Places of the Everyday
Carole Lévesque
Lebanon is a country that has had a long history of successive conquest, destruction, violence, intense construction, and reinvention of its landscape. […] The affirmation of one’s power through the destruction of cities, followed by the reconstruction of a new fabric and major landmarks recurs as a familiar pattern. In its more recent history, political struggles have been manifested widely, and fought in the capital, where several upheavals have overturned contemporary Beirut and transformed the city yet again. Through the long and complex civil war [and troubles that followed], the city, first divided along what came to be known as the Green Line, saw huge numbers of civilians fleeing the country or being displaced within its boundaries. Its buildings were severely damaged, sometimes abandoned, sometimes reduced to partial inhabitation […].
While general discourse has widely condemned the unregulated growth of the city and its suburbs since the days of the civil war as the main factor behind constant traffic congestion, encroachment of private space on green or public land, and similar concerns, Jad Tabet shows in Beyrouth that these processes are not unprecedented in the city’s history. To begin with, its geographical location, a narrow plateau interrupted by two major hills, torn between sea and mountain, reduces its capacity for large expansions. Building densely and developing additional layers over preexisting fabric are a necessity. Independently of its physical constraints, the city’s history also shows an iterative process of demolition and reconstruction, accompanied by regulations that have contributed to shaping the current situation. While archeological artifacts show that the city has been continuously occupied since 3000 BC, […] the 19th century saw Beirut truly flourish, especially with the building of the new port and the Damascus Road. While Damascus was and remained for a long time thereafter the central power of the region, the new road made it possible to link the two cities in a 13-hour ride—instead of a three-day journey[1] —allowing for a great number of both goods and people to travel inland. The new port in Beirut, which superseded those of Haifa, Saida, and Tripoli, managed most of European boats, merchandise, and travelers. The intra-muros city acted as the main place of business, and works undertaken by the 1820s to improve hygienic conditions, road networks, water canalizations, and similar sanitation projects helped new neighborhoods to develop along the Damascus Road and densified what had been, up to that point, relatively open fields and gardens with a growing number of bourgeois residences. As the city grew, changes in the legislation overseeing urban growth brought profound transformations in the production of the city. As Tabet explains, occidental legislation known as Tanzimats replaced older religious ones between 1839 and 1856. A series of laws were shaped which progressively linked cadastral numbers to names of occupants, gave ownership titles, shifted taxation from in-kind to monetary, legalized mortgages, purchase of land, seizures and transfers of property, and perhaps most importantly for what was to happen in the midst of the First World War and again during the civil war, introduced the notion of eminent domain. If these reforms were presented as means to improve public hygiene, aesthetics and efficiency, they made it possible for the Empire to control more directly, in a top-down manner, the development of the city.[2]
Gemmeyze, Saifi, Bachoura, Zokak el-Blat, and Minet el-Hosn—areas adjacent to the city center now considered heritage or historical neighborhoods—grew to become mixed-used areas, with commerce on the ground floor and apartments in the upper ones. But in the center per se, the urban vision of the Ottoman Empire was partially restrained by business owners who saw as detrimental to their interest two planned roadways intended to link the port directly to the Damascus Road—by way of the existing souks. For a number of years, the Empire tried in vain to accomplish this plan. But in the spring of 1915, as the Great War was nearing the shores of Lebanon and as it began to be apparent that the Empire’s days were numbered, an order was given for the plan to proceed as a necessary step toward the development of the city. Occupants of the souks were given a three-day notice to evacuate, and so started the demolition.[3] Britain bombed the city center three years later, so when the Alliance “liberated” the city, it found a center in ruins and an unfinished project of modernization.[4] The following French Mandate continued the Ottoman’s project, expropriating yet more properties and enlarging roadways well into the 1930s. Building on what the Ottomans had begun, orthogonal lines were finally drawn, sparing very little of the old Arab city. The old city lost its intra-muros character and historical meaning, and was officially reduced to the port district. Saifi, Bachoura, and Minet el-Hosn completed the business and entertainment quarter, on which the populace bestowed a perceptive unity by naming the general area al-Balad, that is, the city.[5]
