Portal 9 Issue #1 The Imagined English by Portal 9

STORIES AND CRITICAL WRITING ABOUT THE CITY

P O RTA L 9 SOUTH SUDAN’S NEW CAPITAL CITY . BAGHDAD VISIONARY: KAHTAN AL MADFAI RECONSTRUCTING PORT-AU-PRINCE . CHINESE CITY IN THE FAST LANE BEIRUT THROUGH THREE GENERATIONS

Issue #1

THE IMAGINED AUTUMN 2012

ISSUE #1, AUTUMN 2012

THE IMAGINED Fadi Tofeili

2 ‫ صفحة‬،‫ البوابة التاسعة‬،‫اُﳌتخﱠيل‬

To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in

their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define

them in the air of the imagination, will have colors with a durability not found in cellular life. What moves lives. What is said endures. There’s nothing in life that’s less real for having

been well described. Small-minded critics point out that such-and-such poem, with its

protracted cadences, in the end says merely that it’s a nice day. But to say it’s a nice day is difficult, and the nice day itself passes on. It’s up to us to conserve the nice day in a wordy,

florid memory, sprinkling new flowers and new stars over the fields and skies of the empty,

fleeting outer world …

… The grand, tarnished panorama of History amounts, as I see it, to a flow of

interpretations, a confused consensus of unreliable eyewitness accounts. The novelist is all of

us, and we narrate whenever we see, because seeing is complex like everything. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Richard Zenith

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), 30.

In 1925, Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), renowned for his fictional characters, pseudonyms, and unbridled fusion of fiction and reality, wrote a guidebook for his beloved city, titled Lisbon – What the Tourist Should See. The guide was discovered more than fifty years after his death and first published by Livros Horizontes in 1992 in both English and Portuguese. It was updated in 2008 with current spellings of names and places and with archival maps and photography for the tourist to better trace the poet’s path throughout the city, nearly ninety years after the guide was written. It must be thrilling for the flaneur to follow Pessoa’s path and “disquieted” footsteps through the city of today. The poet and author of The Book of Disquiet, who blended the imaginary and the real with almost indecipherable differences, was obsessed with place – with wandering between places as a way to discover “non-place” and to roam in the spaces of the mind, as he liked to think. For Pessoa, existing places, perceivable by the senses, are the gateway to “non-place,” and reality is the point of departure for an indeterminate journey with no end in sight. “I didn’t set out from any port I knew. Even today I don’t know what port it was, for I’ve still never been there,” reveals the poet in his chapter “The Voyage I Never Made” in The Book of Disquiet. Such a capacity for imagination is the hidden secret to living on solid ground in a perceptible place, according to Pessoa. It is the other dimension of living, the gateway to shades of meaning and the guide to an infinite universe. Imagination is the antithesis of stasis and rigor mortis. It is the ideal cognitive process for exploring the boundless possibilities of life.

EDITORIAL

In a journal about the city, place, and urbanism, we call upon and seek inspiration from Pessoa because his body of work stands as a paragon of how to render the city – its places and spaces – a field for unbridled interplay of the imagination. Whereas rural areas and the natural world are often adapted according to the primary needs of biological life and its immediate requirements, the city has long encompassed ways of living that transcend and seek liberation from the natural world. This urban transcendence, which heightens perception and theoretical inquiry, is embodied in the currents of architecture, lifestyle, and passion, as well as artistic and intellectual movements. For the city, due to its clear distinctions from the natural world, has always stimulated imagination, foresight, and cognition. Thus, the city affirms its urban essence, full of potential. In this regard, cities are like socio-urban beings, always under construction, forever in formation. They are in an endless process of coming into being, unconsciously avoiding completion for fear of veering toward stasis. As such, cities that witnessed profound changes in the course of history, cities like Beirut, despite its troubled history and successive shocks, have the privilege to deepen and broaden the meanings of urbanism. It is a privilege with the risk of cruelty, but a privilege all the same. For who is to say that cruelty is not intrinsic to the city? “The Imagined” in the city through time is an exploration of the metaphysical and probable realities, as well as the internal, unbound logic of the city. It is an open path to unexpected passages and countless gateways. “The Imagined” has no destination, no boundaries, no port of call. Its meaning eludes conclusions. If “The Imagined” leads to and reveals a particular place, then that place will embark with “The Imagined” on a journey of endless self-discovery. To imagine a city is to express more fully its living character, rooted in its diverse experiences and its ongoing formation. “The Imagined” in a place creates another place, a refuge; it multiplies our capacity to live, transcending actuality and broadening its horizons. The relationship between what is imagined in the city and what actually exists in its perceptible reality is fundamental to linking a place to its prospects, and it enables these prospects to play a role in the discussion about the identity and peculiarities of the place. This relationship also opens a discussion, impossible to conclude, about what came first. If, for the sake of argument, we considered a historical event to result in the establishment of a city, the question about what came first – imagination or construction – almost always remains unanswered. Does imagination call for the city? Or does the city call for the imagination? These questions will forever remain open to debate, a debate that will continue to affect our relationship to the city itself, for whenever we believe the city to be complete, we return to “The Imagined” that challenges our presuppositions. And so, the city regains its dynamic, its premise. To imagine a city is to begin from the beginning: from manifold points of passage. We start the city from its ideal state of forever coming into being, never arriving at completion. Inspired by Pessoa who, through his creation of places, people, lives, and deaths added a new dimension to what exists in reality, this journal aspires to be a new gateway, a new portal, to Beirut. We invite you to enter this portal and to reflect on its many prospects. Based on a translation by Maya Khoury

P O R TA L 9 : S T O R I E S A N D C R I T I C A L W R I T I N G A B O U T T H E C I T Y

Issue #1

THE IMAGINED Autumn 2012

ED ITOR IAL

THE I M AG I NED Fadi Tofeili

NAR R ATIV ES

B EFOR E WI TH M Y FATHER , AF TER F OR M Y SON Youssef Bazzi

P ORT-AU-P R I NC E A STR I DE THE FAULT LI NE Pooja Bhatia

BUI LDI NG STATEHOOD, FROM THE G ROUND UP Malu Halasa

D OCUM ENTS

LEBA NON’S DEBUT I N THE WOR LD OF TOM OR ROW Eyad Houssami

P HOTO

ESSAY

FOR THE G LORY OF SP ORT Giorgos Moutafis

NUM EROLOG Y

R EA DI NG G A ZA THROUG H DUBAI Joumana Al Jabri and Karim Elgendy

UR BANOG R AP HY

OR DOS: A C HI NESE C I TY C ONSTRUC TED I N THE FA ST LA NE Michael Ulfstjerne and Bert de Muynck

SOUTH SUDA N SEA RC HES F OR NATI ONA L UNI TY BY M EANS OF A C I TY Leben Nelson Moro

I M AG E C ONSC I OUS: R EP R ESENTI NG NEW WEA LTH I N TUR K EY ’S A NATO LI A N TI G E R C I TI E S Tahire Erman

101

P ORT SAI D 1957: EG YP TI AN M O DE R N I SM UN FUR LE D Mohamed Elshahed

CONV E R SATIO NS

117

K A HTAN AL M A DFA I : BAG HDAD V I SI O NA RY, OC TO G E NA R I AN ARC HI TE C T Shaker Al Anbari

COR RE SPOND E NCE

127

HOM E V Ahmad Makia

CONTENTS

F LANEUR

141

THE WI ZA R D OF C A R AC AS Rasha Atrash

EPISOD ES

152

I M AG I NED ENG R AV I NG S I N THE C I TY Edited by James Westcott

CR EATIV E

155

WR ITING

SOLDI ER S F I G HT B ETTER WI THOUT HOP E Alireza Mahmoudi Iranmehr

R EV IEW S

AND

CRITIQUE

165

FROM THE STRUC TUR E TO THE PAG E: THE R ETUR N OF THE ARC HI TEC TUR AL JOUR NAL John Jervis

169

ROYA L OP ER A HOUSE OF M USC AT Katherine Hennessey

175

...C A I RO STOR I ES BY JUDI TH BAR RY Omar Kholeif

179

UNTI TLED ( 12TH I STA NBUL BI ENNALE) Sam Thorne

AR ABIC

INSERTS

182

FROM THE WA LLED TOWN OF EI G HT G ATES TO THE ARC HI TEC TUR E OF THE C I TY Waddah Chararah

183

WHER E M A JNOUN ROAM S Illustrations by Hatem Imam Introduction by Fadi Tofeili

E XC LU S I V E TO P O RTA L 9 J O U R NA L . O RG

Stories: Waddah Chararah delves into the two-hundred-year social history of

the walled town of Beirut, and Youssef Rakha explores “The Imagined” from the perspective of Mustafa Çorbaci, the fictional protagonist of his first novel, The Book of the Sultan’s Seal.

