A Landscape of Recovery: The Polysemy of Spaces/Places in Downtown Beirut

CHAPTER 11
A Landscape of Recovery: The Polysemy of

Spaces/Places in Downtown Beirut
YASMEEN ARIF
How should a city mark the difference between what was, what happened and
what should be?
– Richard Sennet (1990: 6)
PROLOGUE
D
uring the weeks following February 2005, after the assassination
of Rafik Hariri, the charismatic billionaire and ex-Prime
Minister of Lebanon, Beirut witnessed, arguably, some of the
city’s most memorable social and political spectacles. Downtown Beirut,
the place that my discussion below is anchored in, became once again
the parenthesized location where the refashioning of a city’s social,
political, material landscape was manifest, in ways that add further
nuance to the multifaceted notion of urban post-crises ‘recovery’.
Downtown Beirut, in the temporal span that this essay focuses on, was
the focal point of the city’s and by far the nation’s reconstruction and
recovery program after the devastation wrecked by the fifteen year span
of Civil War. Controversial and spectacular, the reconstruction of
downtown Beirut came to represent a series of registers, as I describe
below, each of which elucidated on how urban recovery can be
conceptualized, implemented and critiqued in the domains of planned
reconstruction. However, the events that occurred in downtown Beirut
after Hariri’s assassination opened a separate register where it was not
just the formal plans of reconstruction that lent themselves to
interpretation, but rather an ongoing usage of a city site that gestured
towards how spaces come to be re-inscribed with new experiential
11 Ch. (Comparing).indd 276 10/16/08 11:58:19 AM

A LANDSCAPE OF RECOVERY 277
meaning, meaning that goes far beyond the expected predictions of a

planned post-war reconstruction project. It will be beyond the limits of
this essay to detail these new meanings, but a brief sketch of the events
will indicate how they coalesce with the overall idea of urban recovery
that I underline in the course of my argument.
Rafik Hariri was the powerful mastermind and visionary for the
reconstruction of Downtown Beirut—his assassination in its environs
marked an unusually literal closure for the man’s astonishing visions and
achievements in reviving post-war Beirut. His death and subsequent
burial in the new city centre, has turned it not only into a quasi-
pilgrimage site, but also provoked a stunning public performance of
protest and outrage, perhaps unparalleled in the city’s recent history.
During the weeks from 16 February 2005 to the ‘Unity week’ in April
marking the thirtieth anniversary of the start of the Civil Wars, various
demonstrations, spontaneous and massive (on days participants
numbering more than a million and a half ), constituted by Lebanese of
all hues and affiliations came together in Downtown Beirut to pronounce
and perform their opinion, consolidate and display to the world a new
public political configuration of post-war Beirut/Lebanon. Formed in
various coalitions, for instance, of pro or anti-Syria, or in multiple
renditions of patriotism, or conflicting claims on nationalism—this
amazing series of public demonstrations inscribed yet another layer to
the polysemy of meaning to the new city centre, i.e. Downtown Beirut.
The significance or rather the signification of these events in the wider
horizon of the city implied many ideas of new publics and counter
publics (Michael Warner 2002), of re-inscribing and reclaiming core
urban spaces with new practices and performances of a renewed politics.
(Samir Khalaf, 2006 and Sune Haugbolle, 2006). For my intents here,
it will be important to note these events as the spatial scriptings of the
actual and the eventual, in the semiotic of urban recovery. If the planned
visions of reconstruction I describe below could outline the actual
practice of ‘planning’ recovery, it is in the potential of the eventual that
the experience of recovery comes to be fleshed out into a ‘lived’
dimension. What makes this dynamic of the actual and potential
interesting is its engagement with a particular configuration of the
‘present’1—the now and the ongoing—in the social-political-spatial
imagination of the city.

278 COMPARING CITIES
While the visions of a new city centre, as I discuss below energized

the planning and reconstruction discourse in Beirut, its use as a stage for
the contemporary dynamic of Lebanese politics and society suggest
another complex of meaning about how urban recovery after crisis is not
a phenomena which can be best understood in singular discursive genres
but rather in multiple bundles of the actual and the potential, each of
which are tied intricately to the complex of sociality, historicity and
spatiality.
In the fall of 2004, Downtown Beirut presented itself as an impressive
urban centre, the near complete realization of a reconstruction vision
started almost a decade earlier. It was also a spellbinding vista for me to
gaze upon, since my last visit in 1998, when the area was a large
construction site, and my exploration of its potential rebirth was limited
to the many manuals and brochures that was available at that moment.
Facing the Mediterranean seafront and surrounded by sweeping
avenues, it is a spectacular square mile of glossy high rises, ‘heritage’
structures buffed to an antique sheen, historic and archaeological sites
spanning 5000 years—all ensconced in a slick new setting. There is
much more—gleaming window displays of high-end fashion, beautiful
‘traditional’ residences, quaint paved walkways, perfumed gardens,
stylized souks, important public squares, international business houses,
glamorous hotels, stylish café trottoirs and restaurants, trendy nightclubs
and theatres together compose a dazzling city centre. Moreover,
government offices of the highest power and authority lodged in
imposing period buildings form an important part of Downtown Beirut.
Many important cultural events of the city are frequently held here.
Holidaymakers and city folk throng the leisure and shopping areas. It is
one of the most thriving public spaces in the city.2 The transformation
of Downtown Beirut to Beirut Central District (BCD) as it is called now
is an astounding ‘before/after’ urban makeover feat that tells a significant
story of how urban space once inscribed by violence comes to be re-
inscribed as a spatial icon of recovery.
Before the war, downtown Beirut was an urban core whose centrality
seemed to have been established over 5000 years and many historical
eras. In a dense and chaotic maze of streets where both historic
architecture and modern buildings jostled together, pre-war Downtown
Beirut provided for most of the city’s central administrative functions as
well as commerce and leisure. The nation’s economic backbone of

financial institutions was located here, as were the souks, or the ancient
market places. Combining both the popular and the sophisticated, some
of the city’s main social meeting points were here—public squares, bus
terminals, shopping avenues, grand theatres, cinemas, mosques and
churches of various denominations and so on. Pocketed in the midst of
all this were little residential zones that housed Lebanese citizens of all
sects and confessions. Downtown Beirut embedded in the memory of
the city as a shared space, perhaps the only one of its kind in the Arab
world at that time. Together with its history, the myriad of functions
and places in downtown Beirut, the constant interaction of one single
site with commercial centrality, governmental administration, everyday
lives of residents and citizens in leisure or in work had made this city
centre into a ‘quality’, a characteristic of the nation that Lebanon desired
to be.
Between 1975 and 1977, when the fifteen-year cycle of the Lebanese
Civil Wars began, the initial episodes of armed warfare took place in
Downtown Beirut. As the years went by, as the wars raged on in other
parts of the city and country leaving the centre apparently ‘silent’, it
continued to bear the indelible marks of growing war devastation. With
the constant threat of snipers and militia hideouts guarding a fast-
emerging dividing line between Muslim West Beirut and Christian East
Beirut, which ran like a central axis through Downtown Beirut, the area
crumbled rapidly into a decaying neighbourhood. Businesses died or
moved out; cinemas, restaurants and shopping streets remained deserted;
the damaged buildings deteriorated beyond recognition into the squalor
of squatter homes for those fleeing from other parts of the country or
city. The few original residents who could relocate their homes did;
others managed to cling to a precarious existence in the same place. The
dividing line between East and West had congealed into the ‘Green Line’,
one of the most enduring spatial inscriptions of hostility in the city. By
all accounts, Downtown Beirut was a desolate landscape—on one hand
the horizon of a devastated built environment and on the other, inner
city life lived on the margins of a ravaged society.
After the cease-fire was declared in 1989,3 while few spots in the city
were untouched by physical destruction, Downtown Beirut, in its
compact form of burnt and damaged buildings, deserted streets blocked
with overgrown shrubs, remained a stark reminder of wartime destruction
and social fragility in its most vivid and compelling manifestations. Since

