c: Beirut: The privatisation of a development

It must be remembered that Downtown Beirut is […] a melting pot where persons of different faiths converge in one place [representing] the natural location for Lebanon’s financial and economic core. (Makarem, 2013)

There has been a transition over the past sixty years, as discussed already, from interstate conflicts, happening between nations, to intra-state conflicts, between opposing sides within one nation. (Holsti, 2010) More often than not, these conflicts have become

urbanised, with religious disputes featuring on the agenda of many. In such situations the post-conflict scenario rarely results in resolved tensions, leaving, as in Beirut’s case, the city divided with the Christian Maronite East and the Sunni Muslim West, each having their own distinct political cultures, and the so called ‘Green Line’2 buffer zone forming between them (Khalaf & Khoury, 1993).

Internal conflicts and civil wars over the past decades often focused on the politics of identity or nationalism from their outset, revolving around how communities related to each other, rather than any particular state interests. (Ramsbotham, Miall, & Woodhouse, 2011). This has seen an increase in the targeting of the ‘others’ heritage, a deliberate attack on a community’s history in order to inflict, in many cases, cultural genocide. However, whilst Beirut is a prime example of this, the main concern since the withdrawal of the Syrian Army in 1982, has been the privatised redevelopment and rebuilding of downtown

Beirut.

“Today, with the fighting over, there is a new plan to destroy the city centre once again, but this time with the bulldozer and the pick-axe, in order that Beirut can reclaim its former title as the Hong Kong of the Middle East.” Trendle quoted in (Sawalha, 1998)

Founded in 1994, by Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the private company, Solidere, ‘took over’ the reconstruction of downtown Beirut in a city where conflict had seen 800,000 residents migrate from the city. With one quarter of all housing stock either damaged or destroyed during the conflict and the further destruction of the ancient Souks ‘in a series of mysterious demolitions in 1983 and 1986’ (Makdisi, 1997), there was little opportunity

Figure 13: Aleppo’s ancient Souks before war damage (2010) Figure 14: Moneo’s redesigned Souks open for business. (2016)

Figure 15: St George’s Hotel, Beirut. Campaigning against Solidere’s forced redevelopment (2016)

de facto absence of residents -and the implementation of Law 117 (Randall, 2014), passed in 1991- allowed Solidere to expropriate the property of residents within the downtown area.3 This has led to a modernist, seemingly Westernised, drive in the architectural styles of the rebuilt city and, also, the masterplanning and further destruction of the downtown

area:

The city centre appears as an empty space, a placeless space, and a hole in the memory. How are we to preserve the memory of this place in the face of such frightening amnesia?

Elias Khoury quoted in (Sawalha, 2010)

The Solidere team speak of downtown Beirut as an area ‘thousands of years old’ with a traditional ‘focus of business, finance, culture and leisure’, (Solidere, 2016) and whilst trying to reinstate Beirut as ‘the Hong Kong of the Middle East’, it seems almost ironic that the reconstruction plan should erase the city’s history leaving a blank slates for Hariri’s team to work on.

With Moneo’s redesign of the ancient Souks (Fig.14), Hadid’s plan for a high-end shopping mall and Marino creating ‘Manhattan-style’ apartments, the scheme has had impressive publicity, appearing regularly in architectural journals as projects by Richard Rodgers and Norman Foster are announced. But this is an example of where well designed, beautiful architecture is not, at this stage, suitable for a city still emerging from conflict. The enormous amount of new infrastructure within the heart of Beirut intends to return the

city to days of former glory, but in doing so the needs of the less economically wealthy, and vulnerable, residents have been pushed down the list of priorities. Downtown Beirut now belongs to the high end business and tourist economy as high rents and the further removal of heritage sites push out the residents and local business that still remained. [Pultar, 2013][Wainright, 2015]

However, similar to a project named ‘Common Enemies’, created by a Cambridge studio tutor of (Gittner), Solidere’s presence in Beirut has found unified opposition from residents who are ‘developing daily opposition strategies in the form of public speeches, demonstrations, gossip, and issuing religious legal casuistries.’ (Sawalha, The Reconstruction of Beirut: Local Responses to Globalization, 1998) (Fig.15) Such activities express the importance of the

existing public spaces within the city, where locals can express their views. This has been the role of Martyrs’ Square since the 18th century, and after fifteen years of being divided by the ‘Green Line’, in 2005 it once again became a space of public communion following the assassination of Rafik Hariri.

With breath-taking speed, Martyrs Square had reclaimed its forgotten role: a place of meeting, continuity and community. In a single moment it had shrugged off its emptiness and separateness, becoming a place of new symbols in harmony with the symbols of the past and the rebirths of history. [Yussef Bazzi]

At that point, it remained one of few places in downtown Beirut not yet developed, serving as testimonial to the importance of a thread of continuity for the city’s residents to hold on to. But is the destruction of other spaces and other heritage irreversible? The physical structure of a Souk can be recreated, but can the atmosphere of spontaneity and its community involvement ever be restored in a city forever altered by conflict? Or has the work of Solidere now set the city on a new path, unable to reclaim its long heritage and having to settle for a new identity?

Many, both national and international have criticised the development as passing over the heads of the community and being, as Vanessa Martin describes, ‘Hariri’s profit making puppet’. Solidere’s campaign argues that the continued destruction of buildings under the pseudonym of reconstruction was to remove the troubling architecture that would ‘remind people of a disturbing, unsafe or undesirable past’. Yet there was little community consultation as to what this undesirable past was. In fact, with the post-war community still heavily divided and Hariri himself not being from either side,4 yet still carrying the majority stake in Solidere, what is undesirable for the people of downtown Beirut is a

contentious topic.

Three hundred structures which pre-dated the era of sectarianism and the civil war were allowed to be restored as ‘neutral, safe memories’ (Makarem, 2013), in an act that further erased the memories and struggles of the civil war period. Indeed, the modernist reconstruction has been perceived as a Westernisation of the city, an alternative source of cultural destruction with many critiques of the ‘Manhattan-style skyscrapers’ growing on the skyline (Sawalha, Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab

24 City, 2010). Hariri, unlike Zachwatowicz, was faced with a choice of how to rebuild, with enough building stock remaining for Solidere to feasibly attempt to return the city to its ‘traditional role’ where ‘people of various social-economic configurations could interact with one another’ rather than the current depoliticised centre based purely on ‘an ethos of consumerism and commercialism’ (Makarem, 2013) that Foster’s high rises may pertain to.

Beirut and the case of Solidere opens up two questions for Aleppo. The first is that of leadership, and the control of such a project. Solidere has always remained under the hand of Hariri’s estate which created unified, masterplanned development in the downtown area. Whilst there has been rumours of land grabbing by various parties in Syria (Week In Review, 2016), the more prominent issue are the Syrians returning to Aleppo to sell their property in order to fund their emigration. Reports suggest that the buyers in such cases are mainly developers, but not a united conglomeration (BBC, 2015). With domestic housing plots lost to developers this could potentially see the further influx of modern Aleppo into the older city. Meanwhile Assad himself has been talking future plans with Russian and Iranian companies, with, most notably, a lack of Western involvement, which could present a more reasonable and potentially less profit driven alternative. (Heffez & Raydan, 2014)

The more likely scenario is that any future projects will accommodate the needs and desires of whoever retains the power. As such, with Assad’s supporters generally being middle class families, the worry is that a similar fate will befall the working class residents of Aleppo as those of downtown Beirut. However, this time, rather than being priced out of downtown Aleppo, development may consume the entire city.