Critical Writing: Brian Whitaker considers how book publishers scrambled to capitalize on the commercial possibilities of the Arab Spring, and Morgan

Quaintance looks back on the Los Angeles dreamscape at play in a review of

Ariel Pink’s seminal album Before Today. Audio: Hassan Abdullah reads his poem “Saida” about Lebanon’s southern port city, originally published in 1972 in the collection Azhkur Annani Ahababet (I Remember That I Loved).

Colophon Portal 9 is a journal of stories and critical writing about urbanism and the city. Published twice yearly in English and Arabic, it addresses the need for a conscientious debate about architecture, planning, culture, and society in urban contexts across the Middle East and the rest of the world. Each issue focuses on a unique theme and blends creative writing, photography, and personal essays with academic scholarship, perceptive journalism, and cultural critiques. Backed by Solidere, the Lebanese Company for the Development and Reconstruction of the Beirut Central District, Portal 9 is an exploration of the nexus between urbanism and culture by people who care about cities and think rigorously about them. Portal 9 (ISSN 2305-5197) is published twice yearly in Beirut, Lebanon by Solidere Management Services s.a.l.

Beirut Central District, Building 149, Saad Zaghloul Street PO Box 11 9493, Beirut 2012 7305 Lebanon T +961 1 980 650/60 Unsolicited materials cannot be returned. Permit Number: 465 Director of the Publication: George Allam Copyright ÂŠ 2012 Solidere Management Services s.a.l. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, used, stored in a website or other form of electronic retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including but not limited to electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the express prior written permission of the publisher. The opinions expressed in Portal 9 are the sole views of the author or authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the editors and publisher. Portal 9 does not guarantee the truthfulness, originality, accuracy, completeness, or reliability of any information or opinion, presented in Portal 9, nor does it make any representation concerning the same.

S O L I D E R E M U LT I D I S C I P L I NA RY D E S I G N D E PA R T M E N T

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Fadi Tofeili

C R E AT I V E D I R E C T O R

Nathalie Elmir

MANAGING EDITOR

Eyad Houssami

DESIGN TEAM

Antoine Ghanem Karine Wehbe Limassol Zok

P RO D U C T I O N T E A M

Dina Boustany Zeina Naccache Mario Razzouk

A D M I N I S T R AT O R S

Sumaya Baroody Mohamad Rhaymi

E D I T O R - AT - L A RG E

Malu Halasa

URBANOGRAPHY EDITOR

Todd Reisz

REVIEWS AND CRITIQUE EDITOR

Omar Kholeif

PHOTO EDITOR

Dalia Khamissy

COPY EDITORS

Mohammad Hamdan Sophie Perl

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Printed and bound in Lebanon

Special Thanks Hassan Abdullah Noreen Abu Oun Khaled Adham Jean Akl Elizabeth Angell Nuha Ansari Marwa Arsanios Reem Askalan Judith Barry Nasser Chammaa Carole Corm Rami Corm Hassan Daoud db Studios Tabitha Decker Mounir Douaidy Khaled El Ammari Makram El Kadi Bassem Eldaouk Patricia Elias Albert Ferre Jean Fisher Adrienne Fricke Angus Gavin Selva Gurdogan Ali Hamed Rebecca Hamilton Saba Innab Lawrence Joffe Maya Khoury Daniella Rose King David Kirkpatrick Ghaleb Mahmassani Peter F. May Nadim Mishlawi Bachir Moujaes Zahi Naamani Konstantinos Pantazis Ghalya Saadawi Christel Salem Ghassan Salhab Robert Saliba Tamara Sawaya Sherene Seikaly Amira Solh Anna Tetas Nadine Touma Ghada Waked Fulong Wu

P O R TA L 9 : S T O R I E S A N D C R I T I C A L W R I T I N G A B O U T T H E C I T Y

B E F O R E W I T H M Y F AT H E R , A F T E R F O R M Y S O N b y Y O U S S E F B A Z Z I

Rim El Jundi, In the Meanwhile, 2009, acrylic and mixed media, 90 x150 cm.

N A R R AT I V E S

B E F O R E W I T H M Y FAT H E R , AFTER FOR MY SON Three generations live in the shadow of a fractured city. Youssef Bazzi

portal9journal.org ‫ثﻼثة أجيال ﰲ أطياف مدينة متفّرقة‬ There was once an East Beirut and a West Beirut, and the Green Line divided the two parts of the city. It extended from the Al Lailaki-Al Hadath axis to the Sodeco-Damascus Road axis and expanded into a no man’s land buffer zone, which encompassed all of downtown Beirut. Aside from this no man’s land, life in both sides of the city followed the rhythm of war and its terms of order, chaos, and instability. People in each part of the city led lives independent of the other half; they were isolated from the other side just as they were engaged in bloody political hostility with it most of the time. With the partition of Beirut, life withdrew from the city’s central district. The area fell into tatters, a field of abandoned buildings, rubble, scorched ruins, and walls ridden with bullets and shells. It became a zone of ambushes, sniper posts, and barriers of concrete and sand – a place of harrowing darkness and deafening daytime silence. From 1975 until 1991, every part of Beirut was planned to be a self-sufficient, standalone city, and alternative spaces emerged to compensate for the loss of a downtown. New markets and transport hubs arose as substitutes for the central district. The Pigeon Rocks Market established itself along the Corniche until it was demolished in late 1982. Street vendors then overtook Rue Hamra, which later gave way to the Mar Elias and Barbour markets. In terms of transport, West Beirut’s Cola and Barbir and East Beirut’s Dora and Adlieh replaced the defunct central hub in downtown, and independent transportation networks formed in each area. As time passed, these neighborhood-cities exacerbated the divisions of Beirut as a whole. As the security climate worsened and armed clashes continued, fueled by narrow communal identities, people attempted to minimize so-called security risks and dangers by staying close to home and sticking to the neighborhood. People were fixated on demographic segregation and sought to “cleanse” their neighborhoods by evicting certain communities and eliminating multiculturalism. A brain drain of urban elites occurred, and rural-to-urban migrants, displaced by the war and uprooted from their homes, replaced these émigrés. As populations shifted, sectarian identities hardened at the expense of national identity. These political and demographic forces led to the pursuit of homogenous, autonomous neighborhoods. In every part of the city, merchants and investors built schools, supermarkets, barber shops, auto repair shops, boutiques, and movie theaters (wherever possible) as well as bakeries and restaurants, all in an attempt to create secure areas of vital amenities such that residents never had to venture out into the realm of the unknown, dangerous city. The withdrawal was first and foremost a physical phenomenon accompanied by political, cultural, and urban transformations. Sixteen years sufficed to turn Beirut into an array of small, sectarian cities, each surrounded by intangible walls marked by political banners hanging above the streets, political party symbols plastering street walls, and local neighborhood accents. Above all, it was the prevalent social practices that discouraged mixing between groups and instituted an axiomatic acceptance of estrangement and division between the two parts of the capital. Certainly, there were multicultural corners of the city that held strong. Despite economic decline, Ras Beirut and Hamra in West Beirut, for instance, maintained a space for relatively holistic, urban living that tried to continue the traditions of civility, time management, socializing, communication, and individualism, as well as individual freedom. This pocket became a site of nostalgia for the capital – its perks, pleasures, and bustling center. In the late eighties, the pursuit of peace (no matter the cost) re-emerged, and this dream was coupled with a “return” to the city center and with the idea of reinstating an integrated, cohesive city.