1995, one of the world’s largest rebuilding projects have been launched
in Downtown Beirut under the aegis of a state-supported private real
estate company called Solidere. The new Beirut Central District (BCD)
as it appears today has resulted from this company’s efforts over almost
a decade of reconstruction.
The version of state-capital alliance at work here shapes a very special
register of reconstructive activity. In a nation and a city physically and
socially damaged by war, a flagship project such as BCD becomes an
urban symbol of how the nation copes with its crises. The building of a
new city centre in the capital, with its implications for new spatial
inscriptions, not only reveals the reconfigured economy of the core of
the nation; it also is a profoundly re-arranged social world. It signifies
new city geographies of socio-economic inclusion and exclusion, of
concealed losses and buried experiences—everyday urban dynamics that
lie under the shadow of a gargantuan project of urban regeneration. 4
Beirut, on the whole, stands separate from other contexts of post-war
rebuilding, a city site where no ideology but that of re-construction itself
seems plausible. Given the fifteen years of warfare between a myriad of
factions, no ideological triumph nor loss, victors nor victims, traumas
nor injustices have been documented, contested and eventually
memorialized in plan, stone and concrete. At the time when violence
came to an uncertain cessation in Beirut, the core of the city seemed a
strangely empty yet saturated void5—it was saturated with an excessive
marking of violence and at the same time, its visible emptiness seemed
to indicate an excessive absence of either the possibility of a future or
the remembrance of a benign past. These excesses made the city centre
of Beirut a potential crucible6 for the inscription of new temporalities
and spatialities. Today, it is a core where the silent violence of brutal
defacement has been effaced by a newly-created built environment, one
that seems to articulate a ‘landscape of recovery’. The thrust of this essay7
will be to show how, through design and expediency, Downtown Beirut
became the focus of an effort towards urban recovery through
reconstruction. Through the idea of a compiled landscape of recovery, I
aim to show how several aspects of planning and design activate a city
site in such a manner that multiple spatial imaginations together in a
contemporary time frame to produce a multilayered spatial construct.
Ultimately, these new imaginations underscore the political economy of
a deeper concern: How does a city site chart a trajectory of recovery

when negotiating the effects of devastating civil violence and severe

physical damage?
LANDSCAPE OF RECOVERY
The impulse to term the reconstruction of downtown Beirut and its
emerging horizon as a ‘landscape of recovery’ is drawn from an
interpretive approach that adds to the genre of landscape studies by
considering landscapes as representations of a ‘cultural practice’ (W.J.T.
Mitchell 1994). Mitchell (1994: 1–4) argues for a comprehensive model
that studies the notion of a landscape not only in terms of what it ‘is’
(the art historical approach) or what it ‘means’ (a semiotic and
hermeneutic approach) but also in terms of what it ‘does’. Approaching
the reconstruction of downtown Beirut as a compilation, through plan
and agenda, of an emerging horizon implies the ‘doing’ of the culture of
recovery over an existing ‘landscape’. The landscape of downtown Beirut
encapsulates the culture of recovery by bringing together several imagined
and reified spatial interpretations of an environment, with each
interpretation representing a particular rendition of the practice of
recovery.
The different ‘layers’ that I describe below are the various interactions
that a particular city site can have with the ‘social-cultural-political’.
They are layers that occupy the same location, but lay out different
spheres of a spatial imagination positioned in the larger framework of
reconstruction in the discourse of recovery. These layers can also be
thought of as different places, each one with its own dimension of
meaning and function. While the overall space of downtown Beirut is a
single expanse, it comes to be constituted by several layers, or places.
This, in effect, is an imagining that renders a single space into several
places. In this distinction between space and place, a place is a ‘specific
location’ and a ‘space is a practiced place’ (W.J.T. Mitchell 2000: 198).
Mitchell draws his distinction from Michel de Certeau’s (1984) seminal
differentiation between spaces and places. In de Certeau’s terms, a place
is ‘situated in its own ‘proper’ and distinct location, a location it defines.
A place is an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies a
configuration of stability’ (1984: 117).
In relation, ‘space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that
orient it, situate it, temporalize it and make it function in a polyvalent

unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities’. Various

practices render the fluid polyvalence of a space into the univocality of
a stable place. Thus, the space of Downtown Beirut is a site that can be
activated and animated by ‘actions, narratives and signs’ (W.J.T. Mitchell
2000: 198), which results in a comprehensive spatiality that is split into
places.8
Once this rendering of space and place is located within the wider
discourse of recovery in which Downtown Beirut assumes the conceptual
frame of a landscape of recovery, where a singular space assumes the
compiled configuration of a collection of places. Each of these articulate
a kind of reconstruction or recovery, and together they compose a stable
landscape representing the practice of recovery. They are not, as W.J.T.
Mitchell describes, ‘fixed places treated as objects for visual contemplation
or interpretation’ (1994: 5), but they are both a represented and a
presented space, both a signifier and a signified, both a frame and what
a frame contains, both a real place and its simulacrum, both a package
and the commodity inside the package….’
THE ICONOGRAPHY OF PLANNING

The gradual demise of Downtown Beirut began to carve out a new urban
geography in the city. In the two years after 1975, the implosion of
Downtown Beirut as a war zone effected the most extensive evacuation
of the local population of both businesses and residents undertaken in
recent memory. The services and functions of the centre were taken over
by a series of suburban centres, peri-urban and rural locations. This
forced migration and displacement in Beirut was to effect changes that
would remain consequential even beyond the era of hostilities. The city
came to be portioned into ‘unconnected islands’ of ‘single community
ghettoes’ (Nabil Beyhum 1993: 43–62), where citizens were locked in
insular pockets, removed from any participation in ‘public’ spaces.9 Once
considered neutral, Downtown Beirut was rendered either partisan
because of its annexation to segmented territories, or impotent because
of the widespread destruction in the area. In a post-war milieu,
Downtown Beirut is remembered as a place in which the social co-
existence of the different communities in Beirut went beyond mere
practice to a social value etched deep in the social geography of the city.

It carries not only the memory of annexation to social differences but

also of that of an imposed ‘neutrality’ effected by wartime destruction.
Simultaneously, through the war years, as the city fragmented further
into territorialized segments, the state progressively became no more than
a splintered entity incapable of coherent functioning. Once the cease-fire
came into effect in 1989 and the hostile territorial claims were to be
dismantled, the return of the state could be heralded only by its
reinstatement in a spatial centrality that was endowed with appropriate
symbolic force. Although this essay cannot document a detailed analysis
of the travails of the Lebanese state in the context of the Civil Wars, 10
the reconstruction of downtown Beirut is a statement of the state’s efforts
at re-consolidation: it locates an iconic representation of its renewed
coherence in spatial terms. Hashim Sarkis, who has been an involved
critic of the reconstruction process as an urban planner/academic
maintains,
It is not difficult to imagine why the political return of the state would
immediately imply its return to the city center. Only there could its face be
saved. Hence, only when the downtown is rebuilt will the central government
have fully recovered its power…The state could not locate itself in East
Beirut or in West Beirut without symbolically creating an imbalance. It had
to assume a neutral stance, differentiating itself from the contentious groups
and warring factions. It had to find its place in a gap, a void, an empty site
so-to-speak…the city center has been transformed by the war into such ‘open’
space(s). (Sarkis 1993: 103)
It has to be noted that the use of planning imagery in forwarding state

ideologies, particularly in contexts of post-war devastation is not a new
strategy. Although committed to modernist visions, German
reconstruction in 1943 made ample provision for Nationalist Socialist
characteristics—parade streets, party buildings and so on (J.M.
Deifendorf 1990: 7).11 What makes downtown Beirut stand apart is that
here a victorious new ideology or state power was not to be inscribed;
rather, it was the resurrection of a state that had hitherto lost credibility
in the years of civil turbulence.
Hashim Sarkis (1993) uses a persuasive argument to state that any
attempt at constructed reconciliation through the agency of urban
restructuring must recognize the fact that contested territory or the built
environment that inhabits it does not lose their symbolic codification