Samir Kassir explains, in Histoire de Beyrouth, how any given block within the Balad showed both a modern façade and traditional interiors, where land use and settlement could be more informal. Despite the hard work of modernity, the occupation of these interiors showed the resilience of tradition: shops, sheds, one-room tenements grouped around a common yard, or storage for a variety of goods were all still part of the new fabric. While the Mandate made every possible effort to modernize Beirut, continues Kassir, the informal didn’t cease growing, progressively taking over terraces, shacks being built within or on top of new buildings, along with rooftop sheds for breeding pigeons.[6] Through the term of the Mandate up to the end of the civil war, the story of the Balad is thus one of dual development: one development pushed forward by the desire of those in power for a well-organized and functioning city, the other sustained by the means, needs, and desires of its inhabitants. Despite the efforts of central power to build a modern city […] the neglect to provide adequate infrastructure and services to the growing suburbs paved the way for a more informal process of building the city to take shape. A mutual accommodation between the modern and the traditional formed, allowing them to coexist and build on each other. Thus the various expansion episodes were all to be characterized by the conquest of the modern by the traditional, and of the ordered by the informal,[7] within municipal Beirut as much as in its immediate surroundings.While various areas within the municipal limits slowly acquired ethnic or religious identities from the turn of the 20th century on, […] the Balad and its adjacent neighborhoods maintained a more diversified character. Naturally, when the civil war erupted in 1975, the city center—not belonging to a specific group other than that of merchants—became a buffer zone, or perhaps more accurately, a battlefield. The Damascus Road was used as the division governing the city’s territory, while its bordering neighborhoods were taken over by dissenting groups. Along the 4.5 km of the demarcation line, says Tabet, 23% of buildings were fully demolished, while another 58% were damaged to various extents.[8] As buildings were falling apart, rubble and other domestic trash were thrown to sea; they began to contribute to a landfill that would become, in the 1990s, the foundation for reclaimed land from the city center over the Mediterranean.
The civil war period is complicated, as a war tends to be. Because consensus about the conflict and the events that took place in and around it has yet to be reached, one should refer to specialized political writing to understand its complexities. This being said, it is fair to say that this period became a time of unregulated urban expansion toward the suburbs and the mountains. It placed severe pressure on the city center, its former, now-displaced inhabitants, and its new illegal settlers.
At the end of the civil war in 1990, the Lebanese government found itself incapable of rebuilding the city for a number of reasons. A lack of finances, the great number of landowners who would have to be consulted in the reconstruction efforts—over 40,000[9]—and the pressing public housing project needed to house all the displaced people who had set camp downtown under dire conditions, were all contributing factors. Financing of the chosen reconstruction strategy fell onto the private sector. Solidere, the Société Libanaise pour le Développement et la Reconstruction de Beyrouth, […] was given the task of assembling the necessary financing and leading the development process. As one portion of the negotiated terms and in order for this project to take form, the government drew a boundary of some 180 hectares[10] within which all properties, including designated public spaces, became Solidere’s. The eminent domain legislation of the 19th century and the work of the Mandate had set legal precedents for this development. Owners were offered a choice. They could receive stocks in Solidere to an equal value of their property […] or they could submit a large payment to Solidere along with demonstration of capacity to restore their building in line with the official preservation plan and, in exchange, retain ownership of their land and building. Needless to say, few owners had the liquidity to buy back their properties and follow Solidere’s guidelines, so most of the central district fell onto the lap of a single, private ownership. Solidere was thus essentially granted the permission to use, transform, demolish, or rebuild any parcel or building it deemed necessary for the development that it itself proposed and for managing the city center thereafter. In addition to this extraordinary power, Solidere was also given the right to reclaim 60 hectares of land on the sea front,[11] extending its power over the shoreline. Its revenues would be free from taxation for a 10-year period,[12] and expenses would be reimbursed by the state for all infrastructural work completed—roads, sidewalks, lamp posts, parking lots, public spaces, etc. Angus Gavin, acting as head of urban design at Solidere at the time, spoke of the gargantuan project in Beirut Reborn: The Restoration and Development of the Central District as “the dream of a reconnected city, a renewed and active center. It is the dream of a new and optimistic generation: the vision of Beirut reborn.”[13] […] Gavin paints the portrait of a very ambitious and unprecedented urban renewal endeavour concerned with preservation, archeology, transport, communication, connectivity, diversity, commerce—in short, a truly engaged and holistic approach to city design. The promise to reunite divided communities in the very site where business had been carried out for hundreds of years prior to the war, and to create a new center opening onto the sea and acting again as the locus for connection with other cities in the country and beyond, set truly high expectations. Whether these expectations were met is still debatable.
Demolition began in 1992, prior to Solidere’s reign, on behalf of the government. While several buildings were damaged beyond repair, many will argue that these buildings were brought down with excessive high-explosive demolition charges, so that the foundations of neighboring buildings were affected. In this way, each building, as it collapsed, damaged other buildings, which would then be declared hazardous to public safety and in need of demolition. All in all, approximately 85% of buildings in the city center were taken down[14] and 4,7 million square meters were planned to be built over a 25-year period.[15] Al-Balad thus became Solidere.