B E F O R E W I T H M Y F AT H E R , A F T E R F O R M Y S O N b y Y O U S S E F B A Z Z I

to the site of the flower clock that announced the time on the hour and was also a spacious garden. People used to pay a photographer to take their picture next to the clock. Afterwards, it was time to go to the cinema. There was that giant cutout of Souad Hosni in her bellydancing outfit that ran the length of the Rivoli Building, with the name Zouzou written in large lettering. Souad dominated the Beirut central district, and I stood beneath her with my father, amidst a swirling crowd and cacophony of honking. On the second trip, we watched a kung fu film starring Bruce Lee. I remember, on that trip, my father marveled at the new Byblos Building. When we arrived, he took me to the shop Saarti to buy me black trousers like the ones elegant men used to wear. We then continued on to a nut roastery and juice shop. As for the third trip, which I can hardly remember, it was with my mother, and we went to see Farid Al Atrash’s film Tune of My Life. Farid Al Atrash died a few days later, the war broke out, the central district died, and my father passed away. It all happened at once. Thus, from 1975 until 1991, I lived without a city center and without my father. When I went down to the devastated city center with my partner in 1991, we quickly withdrew to West Beirut, coming to terms with the fact that we had to continue living between a real half-city and another imagined half.

In 1991, we went down to the devastated city center. Hellish trees shot out from the pavement and the floors of abandoned buildings, and we could match the layers of rubble to each period of conflict: the Two-Year War, the late seventies, post-1982, post-1985, and the last battle. Putrid water, mud, and a film of dirty gray coated every surface. There were dark holes, mysterious entryways, and shadows, still and diabolic. Twisted metal jutted out from this side and that, and rust and shrapnel burrowed in every crevice. There were ubiquitous ruins, scorched by fire, that had seen countless winters and rubbish toasted by the suns of summers past. The place was strewn with rotten soda cans from fighters, and we shall never know whether they lived or died right there. It was an apocalyptic scene, neglected and charred. We took some pictures, and then we left. At that point, we realized that there would be no “return” to the center, that we would have to invent a new city center, one that did not resemble the old central district that I remember from two trips I made with my father as a seven-year-old. On the first trip, my father took me to watch the film Beware of Zouzou because our Christian neighbors used to call me Zouzou. He had a Mercedes 180 and worked as a driver based at the Saifi taxi station. He kept a club, like a baseball bat, by his seat. It was indispensable for roaming the streets of the central district back then, for fending off the gendarmerie and Division 16 as well as the thugs of the Phalange Party and Deuxieme Bureau, thieves from the port nearby, small-time traffickers, and midnight con men. My father had blue beads, an amulet against the evil eye that dangled from the rear-view mirror, and he wore well-pressed white shirts. On this trip, he took me in his car from our home in Nabaa, and as we passed by the pastirma (cured meat) shops in Bourj Hammoud and Dora, he picked me up a grilled meat sandwich, which we used to eat only on special occasions and when we went picnicking in the mountains. I remember him talking to his friends about the horse races – the winning and losing horses. We continued our journey by car, my gaze fixed on my father’s arm shifting gears now and again, until we arrived at the Saifi taxi station. From there, he took me to a strange café on the second floor of an old building. It was redolent of arguileh smoke and full of loud voices. I took pride in the fact that I was the only kid among all those men. My father had taken me to his special world of pungent odors and vitality, with tables covered in teacups, cards, coffee, cigarettes, and newspapers. I had a bottle of 7UP with a wax straw that gave the soda a light aroma. We went down to the wide square. “This is the state’s donkey,” he said, referring to the public beige buses. Then, he took me to the heart of the square,

II With the birth of my son in 1993, the bulldozers began working in downtown Beirut. Refugees and squatters were relocated from crucial sites, buildings were revamped, and their verandas restored with luster. Building encroachments were removed, walls painted and cleaned, sidewalks paved, streetlights installed, cabling reconfigured, and stray wires discarded. Garbage collectors appeared, trash bins and dumpsters were put out; beautification works flourished, storefronts were renovated, barriers removed, political slogans wiped off walls, sewers repaired, phone lines fixed, and trees planted. Police regained respect (to an extent), traffic was organized, and violations penalized. Consequently, the roads reopened, and Lebanese flocked to the city center as domestic tourists, just as foreigners, Arabs, and other nationals visited the new downtown Beirut. The city was welcoming anew foreigners and tourists and abandoning some of its so-called local character. People started to brush off the dust of the war. Taxi drivers began to get rid of their wrecked, tattered, and dilapidated Mercedes and bought newer ones. Women appeared to be increasingly at ease in bold, and sometimes frivolous, styles. Men also started to appear more elegant, since the new generation had office jobs that

N A R R AT I V E S

required suits and ties. They were proud because they realized they were different from us, the people molded by the war and its relentless meanderings. The new generation diligently kept up with the changes and happenings in the city, from art festivals to outdoor concerts, and they trekked out to faraway destinations in Lebanon to party. At the same time, satellite TV, mobile phones, and computers were generating a new culture of technology at a dizzying speed, providing the youth with an identity that broke from the past. It was at that time when the first mockup of Solidere’s master plan of downtown Beirut appeared: a virtual image that combined red brick and stone elements, which historically ornamented architecture, with glass and metal, the materials of the future. I compared the mockup with the images still fixed in my memory from the three trips I made in my childhood to the city center before the war. The blue and red mockup looks like something out of a movie, I thought with sarcasm. As this virtual master plan was being promoted, a real estate rush struck Beirut. Everyone was living with the fantasy that Beirut would become supremely deluxe. That entire period can be summed up by a photograph I once saw in a newspaper: a raggedy-looking man standing among the ruins in Martyrs’ Square, carrying in one hand a poster depicting the square before the war and in the other a poster supposedly showing the master plan, to sell it to passersby and visitors – a shattered present, a golden past, and a marvelous future. Reality was worth nothing. It had to be erased from memory and cast into oblivion, while virtual reality was marketed on a large scale. It was this virtual reality that started to lead the economy, capturing the public’s attention, driving the discourse, and figuring into cultural production. Everyone was asking: what kind of city do we want? This master plan became the central issue, even in politics. While we were deliberating the master plan, home and flat rental prices soared in all parts of the capital. The master plan added a high potential value to real estate, prompting those like me, those who had just started their professional and family lives at the end of the war and who had no inheritance, to realize that they had to leave the capital or else face the humiliation of being kicked out of “paradise.” The myths, stories, and fantasies associated with “rebuilding and reconstruction” had embedded in our minds that the neighborhoods and suburbs of Beirut would not be the same in just a few years. Magic would soon dominate the urban landscape. For instance, it was rumored that the new airport would revolutionize the development of the southern suburbs. A pan-Arab highway would pass through that area, and Al Hadath, a university city, would be constructed according to the highest international standards.

