Zamalka Into The Future: Rooftops Rebuilt as the Shared Public Realm of Post-War Syria

Most reconstruction plans begin with the ground: clear the rubble, redraw the streets, start again. Zamalka Into The Future: Re-Coding Post-War Syria begins on the roof. Its central claim is that rebuilding a war-damaged town should be an act of transformation rather than replication, and that the most underused surface in a dense, damaged neighbourhood is the one above everyone's heads. The proposal lifts public life onto a lightweight lattice threaded over existing buildings, turning rooftops into a connected civic layer.

Developed as part of the ongoing research of Reparametrize Studio, the project received a Jury Commendation in Habitats '20, uni.xyz's residential architecture competition. Its site is Zamalka, a Syrian town marked by conflict, where the designers set out a framework that combines rehabilitation, adaptive reuse and new construction instead of the tabula rasa approach that often follows destruction. The full entry is available on the project page.

Six Repaired Buildings, Two New Ones, One Continuous Grain

The aerial render makes the strategy legible at a glance. A timber-framed grid with planted terraces sits among the white block buildings beside the street; it does not replace them. The proposal renovates six existing buildings and inserts two new structures into zones that were destroyed, a ratio that tells you where the designers' priorities lie. Most of what Zamalka was is kept, and new architecture fills only the gaps left by loss.

This matters because the scale and rhythm of the existing urban grain carry memory in a way a fresh masterplan cannot. The new frame adopts the footprint and height of its neighbours, so the contemporary language reads as an overlay rather than a rupture. Preservation and intervention share the same block instead of competing for it.

Courtyards Where the Neighbourhood Learns to Gather Again

At ground level, the courtyard view shifts the conversation from structure to daily life. Trees and climbing plants soften stacked glazed balconies, while children and a cyclist cross the paved ground. The image argues that reconstruction has an intangible side, social cohesion, and that it is built through shared spaces where residents meet without arranging to.

Circulation is designed to weave across multiple levels, linking private units to courtyards and, above them, to the rooftop network. The result is a continuous route rather than a stack of isolated floors, and the balconies overlooking the court keep the space watched and occupied. In a community rebuilding trust, that kind of informal visibility is a quiet but deliberate design move.

The Social Rooftop: Verticality Recast as a Civic Asset

The second aerial is where the proposal's core idea comes into focus. Orange timber lattice frames carry trellised decks and clustered planting across a field of white rooftops, forming what the designers call the Social Rooftop. These elevated platforms act as extensions of public space for recreation, interaction and ecological integration, compensating for the scarcity of open ground in a dense post-war setting.

What keeps the idea from becoming a rooftop garden cliché is its handling of privacy. The network sets up gradients, letting residents move from intimate domestic zones to collective terraces in steps rather than in a single leap. Shaded walkways and green terraces also do environmental work, tempering the microclimate across a roofscape that would otherwise absorb heat.

A Modular Lattice Built to Grow in Phases

The site plan shows the intervention as a gridded cluster of planted modules and courtyards set between dark city blocks and tree-lined streets, a neighbourhood-scale patch rather than a singular object. The exploded isometric then peels it apart: the lattice volume on top, a colour-coded layer of public spaces, paths and units in the middle, and the existing buildings below. Reading the layers separately shows how much the scheme depends on the old fabric as its foundation.

The modular structural grid is the project's practical answer to uncertainty. In post-conflict contexts, funding and timelines rarely arrive all at once, so a framework that can be built in phases, scaled up or left partially complete is more realistic than a fixed masterplan. The architecture stays open-ended, built to absorb changing needs while streets, courtyards and transitional spaces are reimagined as active parts of the same system.

Why This Project Matters

Zamalka Into The Future treats reconstruction as an urban design problem rather than a housing quota. By keeping six buildings, adding only two, and placing new public life on the roofs, it shows that landscape, infrastructure and architecture can work as one system in a damaged town. The Jury Commendation at Habitats '20 recognises a proposal that respects what survived while refusing to simply rebuild what was there before.

Its broader value lies in its replicability. A modular lattice, a layered approach to privacy and an insistence on shared space are tools that could travel to other post-conflict regions, adjusted to local grain and climate. The open question, and a productive one, is how residents themselves would shape the frame over time. A design built to be incomplete invites exactly that kind of authorship.

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Project credits: Zamalka Into The Future: Rooftops Rebuilt as the Shared Public Realm of Post-War Syria Habitats '20 (uni.xyz).