1875, 1920, 1972, 2004, 2017
While the processes and outcomes of this renewal strategy have been widely discussed and questioned […] it has brought to the city yet a new period of reconstruction and transformation. This time though, the transformation is not in the name of an invader, but rather follows the precepts of neoliberal development, resulting in massive capital investment and real-estate speculation. Opinions about Solidere are generally one of two camps: either it is seen as the only mechanism that could bring central Beirut back to its feet or it is the ugly corporation that has destroyed what was left of the pre-war fabric. It is either seen as the pragmatics of urban development mixed with clever economics or neoliberalism at its worst, making downtown Beirut a privatized distinct city. It is either understood as the good will of a venture wanting to inject life back into the Lebanese capital or a group that has sold the soul of Beirut to international developers and land owners. Despite these diverging opinions with regard to the reconstruction processes, one must admit that the rapid transformation of the city center brought a sentiment of calm and hope that peace might endure […]. While this state of affairs needs to be acknowledged, one also needs to see that Solidere actually did very little, if nothing at all, for the city as a larger entity in regards to infrastructure, public transportation, or diversity within the center. At the end of the war, less than half of phone lines were working—which gave way to a massive use of cell phones. Only a third of the electricity generated by power plants was available—power cuts are still a daily occurrence throughout the country. About 80% of water reserves were polluted, and tap water is still unsafe to drink. All waste water treatment facilities were out of service—some have now been rebuilt but are not functioning for lack of financing. The road infrastructure needed major rehabilitation—and we can now witness highway planning from before the war being pulled out of dusty drawers and presented as right-minded, contemporary developments. One also has to see that the spirit in which Solidere has acted since its creation has opened wide the door for more major exclusive developments to take place in historical or more vernacular neighborhoods. Solidere has, in addition, laid the groundwork for its own planning of incremental developments further out into adjacent and peripheral areas.
As such, laws were passed in the early 2000s to loosen regulations that had restricted the height of towers to be built in crowded neighborhoods and demanded that new buildings have a street façade. The consequences of these decisions are now tragic for historical and vernacular areas alike. Firstly, it means that there is a growing deficit of natural light and an overabundance of traffic in narrow streets, which is most of the streets throughout the city. Secondly, it means that the traditional inner block building—i.e. with storefronts on the streets and pedestrian access from the street to common courtyards, private gates, and houses—is now being replaced by the consolidation of properties into a single lot on which sits an oversized floor plate […]. Like neighborhoods, buildings receive very little protection. According to NGO Save Beirut Heritage, of the 1,600 heritage homes and buildings identified in a 1990 census, only 200 remain today. Needless to say, such ferocious development brings a dramatic change to the physical and social fabrics once supported by the smaller-scale city; it incrementally compromises the details and experience of Beirut.
If it is quite normal for a city to be constituted by all sorts of areas, […] the obvious inequalities between reconstructed neighborhoods and standing ones […] are now everywhere in Beirut: derelict buildings next door to high-tech towers, city blocks without proper electricity next to fully air-conditioned ones, construction workers living in desperate conditions within the site of the luxurious towers they build. And if Solidere and the growing speculation that accompanies it present a healthy image of the city’s rebirth, infrastructural challenges remain in most of greater Beirut. Inside the municipal boundary, electricity is usually available on a regular schedule with three-hour power cuts per day, but outside the boundary is randomly provided, with daily 6 to 12-hour cuts. Provision of water, which is unsafe for drinking, is intermittent during the summer months. Garbage is usually picked up by the private company Sukleen, but it is often discarded in abandoned houses or parcels, burnt on the side of a hill, or piled up in heaps along roads or, worse still, along the sea front.[16] Density per square kilometer is high and still on the rise, with a stock of buildings in a wide range of conditions. As Samir Kassir would say, the more the city grows, the more it resembles the entanglement of the intra-muros city before the first roads were opened in the dense fabric; streets might be wider but perpetual traffic jams and the encroachment on sidewalks amplify the impression of anomy and of overcrowding.[17] But while Solidere and other major developers are busy rebuilding Beirut, transforming its once mid-size scale to residential high-rises, some pockets of the city are left stagnant—no longer at war, yet not in reconstruction either.
