This is a conversation with Dr Mona Harb, Professor of Urban Studies and Politics at the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut. She also works at Beirut Urban Lab which is:
“a collaborative and interdisciplinary research space. The Lab produces scholarship on urbanization by documenting and analyzing ongoing transformation processes in Lebanon and its region’s natural and built environments. It intervenes as an interlocutor and contributor to academic debates about historical and contemporary urbanization from its position in the Global South.”
Mona recently wrote reflections on the blast on Jadaliyya – Quick Thoughts: Mona Harb on the Aftermath of the Beirut Explosion – which led to this invitation on The Fire These Times. We use the blast as the anchor for our conversation. We spoke about the roles of dominant political figures/parties – especially Hariri Sr+Jr and Hezbollah in this case – in privatisation processes which have led to a highly disfigured city even before the August explosion. We spoke about the difficulties of trying to love Beirut and how it can often feel like it is too much to handle. In short, we spoke about our very modern experience affecting not just our country but places around the world.
Indeed, although Beirut and Lebanon-focused, this is a conversation that applies to multiple cities around the world that are facing the challenges of human-caused destruction (the blast, climate change, urban inequalities, and so on) while also navigating the limitations imposed by nation states under the still-dominant (despite everything) neoliberal framework.
The title of this episode was partly taken from “Initiatives in Response to the Beirut Blast” on the Beirut Urban Lab website in which they ask:
“How to ensure a people-centered holistic recovery process, in ways that are inclusive, gender-sensitive, and environmentally sustainable, in order to redress deep-rooted socio-spatial inequalities and reclaim the public domain?”.
The Beirut Urban Lab is also providing an up-to-date basemap of Municipal Beirut for all to download.
I highly recommend checking out their website!
Mentioned:
- resilient:broken, my essay for Mangal Media
- The quote by Mona Fawaz and Marwan Ghandour is:
“Often associated with processes of healing, postwar reconstruction projects may be less related to the predestruction phase than to the actual act of destruction. This, at least, is what the Lebanese case suggests. In this essay, we argue that the spatial erasure initiated by war destruction is consolidated during postwar reconstruction.”
Link to the article.
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Music by Tarabeat. Photo taken from Beirut Urban Lab.
Transcript via Antidote Zine:
I use the word “recovery” rather than “reconstruction” knowingly, because we need to recover from all the traumas that have been inflicted over the past three decades and the dysfunctional policies that have been produced. How can we be rethink these relationships in ways where vulnerable people are at the center, where policies are designed to protect them foremost, where their interests are seen as a priority?
Elia J. Ayoub: Ever since the explosion in Beirut on August 4, 2020, people have been genuinely concerned about what might come after. This is a tale that’s unfortunately not new in Lebanon. Following the civil war, a private company called Solidere had special status and in tandem with the government managed to “reconstruct” most of downtown Beirut. The problem is that it did so under a neoliberal model, and thirty years later, downtown is pretty much a ghost town. The same thing happened in the southern suburbs of Beirut in what is now called Dahieh, and there is a risk that this might happen in the destroyed parts of Beirut this time.
Is this a realistic risk? What are some of the things to look out for? Can things be done in a different way? Can we rebuild Beirut in a way that makes sense, in a way that prioritizes the people that live there? These are some of the questions that I asked Dr. Mona Harb, my guest today. She’s a professor at the American University of Beirut, focusing on urban studies and politics, and she’s been writing essays on this topic that I highly recommend. So this is a conversation about urban studies, but it’s also a conversation about rebuilding. How can rebuilding happen when the forces that caused this destruction are still in power?
We look at two case studies: the example of Solidere in downtown Beirut, and the example of Elyssar in the southern suburbs of Beirut. You don’t have to know much about Beirut to find this episode interesting. The idea is to look at what’s happened in Beirut as a warning not just for people who live in Beirut or in Lebanon, but for everywhere else. What has been happening in Beirut and in Lebanon more broadly for the past three decades can happen anywhere. There’s nothing exclusive about what we have been going through, and that’s why I’m having these conversations, to connect us with what other people go through.
Mona Harb: I’m Mona Harb. I’m a professor at the American University of Beirut; I work on urban studies and politics, and I teach in the graduate programs of urban planning and policy and urban design. My training is in architecture, urbanism, and political science. I’m also one of the research leads at the Beirut Urban Lab, a relatively new research platform established in 2018 at the Maroun Semaan Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at AUB.
