Driven by high property prices, Daraa residents are building homes beyond the planned boundaries of cities and towns, creating new neighborhoods without basic infrastructure and presenting already overstretched municipalities with a dilemma. The post Outside the plan: Urban growth outpaces roads and
Driven by high property prices, Daraa residents are building homes beyond the planned boundaries of cities and towns, creating new neighborhoods without basic infrastructure and presenting already overstretched municipalities with a dilemma.
30 June 2026
PARIS — Two kilometers outside Jassim, a city in Syria’s southern Daraa province, Muhammad Abu Qassem is building a small home for his family on a plot of farmland inherited from his father. He began construction earlier this year, when the high cost of land and real estate prices in Jassim led him to consider options outside city limits.
Basic infrastructure—electricity, water, sewage and roads—does not extend to Abu Qassem’s house. He plans to rely on solar panels for electricity, dig a septic pit and use his motorcycle as the sole means of bringing his children to school and making household purchases, he told Syria Direct.
Over years of war in Syria, houses like Abu Qassem’s have been built outside the planned urban areas of cities and towns in Daraa, with new neighborhoods popping up on agricultural land and the “protection zones” ringing cities as residents sought affordable housing.
The phenomenon accelerated with the fall of the Assad regime on December 8, 2024. Newly constructed areas emerged, lacking basic infrastructure and services like water, power, schools and healthcare centers. Residents rely instead on individual, rudimentary alternatives.
“Before the regime fell, construction activity was negligible. Since then, the city has seen a boom of construction and rapid growth due to the housing shortage, the return of Syrians from abroad and [greater] security and stability,” Muhammad Amarin, the mayor of Nawa, a town in the western Daraa countryside, told Syria Direct.
This informal sprawl not only means losing portions of farmland, but leaves Daraa municipalities grappling with urban growth that is difficult to regulate and service. Meanwhile, large areas that were formally incorporated into official zoning plans just before the Syrian revolution broke out in March 2011 still lack basic services, three government officials told Syria Direct.
As unregulated, unserviced housing spills outwards in response to residents’ urgent needs, new informal settlements are taking shape that will be difficult for Daraa’s overstretched municipalities and worn-out infrastructure to manage in the future. Beyond the southern province, a similar dynamic is playing out in Reef Dimashq province, and in areas around major cities across the country.
Highlights show areas of increased construction density between Inkhil (bottom right) and Simlin (top left) in the northern Daraa countryside between May 2011 and June 2026 (Google Earth/Copernicus/Syria Direct)
A snapshot of this new reality can be seen in satellite images of Inkhil and Simlin in the northern Daraa countryside, where a significant expansion of residential development has taken place on mostly agricultural land between May 2011 and June 2026.
Scattered houses have begun to crop up near Abu Qassem’s nearly finished house, but the area is not yet an informal neighborhood. Farmland and dirt roads stretch between buildings, none of which are hooked up to public service networks—something that imposes additional costs, despite the cheaper land.
“Many houses are being built around me, but the area isn’t yet a full-fledged neighborhood,” Abu Qassem said. “Outside the city, you get cheaper housing, but services aren’t available and the roads are dirt.”
Abu Qassem is aware that daily life “will be more challenging until the area is served by the municipality.” Like his neighbors, he will rely on solar panels to power lights and some appliances. “Hooking up to the public grid isn’t possible because it is outside the [master] plan, and the same goes for water and sewage.”
Municipalities are “not legally concerned with providing services to neighborhoods and houses outside the organizational plan, so most services in those areas are provided by property owners themselves,” one mayor in the eastern Daraa countryside told Syria Direct, requesting anonymity because he is not authorized to make statements to the media.
Once Abu Qassem’s family moves into their new house, his children will be far from their schools, and have to be transported at least three kilometers by motorcycle every day.
In Inkhil, a city in northern Daraa, a lack of services is not limited to houses built outside its zoning plan. Muhammad Abu Mazen is building a home on land inside city limits, but the area has yet to be fully served by public infrastructure networks.
In 2010, Inkhil’s organizational plan was expanded. New areas of land surrounding the city became part of the planned area, including the land where Abu Mazen is building his house today. But when the Syrian revolution broke out in 2011, followed by years of war, most of the new expansion areas remained without public networks and roads, an official municipal source in Inkhil told Syria Direct, requesting anonymity.
“During the war, public networks weren’t updated or completed. After the [2024] liberation, the municipality repaired some of them, and some roads,” Abu Mazen explained. “It still hasn’t really started to work in the new expansion areas, due to weak capacity and lacking resources.”