The Silicon Valley of the Middle East would emerge south of Beirut with an easy-to-access freetrade zone and elegant residential complexes, infrastructure, hotels, and parks. The coast from Jnah to Khaldeh would become the Riviera of the Middle East. The Elissar Project, the equivalent of Solidere in the southern suburbs, would make each suburb no

“A raggedy-looking man standing among the ruins in Martyrs’ Square, carrying in one hand a poster depicting the square before the war and in the other a poster showing the master plan – a shattered present, a golden past, and a marvelous future.” longer just a suburb, but an extension of the capital itself. With this Hong Kong-like economic boom, the standard of living would rise, and life in the public sphere and inside these new developments would be lavish. This was all packaged alongside the perks of Lebanon’s magnificent climate, snow on the mountaintops and sunny beaches lining the coast. The message was clear: Head to Lebanon now with your family, buy a cheap flat in Mreijeh near the airport, and before long, you will find yourself in a real estate paradise. Jump on the opportunity, and enjoy a bright future. I did not think twice. I bought a flat in installments. I stayed there for who knows how long: two months, six months? I don’t want to remember. What happened was that the displaced refugees from Wadi Abou Jamil in the central district marched on the area with big fat compensation checks in their pockets and bought all the apartments in the environs. Then they destroyed them, or rather, redesigned them to fit their lifestyles, recreating here what they had become accustomed to on many levels – social, political, and urban. They destroyed the virtual master plan I had in my mind: the elegant Beirut expanding to the edge of the mountain, assimilating to the suburbs, its fabric and morphology. The defiant southern suburbs were the site of many historical events that stymied imaginations and instituted bitter facts on the ground: the weak state and treasury, Syrian tutelage and its costs, the Israeli occupation and its costs, the resistance and its implications, and the power that the warlords still wielded as well as their

B E F O R E W I T H M Y F AT H E R , A F T E R F O R M Y S O N b y Y O U S S E F B A Z Z I

mafia-like pattern of relations. This all contributed to keeping the master plan in check and restricting it to the city center. Not one year later, I drove myself out of the suburbs and left Lebanon entirely, heading to Kuwait. I got rid of the flat and lost my job while the bulldozers kept working, night and day, in downtown Beirut.

pre-war Beirut. There, post-war Beirut began anew with booze, music, and young people. There, intellectuals of East and West Beirut met and mingled with musicians, playwrights, and journalists, along with fashion designers who, all of a sudden, soared to local stardom as the image makers of tomorrow’s Lebanon. There, free love dropped its anchor. There, we discovered the emerging society of yuppies, young businessmen displaying wealth in a permanent celebration of themselves. They were becoming role models of success, embodying a new set of ambitions, morals, and values. In that place, a new city was brewing with former leftists who had tired of their “revisionary” liberalism and democracy, former right-wingers whose fascism had cooled somewhat, and new activists from the universities. There, in the nights of Monnot, plans for Lebanon’s future were taking shape. The battle for political freedom and rejection of tutelage began, and the battle for individual liberties and social liberal values launched. The battle for an economy of tourism and services took off, and the battle for cultural development and alternative urban planning began. A sphere of exchange where the two parts of the capital could convene and draft a social contract was born. It was like a virtual city center that sprung to life only at night. In 2003, I went to visit the new downtown as a tourist. From the moment I stepped onto Maarad Street, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. I knew right away: I was there to look around, not to live it. It was as though I had mistakenly entered a massive film set, with all the faces of the nouveau riche. Everyone looked like magazine cutouts, and families appeared to be straight out of a television series. The cafés lacked character and seemed to be designed for showing-off, or for the confused tourists or passersby. The buildings were empty and impeccable, part of an architectural exhibition in a World’s Fair at which we were only visitors. This city center, the beating heart of the capital, was at that moment a playground for children with balls, balloons, and bicycles, which only aggravated my sense of alienation. This was neither the city center of 1974 nor the one that I visited with my future wife in 1991. It was the new place where my son practiced riding his bicycle. Behind Maarad Street, there in Martyrs’ Square, was a void, an empty space awaiting a virtual blueprint yet to be drafted. That void was not a public square. It was a no man’s land that still separated West Beirut from East Beirut, waiting for the miraculous uprisings of February/March 2005. When I take the Fouad Chehab Ring Road from Hamra to Achrafieh, I realize that people cross back and forth from East to West Beirut and bypass that island, the city center, isolated from traffic and the arteries of daily business, society, and economy. It is an island, or in the tradition of the Commonwealth,

III I returned to the capital in 1999, armed with a new virtual master plan of Beirut. I was coming from the Gulf – Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, and occasional visits to Dubai, so what I imagined in my mind was informed by the topographies of the Gulf: endless curving highways, villas and palaces on the outskirts and in the suburbs, and a commercial city center at the heart of the city. There would be a stock exchange building, police station, Palace of Justice, museum, park, fish market, old market, and seaside promenade dotted with luxury hotels. At a distance from the capital, the industrial zone would lie on one side and an airport on the other. The urban plan would be an arrangement with no place for improvisation, an order that leaves no room for chaos. I hated that about the Gulf. To me it was like a movie set built for Westerners in the middle of the desert, but it felt lonely and isolated. Still, I tried to adapt that master plan in my mind to something suitable for Beirut, if only to eliminate its signature chaos. I saw that this would mean resuming the city’s destruction and disfigurement and projecting another city onto it. Immediately after I returned, I realized that entering the capital once again required throwing away my old map: the cafés on Rue Hamra changed. The small bar had been neglected, forgotten, and abandoned by its usual patrons. The seaside cafeteria, where we used to spend summer nights, lost its poetry, becoming a playground for children and a family destination. The way people moved, the daily rhythm of life had been altered. The culture of malls arose as global fast food chains mushroomed everywhere. All of the old movie theaters disappeared and were replaced by movie complexes elsewhere. During those years, far from the plans for rebuilding and reconstruction, far from downtown, from the EastWest Beirut mentality, the lights were glimmering in an almost forgotten back street. At the edge of Achrafieh between Abdul Wahab Al Inglizi and Monnot streets, a plan emerged organically in a part of town that was relatively spared by the war. The neighborhood was typical of so-called “Christian Beirut” – bourgeois, Mediterranean, and colonial. In terms of appearance and architecture, it embodied the nostalgic images of

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a fenced plot and an exclusive social club, for the recreation and leisure of the elite. This impression is confirmed when I take the Bourj Abi Haidar-Salim Salam axis down to Riad Al Solh Square. As soon as I pass through Zouqaq Al Blatt, I immediately feel that I’ve moved from one urban landscape to another, even though the distance between them is no more than a few meters. The same goes for all buffer zones surrounding downtown Beirut. This is an urban-socialcultural dichotomy, suggesting that the rest of Beirut will not be affected by the master plan for this city center. Instead, the rest of the city is at the mercy of a de facto master plan which continues to deepen the cleavages of Beirut. The balkanization of the city into a constellation of conflicting sectarian mini-cities during the civil war remains a stubborn urban reality.

sold. In the early evening, they end up in a giant park, there by the sea, people coming and going, or jogging, while kids play. There are street vendors, police, and young environmentalists distributing flyers while a band jams in the center of the park. They meet up with friends on the lawn next to the Martyrs’ Monument before they head to Virgin Megastore, each shopping for himself. Finally, my son takes the new tram from Bab Idriss to Damascus Road and then home, to Furn Al Shebbak. I picture him going back and forth between Hamra, Bliss, downtown, Achrafieh, and Furn Al Shebbak, the son of a middle-class family, who eats cheap sandwiches and wears expensive shirts, who mocks the snobs but never appears shabby. He wants a grocery store on Maarad Street that does not sell Pepsi at an exorbitant price for tourists; he wants to dine in an elegant restaurant, where students are not driven out by a gold-plated menu. He wants a shop that sells a good cup of espresso

IV My son is now eighteen. Luckily for him, he has lived in both Hamra and Achrafieh. He parties in Monnot, Gemmayze, and Ras Beirut. He goes to ABC in Achrafieh and to Dunes in Verdun. He shops and hangs out in Sassine Square and on Rue Hamra. He speaks three languages: French, English, and Arabic. His friends live in Sin Al Fil, Achrafieh, Ain Al Rummaneh, Furn Al Shebbak, Shiah, Verdun, Karakol Al Druze, Corniche Al Mazraa, Hamra, Bir Hassan, and even as far as Mansourieh. Next year, he will go to college and will begin his independent life in the city. Over the past few years, I’ve come to believe that the city center is not my city anymore. It is my son’s city. But why is it that, so far, he does not have a real relationship with downtown? I began to imagine him and his generation, writing a life for the city center and for themselves, different from the one that we lived. A life in which they thread those invisible strings between the city’s parts and parcels, making memories on pavements, balconies, entrances, exits, alleys, streets, rooftops, rooms. I started imagining the arduous mission that my son will have to undertake: engineering a life that transcends the city and that adds to it, warm breaths and emotions that would unite it and bring its parts closer together. I imagine him as a student at the American University of Beirut, riding the restored tram from the fifties on Bliss Street to Riad Al Solh Square. There, he meets his girlfriend at the entrance to the Grand Theatre, which is presenting a Souad Hosni Film Week, and they watch Beware of Zouzou. Together, they leave the movie theater laughing and make their way to the small Armenian shop in an alley off Maarad Street to eat pastirma and sausages. They take a stroll down toward the seaside, passing small kiosks around City Hall, where souvenirs, pictures, sweets, and cakes are