EA: First of all, thanks for having this conversation with me. With most guests these days from Lebanon, I start by saying that I know this is not an easy time to talk about any of this, so I appreciate the time.
MH: Sure. Thanks, Elia, for having me—indeed it’s not normal times at all. I don’t know how we’re functioning, but it’s certainly not resilience. I don’t like to qualify our ability to function as that. But it’s a survival mode of sorts.
EA: For sure. Just a few weeks ago, I published an essay on questioning the concept of resilience as well, mainly from a personal perpective. I wasn’t saying that it’s wrong if people feel that way, but I think it has run its course. Let’s start with that, the difficult question of how you’ve been living the past year, especially since October 2019 when a lot of these things started happening—just your reflections on the multiple crises within the crisis.
MH: It’s a difficult question to answer. It’s a very personal experience for every one of us, a very challenging and difficult experience for everyone, depending on their trajectory, their positioning in Beirut and Lebanon more generally, professionally, personally, emotionally. As far as I’m concerned, it has been quite hard for the past three years, with all the struggles seemingly reaching a dead end. I feel that the blast sealed that dead end in many ways, confirming there’s something that needs to fundamentally and structurally change. It reitirated for the nth time the uselessness of the political system we live within, and the limitations of trying to work within it—or even the ability to challenge it without.
How do you change things? Do you go in and change, or do you make a revolution and change it from without? There’s a major dead end in my own mind about what works. I was working for the past few years on documenting the efforts of urban activists in challenging the sectarian system, and I was quite convinced that if we inflict more cracks in the system, these cracks at some point will coalesce and will lead to some change. I strongly felt, in the aftermath of the revolution of October 2019, at the beginning of the violent repression by the sectarian regime, and then the blast, that the apparatus of that sectarian regime, and the geopolitics that cushion it as well, the international aid apparatus that was set in place in the aftermath of the blast—this all reminded me (and colleagues with whom I work) of the very big monster that needs to be fought, and made us question the modalities of the work we’d been mobilizing.
There’s a lot of disillusion, and also deep questioning of what we are doing and how we were doing it, what works, what doesn’t. Should we keep on doing what we’re doing? Real deep existential questions about these issues I’m sure are shared by many.
EA: I’ve been meaning to have a conversation with you on one of your main research topics, the Elyssar project and the reconstruction of the south suburbs of Beirut. Many people know more about Solidere than about Elyssar. And it just so happens that now we have both Hezbollah in government and Hariri coming back—it reminded me that we’re dealing with a dual monster; in some ways it’s the same one, just two sides of the same coin.
Now in the aftermath of August, according to your reading and from your experience, what are some of the risks that we might see in terms of real estate vultures that might come into those destroyed places in Beirut and try and profit out of it?
MH: It’s a great question. There’s an uncanny resemblance to the early nineties, to the first decade of the post-civil-war reconstruction phase, currently, with these actors re-positioning themselves. At the time it was Rafik Hariri, and there was quite a honeymoon with Hezbollah and Amal—what I refer to in my earlier work as the “enemy-brothers,” because we tend to forget that both parties, Amal and Hezbollah, did fight each other very violently. Brothers in the same family fought each other in the streets of Haret Hreik, Bourj el-Barajneh, and other neighborhoods in what came to be called Dahieh.
There’s something very absurd about what we’re living, and it builds on this difficulty of having to cope again with so much deja-vu. It feels like I’ve written this, I’ve worked on this, I’ve seen this before. It’s so predictable; it’s unbelievably the same as what we’ve lived, what we’ve critiqued and had debates and seminars and writings and discussions about, what people a generation older than me wrote about and decried in the early 1990s against the Solidere project.
There was a series of projects; maybe I’ll start with that. In the aftermath of the civil war, with the return of Rafik Hariri as prime minister (and the big euphoria that accompanied that return), as the person who’s going to salvage Lebanon and place it on the map as a leading country in the region, that will compete with Dubai and the Gulf—We are going to be a global city, a competitive city in the geography of the Middle East—the rebuilding of downtown Beirut was the emblem of post-war reconstruction that would reposition Lebanon, as the motto back then put it, as the “ancient city for the future.” That motto was very strong at the time, and was well-analyzed by people who worked on this project.