once hostilities are over. As such, the manipulation of such codes,

particularly when the agenda of manipulation is to counteract the forces
behind the hostilities, cannot be a mere reversal of persistent codes—a
strategy he believes to be predominant in the rebuilding of the city
centre. However, the continued attempts by the state to rebuild the city
centre from as early as 1976 do indicate that considerable importance
has been assigned to the symbolic coding of this area and its perceived
potency to establish a de-territorialized common space. Nonetheless, by
arguing that the city centre has not been ‘created’ by the state but rather
‘found’ through an iconographic loop, Sarkis points to a crucial
observation. The state’s perception of this space and its subsequent usage
of the area to establish its own iconography is actually the state’s co-
optation of the established symbolization of a territory, marked and
articulated in social consciousness by already past events, namely, the
wars.
The strategy resilient enough to realize such state symbolism (one
which no other city site could match) almost inevitably culminated in a
private corporate approach in a gesture that puts Beirut on a global map
of state-backed private development. As demonstrated in the next
section, the final Master Plan that is under implementation underscores
a crystallization of a different kind of iconography: one that emerges
from the coming together of the forces of private capital and political
power/clout. It is the additional component of private capital that
symbiotically sustains and makes possible the state’s symbolism. The idea
of centrality that is ascribed to a recovered city centre articulates a
‘recovery’ scheme that blends an ostensible public agenda of social
change and recuperation to a hard core of private capital and its
calculations.
THE INSTRUMENTS OF RECOVERY

The private real estate company (Solidere) that has undertaken the
reconstruction of downtown Beirut was created under the auspices of
the Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR), the highest
government body responsible for advising and planning all development
and reconstruction in Lebanon. Thousands of little and big businesses
sustaining generations of traders, similar numbers of private residences
and their complicated tangle of tenancy and ownership, several public

and historic buildings and sites, a number of significant public spaces,

and many religious buildings of every known sect formed the backdrop
against which a reconstruction plan had to be devised. The ‘challenges’
to be dealt with in such a venture, as identified by the decision makers
at the early stages of planning, are outlined below.
First, the government required an impressive trust-building gesture
that could announce the end of hostility and a return to normalcy. A
slow, piecemeal approach was not going to achieve the desired effect. A
grand, dynamic and focused project could set the right mode to recovery.
Second, the built environment and every existing infrastructural
facility—water, sewage, electricity, telecommunication, roads and even
parking—had been severely dismantled and this called for immediate,
comprehensive restoration and restructuring. If the business centre of
the city had to be revived so as to be able to function as a modern city
centre, then very detailed and complete infra-structural foundations had
to be one of the most crucial investments. Third, by most considerations,
as a result of successive inheritance and continuous subdivisions of
property ownership or tenancy over several decades, the city centre was
a maze of entangled property rights. A total land area of some 1,043,000
square meters was subdivided into 2,133 plots over some 40,000 right
holders. The most challenging task would be a meaningful reassembling
of property, through some semblance of consensus and cohesion.
Fourth, by the end of the war, thousands of squatters were displaced,
particularly from southern Lebanon where armed confrontations with
Israel persisted. Many more came from areas besieged by local regimes
of violence. The reclamation of the city centre depended on the
relocation of these people. Fifth, within Beirut’s city centre limits, there
were several buildings that were of significant heritage and architectural
value, most of which were severely damaged. These had to be retrieved
from their quagmire of complicated ownership and restored within due
time limits before irreversible damage occurred. Given the antiquated
history of this area, it was also anticipated that large archaeological sites
rich with implications for the nation’s history would be uncovered here.
Most of these sites would probably fall under private ownership, the
retrieval of which could again be an expensive and near impossible task.
Sixth, a fairly serious environmental risk was engendered by the garbage
dump that had been created alongside the shore of the Beirut Central
District during the war years, mainly because refuse from one half of the

city could not be taken to the usual dumping ground on the other half
of the divided city. Adequate measures had to be taken to contain this
pollution, which was anticipated to be very capital intensive. The most
compelling of all constraints was, of course, the enormous resource
crunch.
Although revival of the city centre was certainly seen to be the most
pressing concern, public funds had to be distributed over several other
key priorities, namely power, housing, transport, health, education and
so on. The real alleged challenge was thus the creation of a sophisticated
mechanism which could not only avoid impinging on the nation’s
economic vulnerability, but also pave the way to a ‘secure’ future. In
1991, the mechanism that took shape was the private sector real estate
company called Solidere, an acronym for Societe Libaniase pour le
Developpement a la Reconstruction du Centre-Ville de Beyrouth (‘The
Lebanese Company for the Development and Reconstruction of the City
Centre of Beirut’). This was perhaps the first time in which political
clout, capital power and planning authority culminated into one
operative body in Lebanon. Rafik Hariri, billionaire businessman and
Prime Minister of Lebanon since 1992 (with a brief ousting of a few
years in between), and one of the principle stockholders of the company,
a man whose personal worth constituted a significant portion of the
country’s GDP, heralded an era of unprecedented ‘market forces’, most
of which prevailed under his own aegis. This marked the beginning of
‘Harirism’, the term Saree Makdisi (1997: 670) uses to describe the
‘political-economic discourse’ that was to place the reconstruction of
downtown Beirut as the ‘crowning project’ of Lebanon’s economic
rebirth.
The forces of profit-making capital combined with unfettered political
clout had been unleashed like never before, even for a traditionally
laissez-faire economy such as Lebanon’s. So much so, it appeared that
the state had not necessarily been annihilated by capital, but rather, as
Saree Makdisi phrases it, ‘capital had become the state’ (1997: 699). 12
Even before the onset of ‘Harirism’, the existing political authorities had
already made their positions fairly clear as regards the reconstruction of
the city centre. Decreed on 7 December 1991, Law 117 made the exact
legal framework for Solidere possible. This law was an amended version
of an earlier legislation, where the specific legal implications that allowed
for the creation of a joint stock company were laid out: the company

will command a majority shareholding of pre-existing land on one side,

property owners and other right holders on the other. Its primary
purpose would be the reconstruction of war-damaged central Beirut in
accordance to a state-approved Master Plan.
Solidere was not, however, formally launched until 5 May 1994. Even
without its formal presence, in the spring of 1992, demolitions were
carried out on a scale which some claim, to be unprecedented, even
during the fifteen years of war. Public debate amongst professional
architects, engineers, urban planners, and intellectuals tried unsuccessfully
to call a halt to the demolitions. In October 1992, the government that
was soon to be ousted by Hariri’s Cabinet passed approval for the Master
Plan. Through the latter half of 1993, massive international advertising
campaigns had already been sponsored for Solidere, months before the
company had actually been launched. The creation of Solidere, thus,
comes as no surprise, not only in terms of the existing political-economic
discourse but also from legal provisions neatly contoured to fit the need
of the day.
On 5 May 1994, following a statutory General meeting of the
shareholders, Solidere was founded for a period of twenty-five years,
launching the largest urban redevelopment project in the last decade of
the millennium. By its own speculation, Solidere has undertaken an
endeavour of historic proportions. Its jurisdiction covers an area of
approximately of 1.8 million square meters including 608,000 square
meters that is going to be the land reclaimed from the sea. 86.3 hectares
will be directly developed by Solidere and the remaining area is composed
government properties—roads, utilities, squares and public gardens etc.
Under Solidere, Downtown Beirut was to be called Beirut Central
District (BCD).
SPACES OF RECOVERY
Beirut Reborn is the story of the Master Plan that governs the post-war
revival of this area. It is a book about vision and ideas, and tells of the
challenges and process of making of an urban plan for the Beirut Central
District. It is also a book of record, detailing the concerns of the urban
planners as they sought to give form to a city center that balances old and
the new and enhances its heritage and creates an ‘Ancient City of the
Future’… In terms of social and economic reconstruction, Lebanon looks to

the revived center of the capital to trigger the growth process and help reunite
the population. (Angus Gavin et al., 1996: 8)
The above quote is an excerpt from Nasser Chamma’s (Chairman and