While waiting to see which private investors will eventually take over the remaining areas, some of these areas have taken on a life of their own. They stand secluded from the rapid urban development underway elsewhere; and at the same time they appear as the only remaining places where alternatives to the crushing speculation might still be found.
Bachoura is one such neighborhood. Despite its adjacency to Solidere and its role in the former Balad, Bachoura is now at a standstill, ingrained in an everlasting present, overwhelmed with the weight of the recent past, and without a future other than the eventual tabula rasa that will clear the way for developers. There are, of course, other such areas: the southern edge of Ashrafiyeh for instance, parts of Karm el Zeitoun or Karantina, dense areas such as Bourj Hammoud or Ouzai, all of which are for the most part untouched by current growth. But because Bachoura stands next to Solidere, it shows us with crystal clarity the dualities of Beirut, dualities engaged between the city of the conqueror and the city of the dweller. It also demonstrates, this time in concert with Solidere, the consequences engendered by the disengagement from the municipality toward its city. On the north side of the Ring Road, Solidere is chief of urban development, the government having signed its rights over to private investments; on the south side, Bachoura goes on about its own business, making do with what is available, while decision-makers apparently couldn’t care less for its organization, other than being able to persuade investors to eventually demolish and rebuild. It seems it would make a certain sense to think the municipality would see fit to ensure a coherent distribution of services, infrastructure, and investment across diverse areas. But both Solidere and Bachoura tell a different story.
Bachoura grew from the city walls toward the south and rapidly came to play an important role during the Ottoman Empire, as the direct extension of the business and entertainment quarter. The long triangular cemetery and a hospital, both located on the gently sloping hill overlooking the Balad, were important markers for the area. Multiple-story apartment buildings were built along Tyan Street and the Damascus Road, some of which remain today as remnants of the early Mandate period, as beautifully documented by Robert Saliba in Beyrouth: Architecture aux sources de la modernité.[18]
The municipal boundary of Bachoura reaches from a thin sliver on the west side of the cemetery to the Damascus Road, and from the former intra-muros city’s boundary, to what is now known as Independence Street. Stretching from Hamra to the Nahr Beirut, Independence Street was, and has remained, an important east-west axis and commercial artery through contemporary Beirut. Streets that crossed Bachoura allowed direct passage from the Balad to Basta, the southern district, and beyond. But in 1960, in an effort to ease the growth of vehicular traffic, a partially elevated highway, the Fouad-Chehab Road, locally known as the Ring, drew a new frontier approximately a third of the way into the neighborhood, blocking most north-south connections with the center and dissecting Bachoura in two unequal parts, in terms of surface, but also in terms of future development, as the smaller portion now falls into Solidere’s territory. After the war broke out in 1975, two supposedly temporary metal bridges were built over Independence Street, so as to ease the traffic—of tanks. The bridges have well outlived the war and are still there today, allowing traffic to get across the city, but having killed any chance of community ties or development between Bachoura and Basta. The proximity of the neighborhood to the war’s demarcation line was fatal for the community, who, for the most part, fled to better places. The unforgiving barrier, used by snipers to control both sides, destroyed the bordering buildings, while inner layers shielded adjacent areas. The Green Line, literally green with the over-grown vegetation that flourished over the 20-year civil war, spread the devastation to its bordering neighborhoods. Not only was Bachoura unfortunately located along the green battlefield, it was also neighbor to downtown, where all had been abandoned to yet more snipers, wild dogs, and corpses. So between the Ring Road and the metal bridges over Independence Street, the cemetery wall and Damascus Road, Bachoura was incrementally closed onto itself, bordered on all sides by relatively impermeable infrastructures.
Five Rooms, (2011), initial sketches
[…] Bachoura has remained, for the most part, intact; or one should say, appearing as a war-torn zone. Some buildings were turned into workers’ housing, providing them with one-room apartments or larger, but over-crowded ones. The demographics have not changed much since, with the addition perhaps of North African and Syrian construction workers who occupy the larger apartment buildings or shelters along the cemetery wall.[19]
Most residents and property owners left during the war, […] abandoning their buildings. They were then taken over by squatters who have now settled in for a third generation. As is the case for many properties throughout the city, owners are often unknown, or have become multiple when the father has died and passed along the property rights to his family. Disputes arise as to what should be done with the properties, usually settling for large sums of money from developers who then proceed to evict, demolish, and rebuild. The identity of old fabrics […] ensured a sense of community and of proximity. But helped by the new laws, developers now embrace the consolidation strategy, seeing the promise of a prosperous future with the building of luxurious towers. Not only are these new towers changing the scale of their neighborhoods, they also attenuate, if not eliminate, the possibility for common space to exist. In exchange, they provide private, gated façades to the street, either surveilled or overtly patrolled.