Within that framework, there were also other projects that were being sought out for the reconstruction not only of Beirut proper, but of metropolitan Beirut. The idea was to reposition Greater Beirut on the map. And they were all coming from the same approach of maximizing real estate value as much as possible in the aftermath of the civil war, where there was both destruction as well as open abandoned areas that could be repurposed. The coastal areas were being eyed because this is where there is a lot of potential real estate value.
Land was reclaimed from the sea in downtown Beirut—one-third of the land was built on the sea, in a land reclamation project that makes the books of urban design, and that provided the Solidere company with additional square meters to develop and make money from. There were also ambitions to develop the north suburbs of Dbayeh, what became the Dbayeh waterfront. It was supposed to expand south towards Bourj Hammoud and to repurpose the garbage dump over there (which is still there), with the LINOR project. This didn’t come through over the years, so it’s still a garbage dump, as we know. And there was another project to develop the south parts of Beirut, mainly the squatted areas on the sea that are contingent to Jnah and Ouzai, and to develop them into touristic projects that would bring important real estate revenues to the government.
All these projects were done with the approach of a public-private partnership with real estate companies that would develop these projects, and somehow the public institutions would facilitate these operations rather than be a key partner; the state is withdrawn and is only facilitating these market developments, which would be led by private companies. So while Solidere “worked,” it took a special law that was issued by parliament (and nearly everyone endorsed it, very few people stood against it) that gave superpowers to the real estate company that became Solidere (which is an acronym for “Société Libanaise pour le Dévelopement et la Reconstruction du Centre-ville de Beyrouth”).
So we had this real estate company in downtown Beirut with its special powers; we can discuss it if you’re interested. But we had very different setups in other places. With Elyssar, what’s very interesting is that Hezbollah and Amal positioned themselves as the defenders of this territory, of this part of Beirut, and said, We don’t want another Solidere in this part of the city, and we want to make sure to retain the property rights of people there. And the project transformed into a very different project than what it started as, and came to include touristic developments on the coast, and also a social housing component (in addition to relocation components into these social housing units, and industrial zones that would serve these units) in a first attempt at introducing a social and economic layer to reconstruction in Beirut.
It also didn’t develop under the real estate company’s operational setup; it was developed as a public agency, according to the urbanism laws we have in Lebanon. So it took a very different course, and today we have a public agency named Elyssar, which is situated on Airport Boulevard in Ghobeiry (in Haret Hreik specifically), which employs a number of public employees, which is responsible to apply the master plan (that was developed by [engineering and architecture consultancy] Dar Al-Handasah yet again), but which has done almost nothing of that master plan. It’s restricted its work so far to operations of land reallotment and grouping. It facilitated some real estate operations in the areas that extend between the Golf Club of Lebanon to the old Airport Boulevard road, so you see that there has been some middle class real estate development of residential buildings and some commercial activities next to them. And that’s about it.
In the north, the LINOR project did not come through, but the waterfront project developed by Joseph Khoury did, and you already see that some people live in these residential buildings that were developed there; there is the luxury yacht resort with the private club that services this area, with a corniche on the edge of it that’s well-used by the public of the northern areas of Beirut as well. This works partially.
These are all remnants of that era and that approach to redevelopment, which we label as neoliberal because it gives primacy to private real estate actors, to private property, to maximizing the real estate value of land, and to deleting the social value of land, the public layer of use, and the cultural heritage dimension of spatial practices. It’s still very much in the minds of these people, and one can really be concerned about the present government being made up by the same minds of these political sectarian players when we look at the reconstruction process that’s happening in the neighborhoods affected by the port blast.
EA: Shortly after the blast, I spoke with a friend who was involved in Save Beirut Heritage with me, almost a decade ago now. We had the same thought at the same time, panicked that they may just bring forward a Solidere 2.0, an Elyssar 2.0, and do this again. Do you see this as a real risk?
MH: Yeah, there has been a lot of discussion about this, the fear of another Solidere in these areas which are very rich with cultural and urban heritage. This is the historic fabric of the city, one of the last ones, which was already getting heavily gentrified even before the blast. We need to also highlight that the blast was not ground zero; even prior to the blast, the forces of real estate development and the financialization of land has been operating full blast, and has already erased a lot of our cultural and urban heritage. Organizations like Save Beirut Heritage and other activists have been protesting and demanding a more updated law to protect cultural heritage and urban heritage in Beirut, as you’re saying, for many years now. The problem is not new.