General Manager, Solidere) foreword to the book entitled Beirut Reborn:
The Restoration and Development of the Central District. Beirut Reborn is
a glossy production published during the second year of Solidere’s
activities in downtown Beirut. As the above quote suggests, its pictures,
illustrations and detailed descriptions trace the various dimensions that
the planners have considered and dealt with when developing the Master
Plan. Various technical aspects of planning are elaborated and graphically
illustrated. The final Master Plan that is elaborated in this book had been
in the making since 1991. In those early months, a process of public
debate and critique had tempered some aspects of the initial visions for
the new city centre, ones deemed as a designer’s fantasy of a hyper-
modern urban core, which would achieve nothing less than a near-
complete erasure of the character of Beirut’s urban fabric—first in form,
and subsequently in content. The design and planning that subsequently
followed took cognizance of two unavoidable elements: the historic
context as well as the perceived urban texture of the city centre.
At the very outset, as the quote suggests, there are two self-evident
and obvious themes under which reconstruction was to be addressed: the
economic and the social. The revival of Beirut’s city centre is aimed, first,
at an economic reformulation of the role that Beirut should play in the
changed local milieu and changing regional environment. Beirut’s need
to be re-established as a regional business centre of some calibre implies
a fundamental re-organization of the city’s former role of an economic
‘halfway house’. The design of the future city centre will have to reflect
the potential of regaining Beirut’s former economic competence, but in
a different mould from that of the past. Second, Beirut was already a
divided city, manifesting social fissures that prevailed over the entire
country. Recovery in Beirut has the inherent implication of transcending
these fissures in a project that seeks to reclaim a city site after civil
violence, the re-establishment of ‘social order’ becomes an implicit
agenda. Although Solidere’s work in Beirut Central District is essentially
a project of comprehensive physical reconstruction and restoration which
is amply and expertly manifested in the Master Plan, the ‘vision’ and the
implicit principles of social engineering that inform the Master Plan are

powerful statements on the functionality and efficacy of a built

environment in inducing desired social arrangements. 13
Beirut Reborn (Gavin and Maluf 1996: 42–43) identifies these two
primary concerns in the five main functions that have been assigned to
the rebuilt city centre. The new city centre was going to be the seat for
government institutions, city centre office functions, retail and
commercial activities, tourism, recreation and cultural events and, finally,
for residential neighbourhoods. The ‘modern’ facilities of a twenty-first
century city will be a selling point of Beirut’s city centre. At the same
time, the couching of these facilities and amenities in a ‘traditional’ and
historic aesthetic will not only add a competitive nuance, but will also
ensure that the Master Plan does not ignore the sense of place that
Beirut’s downtown has carried from the past. The concerns of
reformulating an urban core in the city centre mirrors the underpinning
vision of locating a centrality in the spatial discourse of Beirut city, where
Beirut Central District is to be a ‘central place’ not only in terms of
economic and state governance, but also as a social meeting point.
In order to employ the above inscriptions as potential configurations
that can locate a process of recuperation in the city centre, they have
been spatially coded in the Master Plan into places that can actualize a
desired social (as also economic) ordering. The five functions mentioned
earlier are also versions elaborating the broad concept of a public
domain. In downtown Beirut, the agenda is the establishment not only
of a multifaceted public domain, but also of an arena which potentially
sets an example as a charismatic centre from which urban energy can
flow out in waves to the surrounding city.14 The ultimate potential of
social ordering that the Master Plan seeks to engineer in the city centre
rests on a successful pattern of public urban activity which can be
harnessed by making available a creative public domain—one that
circumscribes both local anchors as well as global arenas. As the following
statements indicate,
Through the renewal of their city center, the citizens of Beirut will be able
to reclaim a public domain that set standards to be matched elsewhere…
Central District can offer a focus of national identity, cultural stimulation
and modern urban living. As in the past, Beirut’s future city center will
remain the place where opinions are formed, ideas are exchanged, and culture
is created. (A. Gavin et al., 1996: 35–37)

Immense emphasis is paid to the design and planning of such spaces

which can cater to, support and even encourage the social aspect of a
built environment. The basic principle that guides this process is the
emphasis on a ‘mixed use’ pattern of land usage in the entire area. This
simply means that the development of the built environment covering
this zone area will not be limited to any one kind of function, for
instance commercial or retail use, because this leads to a limited sphere
of human participation. On the other hand, if the same area includes a
wide range of facilities such as business, entertainment, residence and
leisure, the corresponding intensity of public usage also increases since
social life is a ready corollary to the character and function of the built
environment.
Moving on from this basic principle, the Master Plan allocates a
category of spatial entities in which the notion of a public domain will
achieve its primary expression through a human scale of interaction. This
category includes the squares, the waterfront promenades, numerous
parks and the special conservation areas, all of which will be pedestrian
environments thus ensuring focal points of public intermingling. A visual
landscaping approach has also been finely honed to add greater appeal
to the pedestrian environment. While pedestrian environments imply a
mobile public interactiveness, the squares are intended to intensify
interaction. They are to be used as locations for public gatherings, festival
events, exhibition grounds for art or other displays during various
religious festivals etc., almost as if they mimic a grand salon, the pivotal
place for sociality in a city.
Having provided for a social and economic convergence of centrality
in the regenerated Beirut Central District, Solidere has added to the
planning strategy by actively promoting the area as a ‘prestige address’,
perhaps as one of its kind in the city. In 1994, as part of the Beirut
Festival, Feyrouz, Lebanon’s most celebrated and extraordinarily gifted
singer performed to a crowd of 35,000 assembled in the Martyr’s Square,
which was done up with a backdrop resembling ships sails that recalled
the city’s maritime heritage. As Angus Gavin (1996: 35) writes in Beirut
Reborn,
This was Feyrouz’s first public appearance in the country since the outbreak
of hostilities and marked the end of her long, personal campaign of silence
against the war and its aftermath. A spectacular orchestration of public

sentiment and memory, combined with the ‘place-making’ force of the square
has established a powerful trend of events that make successful use of a space
which is still ambiguous, yet offers the potential of setting the stage for a
regenerated urban core.
These events and their potential to induce ‘meeting events’ amongst
various different kinds of visitors and users of the city centre covers a
grounded level of localized, face-to-face possibilities.15 On another plane,
a different dimension to the notion of the public domain can be
surmised from another set of provisions in the Master Plan, which seem
to introduce the idea of a ‘global’ public arena supplementing the local
one.
The complete overhaul of the city centre’s infrastructural facilities has
been mentioned earlier. Motivated primarily by the need to construct an
economic base attractive to contemporary businesses, part of the
infrastructural facilities incorporates technology and building standards
that resonate a sense of the global. Here ‘global’ would indicate a
sensibility that seeks homogenous conditions, technical or institutional
which support and meet with standards that have been set primarily by
economic activities that transcend localized standards of reference. For
example, the Master Plan carefully follows international standards of
safety in building processes and environmental concerns. Provisions such
as these set the stage for an urban core that can meet global acceptance.
The globalized nuance of downtown Beirut is completed with the
enormous emphasis of global communication networking facilities. The
future here is definitely seen as a phase when Beirut will be placed in a
global techno-space which, in other words, extends its public domain
from the city to the international or from the local to the global.
When the city centre has been assigned centrality, it has simultaneously
been made a ‘crucible of transformation’, as James Holston (1989: 87)
frames Brasilia, in a way that works for consciousness of the city
ultimately that of the nation as well. If the future is to usher in a
transformed reality in Beirut, Beirut Central District with its models of
social sculpting and economic efficiency can be a crucible of a new
reality. The aura of sacredness immanent in the ancient courts is also not
lost, for shedding the ‘evils’ of violence to don the cloak of a utopia must
have some cosmic reverberation in the faith of a city.