Though Bachoura was left alone after the end of the civil war, its fate is slowly becoming the same as everywhere else. At the beginning of the documentation presented in this [project], in the summer of 2010, evictions had begun. In the summer of 2011, a first building was taken down and an empty lot was fenced behind a cinder block wall. In the course of 2012, evictions continued, two more buildings were taken down, and an abandoned construction site started operating again. By 2014, the construction site was completed as a relatively high-end property, one of the traditional settlements was demolished, and two major excavations were started, one at the corner of the Ring and Damascus, the second over the land where the hospital had once stood, taking away the children’s football field. But as it should be with a city as old as Beirut, archeological ruins were found on both excavation sites, putting a halt to the construction plans and leaving exposed a forbidding gap bordering the northern edge of the neighborhood. But as it also is in a city such as Beirut, ways were found to pursue construction, and by 2017, the northern tier of the neighborhood had become BDD, the Beirut Digital District, tearing everything down or building over existing buildings, providing “a one of a kind community” and the“healthiest environment for the young and dynamic force, all at competitive and affordable rates.”[20]
Though there is a general disregard for the social, architectural, or urban value of the neighborhood, Bachoura is not derelict. Today it is even more tightly confined between this new luxurious development, two major roadways (one of them elevated), and the cemetery (also at a higher topography); together they articulate very clearly the extent of the neighborhood’s (non) participation in the city. Despite this it is filled with commerce, craftsmanship, a public elementary school, a mosque, and a vibrant market street.
Arriving in Beirut (2012), ink on paper, 25x25cm
A room for sharing essential things (2011), ink on paper, 1:10
غرفة المشاركة في أمور أساسيّة
While it is certain that its disappearance is imminent, Bachoura is not vacant. Despite its empty buildings, either newly renovated, tumbling down, or simply sitting, waiting, it is densely inhabited with people of all ages, occupying every corner in all sorts of creative ways. If Bachoura is neither derelict nor abandoned, it is, without a doubt, uncertain, occupying a temporal no man’s land. Its permanence is being challenged, and though it is still used as a territory worthy of inhabitation, it is now under the transformative eye of prosperity. Whether one worries about the historical buildings or the residents of the neighborhood, one can be certain that all will be disposed of. But despite the challenges facing everyday practices during the final days of this vague urbain, possibilities for hopeful self-determination still remain sheltered beneath the precarious protective layer maintained by its inhabitants. Coincidentally, its local name, Khandaq el-Ghamiq, brings with it a whole alternative marvelous field: “the deep ditch,” in its English translation, suggests a world of its own, physically divided from a world further above, with the promise of unprecedented configurations.
If Bachoura is clearly not a space offered to spontaneous appropriation, as Luc Lévesque would describe the terrain vague[21]—due mainly to its political flavors, which trigger, more often than not, suspicion and surveillance—a terrain surprisingly open to curiosity and imagination can still be found. The close study of Bachoura’s details, of its built environment and lived experience, link the creative dimensions of its everyday to its margins, to its unstable context and its imminent disappearance. Its practices, as strange or as banal as they might appear, reveal a Beirut that is still rooted in its traditions, a practice of Beirut that is still able to manage informality within the formal, and a proposal for a Beirut that still welcomes the presence of spontaneity, awkwardness, and inventiveness as bearers of city making. In fact, the close study of Bachoura illustrates de Certeau’s “ethics of tenacity”[22] and provides a space from which to reflect upon the city’s trajectory. Within the new city, Bachoura presents, as de Certeau would say, a thousand ways of refusing the established order,[23] or, perhaps more precisely, the order that wishes to be established. If de Certeau spoke of ruses, tricks, and tropes being played within the everyday language as ways to displace the scientific, correct, and agreed upon language, ruses practiced in Bachoura act as signs of an embedded memory, of informal appropriations that have taken place in the city’s history. They are acts of reminiscence that Beirut can still be a heterogeneous city, one where desires, needs, and narratives may be diverse, and where details might very well tell stories anchored in the Lebanese culture and imagination.