It’s important to say that the legal and institutional setups in place already do not protect cultural heritage, and the gentrification process is well ahead. Now we are in a situation which is very different than the early 1990s when Solidere was put in place: we don’t have the same influx of foreign capital that came to Beirut at the time, when there was trust in the figure of Rafik Hariri to salvage Beirut and place it on the economic map; in terms of investment, people were sent a message that this is a good investment to make. We are definitely not in the same period now—I don’t know who would place a penny in Lebanon at this time. So we don’t have that flow of capital that would financialize land. And within Lebanon, I don’t know how many people have the means to purchase property under the present circumstances, and would choose to do it in these areas.
The threat is much more a threat of displacement of people: people leaving their homes because they’re unable to stay within the slow reconstruction process, within the very difficult financial set up. People cannot even repair if they want to repair, because their money is locked in banks or has lost its value. And the flow of foreign aid (even if there are a lot of pledges, or a lot of money has come already) does not match the need. So we have very few people who are able to remain, and there’s a real fear of displacement, and people choosing not to stay.
The fear is eviction and displacement, and these areas becoming ghost towns (or ghost areas or ghost neighborhoods) like we already see today in several sections of the city. I mean, downtown today is a scary place. The rate of vacancy in some neighborhoods of Beirut reaches up to fifty percent. That’s something that I worry about much more than a Solidere 2.0.
EA: Speaking of that, would you mind bringing in a bit more of Beirut Urban Lab for those who don’t know, and speak a bit about the importance of residents in reconstruction? In Lebanon, residents tend to be viewed by developers as more like obstacles rather than This is where they live. Solidere is the obvious example here, but it goes beyond Solidere. I’m wondering if we could talk a bit more about the importance of residents in any proper urban planning.
MH: Yes, thank you for this, this is very important. And truly it is often evacuated, although I think people know this as a common sense.
Let’s start by reminding ourselves that cities function not only through their physical fabric of buildings and streets and infrastructure, but function primarily through the people who inhabit these buildings and streets, open spaces and public spaces and commercial activities. People make cities; people make neighborhoods. So the physical environment is not the only variable that defines reconstruction.
We have a very good example of that with Solidere again. We always go back to it because it’s such a fascinating case study of postwar reconstruction, from which you can derive so many lessons. Solidere is a very good example of reconstruction that is very beautiful and pretty, where we take friends and cousins and expats who come and visit, and we go and we walk there, and we take photographs—couples go there to take wedding pictures because it’s so pretty—but it’s not what we call a lived space, it’s not an experienced space. It’s not a space where you can go and spatially practice that space like you would do in other neighborhoods.
And we have so many of them in Beirut (and around Beirut) that function as very lived spaces; even if they’re not perhaps as pretty as Solidere, they are lively. They are vibrant. We like to go and walk there. Obvious examples are Hamra (although these days it is less of a good example); there are still components of Hamra where you walk and you enjoy it, because there are people around, and people can gaze on each other and see what other people are doing.
This is what people like in cities, and like in streets, and like in open spaces. We see it very well in Mar Mikhael and Gemmayzeh and Geitaoui. That’s why people have very strong bonds with these neighborhoods; that’s why people choose to live there. That’s why people go and spend their evenings there, and go and walk and climb the stairs there, and hang out there with their friends and their families. There’s a quality to urban spaces in Beirut, in many of its neighborhoods.
And I don’t want to single out the neighborhoods that have a touristic flair. We see these qualities in places like Tarik el-Jdideh, like Bourj Hammoud, like Haret Hreik, like Bourj el-Barajneh, like Barbour, like Mazraa. We see them in all the places where there is a street life—and we are a city with a very strong street life; people live on the street, put their plastic chairs there. You have conversations with the grocer, you have a conversation with a hairdresser; if somebody asks you a question, you can engage in conversation with a total stranger. We have a very strong social fabric in our social structure that we materialize in our streets and open spaces. This is a crucial quality of urban life in Beirut; it’s why certain people choose to live here, because of this.
