Re.greeneration: Turning Aleppo's Explosion Craters into Biotopes, Gardens and Places of Healing

What does a city do with a crater? Most reconstruction plans treat war damage as something to erase: clear the rubble, level the ground, rebuild as quickly as possible. Re.greeneration argues otherwise. It reads Aleppo's demolished buildings not as ruins but as parts of an evolving ecosystem, and it proposes that the scars of destruction can become the city's most fertile ground. Explosion craters become biotopes, and broken plots become fruit gardens, crop fields and greenhouses. Memory is not paved over. It is planted.

The project was developed by Claudia de Sas Trujillo and Juanita Leal Ochoa and was shortlisted in the Memory competition on uni.xyz. Its site is Aleppo, a city whose layered heritage has been badly damaged by conflict. The designers frame their response around five pillars: community engagement, ecological restoration, cultural revival, green integration, and empathy and healing. Together they describe a reconstruction strategy that is as much social and emotional as it is spatial.

Reading the Ruin as an Ecosystem

The conceptual move at the heart of the proposal is a change of category. A demolished building is usually counted as a loss to be cleared away. Here it becomes a starting condition: a remnant that can host growth, healing and reconnection. The shift matters because it keeps the physical evidence of what happened inside the city's fabric instead of removing it. The designers' stated aim is to preserve Aleppo's history and celebrate it, and their way of doing so is to let new life take hold in the same places the old life was interrupted.

That decision also answers the competition's theme directly. Memory here is not held in a plaque or a sealed monument. It sits in the ground itself, in landscapes that will keep changing as plants mature and residents return. The past stays legible because the future is literally growing out of it.

From Craters to Biotopes, Gardens and Greenhouses

The ecological programme gives the concept its working parts. Former explosion craters are turned into biotopes intended to foster biodiversity and restore natural cycles, and the voids left by blasts become habitats. Around them, the proposal sets out fruit gardens, crop gardens and greenhouses meant to bring greenery back into the city and to support a degree of self-sufficiency. In a city where supply chains and livelihoods have been disrupted, growing food close to home is a practical tool for recovery as well as an aesthetic choice.

The Aleppo's Pine Initiative adds a symbolic layer. By planting native pines, the designers tie landscape restoration to the city's own name and identity, making each tree a small marker of resilience. Construction follows the same logic: solar energy, rainwater harvesting and vernacular materials keep the new interventions grounded in local climate and building tradition rather than imported formulas.

Gardens as Social Infrastructure

The strongest idea in Re.greeneration is that its gardens are not only landscapes. The fruit and crop gardens are designed as social hubs where residents can meet, learn sustainable practices and share experiences. Collaborative workshops and activities invite citizens to take part in rebuilding their own neighbourhoods, which turns reconstruction from something done to a community into something done by it. Alongside these productive spaces, the proposal sets aside areas for communal healing, self-discovery and emotional growth, and places for cultural exchange and artistic expression that reflect Aleppo's heritage.

This pairing of cultivation and care is well judged. Tending a garden is slow, repetitive and shared work, exactly the kind of rhythm that can help a traumatised community rebuild trust. The landscape becomes a place where grief and recovery can happen side by side without forcing a single, official narrative onto what the city has lived through.

Why This Project Matters

Post-conflict reconstruction often swings between two extremes: nostalgic replication of what was lost, or tabula rasa redevelopment that erases it. Re.greeneration offers a third path. By treating destruction as part of an ongoing ecological and social process, it lets the city remember without freezing it, and rebuild without forgetting. The craters stay, but they now hold water, plants and people.

The proposal leaves open questions of scale, phasing and governance that a built version would need to resolve. Its value lies in the framework it sets out: heritage conservation, ecological restoration and community healing treated as one design problem rather than three separate briefs. That framework reaches beyond Aleppo, to any city looking for ways to let its wounds become places of growth.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Claudia de Sas Trujillo, Juanita Leal Ochoa

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

uni.xyz runs architecture and design competitions year-round that reward proposals with spatial conviction and real site intelligence.

Project credits: Re.greeneration by Claudia de Sas Trujillo, Juanita Leal Ochoa Memory (uni.xyz).