Visiting Beirut (2013), ink on paper, 25x25cm
A room for going where you don’t need to be (2011), ink on paper, 1:10
غرفة للذهاب إلى حيث لا تحتاج أن تكون
As is the case for most cities, negative views and perceptions of the terrain vague are very much present in the Lebanese conception. This being said, Beirut’s terrains vagues are paradoxically inhabited by a second, contradicting meaning: while being eyesores and dirty, occasionally feared or avoided places, they are also understood as opportunities or signs of hopeful prosperity: as chances to rebuild and move on. Rather than being manifestations of an economic downturn, terrains vagues in Beirut are signs of economic growth soon to come. Even if this chance to reconstruct a possible future comes with the inevitable loss of the urban fabric and its associated ways of using and being in the city, the desire to build a prosperous future devoid of signs of a troubled past holds sway over any open land.
The same goes for the vague urbain, which, in the eye of the developer, seems to appear as a simple mathematical addition of terrains vagues. But the vague urbain has more to it: it holds a community, commerce, play, exchanges, practices; in short, it contains urban life. […] While [Bacoura] has most services a “regular” neighborhood might have to offer, perhaps beside reliable running water or electricity, it is not that far away from being a neighborhood amongst others. […] [U]nlike a slum or a makeshift settlement, it is organized and woven into the regular fabric of the city through its street network and its building stock. It is a direct continuation of the city’s network and is inscribed in its history. […].
Weaving the marvelous, the act of configuration, the vague, and architectural invention and representation as a theoretical structure, I have tried, through the words, photos, and drawings presented in this [project], to provide an opportunity for creative proposals to emerge and for the neglected neighborhood and community to participate in our imagination of Beirut. The attentive observation, description, and transcription of Bachoura suggest that there can be ways to find the imagination of the city within what is already there and experienceable. [This] project attempts to […] brush away the fear that the everyday is hopeless, fearful, or simply ordinary. Rather, it proposes that the configuring of Bachoura draws our attention to alternative practices instead of standardized positions as to what is worth our attention. I have sought to [build] a creative documentation that presents for our view non-official stories while posing a sincere and conscientious attention to a place that seemed, a priori, useless and disposable.
Building on the intricacies of Bachoura […], the photographic documentation, descriptions, architectural machines and drawings explore how a parallel Beirut can be found: where the remnants of abandoned buildings, overgrown lots, and improvised playgrounds act as marvelous devices for informal invention. This undertaking sought a way to infiltrate bachourian practices into the changing context. When Bachoura is devoured by the newer Beirut, perhaps the imagined infrastructures would allow for the bachourian marvelous real to stroll and glean the new landscape. Through the interpretation and telling of practices that are not otherwise represented or that are devalued by the current discourse, the work proposes that the vague urbain contains a marvelous real that is necessary for the well-being of the city and for escaping a one-way urbanization.
Because I am very much aware of my non-lebaneseness, let alone my non-bachourianness, it would be impossible to argue that my observations were always completely aware of all the intricacies at play, or that they weren’t tinted by my foreigner’s eyes, or, again, that I wasn’t given access to places, people, and situations precisely because I looked and sounded from elsewhere. This being said, the point was not to explain Bachoura in an anthropological manner, nor to investigate its political affiliations, but to find its practices and transcribe Bachoura. As says Klaske Havik, “the art of transcription lies in finding the ‘essence’ of the original version, and developing a second version that, however different, embodies the ‘soul’ of the first.”[24] The idea is thus not to copy the original or to pretend to know everything about it like a carbon copy, but to capture details that embody essential aspects of what is observed in order “to add new qualities to the original,”[25] to give it value and possibilities. Using architectural methods of analysis and creativity, each element of the project allows for different readings and stories to emerge, challenges our preconceptions about Bachoura, and provokes an engagement with a place where we most likely didn’t need to be.
Settling down in Beirut (2012), ink on paper, 25x25 cm
A room for hiding in the shadows of a room (2011), ink on paper, 1:10
غرفة للاختباء في ظلال غرفة
The practice, as presented by de Certeau, of the marvelous real, as defended by Carpentier, implied in the present time, as described by Ricoeur, can only be generated through situational actions. In other words, it is through practice that one can grasp situations that are ever so slightly detached from the everyday continuum to reveal a specificity and a recognition that what might have seemed accidental in fact contains deeply rooted elements of what constitutes the everyday. Practice requires action and engagement with the everyday; it requires an acute eye and receptivity to details and differences, time spent walking aimlessly through all geographical variations, and the presence of mind to capture, transcribe, and transliterate these meaningful situations.