And I’m not talking about the green layer that accompanies it: we have a lot of abandoned areas and lands that are planted by people sometimes, or that are left to themselves, and that shade certain streets, and that become almost like informal gardens in certain neighborhoods. Again, we have a lot of this in the areas hit by the blast. Karantina is an area where there isn’t the kind of urban heritage that we think of when we think about urban heritage, but has very rich social-spatial practices (this is the keyword in urban studies).
With this introduction, what I want to highlight is that people have been documenting the city, the urban fabric of Beirut and beyond, people who care about celebrating and highlighting the importance of these social-spatial practices, and the importance of the social and the spatial, the physical and the social—and the economic, because they’re all interrelated. People are keen on advancing and protecting these social-spatial practice in cities, because this is a key quality of public life that we need to preserve.
Two years ago we established the Beirut Urban Lab, which has several functions. One of their key functions is to document a number of dimensions about Beirut, including documenting these practices through a dataset of information that is available as open access to everyone who loves the city, is interested in working on the city and researching the city. Because in the absence of information about the city, we cannot improve it. And as people who work on the city, we’ve been looking for a base map of Beirut for years, and every time we borrow a base map from someone, we improve it a little bit and it’s never an accurate one. So we decided to do the job of the municipality.
The municipality should have a base map of Beirut and all the layers of information about the city—social, economic, historic heritage, information about public space, open space, who owns what where—and understand the city, to be able to intervene on it and improve it. We decided that if the municipality is not going to do that, we’re going to do it, and we’re going to put it in open access, and create a database of municipal Beirut. We’d like to do that for every city and town all over Lebanon. We don’t have the resources to do it yet, but we at least developed the methodology to do it, and we’d be able to reproduce base maps of all cities and towns of Lebanon in no time now that we’ve learned through the Beirut Municipal Map.
This map is available in open access on our website, it’s called the the Beirut Built Environment Database, (the BBED), and it includes several layers of information that can be downloaded using ArcGIS software, so people who work with open access maps can benefit from it. We’re also ready to share other layers of information depending on what is needed, if people contact us, and we have been doing that now with the recovery, with as many as stakeholders as possible. We’ve been informing the work of the Order of Engineers and Architects; we have a partnership with Rice University in the US to produce a map of the damage assessment (to make available online), and we’re working on developing a 3D map of Beirut with them.
We’re also sharing this data set with INGOs and UN bodies whenever possible; we’re trying to do MOUs with these organizations to enhance this data sharing and also to benefit from any data that is being collected by others, to feed our dataset as well.
EA: That’s amazing.
I have this quote by Marwan Ghandour and Mona Fawaz, from an essay that I have been using in my own PhD. I’ll just read it:
Often associated with processes of healing, postwar reconstruction projects may be less related to the pre-destruction phase than to the actual act of destruction. This, at least, is what the Lebanese case suggests. In this essay, we argue that the spatial erasure initiated by war destruction is consolidated during postwar reconstruction.
This was written in 2010.
MH: Yep. And it reflects on both Solidere and Waad, which brings back the two actors that you were mentioning, the reconstruction efforts led by Hezbollah in Haret Hreik with the Waad project, and those of Solidere and its patron Hariri in downtown Beirut. It’s a very apt citation to bring to the table, to highlight that indeed, in this postwar phase there is a real danger of spatial erasure and displacement, because people are not put at the center of the urban policy of reconstruction.
And when I say people, I don’t mean all people. I mean being biased towards the most vulnerable people, making sure that the disadvantaged people—and there are so many now in Lebanon. So many people are disadvantaged and underprivileged because of all the accumulation of inequalities over the past three decades. We have so many people today who are unable to pay rent, because the landlord is factoring rent in US dollars, and perhaps has options to find tenants who could pay rent in fresh dollars, and who doesn’t really care about the tenants that they have been housing for years in their building, and he prefers making income. That’s understandable from the perspective of a landlord, and we shouldn’t expect the landlord to subsidize the tenant. We should expect a public actor to devise a policy to protect the tenant and to subsidize the landlord.