THE PAST IN RECOVERY

Repairing physical and economic damage or ‘planning’ a degree of social
reconciliation is not the only priority in the reconstruction agenda of
Downtown Beirut. Establishing temporal contact with the past in the
built environment is another foundational aspect on which the recovery
process has been grounded. Two material dimensions, archaeology and
architecture, provide the anchors here. Their implication in the recovery
agenda lies in their ability to represent a past—in the case of archaeology,
an embodied past; in the case of architecture, a simulated past. Both
emerge as symbolic anchors that tether the perpetuation of a cityscape
and its life force (in spite of brutal defacement) to a spatial and material
continuity that binds an alleged reliable past to a projected secure
future.
During the development of the Master Plan the emphasis changed from that
of a ‘grand plan,’ superimposed on the city centre through a designer’s vision,
as if from above, to an approach which stemmed from the existing physical
context, as if from below. It became a plan which grew of the sites’ historical
context, its inherent physical opportunities and its links with the city as a
whole. The past was, in effect, informing the future. (Angus Gavin et al.,
1996: 61)
The last sentence in this passage indicates a central theme in the

reconstruction of downtown Beirut: the notion of the ‘past’. The
reasoning with which Solidere has sought to incorporate either
architecture or archaeology reveals the meaningfulness that is situated in
the framing of these artefacts as special parts of a larger landscape. It
mirrors a particular application of material artefacts to the animation of
recovery as a visual ‘bridge’ in the present between pasts and futures.
Using notions of simulation (in architecture) and presentation (in
archaeology), a ‘surface’ comes to be constituted which allows for a
simultaneous availability of several spatial layers in one place, giving
further meaning to physical reconstruction in downtown Beirut as a
rationally composed landscape of recovery.

THE EMBODIED PAST

Archaeological artefacts and their incorporation into the re-designed city
centre come to encapsulate the embodied imagination of a past in
physical recovery. By embodied imagination, I suggest the sensual and
corporeal experience of a past through a direct interaction with antique
material objects. Multiple motifs of antiquity such as the recently
excavated Roman baths, Phoenician city walls, Byzantine mosaics and
several others have been used to embellish the city centre. Heritage trials
have been planned, which will enable visitors or even casual pedestrians
to walk through monuments and artefacts in such a way that they trace
a visual and tactile journey through moments of antiquity, however
fleeting the journey may be.
Such an embodied experience is sharpened also because it is a
commodified experience—these artefacts impart a sense of material value
as they also hold the fascination of ‘treasures’. The incredible value of
comparable objects in the collector’s market is well known in Lebanon—
their presence in an everyday surrounding makes the experience even
more immediate. By the very act of interacting with a commodified
sensation of antiquity in the contemporary moment, there appears to be
an acutely physical act of traversing to an antique past, an ‘act’ which
imbues the interactive moment with a sense of genealogical depth and
continuity. It becomes an embodied sensation of legitimacy that ‘grounds’
a physical space into a temporal anchor. In Beirut, where the turbulence
of the recent past and its reverberations continue to instil unstable
terrains of ordinary life, the possibility of an embodied experience of a
continuous past has enormous significance for recovery. The fissures of
a recent past seem to appear less traumatic when the immanence of an
antique land and its peoples imply a temporal breadth and resilience that
far surpasses any episodic disruption. The Master Plan has invoked
several places within the same space, and the city centre as an antique
place is one such articulation. As a symbolic realm, archaeology adds
nuance that makes Solidere’s approach to corporate reconstruction more
rooted in Beirut’s historical context, giving it an advantageous marketing
edge. At the same time, the impersonality of technically-induced urban
renewal through rationalized planning is minimized when the ostensible
concerns are about local authenticity and character.
In another nuance, the same artefact applies to the pivotal processes
of community identity and their perpetuation. As material remnants of

contesting historical communities, their positioning in a landscape of

recovery in the post-civil war context of Beirut articulates a politics of
spatial legitimacy. Solidere and its advisors, in dealing with the fate of
archaeological discoveries, are also dealing with heritage management
and the political economy of installing a historicity in the symbolic realm
of the heart of a city. Delving into selected relics of the past and then
investing them with a symbolic force strong enough to inspire patriotic
fervour which can perpetuate communities, identity groups or even
nations is a known corollary of the phenomena of nation-states and their
inherent contestations. In the reconstruction of the city centre in Beirut,
the potential that archaeological discoveries can have in infusing the
recovery effort with a perfect intonation of urban continuity is enormous.
It is not just urban continuity, or plain antiquity; it is the assurance of
the past, the empowerment that a legitimate historicity can instil in
transcending disruptions.
Violence in Beirut had inscribed an immutable demarcation of
territory, for the wars did result in a very real Christian East Beirut and
a Muslim West Beirut. It resulted in a Green Line that ran through
downtown Beirut. Even though the wars have ostensibly ceased there has
been no one victorious group over a vanquished enemy, nor could there
be any claims to a victorious conquest of territory. The unresolved civil
hostilities in Beirut have left behind, amongst the contesting parties,
random insecurities about power and real or perceived threats to
community preservation. In the concentrated realms of city space in
Beirut, all that remains is the symbolic social mapping of community
space onto actual territory that lends itself to the politics of identity
framing. As predicted, the BCD area did yield an amazing array of
archaeological finds. The selection and preservation of some archaeological
finds as opposed to the mismanagement of others reflects the inevitable
contestation over preservation. For instance, a leading Lebanese
archaeologist16 involved in these archaeological sites, responded to my
questions about the politics of heritage management in BCD as
follows:
Q: When these artefacts are discovered—they are obviously from very

different eras—do you have to think about the problem of what should be
preserved…

Response: The vision of what Lebanon should be and what Lebanon is…
about the past and future of the country, there is a controversy and as you
know, in all countries of the world, they use history to back up any political
ideology. So, today, if you look at what has been preserved, tell me…the
Islamic monument and at the other end, the Phoenician—the Phoenician
for the Christian and Islamic for the Muslims and everybody is settled and
all the other most important things of the Roman and Byzantine periods,
the portico of the fourteen shops with mosaic floors…these could be razed
without any scruple because nobody feels concerned. But you try to touch
the others… the newspapers, the whole fuss.
Q: It does involve the larger debate on identity and how it should be

recreated, at least in the city centre, with these physical artefacts by Solidere,
doesn’t it?
Response: Solidere wants to do something which says that Solidere protects

heritage,—for their image as developers. So, it is a package deal—Phoenician
for those who want Phoenician and Islamic for those who want Islamic, leave
one sample here and another sample there so that nobody can say they are
doing something wrong with the archaeology. The problem is that the state
has no policy…what is the rationale behind keeping this and removing
others…what is the criteria. You see, they took the decision because a big
fuss was made about the Phoenician city. But the problem was, they do not
have that many Islamic things that have appeared—monuments, architectural
buildings…nothing. We have evidence of Islamic occupation from pottery
shards. In terms of architectural remains, there are mosques…they are
Ottoman, most of them. That’s why they hung on to the structure of the
Mamluk period. It is the only standing Muslim structure from the recent
excavations.
The politics of heritage hegemony between the Christians and the

Muslims as manifested in the struggle over preserving Phoenician
antiquity or Mamluk monuments is an obvious example of identity and
power politics in Beirut. However, questions about which group has been
validated in terms of historicity, or whether their claims have any
accuracy in the actual structural complex of archaeological discoveries,
or whose political might has prevailed in the selection and preservation
of heritage and how is not the aim of this discussion. The crucial point
is that this kind of material culture has the capacity of being de-
contextualized from a literal historicity to be re-contextualized in a realm
of the present, both physically and conceptually, in order to engage with

a practice of recovery. Both the Phoenician ‘quarter’ and the Mamluk

monument will stand while others will not; the presence of Phoenician
remnants expresses the rootedness of Christian identity in the political
space of the city centre as does the Mamluk monument for the rootedness
of Muslim identity. At present, it is not necessary to know exactly how
long these eras lasted, it is enough to have them stand and be a ‘physical’
icon of genealogy. Their absence or their even destruction threatens these
genealogies. Under ‘normal’ circumstances, genealogies could lie
dormant, but in an agenda of recovery, the force of perpetuation they
carry enriches them. These genealogies must carry the potential of
legitimate identities into a destiny in the future.
Archaeological artefacts are the material validation of such a destiny.
They are the strength that is generated from ‘within’ a reckless historicity
to frame the persistence of an identity over time. In a project such as the
reconstruction of Beirut’s city centre, one of the most passionate
motivations is the agenda of ‘place-making’: tethering space to
rehabilitation of the heart of a city and of a nation, locating it as
historically valid while also imbuing it with a potential for continuity
into the future. The location of community identity ensures the
perpetuation of identity and, if necessary, perpetuation of a hegemonic
identity.
THE IMAGED PAST