Abu Mazen built his house without a building permit, because he could not pay the municipal costs, he said. However, “the municipality takes our circumstances and need for housing into account, and hasn’t stopped construction as long as a building doesn’t encroach on a road or public property,” he added.
“The municipality called me twice when I started construction, and told me I needed a permit. When I explained my financial situation, they looked the other way,” Abu Mazen said.
However, Inkhil’s municipality did intervene when one of Abu Mazen’s friends began constructing foundations along a main road, “warning him to modify the construction and stay away from the course of the road, or else it would tear it down,” he said.
“New, unserved neighborhoods have appeared in the area around Inkhil. Those who live there rely on themselves for water and electricity, and pave the roads by collecting funds and distributing costs among themselves,” Inkhil resident Muhammad Abu al-Majd said. “The children in these far-off neighborhoods travel three kilometers on foot or by public bus to reach schools.”
Houses have gradually extended along the two roads spanning the roughly two-kilometer distance between Inkhil and the neighboring town of Simlin in recent years, essentially connecting the towns while construction extends in other directions, reaching up to three or four kilometers outside city limits.
From the north, Inkhil “is connected to Simlin, and from the west is very close to Jassim,” resident Abu al-Majd said. “The city has clearly expanded on all four sides.”
This sprawl did not happen at once, but began with a scattering of houses on farmland near Inkhil built during the revolution. These houses later converged into semi-connected clusters resembling new neighborhoods without planning or services.
The Inkhil municipal official confirmed that “construction outside the organizational plan has reached three kilometers from its boundaries in some places,” while “both sides of the Inkhil-Simlin roads have been built up.”
But despite such a large expansion on the ground, Inkhil’s organizational plan remains at the limits drawn by the last expansion, 16 years ago. “The current plan has not been updated for 16 years,” while “around 70 percent of the [approved] expansion is still not served. Roads have not been opened, and public service networks are not equipped,” the official said.
With the municipality unable to serve areas that entered the plan 16 years ago, expanding it yet again to include recent construction is a difficult prospect, even as settlement stretches beyond the limits of the last expansion.
“We cannot expand the organizational plan. We have areas that have been waiting for services for 16 years, and at the moment we don’t have the capacity to serve them,” the Inkhil municipal official said. Further expansion would also require municipalities to “take possession of new roads and land, pave and equip them, which is an additional burden, not to mention there is currently no capacity.”
While the prices of land and real estate both inside and outside cities and towns have shot up in Daraa since the regime fell, formal and informal construction continues. “High prices inside the planned area are the biggest motivator for people to go outside the city and build on agricultural land,” the Inkhil official said.
The scale of building on agricultural land differs from city to city, however. In Nawa, one of Daraa’s largest cities, Mayor Amarin estimated more than 200 residential buildings have been built on farmland since December 2024.
Meanwhile, the mayor in the eastern Daraa countryside said of his town that “not expanding its organizational plan for nearly 20 years is a major factor behind the increase in unauthorized construction in recent years.”
This lack of expansion coincided with “the exceptional circumstance of years of war, the return of displaced people and expatriates, increased demand for housing and high real estate and land costs within the planned area,” he added.
Buildings outside city plans do not all hold the same legal status. Some have been built in “protection zones” directly adjacent to cities and towns, while others are built on farmland far from residential areas, the mayor added.
“Protection zones are lands directly outside the boundaries of the plan, but are considered a natural extension of the town or city, and are the areas most qualified to enter the plan if it is expanded in the future,” he explained. For that reason, “building in the protection zones differs from construction on agricultural lands far from residential clusters.”
In his eastern Daraa town, most unauthorized buildings—around 100 houses—are concentrated in the protection zones surrounding the planned area. The rest of the construction is on remote land, and so far is limited to roughly five houses.
“So far, illegal construction on farmland does not pose a great danger to the agricultural area near town because its spread is limited,” he added, but “the continuation of the current situation without regulatory solutions could negatively impact this land in the future.”
At the current boundary of Inkhil’s organizational plan, a 12-meter-wide road abruptly ends. This road was meant to be extended with any future expansion of the city, but houses built outside it have begun to block its planned path, making it a dilemma the municipality will face in the future, the Inkhil municipal official said.
Adding newly built areas to an updated organizational plan would require identifying the course of streets and service networks, as well as allocating spaces for schools and public utilities. This “is difficult to do in areas where houses have been built, since these ad hoc constructions greatly affect urban planning,” the same source said.
“No building permits can be granted outside the plan, so legally we cannot grant them subscriptions to electricity, water and sewage networks,” he added.