In the absence of a public actor that thinks about these dynamics, and thinks of ways of reducing losses for the most vulnerable, and taxes people who are able to be taxed to subsidize these operations, we can’t do much, and it will be left to the forces of the market. And of course the forces of the market are disproportional, and are in favor of people who have means and resources, and will hurt the most vulnerable the most. This is a real dilemma. The most disadvantaged people are again going to pay the price. I’m thinking of refugees, of migrants, of female-led households, of LGBTQ populations, of populations with disabilities. These are the people who are the most under threat today in these neighborhoods, and in real danger of being evicted.
It goes beyond the neighborhoods affected by the blast. They’re the frontline, but we see this all over, in many neighborhoods across Beirut and across other cities in Lebanon. This is a real danger that we need to think of. This brings me to a reflection on this moment as a possible opportunity to rethink the relationship of people and the economy, people and reconstruction, people and urbanity. How can we, through these processes of recovery—I use the word recovery rather than reconstruction knowingly, because we need to recover from all the traumas that have been inflicted over the past three decades and the dysfunctional policies that have been produced. How can we be rethink these relationships in ways where vulnerable people are at the center, where policies are designed to protect them foremost, where their interests are seen as a priority?
EA: I’ll start the next question with a quotation by you, from your reflections in Jadaliyya right after the blast. There’s a sentence that hit home with me—in a sense, because it’s about me: I’m an expatriate right now; I’m in Switzerland. You spoke about some of the areas that were affected, especially Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhael. I am quoting here:
These are the sites which the diaspora is so fond of connecting with when they come spend their vacations in Lebanon. These are the urban spaces expatriates long to reside in, as they embody a particular ambiance of a Mediterranean hybrid city.
I like the way you put it—the Mediterranean hybrid city is something I’ve been thinking of quite a lot. I believe in this potential that I have seen with my own eyes in Beirut (and in Lebanon more broadly, but especially in Beirut), a potential that is being squashed and squandered constantly by the ruling establishment.
I want to ask two questions in one, and it will be the semi-final question that I have. One is: Can we speak about the link between urban planning and mental health? And the other question is a bit different, but we can use it as a reflection towards the end: What do you envision? If you had the power or the resources to rethink Beirut as this Mediterranean hybrid city, what could it look like? And what are some of the things we could do differently compared to how we’ve been doing it? Assuming we had the resources, which is difficult right now, but let’s try to imagine it.
MH: It is very possible. I teach urban planning and policy and urban design to students who are extremely creative in answering this question. The solutions are there. It’s not like we are unable to imagine what it would be like. This is maybe why it hurts so much for us as urbanists, because we are able to imagine how it could be.
The resources exist; we have been graduating urban planners and urban designers in this country since the mid-1990s, from programs that train urban planners and designers to plan and think about re-planning cities in better ways that are more inclusive, more diverse, more viable, more livable. They have learned this and they do it well. The thesis projects of these students are all available in the libraries of numerous universities, from the Lebanese University to NDU [Notre Dame University-Louaiz] to AUB to LAU [Lebanese American University] to Beirut Arab University. All these universities have graduate programs that are training urbanists. We have the skills, we have the resources, we have the answers.
The problem is much more finding the operational tools with which to intervene, finding partners in public institutions with whom we can work to devise these solutions to be implemented. One of the first things my colleague Mona Fawaz did at the Urban Lab after the blast was to go and speak to the governor of Beirut and tell him, We are here at your disposal; whatever you want, we are here to give you our resources and skills and expertise for free; let’s work together. And the governor was so overwhelmed with so many other requests that he was welcoming of this invitation but he never followed up. Now the reconstruction process is being piloted by the army and the higher relief council, with some syndicates alongside it, and the ministry of culture. The heritage people are engaged, so that’s good news for heritage perhaps, but overall the reconstruction procedure, the operation of it, does not include urban planners and urban designers, so the expertise needed to have a comprehensive approach to reconstruction is not being tapped into.
It is mind-boggling that we graduate so many people, and we have these resources—and the resources also include the diaspora. The number of people abroad who are ready to volunteer, who are already investing so much time, effort, and money in trying to inform the reconstruction process from afar, is humongous. It’s amazing. This is what pushes you to keep on working, because you receive phone calls from people who tell you, I can help, I will organize this, I will send money to do that, and you work with the little means you have.
