This paper examines Land Value Capture (LVC) as a complex set of instruments for financing urban development and shaping the fair distribution of rights, benefits, and burdens in cities. Its central argument is that land value is not produced by land developers alone. It is generated collectively through public investment, infrastructure, linkages to wider urban amenities, planning decisions, services, economic activity, and the everyday life of communities. For this reason, a fair share of the value created through public action should return to society through enhanced funding and support to infrastructure, affordable housing, public services, heritage protection, and environmental improvements.

The paper situates this argument within the MENA region, where rapid urbanisation, land scarcity, weak cadastral systems, outdated valuation methods, limited municipal autonomy, and opaque public-private arrangements have often prevented cities from capturing land value for public benefit. Instead, land and real estate have increasingly become vehicles for speculation and elite accumulation. In several regional cases, instruments such as land readjustment, public land transfers, betterment levies, and developer obligations have been applied selectively, reinforcing displacement, spatial inequality, and high-end development models detached from broader social needs.

Syria represents the most acute expression of these risks. Legal frameworks introduced during the conflict, including Decree 66/2012, Law 23/2015, and Law 10/2018, used the language of reconstruction and urban modernization while enabling large-scale land pooling, expropriation, and redevelopment that excluded many displaced residents, informal tenure holders, tenants, and vulnerable communities from meaningful participation or return.

Yet the paper does not reject LVC. It argues that reconstruction offers an opportunity to redesign these instruments around equity, accountability, and rights protection. Properly governed, LVC can help finance infrastructure, regularize and upgrade informal settlements, support affordable and cooperative housing, preserve public land, and rebuild trust. The future of Syrian cities will depend not only on mobilizing finance, but on establishing a renewed social contract around land, participation, and shared urban value.