Architecture, on the other hand, addresses a similar material realm, but
its force lies in the ability to capture the past as an image. Conserved or
restored architectural facades in downtown Beirut invoke the idea of a
traditional and authentic urban texture that is visually palpable and
potent. The visual presence of past styles (simulated in the present), in
effect, implies that there has been a sense of natural organic growth to
the development of the city centre. Those settings in the city centre
which have been reconstructed anew do not display any breaks with the
past, nor do they evidence the defacement sustained during the violent
civil war period. Rather, they continue as a place which has continued
from the past into the present and which will be merged into the
landscape of the future.
One of the main kinds17 of retained buildings in the Master Plan are
those that have been retained because of their historical architectural

character and value and also because they form part of a cluster that have
a distinct townscape quality. As per the plan, these buildings may not be
demolished and if they have been destroyed by some accidental disaster,
they have to be rebuilt in accordance with given specifications. The final
number of retained buildings in the Master Plan stands at 265 structures.
Included in the list of retained buildings are government, public and
religious buildings which are not owned by Solidere even though they
fall within the geographical limits of the Beirut Central District. These
structures are to be individually restored or rebuilt by concerned
authorities, but they continue to follow the same basic guidelines of
regulated restoration as applicable to every other retained building in the
area.
The guidelines are in effect a technique that deciphers and lists the
components of a traditional architectural style. These are described in
meticulous detail in the conservation and restoration guidelines laid
down by Solidere, particularly for the structures that have been sustained
in the ‘Historic Core’ of the city centre and in the ‘Traditional Urban
Villages’. Various components of architectural stylistics, such as the shape
of an arch, a doorway, the design of a veranda, the colour of a façade, a
street lamp or the paving of a street have been delineated in order to
cumulatively suggest a simulated representation of ‘traditional’ buildings
and its surroundings. In effect, this representation is an image abstracted
from several pasts. Eventually, the ‘real’ referent (or factual history) of
all actual pasts is submerged and the simulated image becomes the past
itself. In this built horizon, when the gaze of the onlooker is not that of
a privileged professional who has an academic knowledge of architectural
styles prevalent in the area, the visual experience is that of an amorphous
sense of past styles that constitute part of the landscape in a city. The
strict order of architectural epochs and their chronological genealogy in
the city centre loses relevance; instead, the emphasis shifts to the visual
experience in which different moments in architectural history are
collapsed into an image of an abstracted past.
The following comment is from a conversation I had with a Lebanese
academic and architect closely associated with the reconstruction
processes in Downtown Beirut. Once again, the complicated terrain of
preservation politics presents itself.

Q: What is the sense in which some architecture is called Lebanese

architecture, as a traditional building?
Response: The issue is about what is patrimony…the Lebanese house as such

was created around 1880, at that time it was perceived or considered as
modern—now after the end of the century, it is considered as a ‘national
type’. A French geographer has at that time tagged the Lebanese house back
then as modern and now it is perceived as traditional –so the consciousness
of patrimony changes. Can we call a modern building a Lebanese heritage
because Lebanese architects do it? Does it act as history? Lebanese modern-
ness at the time—in terms of style it could have been international—it does
not have an identity. To start, not only do we have the French Mandate, the
late Ottoman—maybe the modern Lebanese should be listed with other
things…so what you are seeing in the reconstruction process is that many
sections of our built environment is being assimilated as heritage. The issue
is not whether something is Lebanese or not, ….I think our history is a
legitimization of a colonial gesture—meaning what I call the Lebanese
mentality. What they have done here is that they have a national history
called Lebanon, which was built from all pieces. The history of architecture
is parallel to this national history that came from colonialism. So they (the
Conservation groups or Solidere) are trying to pose the term Lebanon as far
back in history as they can—so, is the Lebanese house Lebanese? The issue
here is that the architects have rationalized the history of architecture to fit
official history of the nation.
The search for a real ‘historical order’ of the Lebanese house in

particular, or for any other structure that might have been preserved in
the city centre, and for their position in a heritage continuum is a
daunting, if not pointless, task. At another level, the association of a
national history with material artefacts is well established. There is an
inevitable involvement of ideological positions (for example, the
association noted above, of a colonial history with a ‘Lebanese mentality’
or nationality) and political intrigues which complicate the issues of
historical preservation.18 It is clear that while each retained building has
been selected on a rather amorphous scale of ‘historical style’—a range
of fairly fixed elements have been identified and ‘frozen’ which is then
goes to become the description of ‘historical style’ per se. In planning
and composition, planners and designers commonly target an
architectural texture, which Saree Makdisi has called a ‘Levantine flavor’
(1997: 683).

Several modes of earlier architectural style collate into an image of the

past, which then becomes the ‘traditional style’ that subsequently suggests
the past itself. For the casual visitor, the Historic Core or the Saifi
Traditional Urban Village in the Beirut Central District will form holistic
‘locales’ that conjecture a traditional built landscape. Although internal
genealogical biographies of each building need not necessarily be lost,
their individuality is merged to build up the locale. This somewhat
synthetic streetscape will be the dominant sign: the sign of a material
urban historic environment that will project into the coming future. The
presence of a preserved core or a traditional architectural imagery in a
wider, mixed horizon indicates connectivity to the past.
Currently, when most of the restoration and rebuilding is complete
in the conserved areas, there is an architectural cadence in the overall
zone where the built urban fabric is not as it used to be before the war,
but a simulation of it has been reinstated, based on an imagination that
was generated by some of the selected older styles and ultimately
abstracted into an image. Clearly, this image has been refined and honed,
and does not have those elements of the urban fabric that either clutter
or distract (i.e. the incongruous structural additions made over time)
from a neatly patterned approximation of the past fabric. Once the
desired image has been compiled, it can be reproduced infinitely over
any chosen location. It becomes a mass-produced product of the heritage
industry—at least within the heritage arena of the city centre. Once
again, this texture or flavour is, as in archaeology, a part of the value
added to the new city centre. Where it will not only be equal to if not
better than its predecessor, working infrastructurally as a global node
that can also boast the embellishment of an exotic locale. 19
When such an image of the past is installed in a space such as the
BDC, which has borne scars of recent destruction, this connectivity also
implies transcendence over the devastation itself. Just as archaeology
projects a connection to the antique past, a ‘conserved’ architectural
landscape connotes an inherited legacy of a specific type of urban
environment. Both connote the sense of a bridge that allows a link to
the past, in such a way that the past is not severed from the present on
through disruptive episodes. They not only establish the continuity of
an inheritance, but also keep the genealogical links intact so that the
sense of a legitimate, continuous historicity is sustained. As a metaphorical
mediation, a bridge so conceived performs two functions in the scopic

environment. First, it defies a temporal fissure between the ‘stable’