So resources are not really the problem. The problem is the institutional setup, and the institutional setup needs to connect to a public actor. We cannot do it without a public ingredient. I would be willing to work with a minute public ingredient that would help us protect the public interest. Because if we do it on our own without synergy with public actors, it’s not going to go very far. Some people are doing great work on the ground, but it is limited in scope, it’s fragmented, it’s uncoordinated, and it lacks connection to people. Not everyone is able to know everything, and that’s normal.
On the “hybrid city,” I’m glad you picked up on it, because the choice of the word hybrid was very conscious. I didn’t want to use the word cosmopolitan; I felt that hybrid was better. And I do think that Beirut has an amazing propensity to be a hybrid city, thanks to its history. When you read histories and novels and see movies about Beirut—I don’t want to dwell on nostalgia, but it has this ability to be a home for so many different people. This quality of being a Mediterranean hybrid city that can be a refugee to many different kinds of people will hopefully remain, and will survive even though it’s dwindling and it’s harder to find safe spaces in the city today. For people who live here, we’re looking for them, and when we find them, we’re clinging to them: Okay, I found this corner here, there’s still this cafe there, there’s still this little bit of staircase here, and this bougainvillea there, and this view on the sea in this corner.
You see glimpses of it, always. I want to believe that these glimpses will never go away, and we’ll be able to nurture them. The people of Beirut who will stay behind, who will stay here—new generations will come and nurture them and allow them to grow back, like has happened so many times. Maybe that’s the way it’s going to be; it’s going to die and get revived in smaller ways. I don’t like the image of the phoenix, and I don’t want to allude to it at all, but I think there’s something in this place, in this geography and its people and its histories, that survives all the violences that the city has always been subjected to, for decades and more, since before its creation even.
This brings me to the potential role that urbanists and planners can play, and how they have tools with which they can activate these spaces, connect them to each other, and enliven them. They know how to do this because there are real tools through which you can do it. And you have to do it in very subtle ways, because you don’t want to destroy anything, and you want to keep this spontaneity, and you want to keep the informality of it. You don’t want to over-engineer it; you don’t want to make it a museum like Solidere did; you don’t want to just look at it in a picture, you want to live it. You want to live these spaces.
That’s where the difficulty is, and this is where the work needs to be very sensitive and subtle in its intervention. It is intervention that should be from below, and should be very slow—we should not rush into physical repair and re-construction. We need to understand the fabric and its multiple layers, especially its social, cultural, and economic layers, to be able to identify what makes it work the way it used to work (if it got destroyed) or still works. It’s amazing that some parts of Gemmayzeh and Getaoui and Karantina and Mar Mikhael still operate today. That there is still a street corner, even if all around is destroyed, where old men come and put their plastic chairs and have a cup of coffee and create a public space. That is temporary, it’s a couple of hours, it disappears after a while—but it creates a space where people gather and connect as humans.
These are exactly the types of practices we need to preserve and point to as urbanists. If the reconstruction process does not include urbanists, sociologists, anthropologists, and ordinary people who know that this street corner functions like that, we will never be able to allow it to exist. I am not saying to build it. Maybe it doesn’t need building; maybe what it needs is just to replant a tree that got destroyed and that’s it, so this would be the planning intervention. In some streets we visited, what needed to be rebuilt was the shading device above a store, because this is where people met. They only need to be shaded from the sun, and it was the shading device that needed to be repaired rather than the glass.
This is what we’re trying to tell the NGOS that are repairing: Please repair the shading device, even though it’s not on your list of priorities. The shading device will help people sit outside and create the hybrid space that makes this neighborhood a welcoming neighborhood, a place where you feel you belong, a place where people feel they can connect, where people feel they want to walk and spend time, where you have a human connection to someone while you’re passing by, even if you’re an expat visiting for two days.
I probably tried to answer that without the mental health part, but I can go back to mental health if you want.
EA: It touches on this by default in some ways.
I’ll just add my own reflections and then leave you the floor to end with your own. For me, Beirut is an adopted home. I’m not from Beirut; I’m from Mount Lebanon. It’s the city that Mount Lebanon overlooks, so I would see Beirut every morning or every afternoon; I would go on a walk with the dogs, and I see Beirut. It was always in the background until I started university, when it became this adopted space, adopted home.
And at some point it almost became a bit too much. Beirut can be very difficult to live in, it can be very difficult to love, it can be very difficult to even tolerate sometimes. I had my moments where all I needed was just to get in the car and leave, just go back to my hometown and just stay there for a while. I would have to alternate because I couldn’t stay in Beirut for too long.