“The balkanization of the city into several conflicting sectarian mini-cities during the civil war remains a stubborn urban reality.” on the go, a bargain bookshop, a clean sandwich kiosk. He wants an organized bus stop and a punctual tram line, a large garden for his dreams, and a pier that goes all the way from Dora to Ouzai. He wants to take part in a student protest here and go to an art museum. He wants Martyrs’ Square to be accessible, a place where he is not afraid to hang out. He wants to take care of business in a public toilet or find a students’ studio to rent and a gym, public library, and perhaps even small street for his fleeting vices. From the American University, he passes through Clemenceau, where expats live, having flooded the city following a boom in business and commerce. It is a place of international shops. He passes through Bourj Hammoud, Mar Mikhaël Annahr, and Gemmayze, where Ethiopians and South Asian communities have settled and flourished. They have their own neighborhoods and alleys with Buddhist, Hindu, Tamil, or Coptic characters, next to small hostels, shipping agencies, and industrial plants adjacent to the port, all on the outskirts of the friendly and longstanding Armenian neighborhoods. In the foothills of Achrafieh, he gets acquainted with neighborhoods that draw young singles, university students, and new immigrants, where

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buildings are constructed not for families but for those who want to live in small flats and minimalist studios. That area might be a new sanctuary for those who wish to retire to a private and free lifestyle, or even for newlyweds. He passes through the old streets between Mar Mitr and Sursouk neighborhood, which now have a new sheen thanks to the municipality’s efforts and urban planning laws which allow skyscrapers to stand alongside heritage buildings. He walks around Nabaa, Sin Al Fil, Qasqas, Tareeq Al Jadeedeh, Bourj Abi Haidar, Zouqaq Al Blatt and Aisha Bakkar. Each of these areas has seen a miniSolidere development, or a mixture of urban planning, economic development, and a significant demographic shift, with greater multiculturalism and more open spaces. He sees a large antique market between Bachoura and Basta, crafts, carpentry workshops, and glassware shops. He sees jewelry, fabric, and electronics markets. He notices new stadiums, flourishing football clubs, and boisterous crowds. He and his peers also have a virtual “underground,” where the street life and youthful mischief infuses the city with an artistic and social vitality. It endows the capital with a sense of democracy in terms of development, housing, communication, and quality of life – for example, with a falafel shop on Foch Street where bourgeois women shop and a sushi joint in the heart of Barbour Street. These are just a few features of the imagined master plan, where the elegance of Solidere’s blueprints, the chaos of Beirut today, and the cinematic Beirut of the past coexist in an atmosphere of innovation that combines architecture and spontaneity. Every plan is a response to the difficult question: how can we make stones breathe? My son and his generation shoulder the weight of these challenges, for Beirut cannot remain the impossible dream that we have long imagined. Based on a translation by Sabine Taoukjian

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Rim El Jundi, At Risk, 2009, acrylic and mixed media, 90 x150 cm.

B E F O R E W I T H M Y F AT H E R , A F T E R F O R M Y S O N b y Y O U S S E F B A Z Z I

Rim El Jundi, A Sun on His Suitcase, 2008, acrylic and mixed media, 100 x100 cm.

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Rim El Jundi, The Habitant, 2008, acrylic and mixed media, 100 x100 cm.

B E F O R E W I T H M Y F AT H E R , A F T E R F O R M Y S O N b y Y O U S S E F B A Z Z I

Rim El Jundi, Invasion of Hamra Street, 2008, acrylic and mixed media, 80 x120 cm.

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Rim El Jundi, Beirut Sky, 2008, acrylic and mixed media, 100 x170 cm.

P O R T - A U - P R I N C E A S T R I D E T H E F A U LT L I N E b y P O O J A B H A T I A

Centreville, the heart of the city, was the only zone in Port-au-Prince with a discernable history and orthogonal grid. It became an immediate focus for plans for post-quake renewal. Photograph by Paolo Woods.

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P O RT - A U - P R I N C E A S T R I D E T H E FA U LT L I N E Two years after the earthquake in Haiti, urban renewal staggers amid the ruins of catastrophe and a dysfunctional state. Pooja Bhatia

25 ‫ صفحة‬،‫ البوابة التاسعة‬،‫ برنس عﲆ فالق الصدع‬- ‫ أو‬- ‫بور‬ It takes an hour to drive up to Boutilliers, perched near the top of the mountains that ring Port-au-Prince. From this vista, the city lays out to the west, the houses and shanties decorating the hillsides down to Centreville, and stops only at the shimmering bay, where a cargo ship or two full of gas or rice usually anchors. To the north, one can see all the way to planes lifting off the runway at Toussaint Louverture Airport, the crews eager to ascend before dark so they don’t have to overnight in Haiti. Once upon a time, Boutilliers was a mandatory stop for tourists, but there are few tourists now, and the mountain is peaceful. The city below looks unfamiliar – green, orderly, and beautiful – and whenever I go, I think of the Haitian painter Préfète Duffaut, whose idealized cityscapes are filled with trees and innocent of squalor and suffering. Citizens rarely avail themselves of the Boutilliers view; like many landmarks, it’s better known than visited. A haunting book by Haitian author Lyonel Trouillot, Children of Heroes, plays with this fact. Its narrator is about ten years old, and he and the older sister he adores live in a one-room hovel in the city. It’s a miserable place, choked by cooking fires by day and unbreathable at night, when the children pull a little curtain to separate their mattress from that of their parents. These tiny cement structures pack their neighborhood, almost on top of each other, and until it turned from spectacle to depressing, the neighbors would gather at the entrance of their home to observe their father brutalizing their mother. At last, the children murder their father, and they’re in serious trouble. Intuiting their last opportunity for a lark, they find their way up the mountain. The narrator marvels at the mountain’s salubrity. Houses stand far from each other, satellite dishes top slate roofs, and dogs wag their tails happily. He and his sister manage to make out a few landmarks downtown –

the cemetery, the cathedral, and the soccer stadium – but can’t locate their own neighborhood, another slum indistinguishable from all the rest. “From high up, it didn’t look threatening,” the narrator tells us. “On the contrary, you could imagine the sand mines that tunneled into the mountain’s slopes sending it crashing down there one day. Crushing the city with the weight of its flowers.” I had to reread those sentences a few times to grasp their unsettling fantasy, the narrator’s wish to obliterate the ugly, violent city with mountain flowers. Many years after Trouillot wrote that book, the city below was indeed crushed, though the January 2010 earthquake covered downtown with rubble and dust, not flowers. The hillside shanties cascaded into one another like dominoes, sliding down the mountains. Morne L’Hopital, the massif extending from Boutilliers and to the south of the city center, even appeared to have lost a few meters. *** On the earthquake’s eve, I had a romantic view of my own, up in a neighborhood not far from downtown. Boutilliers was cooler, but my apartment had a closer view. By then I had lived in Port-au-Prince for two-anda-half years, but only recently had I begun to know Centreville, or downtown. It had a dangerous reputation – included in the “red zone” that aid workers were barred from after sunset – and had been bereft of economic power for decades. The better hotels, restaurants, and expat nightclubs had migrated east and planted themselves in the suburb Pétionville. But as my reporting kept taking me downtown, I began to nurse an infatuation that grew into something like love.

