Rubble Employing for Prospective Housing Scarcity in Post-war Syria

Dense and central cities could be concern in common between all the developing countries. Syria is one of these countries that has not only central cities but also dense destroyed cities. Moreover, collapsed infrastructure made four-fifths of the population live in poverty. By the end of this tragedy, reconstruction of Syria will be one of the most important topics that needs to be handle by different people, engineers, and companies. The need of affordable and fast accommodation to build will be essential need when people of Syria return their homes.

The aim of this project is to investigate an innovative building material for housing scarcity crisis, which will affect the country as more and more cities of the war-torn country will be freed and refugees will start to come back. Rubble volume in Syrian cities is estimated by at least 80 million tons; therefor, including the rubble in fast and affordable reconstruction process will be the basic principle in this project. Another area of investigation was the thermal behaviour of this new material in hot and dry climate (Damascus city as a reference). More specifically, it seeks to reduce the heating and cooling demand in Syria, where more than 80% of the electricity network is out. As well the orientation impact on thermal behaviour in the same indicated location was part of the climate design.

The vision of this project is to establish an introduction to inclusive and sustainable plan for the reconstruction of Syria in a decent manner, where the economic potential of post-war Syria mostly will not be sufficient to provide decent housing for returnees. This project examined also the rubble percentage that it can be used in this new material, more than 50% of the rubble can be used in the reconstruction process. Building and clearing in parallel way could be the key feature of reconstruction Syria in systematic manner despite the limited resources.

Project mentor: Nadir Abdessemed

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Ibrahem Al-Salamh – Syria

Ibrahem Al-Salamh – Syria

Ibrahem graduated as a Civil Engineer from the University of Al-Furat, Syria in 2013. He is currently pursuing a Master’s degree at the University of Stuttgart. His past experiences include working as a site engineer at AGM company in Syria for 2 years, holding a UNHCR focal point position for a year, and being a trainee at Daimler in Germany.