Mouneh: Food Practices in Aleppo’s Post-war Residential In-Between Spaces
摘要
War and its aftermath affect people’s lives and the built environment, leading to new behaviours in responseResponse to constant change and resource scarcity. Post-war stress poses challenges for living spaces on physical, perceptual, and cognitive levels. Residential in-between spaces are important for their role in facilitating social, cultural, and natural transformation. These spaces’ temporality and flexibility allow for diverse social interactions and the creation of communityResilience resilienceCommunity resilience. In times of war and food insecurity, households’ responsesResponse are crucial for physical, mental, and social resilienceResilience. Food preservation practices are rooted in cultural heritage and contribute to self-identity and livelihood behaviours. Urban spacesUrban spaces and agrarian urbanism paradigms closely link these practices, which depend on factors like sun or wind availability for food processing. In AleppoAleppo, homemade food products are known as MounehMouneh. Pre-war, making MounehMouneh is a food-oriented cultural practice; however, people used Mouneh to cope during and after the war, as it does not need refrigeration and could overcome the severe lack of electricity. This Chapter aims to inform design practices to enhance the quality of residential in-between spaces to help a post-war community cope with and recover from disasters, by exploring the role of in-between spaces as behavioural settings for MounehMouneh practices. It draws on research on two blocks of flats in AleppoAleppo between summer 2022 and summer 2023, tracing the urban households’ preserved foodscapes and practices. Following behaviour mapping and semi-structured interviews with residents, themes from a qualitative-quantitative analysis highlighted the significance of three in-between spaces for MounehMouneh. Balconies, open entrances, and roofs are major elements in the formation of Mounehscapes for what they provide: direct exposure to the sun, natural surveillance, and a sense of safety. It also demonstrates how these practices contribute mainly to the mental and social dimensions of community resilienceCommunity resilience. The Chapter concludes by proposing design patterns in post-war AleppoAleppo for Mounehscapes, which are spaces that foster these practices and can help people surmount challenging circumstances and facilitate communityResilience resilienceCommunity resilience.