A Syrian boy plays between destroyed buildings in the old city of Homs, Syria, Friday, Feb. 26, 2016. Hassan Ammar/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.The Battle for Home: The Memoir of a Syrian Architect by Marwa al-Sabouni is a profound, understated meditation on architecture's capacity both to civilise and destroy, written while the author witnessed first-hand the destruction of her native city of Homs.
Al-Sabouni argues that years of misguided and corrupt urban planning have ripped apart the delicate urban and social fabric of Syria's ancient cities, facilitating the conditions for violence between segregated communities living as strangers in fractured landscapes they can no longer recognise as their own.
The book's early chapters conjure a shimmering vision of a better Homs, a city of peace that now has the quality of myth. Al-Sabouni knows her remembered city is more than part dream, but it did once exist as a half-realised ideal, an ideal that for centuries sustained a tolerant cosmopolitanism in which citizens of many creeds, races and classes participated.