Sometimes when I don’t manage to “see myself” in Beirut—expatriates long to reside in especially the quintessential neighborhoods that have traditional architecture—when I can’t do that, I end up reading some urban planning; I go on Beirut Urban Lab. It doesn’t necessarily even have to be Beirut; I can just read on another city somewhere else, where someone else has thought about this. Some cities have managed to overcome these difficulties, others not so much, so you see the philosophy of this experience at different stages: some are still at the early stages; some manage to make a city that’s more livable and that’s managing to overcome some of these difficulties. I think of Barcelona because it’s a city I know a bit, and it’s not perfect, but it does have this component that I feel Beirut can learn from, just to use a random example.
This is from my side. Beirut is very difficult—I don’t romanticize it or anything; it is a very difficult city. But it has this potential that I hold on to, not because of a naive idealism (although there’s nothing inherently wrong with that either), but because I have seen that potential. I have seen those interactions that are usually below the surface, interactions between Lebanese and non-Lebanese—there is also a dimension of, Is Beirut just Lebanese or just Arab, or can it also be more than that? And it’s all of those questions.
I’m just saying that I appreciate what Beirut Urban Lab does and what you do in your own research. I’ll let you reflect, and we’ll end the conversation that way.
MH: You touched on very key issues that I’m sure echo with a lot of the listeners, including myself.
Just to echo what you’re saying (I don’t think there are any finite statements I could make), I’m increasingly thinking about Beirut through its people, and realizing that’s what connects me to the city, especially in these times of pandemic where I’m increasingly staying home. But I also think that’s an excuse, because I’m unable to love the city anymore after everything that has been happening to it. I live in Hamra, and Hamra is transforming into a very different neighborhood than it used to be a few years ago. There’s much more impoverishment that is visible, much more decay and abandonment, and much less of this hybridity that always made me love to walk its streets, and find an excuse to prolong my walk and take detours to observe little corners of beauty that I wanted to connect to, be it a jasmine tree or a cute little store or a pretty balcony.
It is very hard to catch these in Hamra these days. So I think because I don’t want to see this transformation anymore, I’m hiding at home. I’m realizing this more and more, recently, that it’s not the pandemic that’s making me stay home. It’s a disconnection from the neighborhood I live in. I work at AUB, and whenever I go there, I’m alienated even further, because there are no students on campus, and I see no one while I walk on campus. It’s very pretty, but it’s empty. That’s what brings me to this idea that the city is its people.
The pandemic, and the departure of people from many spaces—public, private, semi-public, semi-private—and the fact there is this emptiness and this difficulty of connecting humanly to other people, bodily connections, being close in proximity to them—even if you go to a place, you have to distance yourself and push your chair away, and not hug people you want to hug, and not get too close to them or touch them, as people in this part of the world often do—I think this creates a lot of disconnection with the city. And I feel that all these layers of disconnection are very hard to make sense of, and to make sense of emotionally, in our relationship to Beirut.
So I too feel, like you were saying, that I need to go out and resource myself somewhere else, probably in connection to nature, and love the country again, rather than only the city, and say, Okay, no, this is beautiful, talk a little bit to people here and there, see the sea from afar, remember the emotional, affective connections I have to this place beyond Beirut, and then come back to Beirut with a renewed propensity to love it.
It doesn’t work often. It’s a lot of ebbs and flows, and there’s much more disconnection than connection these days. But as someone who has made a lot of investment in this place, who has made the choice to stay, repeatedly, over the years—with my partner, we’ve had several occasions in which we had this conversation, Do we stay, do we leave? and repeatedly chose to stay. I think this investment we made over the years is grounded now in a way that it’s able to sustain this disconnection. In that sense, it’s very personal, the way you feel about things nowadays, to what extent one can sustain the disconnection and the alienation that is dominant these days.
So yes, it’s exhausting, and there’s a big sigh coming from my body as I speak. I really feel the bodily exhaustion that this city and this exhausting political system does to us, and I will end with that.
EA: I’m grateful for the time you’ve given me on this. Thank you a lot for the time to have this interesting conversation.
MH: Thank you, Elia, thank you for having me. It’s been great talking to you.
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