In light of these references and of the argument I have tried to build with this [project], the [work] combines a photographic documentation, as a witness to the condition of prefiguration; textual descriptions, lying somewhere between the acts of prefiguring and configuring; and two series of drawings that bridge from configuration to the beginnings of reconfiguration. Thus from the documentation and description of found places and situations, five nomadic and transitory personal infrastructures were elaborated. Each manifests three essential practices of Bachoura: those of narration, of wandering, and of gleaning—something de Certeau would more likely call poaching. The personal infrastructures are linked to the space from which they emerged; they wander the city to extend its narrative, safeguarding existing conditions while planting new seeds of occupation. They thus stem from found situations and events and become—as they belong to soon-to-disappear places, people, buildings, and practices—invented rooms without definite location, pushed, rolled, pulled, swung, or carried through the new city as nomadic, personal, terrains vagues.
Starting with a systematic documentation recording empty lots, uses of parking spaces, drying laundry, children at play or at work, men occupying sidewalks, green spaces, passages, and artistic interventions, and followed by photographic montages rendering movement in important locations, the photographic documentation is meant to evoke the affective dimension of Bachoura and capture its present—a present enfolding past and future.
Building Beirut (2013), ink on paper, 25x25cm
A room for carrying stones (2011), ink on paper, 1:10
غرفة لنقل الحجر
While most practices found on the streets of Bachoura are repeated over time, the rhythm in which they appear isn’t always clear; hence the necessity of going often, at various times of day, on various days. While such an exercise might appear somewhat normal, suspicion and surveillance are very real in the neighborhood. […] Often mistaken for a real estate developer’s envoy, it is no wonder that the stranger with a camera is unwelcome.
All photos were taken with a point-and-shoot camera so that it could quickly be pulled out of a pocket and quickly put back, while settings had to remain general enough for any kind of situation. While it is common for architects to collage photos when wanting to have a full image of a site or a building, […] the photomontages were done in a […] fluid manner, with the camera placed at a different angle for almost every shot in order to create a dynamism in the photography that simulates, to some extent, the dynamism implied in walking through the different sites.[…].
Along with the desire to document Bachoura, I wanted to test how architectural drawing […] could constitute a narrative tool, or a tool of spatial transcription of the visual documentation. From five of the many situations in which I found myself through the documentation process, the drawing of the personal infrastructures—or the rooms, to put it more simply—transcribe, in their own architectural language, the situational time, spaces, narratives, and practices of Bachoura. For instance, children playing hide and seek in an abandoned building located in the midst of an impromptu garden become A room for hiding in the shadows of a room, an infrastructure to carry shadows with you, no matter the time of day or night. In it, thousands of silky threads embody the shadow, so one may feel the warmth and softness shade provides in the depths of a hot afternoon. Men spending most of their day sitting on plastic chairs, smoking arguileh and drinking coffee, becomes A room for keeping distractions away, an infrastructure to keep one both in movement and in the same space. As one balances on the swing, a reversed gear rolls the machine in the opposite direction so that, though flying through space, one remains in the same location. Confusion about wanting to give unnecessary directions becomes A room for going where you don’t need to be, an infrastructure that is so large and heavy, it is practically impossible to move up a street. Yet, the infrastructure’s purpose is to carry a watchtower so that when lost or uncertain of where to go, one lifts it up and mounts the stairs so as to see further in the preferred direction. But by the time one climbs down the spiral, turns the infrastructure back on its side, and pushes it hard enough to make it go forward, directions are again lost and the infrastructure will lead the way toward where one most likely didn’t need to go. An old woman proud of her one room apartment containing her complete life story becomes A room for sharing essential things, a half dome structure, as a woven basket one carries on one’s back. When wandering about the city and encountering another carrier of essential things, both carriers can put their half dome down to form a complete structure in which essential things, words or practices can be shared. And finally, the incredible story of a Prime Minister who sends men to tear up sidewalks in order to use the stones for building a villa in the desert, becomes A room for carrying stones, an empty wall structure that is pushed around the city in order to collect stones and broken concrete. As stones are collected, the infrastructure becomes heavier, eventually too heavy to be pushed further. Stones are then emptied to allow the structure to be pushed again, leaving behind a pile of traveled stones.
Waiting in Beirut (2012), ink on paper, 25x25cm
A room for keeping distractions away (2011), ink on paper, 1:10
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Even if these rooms seem improbable, their representation of found situations proposes the integration of the marvelous somewhere in the present, and embeds the marvelous within cultural traits, spatial specificities, everyday habits, and local history. That is why the infrastructures are presented in orthogonal projection: their drawing builds a dialogue between, on the one hand, the informality of a found and projected everyday, […] and, on the other, the neutral communication of architectural drawings. In this way, the drawings introduce the informality of the vague urbain, as a silent reality of our cities, into the scholarly discourses of architecture and the cities it builds. The strangeness of the infrastructures and situations from which they emerge are thus associated, through the architectural drawing, with disciplinary know-hows.
