the 1970's had introduced the debate that social life is constructed through ideas that people have about it, and the practices that follow from those ideas (Jacobs & Spillman, 2005). The cultural effects on planning have been the focus of many critical perspectives, and urban design could benefit from engaging with these. There is growing understanding in planning that it is strongly rooted in social, political, and cultural contexts of places and in a combined 90 www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/uspa Urban Studies and Public Administration Vol. 4, No. 2, 2021 and evolving relationship between place making, governance, and society (Nadin & Stead, 2008).
However, little success has been achieved in developing a culturally oriented perspective (Reimer & Blotevogel, 2012), or in showing how these ideas might work in the contexts of urban designs.
There are currently calls for a more contextual urbanism that considers cultures (Watson, 2009(Watson, , 2013), yet whilst a growing literature explores the impact of context-less places, little empirical work on such trends has been conducted. A focus on the complex co-evolving relationship between place making and culture can begin to move urban design beyond the proscriptive and prescriptive, to start considering how cultural perspectives from communities might be unlocked (Frediani, 2007). Of course, a cultural approach needs a methodology that will empower researchers to investigate the role and practices of social construction; we argue that discourse analysis can potentially offer precisely this critical lens.

Discourse Analysis
Discourse is some knowledge about the world, which shapes how the world is understood, it plays a big role in shaping social reality, and thus social interactions should be analysed by understanding the discourses that produced them (Rose, 2012). This has its own rules, language, acts, ways of reasoning and institutions. Discourse analysis focuses attention on the processes maintaining and constructing social worlds. Fairclough and Wodak (1997) emphasize that if we are to understand discourses and their effects, we must understand the context in which they arise. Texts, discourse and the historical context must be connected if researchers are to understand social phenomena. Foucault (1972) argues that since we can only have knowledge of things if they have a meaning, then it is discourse, not the things or the subjects themselves, which produces knowledge. He argues that things mean something and are true only within specific historical contexts.
Discourse is also strongly connected with its physical effects. No ontological distinction can be made between cultural and material practices. Wetherell (2001) acknowledges that one of the most exciting developments in discourse studies has been this emerging focus on what has been called the practical or material efficacy of discourse. She adds that researchers interested in meaning making should study how discourse shapes landscape. So discourse analysis seeks to understand how the social ideas and acts came into being in the first place, and how they became taken-for-granted and maintained over time (Phillips & Hardy, 2002). It focuses on understanding how language constructs social realities.
Discourse analysis can be divided into four categories based on the research interests (Phillips & Hardy, 2002). Researchers might be interested in analysing a specific text; or a wider context; deploying critical discourse analysis; or a constructivist approach. It is the context-constructivist approach (which they call social linguistic analysis) and the critical discourse analysis approach that are most relevant to this paper's scope. Constructivist approaches are concerned with the mechanism by which discourse ensures that certain phenomena are made and become taken-for-granted to structure social worlds.
They focus on understanding how the cultural nature of relationships within societies comes into being and identify the process of construction that holds them in place. Critical discourse analysis seeks to 91 www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/uspa Urban Studies and Public Administration Vol. 4, No. 2, 2021 uncover dominance and the privileges of discourses and reveals consequent effects. It focuses on the role of discursive activities in constituting and maintaining unequal power relations (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997). The Constructivist approach to discourse analysis is not concerned with exploring the dynamics of politics and power. Rather than exploring how actors benefit or are disadvantaged by the socially constructed reality, its concern is more with the mechanism through which discourse ensures that certain phenomena are constructed and taken for granted to structure this social reality. While critical analysis helps in exploring the social and political nature of relationships within societies, a constructivist approach gives an understanding of how these relationships came into being and identifies the process of construction that held them in place.
This framework starts from the question of how a concept, policy, design or assumption came about in a specific culture, and why it has particular meanings at the moment of the research, then focusing on how discourses empowered and weakened actors based on those assumptions. We could explore, for example, how the discourse about a design project draws from and influences democracy, history, religion and identity from the perspectives of the various actors engaged in designing or reading the scheme. We could explore how the concept of informal settlements, for example, is constructed through a diversity of texts, ranging from simple local cultural traditions, to local planning regulations, passing through daily newspaper articles and advertisements, up the political hierarchy to encompass presidential decrees and statements. We might study how external discourses, unrelated to planning or design, give meanings to design-related activities such as respecting planning regulations, facilitating trust in the authority approving the design, or the community's rejection of certain design interventions.