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Downtown began at the wide green squares of the Champs de Mars, where statues of revolutionary leaders – Louverture, Dessalines, Christophe, and Pétion – gazed benevolently over students, families on outings, and flirting teenagers. On the park’s corners, vendors hawked used books to the clientele at the nearby State University. Headscarved ladies crouched on the curbs with baskets full of tiny plastic parcels filled with labapen, or boiled breadnuts, thick shards of spicy cashew brittle, sweet oranges already peeled. South of the Champs de Mars, the alabaster palace gleamed in the sunshine, set off by its golf-course green lawn. Government buildings stood on most corners, tall, white, and imposing even in their decrepitude. Here, the grimy public hospital whose doctors rarely came to work and whose nurses were often on strike. On one wall, a graffiti artist friend of mine had spray-painted a bandaged patient escaping from a window. Two blocks away was the Palais de Justice, where I had once watched a leftist leader defend himself against political persecution; leukemia, not the state, would claim him. Farther west was Rue St. Nicholas, a one-block street crammed with dilapidated houses, a few haunted by lost grandeur. Some of Haiti’s best hip-hop artists grew up there, and the congested alleyways that filigreed off the street hid more than one sophisticated recording studio, tricked out with soundproof glass and Macintosh computers. Rue St. Nicholas dead-ended at the cemetery where, every November, celebrants in white robes gathered in homage to the dead and to Baron Samedi, the vodou spirit who guarded the crossroads between our world and the next. It’s a Frenchstyle cemetery, filled with mausoleums in pale blue, white, pink, and gray. I had seen it in a satellite image before I came to Haiti and wondered what it was. The structures were too small to be houses but too large to be anything else. Half a kilometer from the cemetery, the Stade Sylvio Cator was the only proper arena, with proper lights for evening games, in a soccer-mad country. Farther west still, just a few blocks from the sea, was Boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Less than a generation ago, it was the city’s main artery, known better as the Grande Rue. Two generations ago cruise ships deposited tourists at the bay, and they strolled up the promenade to the nineteenth-century Iron Market to buy paintings and tchotchkes. It had thrilled me to discover remnants of that era. Store signs with 1950s fonts jutted out at right angles over the sidewalk. Stepping around the streaming gutters, I could discern imprints of trolley tracks and imagined flaneurs strolling down the arcade of tallwindowed, multistory brick buildings. Flâner remains a Haitian verb, a beloved activity in the late afternoon, when the sun has stopped broiling.

But when I first visited in 2009, the Grand Rue had become a difficult place to do it. Those vast sidewalks had been given over to commercantes, the market ladies who set up shop under umbrellas. One couldn’t begrudge them: they worked hard. Anyway, the avenue accommodated them, as well as several rows of traffic from tap-taps, the buses painted with lovely, wild murals depicting music stars, famous athletes, half-dressed women with flowing hair, and images of the Savior – often in combination. *** Two months later came the earthquake. For thirty-five seconds, it turned the city into a Tilt-a-Whirl from hell. I crouched under the dining room table, and when the floor steadied, I opened the side door and climbed over a mound of rocks that, minutes before, had been a wall. The security guard was uncharacteristically mute but not visibly harmed. I took him by the arm, and we walked toward open space, away from concrete that might fall in an aftershock. Rising dust and oncoming dusk obscured the deflated domes of the National Palace, the collapsed wing of the Iron Market, and the eviscerated National Cathedral. These we would see the next day from the balcony, and then up close, for months and years to come. We heard a few explosions, perhaps from gas stations, and for a few confounding minutes we believed Port-au-Prince was being bombed. The earthquake had struck Centreville with particular force. It destroyed or damaged twenty-eight of twenty-nine government buildings and turned most of the Grande Rue into rubble. It had wiped out entire blocks of houses on little streets like Rue St. Nicholas. They were pancaked, smashed, knocked off their foundations. Portions of some houses dangled like a child’s loosened tooth and would stay that way for years. Overnight, the Champs de Mars, the stadium, and other public plazas became camps for hundreds of thousands of people with no other place to go. It was as though the city had no room for leisure anymore. The quake’s transformation of the city was not just physical, but political. Over the following months, downtown became almost too trenchant with meaning. Haitians of all political stripes saw something symbolic in the earthquake’s apparent targeting of government buildings; divine retribution, some said, for official crime and corruption. The deflated Palace became the icon of an absent state. Champs de Mars’s revolutionary heroes now watched over the tens of thousands of homeless. As the number of camp residents swelled to nearly 1.5 million, I had a hard time telling squares and lawns apart from the first images I saw of the cemetery. Tents and transitional shelters are just a little larger than mausoleums.

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And yet downtown tended to thwart my attempts at interpretation, my tendency to obsess over the poignant. Residents of Port-au-Prince wear their city like skin. Good, bad, salubrious, filthy, it’s theirs. A few days after the quake, I took a walk on the Grand Rue. Though all of Port-au-Prince resembled a war zone at that point, the avenue looked particularly bombed out. Fires – from what, I am not sure – smoldered here and there amid the rubble and twisted rebar. Feet and hands I saw, too, half-buried in concrete. Men hauled wheelbarrows and bullock carts full of quake-deformed metal. A group of Haitians distributed giant blocks of vegetable shortening someone had retrieved from the rubble of a bakery. Outside the ruined Iron Market, hairdressers glued in twenty-five dollar weaves for a bizarrely loyal clientele. Across the street, a wizened lady sat on the ground with her produce – short pyramids of chadeque, floral-scented citrus – and complained to me that none of her customers were showing up. Up the block, half-a-dozen cobblers sewed sandals by hand and pedal-operated machines. A hot dog vendor chased after me with his wares: “Saucisse! Saucisse! Achetez saucisse!” he yelled. Supposedly André Breton said of Haiti, “Surrealism finally has a country.”

informally liaising between the government, nongovernmental organizations, and property owners in the city’s early reconstruction plans. Of them, he was the most voluble, knowledgeable, and ambitious. He had trained as an architect and urban planner – the title of his 1983 masters thesis at Cornell was “Portau-Prince: Growth of a Caribbean Guerrilla City” – and after the quake, he had taken to hobnobbing with Frank Gehry and Steven Holl and touring first-world architects around the destroyed city. Leslie had big dreams for Port-au-Prince, a city whose population had swelled tenfold over his lifetime. The quake was tragic, but it also provided an opportunity to build a city wholly different from Port-au-Prince as

“The optimism was almost a reflex to the horrific disaster, to the corpses piled up on streets and the city sadly broken. People with power so wished for redemption, or at least a silver lining, that they made promises – to build back better, to create a new Port-au-Prince, to remake the city.”

*** Though filthy and chaotic, Centreville was the city’s heart, the only zone with a discernable history and orthogonal grid. It was also the seat of the national government. Thus, and despite motions toward decentralization, Centreville became an immediate focus for plans for post-quake renewal. In the spring of 2010, the government designated a swath of it for public use, mandating an option to buy private land for US $150 per square meter. (Property in Pétionville suburb was valued at three to four times that.) Residents and shopkeepers spent months wondering what would happen to their little buildings. Over the summer of 2010, I met the preeminent force in reconstruction, Leslie Voltaire, over tuna tartare and limeade at a white-tablecloth restaurant in Pétionville called Quartier Latin. Leslie had an easy laugh and twinkling, vaguely Asiatic eyes that provided fodder for one of his nicknames: Ti Chinwa, or “Little Chinese.” Another nickname was Mr. Ten Percent, a reference to the kickbacks and commissions that people assumed Leslie took. Usually this was said with a modicum of affection: in Haiti, ten percent is not that much. At the time we met, Leslie was Haiti’s Special Envoy to the United Nations, but he had held all sorts of government posts over the past twenty-five years: Minister of Education, Minister of Haitians Living Abroad, Chief of Staff, Member of the Conseil d’Etat. More significantly, he was one of three men

currently constituted: simple and not extravagant, but elegant. His dream depended on decentralization. If a million of the three million residents of Port-au-Prince left for new “growth poles” in Haiti’s secondary cities, he could fill the spaces they left – “voids” he called them – with public gardens and performance spaces. He could widen streets, create sidewalks, and build a new port farther from the city. That would leave space to expand the city’s waterfront, long a no man’s land, into a pretty plaza for strolling. A light-rail system would run along the city’s north-south axis. By the time we met, though, much of the initial energy following the earthquake was dissipating. That optimism was almost a reflex to the horrific disaster, to the corpses piled up on streets and the city sadly broken. People with power so wished for redemption, or at least a silver lining, that they made promises – to build back better, to create a new Haiti, to remake the city. But promises bumped up against social and political reality. For starters, none of the homeless were leaving the city. The fact that Port-au-Prince sat on a fault line didn’t

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Rue St. Nicholas dead-ended at the cemetery where, every November, celebrants in white robes gathered in homage to the dead and to Baron Samedi, the vodou spirit who guarded the crossroads between our world and the next. Photograph by Paolo Woods.