environment of the past (before the war) and its potential future by a
disruptive interim phase. At the same time, through the scopic trope,
the material traces of the fissure such as the mutilated landscape of
violence are successfully swept under this same bridge. Second, it makes
the experience of connectivity available at the contemporaneous moment,
so that there is a co-existence between the past, the present and the
potential future in the same horizon.
The imaging of the past is a quintessential ‘place-making’ manoeuvre
in the planners’ agenda. It is an attempt to re-code the visual landscape
of a damaged city centre to one of regeneration and revival, a process
that includes in its momentum the continuity of a past architectural
legacy into a desired future. The motivation behind ‘place-making’ is
clearly one that seeks to imprint upon the landscape a distinct character,
one that makes the renewed city centre a ‘place’ with a particular
individuality that defines it. The facade of a historic built environment
becomes a constituent feature of this individuality. For the citizen of
Beirut, the city centre then provides a symbol of material identity for
the city and its historicity.
CONCLUDING NOTE
The multiplicity of temporalities and their manifestation as different
representational spaces in the locale of the city centre makes the idea of
a multilayered spatial construct possible. Perhaps a multilayered spatial
and temporal construct such as the Beirut Central District is not
uncommon in several global cities’ centres around the world. However,
in Beirut the necessity of its production as a symbol of recovery makes
it extraordinary. The multiple surfaces outlined above suggest the
recovery agenda of reconstruction as the production of a total commodity.
The slogan ‘Ancient City of the Future’ that Solidere uses to convey its
message typifies the commodification of the BCD. It stands for the
perfect cityscape that presents the ideal combination of multiple surfaces
of the old and the new, the functional and the spectacular. It is not
simply the recycling of old attributes; it is the production of a
commodification process of planned recovery that finds manifestation in
the material or the social symbolic world of critical societies.

The BCD articulates recovery (as exhibited in a built environment)

through a formulation that resonates with Jean Baudrillard’s (1994: 3)
intonation of simulation: ‘To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what
one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have.’
In the new BCD, the new surface will conceal and disseminate the
scars of destruction.20 In other words it will ‘pretend not to have what
one has’. This same surface will also simulate a texture in which
continuity is imaged and reified in the environment and disruption is
concealed—thus it will ‘feign to have what it doesn’t’. Through this
double act of dissimulation and simulation on the surface, a particular
agenda of recovery is accomplished.
Nearly a decade of reconstruction has indeed created a whole new city
space out of Downtown Beirut. It is modern, powerful and enigmatically
‘exotic’. Underneath this sheen lies a host of other stories, of other spaces.
Apart from the overt politics of preservation or the endless debates on
the shortcomings of urban planning lie ordinary narratives of urban
spaces—lived, experienced and lost by many. Solidere’s success in
amalgamating the actual land and property in Downtown Beirut has
meant, in practise, coerced takeovers and demolitions of individual
property. The alleged shares that have been apportioned have been
calculated as a gross under-evaluation of any given property, or they are
tied down to inextricable legalities that makes them worth very little or
nothing. Little analysis is required to see that the popularity, the chaos,
the social and commercial fabric of the old downtown has been replaced
by an exclusive, insular and pristine new ambience. Clearly, the social
and economic profile of the new ‘users’ of Downtown Beirut differs
immensely from the old one. The new apartments sold in the ‘traditional’
residential buildings are some of the most expensive real estate in the
city. Several new businesses in the area are global concerns with
dimensions far grander than most of the local enterprises that used to
operate here. A very small percentage of the original business
establishments or residents can afford to come back. As a city centre, it
can certainly become a prominent link in a global network; however, its
earlier connections with an atmosphere of local social and economic
centrality has definitely been re-arranged, perhaps irretrievably.
The overall effect of the city centre is that of a new assemblage. It has
detached itself from any real anchoring in an organic process of historical
development, it has erased the marks of destruction and aspires to heal

spatial fissures by inscribing new social prescriptions on space. The new

city centre is not a rehabilitation of a dismantled urbanscape; it is the
creation of a new space that draws energy from the power of hard capital
allied with political power. Yet, there is no denying the destruction of
the wars. Is it possible that reconstruction merely completed the urban
destiny that Downtown Beirut was already approaching? It might be
worthwhile to note how the idea of a new assemblage adheres intimately
to Beirut’s situation. In a socio-political milieu where no single
contestation of identity, ideology, or territory can be privileged, where
all social fissures are expressed in multiple voices of spatial and historical
incidents, the only remaining mode of recovery that presents itself is one
that disengages itself from any affiliation and creates a ‘new’ spectrum
of places.
Adding another cadence to the potential of the new city centre, I find
it useful to return to my first explorations of the reconstruction of
downtown Beirut. My representation then was that when the
ethnographic setting moves towards the experience of these spaces in a
more spontaneous, unplanned and indigenous mode, the orderings of
sociality and its practice produce a new diversification of publics within
the spatial frames of downtown Beirut. Notwithstanding the fact that
most of the groups that I have represented here do not constitute the
new ‘public’ yet, however, it may not be mere optimism to conclude with
Samir Khalaf (1993: 132–133) that one way of pacifying the Lebanese
pathos is to reiterate the role of the architects and urban planners in
bringing about a harmonious relationship between space and well being
because,
Put simply, the places where we spend our time affect the people we
are and can become. Hence as the places around us change—whether
fortuitously or by design, carelessly and in good faith—we too are bound
to change.
Harmony may not be the best description for the new ‘publics’ of
downtown Beirut, yet their power in scripting a new spatial politics is
undeniable.
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New York: Holmes and Meier.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1990. Time and Narrative (Translated by David Pellauer). Chicago: University of
Chicago Press (Reprint Edition).
Rowe, Peter G. and Hashim Sarkis, eds. 1998. Projecting Beirut: Episodes in the Construction and
Reconstruction of a Modern City. New York: Prestel Publishers.
Salibi, Kamal. 1976. Crossroads to Civil War 1958–1976. Delmar, N.Y.: Caravan.
Sarkis, Hashim. 1993. Territorial Claims: Architecture and Post-War Attitudes towards the Built
Environment. In Recovering Beirut: Urban Design and Post-War Reconstruction. Samir Khalaf and
P.S. Khoury, eds. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Sennet, Richard. 1990. The Conscience of the Eye. New York: Alfred Knopf.
Solidere. 1993. The Reconstruction of Beirut Central District, Project and Means. Beirut: Board
of Founders Solidere.
Warner, Michael. 2002. Publics and Counter Publics. New York, Zone Books.
NOTES
1. The temporal dimension of the ‘present’ suggests an analytical complexity that I

anchor through Paul Ricoeur’s (1990: 10) ‘thesis of a three-fold present’. When the
‘location for future and past things insofar they are recounted and predicted appears
untenable as temporal experiences that are firmly fixed in discrete categories of the

past and the future, the past and future appear to be dimensions of time whose
possibility of consciousness remains inherent in an acknowledged present’.
2. See Samir Khalaf (2006) about the historical pre-eminence of the area as a
quintessential ‘public sphere’ for at least a century and a half before the current
couple of decades. While his analysis traces the various historic and contemporary
occasions that indicate downtown Beirut as a veritable palimpsest of urban history,
the understanding of how these various occasions have shaped different ‘publics’ (as
Warner 2002 urges us to imagine) in the dense socio-political fabric of the city
remains to be explored.
3. The Taif Accord (the name comes from the city in Saudi Arabia, where the final
document was announced to a conclave of Lebanese deputies on 1 October 1989)
bought about a ceasefire to this phase, a declaration brokered by a special
representative body of the Arab League designated to deal with the crisis in Lebanon.
For a detailed description, in English, of the wars (including the Taif Accord) see
Theodor Hanf, (1993) and also Elizabeth Picard, (1996). Kamal Salibi’s Crossroads
to Civil War 1958–1976 gives an interpretation of the recent history of Lebanon
leading up to the Wars.
4. As I have engaged elsewhere (Yasmeen Arif 2002) with the social re-ordering
generated by the Downtown Beirut project, the focus of this essay will be the
iconography of a city site as it represents the instrumentalities of state-powered
private planning.
5. Andreas Huyssen (2003) writes about a similar ‘void’ created in Berlin after the fall
of the Berlin Wall.
6. James Holston (1989) uses the concept of the crucible to describing Brasilia’s role
in Brazil as an energy centre that can radiate forces of positive change throughout
the nation.
7. This paper is part of a larger research agenda that explored a wider spectrum of
‘recovery’ issues in Beirut. The issues discussed here form part of the ‘formal’ exercise
of recovery, i.e., reconstruction through planning. The ‘informal’ aspect of recovery
was explored in terms of urban social life as experienced in changing neighbourhood
profiles, memories of violence, emerging critical spatialities and more in post-war
Beirut. For a brief ethnographic account of the ‘lived experience’ of reconstruction,
see Yasmeen Arif (2002).
8. This is not to suggest that downtown Beirut in its pre-war years cannot be seen as
a space constituted by several places. My argument is more about how such a
splitting becomes a crucial part of technical reasoning of post-war reconstructive
planning. When a plan for the recovery of an urban space is conceptualized, there
is a clearer delineation of what should compose that space.
9. Even before the wars, Beirut was fragmented into confession-based neighbourhoods
within which almost all aspects of social life cohered around confessional identities
or primordial relationships. However, during the wars, those neighbourhoods that
had hitherto marked out socio-cultural differences in space now congealed into
bounded spaces often protected by armed militiamen. Once the violence ceased,
these spaces remained etched into the socio-spatial imaginary as insular ‘ghettoes’.
For a succinct appraisal of how the social geography of Lebanon has changed in the
post-war years, see Salim Nasr, ‘The New Social Map’. In Lebanon in Limbo: Postwar
Society and State in an Uncertain Regional Environment, Theodor Hanf and Nawaf