Focus groups, semi-structured interviews, ethnography, historical review and analysis of media materials can all contribute to discourse analysis and facilitate understanding how a discourse is structured and enacted in a specific practice. To illustrate the potential of the technique, our argument now turns to an empirical case study from Homs, Syria.

Case Study: Homs Dream, Syria
The selected case study is in Homs City, Syria; a city with historically embedded cultural sensitivities related to sects, religion, politics, and land ownership, and how these have shaped the city's identity.
The case study explores a development project announced before the Syrian conflict, that began in 2011, and we argue that using discourse analysis to understand it may represent valuable data that informs any reconstruction plans in the city post-conflict. Homs is the third largest city in western Syria, it was conquered by the Muslims in the 7 th century and the subsequent Islamic era naturally shaped Alawites and other minorities have been immigrating to the city from surrounding suburbs. The demography and land ownership for the majority Sunni population have represented highly sensitive issues in the city since 1970s when they formally lost power in Syria to Al Ba'ath secular party. Those sensitive issues have rarely been studied in the country due to the sensitive political environment, and the effects of those issues on urban design and the reconstruction plans of the city have never been more critical. The case study aims to shed light on the main relevant discourses that shaped Homs' modern urban context and escalated the tension in the city pre-conflict. It will finally use the analysis as an input to inform thinking about the potential future reconstruction plans in the city post-conflict.
In 2007, only few years before the Syrian war, a highly controversial and very significant urban design project called "Homs Dream" was publicly announced in the City of Homs, in Syria (Homs City Council 2007). The project was described by Homs previous Governor as a "beautiful dream that would achieve the aspirations, needs and dreams of all Homs people" (Zamanalwasl, 2007). The taken-for-granted dream, however, was a nightmare for many people in Homs. A considerable portion of the population saw it as destructive and attacked it. Objection was unusual in Syria and thus the issue was almost unprecedented. Planners and decision makers disregarded this widespread opposition and the government instead assured residents that the right of ownership would be preserved and that no land expropriation would be enforced. Interestingly, some reports made the link between the urban project and the uprising in Homs City (e.g., Al Quds Al Arabi, 2014), as it added to the tensions between residents and the Syrian authorities. Figure 2 shows the key events that happened in  Case research started by exploring the designers' rationale by looking at how Homs City Council tried to sell and justify the project. We explored the formal media reports, the design document and the Governor's statements and comments regarding the project. To understand the cultural context that underpinned local reactions, five workshops with Syrian participants were conducted in the UK. These were conducted in the UK due to the war situation in Syria and the researchers being based in the UK with access to a large network of recent Syrian immigrants from the City of Homs. A pilot focus group was arranged to explore the initial dimensions of the discussion and this framed the subsequent workshop format. Within the workshops wider cultural issues were raised, well beyond the project itself. Participants' assumptions regarding planning, identity, policies, politics, regulations, authority and the project itself were questioned. These questions sought the participants' opinions regarding Homs Dream and the wider issues that impacted their understanding of the scheme. The aim was to understand participants' readings of spatial policies and the urban design approach being promoted by the Local Authority in Homs, and the relationships between these readings. Discussion evolved to consider cultural aspects including demographics, identity, politics, the planning system and historical events. In order to understand participants' positions, the data from the workshops were transcribed and coded.
Archival data and media reports were then collected, and their cultural context explored in the light of the various codes that the participants raised (e.g., the common urban structure of Homs Old City, the planning system, the political context relating to Homs Dream, public participation in the design process, and the delivery of the project) It was important to put the codes in their wider historical context. Finally, the codes were organized into initial categories that represented various themes, which 95 www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/uspa Urban Studies and Public Administration Vol. 4, No. 2, 2021 informed the main discourses that participants used to justify their readings of the Homs Dream project.
Finding the relationships between these categories and the design project was a central aim of the case research.