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Overnight, the Champs de Mars, the stadium, and other public plazas became camps for hundreds of thousands of people with no other place to go. Photograph by Paolo Woods.

LEBANON’S DEBUT IN THE WORLD OF TOMORROW

DOCUMENTS

P H O T O E S S AY

Olympian flame immortal Whose beacon lights our way Emblaze our hearts with the fires of hope On this momentous day As now we come across the world To share these Games of old Let all the flags of every land In brotherhood unfold. First verses of the Olympic Hymn Lyrics by Kostis Palamas (1859-1943)

FOR THE GLORY OF SPORT

As the ebullient parties for the London Summer Olympic Games fade and the historic favelas of Rio de Janeiro are slated for destruction to make way for the facilities of the 2016 Games, the derelict venues and forgotten stadiums of Athens 2004 serve as a warning from history.

Photographs by Giorgos Moutafis

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Athens Olympic Sports Complex, designed by Santiago Calatrav

Athens Olympic Stadium “Spyros Louis,” Olympic Sports Complex, Santiago Calatrava.

Athens Olympic Sports Complex, Santiago Calatrava.

ORDOS: A CHINESE CITY CONSTRUCTED IN THE FAST LANE by MICHAEL ULFSTJERNE AND BERT DE MUYNCK

Easy driving on a thoroughfare in Kangbashi New District, Ordos. Photograph by Iwan Baan.

URBANOGRAPHY

BEIJING ORDOS

ORDOS: A CHINESE CITY C O N S T RU C T E D I N T H E F A S T L A N E China’s new city Ordos is regularly described as a “ghost town,” but the forces behind the city go beyond images of vacant towers. Michael Ulfstjerne and Bert de Muynck

41 ‫ صفحة‬،‫ البوابة التاسعة‬،‫ مدينة صينّية عﲆ اﳌسار الﴪيع‬:‫أوردوس‬ mental sustainability. Despite these pronouncements, the international press has branded Ordos as evidence of China’s real estate bubble and a construction culture gone into overdrive. By drawing on both anthropological and architectural research conducted in the city on various trips between 2008 and 2011, the authors have opted to understand Ordos through the perspective of the reigning car culture. Ordos’s local expression of car culture might shed light on more general trends emerging in China’s newly constructed cities, namely that they are the result of surplus investment and not intended for inhabitation. The aim of this article is not to formulate a general theory of Chinese car culture but rather to acknowledge it as a central issue receiving little academic attention in attempts to unravel China’s urban dynamics. The authors conclude that the car is integral to how the urban environment is constructed, lived, and imagined in Ordos.

In the 1980s we looked at Shenzhen as a model for urban development, in the 1990s we looked at Shanghai, and it is my hope that in the coming twenty years when people look for a new model they will look at Ordos.1

One of the fastest developing urban environments in China is the Ordos Municipality, located in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Established only ten years ago, Ordos has become a widely debated example of an economic and urban development that attempts to leapfrog the progressive stages of modernization. Although growth is largely fueled by local extractive industries, official municipal discourse portrays Ordos’s long-term development strategies as a model to be followed, not only in terms of economic growth. Ordos’s leaders also claim to embrace development in terms of better education, hygiene, social welfare, more ardent institutions for culture and innovation, and environ-

ORDOS: A CHINESE CITY CONSTRUCTED IN THE FAST LANE by MICHAEL ULFSTJERNE AND BERT DE MUYNCK

Kangbashi New District, Ordos. Photograph by Iwan Baan.

URBANOGRAPHY

“Planning and design for Kangbashi have embraced prevailing tenets of contemporary urban planning in China: a mixture of large-scale territorial thinking and pseudo-poetic planning strategies.”

Birth of a Boom Town

China’s wealthy east coast. Over half of municipal revenue is derived from taxes and fees levied on coal mining firms alone. The most apparent result of this accumulation has been ambitious schemes for urbanization and the consequent real estate scenarios for private investment. Once a source of cheap labor for abroad, Ordos’s population now ranks among China’s wealthiest, and immigrants from abroad now arrive in Ordos to find work. Today, Ordos exists as “one city, three districts”: Dongsheng District, Azhen District, and Kangbashi New District, the last of which functions as the local government’s headquarters. The city’s local Communist Party secretary has stated that the aim of Kangbashi New District is to “build a civilized way of life.”7 The district is a twenty-seven kilometer drive southwest of the earlier built Dongsheng District and was mostly desert land and a few scattered rural settlements less than ten years ago. Now plans are in place for a future population of approximately 300,000.8 Neighborhoods of European-style villas and private gardens reflect Kangbashi developers’ ambitions to create “ideal” living (and working) conditions, albeit for a higherincome bracket. Beyond the villas, residential towers, wide avenues, and monumental squares have characterized the district. On top of it all, Ordos’s leaders have prioritized sustainable energy solutions, promising that Kangbashi will be a “green city.” Planning and design for Kangbashi have embraced prevailing tenets of contemporary urban planning in China: a mixture of large-scale territorial thinking and pseudo-poetic planning strategies. Conceived by D’Axis Planners and Consultants (under the auspices of the Singaporean firm CPG Consultants), the master plan employs a scheme of concentric circles. The new city center is described as a sun rising over a meadow and radiating outward. A central axis, 2.6 kilometers long and 200 meters wide, connects the government district to an entertainment area and then a financial district. The wide open Genghis Khan Square begins the axis in front of the government towers. Further along the axis are four large cultural buildings – a library, museum, culture and art center, and minority culture theatre – all of which mostly remain empty and without programming. Motivated by the region’s fossil fuel revenues, local government officials and real estate developers

A collection of mostly rural settlements called the Yekejuu League made up one of Inner Mongolia’s poorest regions before it was assembled into a prefecture-level city under Chinese policy in 2001. The new city was named Ordos. As social anthropologist Uradyn E. Bulag points out, the change had many implications: [Ordos] is ostensibly the revival of the more authentic tribal name of the local Mongols, a name associated with the shrines of [Genghis] Khan, replacing Yeke-juu, an administrative name imposed by the Qing dynasty and meaning Great Monastery. Transformed into a municipality … Ordos appears to be both authentically Mongol and modern.2

Bulag specifies that “modern” in this case refers to the reorganization of the region in a way that mirrors the “administrative homogeneity” of Chinese governing.3 The labeling of places as “cities” has been part of China’s means toward quickening urbanization and modernization processes throughout China. As Bulag observes, urbanization is not a result but a “goal” of China’s economic policies. Ordos seems to fit into this pattern, as its inauguration as a city coincided with a terrific increase in local wealth that brought the towers and infrastructure to fill out what had been named a city. In ten years’ time, Ordos’s residents have moved from getting by on meager infrastructure to experiencing internationally accepted standards of roads and development. During the past decade, the economic growth of Ordos and the surrounding region has been staggering, largely because of vast reserves of fossil fuels that attract a wide variety of investments. Ordos has 149.6 billion tons of proven coal reserves, accounting for about half of Inner Mongolia’s proven reserves and about onesixth of China’s.4 Within the last ten years, Ordos has increased coal production from 25 million tons to 433 million tons,5 an industrial leap alongside a surge in gross domestic production from $1.9 billion in 2000 to $40.6 billion in 2010, an annual average increase of 33.3 percent.6 Extractive industries have fueled rapid urban expansion schemes, leading to precarious real estate speculation that has elevated Ordos’s economic growth rate above even the better-known metropolises along

ORDOS: A CHINESE CITY CONSTRUCTED IN THE FAST LANE by MICHAEL ULFSTJERNE AND BERT DE MUYNCK

Kangbashi New District, Ordos. Photograph by Iwan Baan.

