Introduction

When the New York Times published an article titled ‘Next stop Damascus’ in June 2005, it did not refer to US fighter jets, but to Western jetsetters celebrating Old Damascus, the oldest continuously inhabited capital of the world, with its restaurants and boutique hotels, as a destination for luxury city breaks. There, they came across and benefited from an already-gentrifying urban landscape that, up to then, was primarily aimed at Syrian middle-class professionals, regime cronies and their changing consumer preferences. Gentrification– ‘the production of urban space for progressively more affluent users’ (Hackworth, 2002, p 815) – can best be seen in approximately 100 themed restaurants that, since the mid-1990s, have mushroomed throughout Old Damascus. After 2005, these restaurants were joined by a fast-growing number of boutique hotels, small luxury hotels situated in opulently renovated courtyard houses targeting international business travellers and moneyed tourists.

In this chapter, I scrutinise to what extent gentrification can be considered a successful upgrading strategy for Syria's authoritarian regime, whose legitimacy has been permanently contested, especially so since the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War in March 2011. I argue that the production of gentrification in the Syrian capital not only followed the logics of the market, but also depended on an authoritarian state that had been trying to exploit gentrification in order to secure its power at the local level. The chapter thus sheds light on the interrelations between gentrification and authoritarian rule in the historic old town.

The chapter is organised in the following way. As literature on gentrification in Damascus is almost non-existent, the first section of this chapter aims at connecting the Damascene case to research in other Arab cities. The second section investigates to what extent the principles of the Islamic City – namely, segregation along sectarian instead of class lines – shaped the preconditions for gentrification. In so doing, it provides an overview of the social and political-economic history of Damascus, a task that continues in the second section, which focuses on the rise of gentrifiers in terms of their class constitution. Furthermore, the third section looks into ways in which Damascenes involved in gentrification differ from their counterparts in the West.