Participants were asked to rank their evaluation of each policy during the discussion. At the end of the session, participants were asked to connect their choices in a coloured line. Participants from each group are given a specific colour. Figure 3 shows the five topics that were discussed and participants' selections. The first topic at the top of the sheet discussed urban policies in Syria as a general issue. It allows impressions of Homs Dream to be related to wider issues of trust in the government's urban plans. Interestingly, while participants lacked planning knowledge, they appeared to take trust-less-ness towards planning policies in Syria for granted. The second row discussed a plan dealing with the regional disparities in the country; the third section discussed a regional plan around Homs proposing future developments outside the city. Participants were less engaged and relatively less critical of these regional plans, as many saw the scale to be beyond their interests. Two disctint discourses were highlighted as relevant to the meanings that came to be attached to the Homs Dream project. The first concerns "development and modernization"; the second is the discourse of "urban design as a weapon". These first two discourses appear to operate under a historically embedded sense of trust-less-ness between the planning authority and the local people in Homs. Below, we discuss the key issues that impacted on peoples' understanding of the Homs Dream project through these identified discourses. It is the combination of these two discourses that socially constructs the Homs Dream case study. Homs Dream took a generic approach focusing on physical form, visual appearance and branding was utilised as a rapid mechanism for change. Tall and modern towers invaded the modest urban structure, huge holding companies were instituted, upper-class private schools, where foreign teachers worked were permitted, large Western restaurants, globally well-known brands, boutiques and foreign banks formed the vision behind this new neighbourhood. Homs Dream was reflective of a wider national shift in urban regeneration thinking, which was taken-for-granted, rendered the approach immune from criticism and inevitably came to be perceived as challenging anti-development thought. The Homs

Discourse 1: Development and Modernization
Dream project was the Local Authorities way to modernise the city, however such modernisation was not perceived positively across the full population.
A very different set of ideas emerged from the gap between social classes, which had been dramatically widened since 2000. Official policies had been used to marginalize the vast majority of the population and a new group of businessmen emerged to control the economy. The main reason behind that, according to Barout (2011), was the sequence and priorities attached to different aspects of change. The 98 www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/uspa Urban Studies and Public Administration Vol. 4, No. 2, 2021 market was liberalized before starting any radical institutional reform. Liberalization could achieve growth, but failed in achieving a balanced spatial development at the regional level between central and peripheral places, and between the relatively developed western regions and the deprived eastern areas.
President Assad's tools were simply reduced by the institutional practices to economic growth and modern image in Homs Dream.
Business interests in the case study project claimed to be following the National Plan policy by exploiting an appropriate investment environment in the region and attracting foreign investments quickly. However, the counter-discourse draws on the assumption that businessmen were concerned with improving sectors such as services and properties where profit is easy to extract. They had significant power over the government and granted investments in the shape of build-operate-transfer contracts for quick profit. Industrial sectors and other public sector institutions "were left to face their inevitable fate" (Barout, 2011). irrelevant, what is important is that the discourse has begun to pervade fields beyond official power, reinforcing ideas of planning/design as a weapon.
Sectarian tensions in Homs City encouraged changing emphases in relation to urban design as a weapon.
Citizens questioned the lack of law enforcement in pro-government neighbourhoods. According to this discourse, it was highly suspicious to use the demolition law, when the need of housing had never been greater. Historically, planning policies in many Syrian cities have failed to create a mixed, harmonic urban structure inhabited by different sects. Homs City consists of separate neighbourhoods characterized by their sects. While this might be considered natural in other contexts, religious segregation escalated tensions in Homs. Building a new neighbourhood, Homs Dream, and opening it to foreign residents, for example, was received by many locals as adding a foreign component to the original urban and demographic structure. The deteriorated condition of Homs Old City and the proposed Homs Dream masterplan that sought to demolish parts of the historic urban core and replace it with a design lacking in local context and vernacular was perceived as an attempt to replace both the cities, and the residents, identity and traditional character. So many within the workshops argued urban design was being weaponized in the Homs Dream project by the authorities and powerful minorities to allow systematic demographic change to take place within this area.

The Social Construction of Homs Dream
"I am not against change and modernization…but not the City Centre; they could build a new town centre somewhere else" (Participant A2) As discourse analysis does not seek truth per se, the aim of such a study is to explore discourses and how they came into being, and to make planners, designers and politicians aware of the nature of conflicts and  Vol. 4, No. 2, 2021 urban and social problems in Homs and its countryside. Planning policies had failed to stop immigration or deal with these problems, and probably worsened them. This, probably natural population movement, was perceived by many locals as politically designed and deliberately planned.
Homs Dream, with its tall buildings, high density, and profitable goals was seen by locals as a tool for demographic change. They viewed the whole idea of development and modernization as serving elite interests only. The design, for them, would have changed ownership of city centre land holdings.
