Sustainability assessment of Syrian cities considering historical and cultural heritage

Introduction. The sustainability of territories of urban settlements (USs) and rural settlements (RSs) is one of the priority tasks of urban planning and socio-economic planning, and is also determined by the goal of integrated development of the territory. This issue is widely discussed in the scientific and technical literature, where the focus is on socio-economic, environmental and anthropogenic factors that characterize the urban system, which are used to obtain a quantitative indicator of the level of sustainability using entropy-weighted, (TOPSIS-Technique of Preference Similarity to the Ideal Solution) and other methods. At the same time, the importance of cultural heritage in sustainable development has not received enough attention. This paper presents the results of sustainability assessment of the impact of immovable tangible cultural heritage of eight Syrian cities based on a multi-criteria model.

Materials and methods. The paper uses materials from open sources and statistical data of municipal organizations, the selection of which is based on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the system approach. The data include characteristics of social, historical-cultural, economic, environmental, engineering, transport subsystems of the city. The aim of the study is to determine a generalized index characterizing the sustainability of the city and the impact of its factors on its importance of cultural heritage in promoting socio-economic development and urban reconstruction after the military conflict.

Results. Based on the presented model, calculations of the urban sustainability index (IS) of 8 Syrian cities — Damascus, Homs, Aleppo, Latakia, Palmyra, Daraa, Deir ez-Zor and Idlib for the period of 2010 (before the military conflict) and 2023 were performed, which showed a decrease in the sustainability index up to two times. This is due to the destruction of residential areas of engineering and transport systems, destruction of cultural heritage objects. It is also found that tangible cultural heritage has a great impact on the sustainability of the city system.

Conclusions. The proposed model for determining the index of urban sustainability (IS) allows us to obtain a quantitative assessment and analyze the impact of each factor. It is shown that along with the restoration of residential areas and objects of engineering and transport infrastructure, it is necessary to carry out works to preserve objects of cultural heritage, the loss of which leads to a decrease in the sustainability of the city, the loss of its urban identity.

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