In Nawa, Amarin noted “the building activity is large, and cannot be controlled because there is not enough municipal staff, including technical offices, engineers, building inspectors and municipal police.” For the city of around 120,000 people, “there is only one municipal police officer, which is not enough to control building violations,” he added.
“The municipality cannot provide services to the neighborhoods that have expanded beyond the planned boundaries. They truly need basic services, but the municipality is not required to provide them to these areas, which are an additional burden,” Amarin said. “Municipalities lack the capacity to meet their needs.”
Mazhar Sharbaji, a governance expert and former mayor of the Reef Dimashq city of Darayya, said “the problem is not only related to providing immediate services, but in the absence of a basis upon which organized networks can be built. How can you provide services to informal housing? It is difficult to determine routes for sewage and water lines, or develop a coherent, modern urban plan.”
“Building infrastructure requires approved urban plans that designate the locations of roads, electricity, water and sewage networks, as well as treatment plants. Given their limited resources, municipalities are focused on emergency repairs and rehabilitating existing networks, rather than comprehensive service expansion,” Sharbaji added.
The difficulty of accessing public services pushes people to seek out alternative solutions, including drilling artesian wells. Sharbaji warned of such wells’ impact on subterranean water deposits, amid increasing demand and declining water resources.
Read more: Drought, drilling, diversion: Daraa’s deepening water crisis
Informal construction is also taking agricultural land out of production. “In many areas, farmland has given way to concrete structures and homes,” Sharbaji noted, a shift that directly impacts agriculture, the environment and regional and urban planning.
The Inkhil municipality did not stop the construction of Abu Mazen’s house because he did not obtain a permit, nor did it prevent him from connecting it to the city’s electricity and sewage network. This approach reflects a pattern of how local city authorities are handling informal construction within the planned area. However, this lenience does not extend to encroachments on roads and public property.
Inkhil’s municipality is focusing its limited resources on stopping encroachments that would be difficult to reverse in the future—especially those that impact planned road corridors—rather than going after those buildings without permits, the local municipal official said.
“The municipality organizes weekly tours of the city, and focuses on limiting encroachments on roads and public property,” he added. However, the city’s ability to regulate construction outside city limits remains limited.
“The laws in force prohibit construction on agricultural land, and require us to seal the building with red wax and demolish it. This would mean removing residential communities and neighborhoods that appeared during the war, inhabited by families with no alternative housing,” the Inkhil official said. “If we enforced the law, we would demolish cities.”
Building violations are currently subject to Legislative Decree No. 40 of 2012, which stipulates the removal of building violations and tightens penalties. However, local authorities in Daraa have not conducted large-scale removals, as officials wait for new legislation and policies to reorganize the file and adapt to the current reality imposed by years of war and informal construction.
“Buildings outside the organizational plan are legally considered unauthorized structures, and under [Decree] 40, the owners are referred to the judiciary, summoned by the competent court and legal action is taken against them,” Amarin said.
“So far, we have not carried out any demolitions of unauthorized buildings, given the difficult living conditions people are going through and the urgent need for housing,” the mayor in eastern Daraa said.
Currently, municipal action is limited to “sending alerts and warnings to violators of the consequences of continuing the illegal construction,” he added, emphasizing that “the fundamental solution to this problem depends on amending Decree 40 or initiating an expansion of the town’s organizational plan as appropriate to population growth and urban development needs.”
“Addressing the issue requires technical committees to study the situation in each area, distinguishing unsafe buildings and houses that obstruct roads and utilities from buildings that can be preserved or have their status settled within new planning schemes,” Sharbaji said.
“Determining the fate of structures built on agricultural land requires studying their location and relationship to any future planning—using satellite images and field surveys—before making a decision to either remove them or include them in new zoning plans,” he added.
“Any decision to remove them raises the question of the fate of families who spent their savings to build a house, and have nowhere else to live,” he concluded.
Reducing fees for building permits, Nawa mayor Amarin said, “may reduce construction violations within the planned area and encourage building permitting and compliance.”
Caught between regulations mandating the demolition of building violations—which are socially and economically difficult to implement—and the option of settling the status of existing buildings, an unplanned urban reality is emerging. Meanwhile, municipalities wait for new laws and policies, while managing the issue through temporary measures and looking the other way.
In Jassim, Abu Qassem continues to build—he is not waiting for new laws to complete his house. He plans to move his family over in the coming months, and make do with alternative energy, water and plumbing.
For him, building outside the city plan was the only way he could own a house, after high real estate prices drove him out of Jassim proper. Yet day by day, despite the distance, Abu Qassem can already see the features of a new neighborhood taking shape all around him.
This report was originally published in Arabic and translated into English by Mateo Nelson.
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