Outsiders would come to occupy the towers instead of local people, and they would be from different social classes and from different religious communities. The Sunni population believed that they would become a minority in their own city and wanted to claim back their place. Local peoples' previous experience with regulations, expropriation and urban design, together with other historical events has affected their interpretation of urban and even regional policies. A sense of trust-less-ness emerged, and the gap widened between decision makers and locals. Urban design revealed this tension, whilst playing a crucial role in building it. Planning and urban design were perceived as a tool for oppression and the authority's dream was instead perceived as a nightmare by those who would have to live with the daily realities of it. The site location was a red line for the Sunni people as it represented the city's core and their history, whilst building height and density also took on cultural meanings in this context. Urban designers and planners should have paid more careful attention to these design elements, in addition to the process of communicating and delivering the project. A national scale initiative to re-build the trust and ease the tension was essential. Exploring only formal planning documents and regulations and conducting a physical analysis to the actual proposal would have failed to contextualise this case.
Syria's future reconstruction plans are critical here. However, the political and social situation in the country remains vague, and therefore arriving at suitable solutions is extremely challenging. Are these sensitive sectorial issues going to be officially recognised and tackled? Will there be any genuine efforts made to unify the remaining fragmented society? Is the government going to be more culturally and socially aware regarding its current and future urban policies? The voice of the residual population is currently weak, urban design could potentially play an active advocacy role in easing tensions between government and wider society. The integration of sects may prove extremely difficult after the civil war and any governmental attempts to unite this fragmented society post-conflict will require an urban design approach that both recognises and understands the cultural sensitivities abounding. If a post-political condition is created, in an attempt to reduce tensions and reach consensus, then culture-less generic designs might be used to replace the current urban structure. They are currently being communicated as modern solutions aiming to change the country's current image. Indeed, the government's visions and approved designs to reconstruct the country reflect this. The government's approved plan to reconstruct the neighbourhood of Baba Amr in Homs, for example, is based on generic tower blocks, which is totally unrelated to the neighbourhood's historic culture. While this might be understood as simply a part of a design, other discourses might interpret these differently, precisely because of the local context, which would escalate the tension, rather than unifying Syrian society. Urban design is failing to provide 101 www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/uspa Urban Studies and Public Administration Vol. 4, No. 2, 2021 contextually responsive solutions in Homs precisely because it has made no attempt to be culturally sensitive in its approach.

A culturally Sensitive Approach: Concluding Remarks
It can be argued that the Syrian case discussed in this paper is an extreme example; it was intentionally selected because of this. The case works through the different dimensions of a discursive and cultural approach, and its "extreme" context highlights the importance of this kind of approach. With many post-conflict reconstruction plans expected to begin in the future (e.g., Syria; Iraq; Yemen), such studies could shed light on how urban design might reflect on local cultural aspects that underpin contested urban contexts. However, we argue that other case studies in less extreme environments might also be studied in this way. Such cultural research, we suggest, would be very useful for interpreting comparative case studies, would draw attention to the mobility of modernist and western-oriented design policy issues, and would also help foster a deeper understanding of the nature of urban tensions. In the context of urban design, terms have frequently been borrowed from their original sources and used loosely in design documents. Comparing Homs to Dubai, and applying Dubai's context in Homs is likely to be problematic because these contexts differ. In Homs Dream design terms such as modernity, high-rise and density were borrowed as taken-for-granted concepts. This all led to an apparently context-less and neutral scheme. Therefore, it is useful to explore what happens when urban design ideas travel and are adopted in different places.
We argue that comparisons of urban design concepts should study the process of pulling a design together and its delivery, but also should focus on the informal practices and social discourse that affect the design process, as well as the level of acceptance of the final products among people who might have to live with a design. In the case of Homs Dream the workshop investigations broadened the applicability of conclusions. So this research argues that analysing urban designs should go much further than the physical framework, because the political and social discourses rising from culture, corruption, power relations and conflicting values play essential roles in shaping how designs operate and are consumed.
Whilst urban design has developed a healthy habit of engaging communities in the design process (see AlWear et al., 2017), there is little consideration of these deeper cultural issues. Engaging with a suitable methodology, such as discourse analysis, we argue would be a useful addition to urban designs investigative toolkit.
The relationship between urban design and a society is complex, dynamic and co-evolving. We have tried to explore how urban design might operate as a cultural product and employed discourse analysis as a methodology to approach cultural complexity. Rather than simply exploring formal design concepts, we have suggested researchers might explore the design meanings for a specific culture, and how these meanings came into being in a particular place and time, taking into account different perspectives.
Urban design can evolve to be more than simply a technical product of development; rather it might emerge as a contested channel through which places are designed and developed, and as such might 102 www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/uspa Urban Studies and Public Administration Vol. 4, No. 2, 2021 become contextually responsive, and empowering for all stakeholders. Such an approach would be of great benefit to the people of Homs as they seek to rebuild.