The second series of drawings places the rooms in a Beiruti context, as if they had been built and left to lead a life of their own. The landscapes are half-invented, in that they are drawn from strong images of Beirut but do not depict definitive and precise places. As such, and as with the room drawings, each landscape clearly belongs to the city even if one is in fact incapable of identifying a precise location. Represented like a façade, i.e. in two dimensions rather than in perspective, the landscapes are drawn using standard drawing techniques, as an architect would employ for an elevation. And like the elevation, which demonstrates how a given—imagined—building will act upon its surroundings and contribute to the developing context, so these landscapes, simultaneously real and invented, convey their ability to transform our outlook and steer our attention as we apprehend the cityscape. The landscapes translate essential situational qualities by configuring temporal and spatial heterogeneity, and begin a reconfiguration that includes the marvelous as a given in the city, a factor which acts upon our expectations of the foreseeable future.
In presenting the drawings […], I hope to resonate with the words of Alejo Carpentier when he says that “we must uncover and interpret [the world] ourselves. Our reality will appear new to our own eyes. Description is inescapable, and the description of a [strange] world is necessarily [strange], that is, the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ coincide in a strange reality.”[26] The texts, photographs, rooms and landscapes describe, together, the strange yet ordinary present of Bachoura, its cultural memory and its apparently inevitable future. They are closer to being active devices than is a purely literary description, only because the tools of architecture are meant to translate thought into action upon the environment; each element of the work constitutes a piece of a narrative machine, one that links a vague urbain to the city, and the city to some of its found stories. Through this transcriptive gymnastics, it becomes possible to think of Beirut as a city where explorations questioning the relentless destruction of its found character can participate in both the imagination of other possible narratives and the unearthing of value in existing ones. It is my hope that an undertaking such as this one may, perhaps, make a small room for bachourian marvelousness in the changing context of Beirut.
[1]. Ibid., 101.
[2]. Tabet, Jad. 2001. Beyrouth. Paris: Institut français d’architecture, 9
[3]. Kassir, Histoire de Beyrouth, 191.
[4]. Tabet, Beyrouth, 11.
[5]. Kassir, Histoire de Beyrouth, 343.
[6]. Ibid., 344.
[7]. Kassir, Histoire de Beyrouth, 344.
[8]. Tabet, Beyrouth, 42.
[9]. Angus, Gavin. and Ramez Bahige Maluf. 1996. Beirut Reborn: The Restoration and Development of the Central Disctrict. London: Academy Editions, 14.
[10]. Ibid., 32.
[11]. Ibid., 13.
[12]. Ibid., 16.
[13]. Ibid., 136.
[14]. Tabet, Beyrouth, 50.
[15]. Ibid., 49.
[16]. A garbage crisis erupted in July 2015. As the government failed to agree on a solution following the closure of the Naameh garbage dump, Sukleen stopped collecting garbage and people took to the streets in protest. In August, Sukleen started picking up garbage again, but with no functioning dump, or any other alternative for waste management, bags were piled under bridges, on empty lots or in the then-dried river bed. As of the beginning of 2018, still no solution was found.
[17]. Kassir. Histoire de Beyrouth, 15.
[18]. Saliba, Beyrouth: Architectures, aux sources de la modernité 1920–1940.
[19]. The enduring Syrian conflict has increased the general population of the country by an additional 1.2 million refugees, some of whom have settled in Bachoura. Though no official numbers are available, Bachoura’s population was significantly denser by the fall of 2014. Surveillance, which had been discreet and mobile, is now taken care of by two unofficial guard posts, disguised as coffee kiosks.
[20]. Beirut Digital District, promotional material. Accessed January 31, 2018. www.beirutdigitaldistrict.com
[21]. Lévesque, Luc. 1999. “Montréal, l’informe urbanité des terrains vagues: Pour une gestion créatrice du mobilier urbain.” Les Annales de la recherche urbaine, 85, no.1: 47–57.
[22]. Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, 46.
[23]. Ibid.
[24]. Havik, Klaske. 2014. Urban Literacy: Reading and Writing Architecture. Rotterdam: NAi010 Publishers, 98.
[25]. Ibid.
[26]. Carpentier, “Baroque and the marvellous real”, 106.
Ce projet a été financé par le URB Grant de l’American University of Beirut et le PAFARC de la Faculté des Arts de l’UQAM
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