Harasta is a town in Rif Dimashq Governorate, lying on the north-eastern edge of Damascus where the capital's built-up area meets the open farmland of the Ghouta. Its position on the main northbound corridor out of Damascus made it a natural transit and market point between the city and the countryside beyond, and its own municipality — Harasta City Municipality — remains the local authority that partners international agencies working on the ground.

The town's character was shaped by the meeting of two economies: an agricultural hinterland of orchards and market gardens on the Ghouta plain, and a dense residential and small-workshop fabric built up along the highway approach to the capital. Harasta is organised into distinct neighbourhoods, among them Al-Hadaeq, which recovery agencies have treated as a separate planning unit in their own project documents.

The damage recorded in Harasta is both above and below ground. In a June 2021 procurement notice issued by the United Nations Office at Nairobi on behalf of UN-Habitat, the agency described a network of underground tunnels of varying dimensions running beneath residential buildings in Harasta City and compromising their structural stability, alongside thousands of cubic metres of rubble in streets and public spaces obstructing the return of displaced residents.

The scale of the works scoped to address this gives a measure of the condition of the town. The same 2021 notice put the planned tunnel-filling at approximately 3,000 cubic metres of concrete injection beneath residential buildings, together with repairs to household infrastructure connections running through those tunnels, and approximately 10,000 cubic metres of debris to be cleared from streets and public spaces. These are planned volumes of work, not completed totals.

Recovery in Harasta has been organised as a continuing programme rather than a single intervention. A second phase, "Promote safe access to housing in Harasta city, Rural Damascus", was implemented by UN-Habitat with a budget of USD 499,334.70 and ran from October 2021 to December 2022; its scope covered the removal of 33,000 cubic metres of rubble from streets and building frontages, the extraction of 350 cubic metres of hazardous structural elements from damaged buildings, the rehabilitation of common spaces in 25 buildings, and housing, land and property services for affected families. UN-Habitat reported in May 2022 that restoration work in Al-Hadaeq neighbourhood had begun and that residents displaced since 2011 had started returning to their homes there.