Urban Planning Senior Assistant

Partner UN-HABITAT- Syria
Job categories Urban Planning/Design
Vacancy code VA/2025/B5104/30098
Department/office MR, AMMMCO, Amman
Duty station Damascus, Syrian Arab Republic
Contract type Local ICA Support
Contract level LICA-5
Duration 12 Months (Renewable according to budget availability and performance satisfaction)
Application period 29-Apr-2025 to 13-May-2025


Applications to vacancies must be received before midnight Copenhagen time (CET) on the closing date of the announcement.

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The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) is the United Nations programme working towards a better urban future. Its mission is to promote socially and environmentally sustainable human settlements development and the achievement of adequate shelter for all.

Since 2015, the UN-Habitat Syria Programme has worked closely with Syrian cities and communities to develop an urban resilience and recovery approach. UN-Habitat supports local authorities and communities (1) to collect better urban data to reach a common understanding on urban recovery needs; (2) to jointly identify neighborhood and municipal area response priorities – from humanitarian, to resilience, to recovery; and (3) to design and implement housing, infrastructure and basic services, urban environment, and urban cultural heritage projects that directly respond to these local priorities.

UN-Habitat Syria currently has offices in Damascus, Homs, Aleppo and Deir Azzor, The UN-Habitat Syria programme operationalizes projects across Syria.


Project Background

UN-Habitat, in conjunction with five UN agencies, is carrying out the second stage of the UN Joint Programme (UNJP2.0) to strengthen urban and rural resilience and the conditions for recovery in Syria. This objective results throughout improving equitable access to basic services, restoring food systems and providing dignified and sustainable livelihood opportunities for targeted communities, while building trust and cooperation across social divides. Through these pathways, the programme seeks to better equip local communities to withstand future shocks and to empower them to pursue their recovery priorities inclusively and sustainably.

Moreover, the UNJP2.0 is underpinned by a commitment to collective programming towards resilience solutions, applying a nuanced, area-based and conflict-sensitive approach, which facilitates an optimisation of community participation, thereby creating an appropriate space for participatory and bottom-up-led processes with a focus on the rural-urban linkages, while ensuring gender-responsive/gender-transformative and inclusive planning. 

As the UN-Habitat’s experience in Syria shows that city profiling and recovery planning is the fundamental basis for community-based activities. Accordingly, As-Safira City's Profile and Recovery Planning addresses the recovery priorities that emphasize the rural-rural linkages between the city and key surrounding communities, including Tal Aran and Tal Hasel.

It is a multi-sectoral and area-based tool designed to i) foster inclusive community engagement in the recovery process, ii) effectively empower vulnerable communities, iii) strengthen the rural-rural and rural-urban linkages and improve crisis response efficiency through resilience programming. By leveraging these linkages, the recovery plan seeks to promote programmatic recommendations that shed light on prioritized interventions, including infrastructure improvement, livelihood restoration and ensuring more resilient and interconnected systems.

The methodology of this comprehensive instrument is integrated with the UN-Habitat Information Management Unit to spatially map the participatory results of urban analysis and damage assessment involving local stakeholders, local authorities and communities, including women, youth, people with disabilities, older persons, internally displaced persons, returnees and residents of informal settlements. 

For additional information, please refer to the Urban Recovery Framework publication series available on the UN-Habitat website https://unhabitat.org/urban-recovery-framework-publication-series.







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