Salem (eds.), Badan-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2000, pp. 143–157. Very

little research or statistics is available about post-war Beirut, however, Nasr’s essay
provides basic indications.
10. See Hanf 1993.
11. After the World Wars, especially in terms of architectural styling, as J.M. Deifendorf
(1990: 9) points out, the Soviet bloc in East-Central Europe was a special example
of state symbolism in rebuilding operations. See also J.M. Deifendorf (1989).
12. For a succinct discussion of the ‘state’ and Harirism in the first few years after the
war, see Makdisi 1997.
13. Urban planning and its use in social ordering and economic restructuring is not a
novel strategy; its history, relevant analyses and theoretical stances cover an
enormous body of interdisciplinary scholarship. The purpose behind elaborating
this aspect of planning in Beirut Central District is to delineate those modes of
technique and design that are seen as potent sculptors of recovery in urban spatial
structures, especially in a post-critical situation.
14. On 20 March 2000, Solidere announced the winning design for a ‘Garden of
Forgiveness’ which is expected to be a key location linked by the Heritage Trail. The
Solidere Quarterly of January–March 2000 (Internet document, www.lebanon.
com/construction/the.quarterly/index.htm, 2004) carried this information, however
it is no longer available as such at their website. Quarterlies at the current website
www.solidere.com, 2007 appear to be listed only from 2001. Samir Khalaf (2006:
160–162) however, writes in some detail about its projected role in the new city
centre—as a garden with the name hadiqat-al-samah—the garden of forgiveness.
There was no concrete proposal for this plan during my fieldwork in 1997–98. Nor
was it evident during my second visit during Fall 2004. However, a site like the
Garden of Forgiveness adds to the notion of public spaces that Solidere uses in
propounding social engineering through space. The Garden of Forgiveness, at least
as far as the name suggests, would be one of the first formally planned spatial devices
used explicitly in negotiating the fissures created by the wars, a gesture which had
so far been missing in the Master Plan. I would, nonetheless add that a planned
spatial gesture such as the Garden need not be categorized, too quickly, as a
commemorative device. As I have mentioned earlier, memory related to Lebanon’s
Civil Wars opens a complex terrain which as yet does not clearly mark out survivors
or perpetrators, or a legitimate register of the violent events, making the attempt at
some decisive closure uncertain.
15. It is interesting that this kind of ‘social engineering’ aspired to in the Master Plan
comes to be co-opted to a powerful political performance/practice after Hariri’s
assassination. The idea of place making achieves a greater density when these new
practices are viewed as statements of new publics—ones that invest a greater power
to the politics of space—an undoubtedly crucial aspect of urban politics.
16. Personal interview conducted during November 1997. The above is an excerpt from
a larger conversation on related areas. For reasons of privacy, names and places have
not been mentioned.
17. The other kind of retained buildings are those that could be of a ‘later’ period but
continue to house tenants/residents or possess some other ‘social’ or economic value.
(Source: Article 5.3.1, in ‘Regulation and Planning in the Beirut Central District
and its Sectors’, Document prepared by Dar Al Handasah, Shair and Partners,

English Translation, Solidere, August 1994. This document was originally compiled
in 1993.
18. These issues lie outside the focus of essay, mainly because the politics of preservation
that are not under discussion here; rather, I am focusing on the processes and
techniques through which a physical environment is recreated as a spatial
phenomena. Nevertheless, these debates are a crucial part of the recovery process,
and they are not precluded here but are assumed to be an existing condition.
Amongst the wide array of publications on related issues, those available in English
include Rowe and Sarkis (eds.) 1998; Khalaf and Khoury (eds.) 1993; essays in
Beyhum, Salam and Tabet (eds.) 1994; and articles in The Beirut Review between
1991 and 1993.
19. An important vision behind the reconstruction of the city centre was the
reaffirmation of Beirut’s position as well-equipped to compete with other regional
centres (such as Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and perhaps Tel Aviv). The exotic ambience of
Beirut’s new city centre was a central concern of competitive advantage working on
the principle of sustaining local flavour in global spaces.
20. I use a visual allusion here. Clearly, the resurrection of downtown Beirut as a newly
assembled city centre cannot effectively conceal the discursive spaces that have
located downtown Beirut as one of the most compelling urban sites of the civil war
violence. The idea of concealment that I invoke here is aimed at the visual play of
an urban landscape and the effects it could produce in the practice of recovery.

A Landscape of Recovery: The Polysemy of Spaces/Places in Downtown Beirut

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CHAPTER 11

A Landscape of Recovery: The Polysemy of

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meaning, meaning that goes far beyond the expected predictions of a

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While the visions of a new city centre, as I discuss below energized

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11 Ch. (Comparing).indd 279 10/16/08 11:58:19 AM

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when negotiating the effects of devastating civil violence and severe

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unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities’. Various

THE ICONOGRAPHY OF PLANNING

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It carries not only the memory of annexation to social differences but

It has to be noted that the use of planning imagery in forwarding state

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once hostilities are over. As such, the manipulation of such codes,

THE INSTRUMENTS OF RECOVERY

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and historic buildings and sites, a number of significant public spaces,

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11 Ch. (Comparing).indd 286 10/16/08 11:58:21 AM

will command a majority shareholding of pre-existing land on one side,

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The above quote is an excerpt from Nasser Chamma’s (Chairman and

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powerful statements on the functionality and efficacy of a built

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Immense emphasis is paid to the design and planning of such spaces

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11 Ch. (Comparing).indd 291 10/16/08 11:58:22 AM

THE PAST IN RECOVERY

The last sentence in this passage indicates a central theme in the

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THE EMBODIED PAST

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contesting historical communities, their positioning in a landscape of

Q: When these artefacts are discovered—they are obviously from very

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Q: It does involve the larger debate on identity and how it should be

Response: Solidere wants to do something which says that Solidere protects

The politics of heritage hegemony between the Christians and the

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a practice of recovery. Both the Phoenician ‘quarter’ and the Mamluk

THE IMAGED PAST

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Q: What is the sense in which some architecture is called Lebanese

Response: The issue is about what is patrimony…the Lebanese house as such

The search for a real ‘historical order’ of the Lebanese house in

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Several modes of earlier architectural style collate into an image of the

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environment. First, it defies a temporal fissure between the ‘stable’

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The BCD articulates recovery (as exhibited in a built environment)

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spatial fissures by inscribing new social prescriptions on space. The new

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1. The temporal dimension of the ‘present’ suggests an analytical complexity that I

11 Ch. (Comparing).indd 303 10/16/08 11:58:24 AM

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