Beyond the choice between preservation and imitation

Historic forms and cultural practices can carry significant knowledge. Reproducing their visible features does not necessarily preserve their meaning or make them relevant to contemporary life.

Nostalgia also tends to remember selectively, smoothing over the constraints and exclusions that were part of the past.

International models can offer valuable knowledge, technologies and methods. Their success elsewhere does not guarantee that they will work in a different social, economic or cultural context.

A model carries assumptions about incomes, households, institutions and habits. When those assumptions do not hold, the model may fail quietly.

Copying a cultural reference keeps its form. Understanding the principle beneath it allows that principle to take a new form suited to present conditions.

• How hospitality shapes spatial design: the sequence of thresholds, the room given to guests, the separation of public and private.
• How local material knowledge informs product development: what lasts in a given climate, what can be repaired, what is locally available.
• How language influences visual identity: the rhythm and proportion of Arabic script as structure rather than ornament.
• How social relationships shape the use of public space: who gathers where, and at what times.

These are illustrative examples, not findings from completed research.

We use “rooted modernity” as a working concept, not an established doctrine. It describes an approach to contemporary development that draws on contextual knowledge while remaining open to experimentation, external influences and change.

The concept is provisional. It may prove too vague, or be replaced by better terms as the work develops.

What would modernity look like if it began with a careful understanding of the society in which it was taking place?

Modernity is often spoken of as a single package arriving from elsewhere. In practice, societies have taken up different parts of it at different speeds: the telephone before the archive, the highway before the public library, the smartphone before reliable electricity. Each combination produces its own tensions.

Asking which parts of modern life people in Syria want, which they have been given without choosing, and which they have refused, may be more productive than asking whether Syria is ‘modern’.