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Though Kangbashi’s development has gained notoriety as the moral of the story of global urban financing, economist Ting Lu from Bank of America Merrill Lynch added a bullish touch to the real estate riddle by hailing Ordos’s scarcely tenanted skyline as a “mustsee for emerging market investors.”16 He reported that “we found a brand new but empty city, but reporters could easily distort the overall picture, exaggerate problems, and overly generalize findings. In fact, Ordos is very unique – and it is quite misleading to assume what happens in Ordos could happen in other parts of China.”17 As 2008’s global financial crisis unfolded, a trip to Ordos revealed only empty streets among the ongoing construction of this desert district. Ordos’s backers argue that the city is still under construction, and people will eventually occupy the new housing and offices. Whether or not Kangbashi can or should exemplify China’s real estate condition, emptiness is a reality in Kangbashi, as few of the hundreds of thousands of potential inhabitants have made the move from the old Dongsheng to Kangbashi New District.18

have propagated a growing new city, with little consideration of who might live there. Many spectators remain critical of the consequences of so much invested capital and construction and so little occupation. The district is populated today mostly by the migrant workers building the towers and the civil servants overseeing development schedules. Despite financial investments in Ordos’s real estate, there is a minimal presence of commercial interests to support residents’ supposedly urban existence. The Chinese press has focused on the potentially perilous economic relationship between Ordos’s construction and its people. One of the most recent developments is the establishment of private equity funds in Ordos, a region once known for more conservative investing.9 But as observations in Ordos show, many of the formal investment opportunities are overshadowed by the widespread market for private high-interest short-term loans. These loans flow between local networks with monthly interest rates between 3 and 5 percent. Locals estimate that a large majority of the Ordos population takes part in these illicit lending schemes, and that most of the cash flow ends up in real estate.10 11 International coverage of Ordos has focused on Kangbashi New District’s development, not because of a miraculous metropolitan boom like that of Shanghai or Shenzhen. Rather, news reporters have arrived in the city in their quest to position Kangbashi as a negative example, if not a warning, of the dangers of rapid urbanization in China. This district, so it seems, is condemned to receive journalists that marvel about and condemn its seemingly megalomaniac emptiness.12 “Kangbashibashers,” as the critics can be called, have portrayed Ordos’s ambitions as flawed, ridiculing Kangbashi New District as China’s exemplary ghost city.13 They have tried to answer the urban riddle with vivid imagery of Ordos, a city of “monumental, neoMongolian sculptures, empty plazas and hulking concrete shells” while “cranes sit idle over unfinished skyscrapers and migrant workers are fleeing.”14 Google Sightseeing’s Alex Steinberger writes: “[Ordos] rises from the desert to proclaim the glory of mankind’s accomplishments. Its glittering high-rise buildings and grand government projects are skirted on all sides by smooth unblemished pavement and endless rows of modern street lamps. There’s only one problem … it’s practically uninhabited.”15 With towers of new apartments financed by speculating believers in Ordos’s future, the new city’s empty streets and vacant housing developments have become an easily photographed target to illustrate China’s runaway real estate bubble.

Cars and the City To understand the forces shaping Ordos, one must also look beyond the empty towers built on debt and for speculation and consider the role of the automobile, both in terms of an industry and as an individual status symbol. Reliance upon, if not a society-wide obsession with the automobile determines how Ordos is constructed, lived, and imagined. Referring to observations and interviews with Ordos’s residents during several visits between 2008 and 2011, this essay considers the urban expansion of Ordos from the vantage point of its drivers. No other means of transportation has had, in such a short timeframe, such a profound impact on the contemporary city as the automobile. As a moving tool, the car is an effective disrupter of our understanding of time and space. We blame and bless it. We speed, search for space, and then find ourselves at a standstill. Automobiles are also pivotal to the development, pace, and form of cities. We characterize cities by their traffic counts (Beijing, one thousand new cars a day) or their average speed of traffic (Jakarta, about six kilometers per hour). The dissemination of the automobile has altered the way cities are manufactured. Its presence and the infrastructure it demands drive the horizontalization (or sprawl) of our cities. The automobile industry itself has been an engine of urban development. Detroit (GM, Chrysler, Ford) and Wolfsburg (Volkswagen) are dependent on automobiles – not only

ORDOS: A CHINESE CITY CONSTRUCTED IN THE FAST LANE by MICHAEL ULFSTJERNE AND BERT DE MUYNCK

Kangbashi New District, Ordos. Photograph by Iwan Baan.

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“As much as the automobile brings people to this new Inner Mongolian city, it encourages them to appreciate and expect emptiness.”

in terms of economic development and employment opportunities, but also in how they have grown and been shaped. China is a relative latecomer in the mass-scale acquisition of cars and the consequent reconfiguration of urban space. Chinese cities not originally designed for cars are now known for their daily gridlocks. New, car-oriented cities can increasingly be found in China. One example is Anting, a city not far from Shanghai that is dubbed “Motor City” because of its ties to the motor industry, especially Volkswagen and General Motors. Anting distinguishes itself with a special automobile economic zone for manufacturing and assembly plants, an automobile trading center, and a technical research center. Ordos’s Kangbashi district profiles itself similarly, with car manufacturing and other automobilerelated industries now present and continuously being courted. The Ordos International Circuit (OIC), with a racetrack in the shape of a sprinting animal, claims to be “the core project” of Kangbashi’s plan “to build [an] auto sports tourism culture.”19 An automobile theme park is also planned to solidify Ordos’s emblematic relationship with the automobile industry.20 21 Ordos is dispersed, spacious, and large; its wide avenues invite, if not require, residents to own automobiles. And residents have accepted the invitation quickly. According to Ordos Statistics Bureau, in 2000 the Ordos region had no high-speed public roads; by 2009 there were 658 kilometers of high-speed roads.22 Statistics gathered by the local police department indicate more than 500,000 registered cars for a population of 1,600,000, or more than 300 cars for every 1,000 persons.23 Based on a simple (though unlikely) calculation, there would be one vehicle for every three-person household. In reality, the households that can afford an automobile are most likely to own more than one. National statistics reveal that there are 118 passenger cars for every 1,000 Chinese nationals.24 Ordos, then, is characterized by a statistic that seems to divorce the city from the rest of the country. For Ordos, it has been a rough transition from actual to measured horsepower. Few residents seem to have much experience in driving, or riding in, automobiles. Seat belts are rarely used. Some drivers acquire small plastic devices that they plug into the seat belt buckle to disengage the safety alarm without having to fasten up. The perils of driving quickly extend beyond

the people inside the automobiles. During one writer’s departure from Kangbashi in a Toyota Land Cruiser, there was an unexpected traffic jam. Traffic jams on Kangbashi’s usually open roads often have one cause. An hour passed without headway before traffic began to move again. Along the roadside, the remains of a bicycle were spread out across a twenty-meter radius of the multi-lane highway. Blood was scattered over the road. While driving among the huge coal trucks on Kangbashi’s roads can be dangerous, walking along the forgotten road shoulders, used by low-wage commuters on foot and bicycle, can be deadly. “You are what you drive.” Car frenzy in Ordos is inescapable. Not only does the automobile dominate the landscape and everyday discourse, but it also steers the development of local industries, influences business endeavors, and delivers personal gratification. One might refrain from judging the proverbial book by its cover, but in Ordos one rates a business contract based on the dealmakers’ cars. Instilled with opportunity and agency, the automobile takes on human characteristics. This process of anthropomorphism has developed to the point that there is a “car culture,” which in turn becomes a way to analyze human decisions, from the personal to the urban scale. The city can be read through the car. Car frenzy in Ordos is also contagious, as an interview with a young Christian missionary there suggests. Originally from the prefectural-level city of Bayan Nuur in Inner Mongolia, she was at first skeptical about the local obsession with cars. She considered it a banal indication of sudden wealth coupled with a lack of imagination. After living and working some time in Ordos, however, she found herself infected by the craze and now strives to earn enough money to buy a fourwheel drive. She acknowledged her shift in perspective but stressed her realization that a luxury car is more than branding. It is quality. As you come to learn more about cars through everyday interaction, their appeal becomes unavoidable, she said. With a monthly income of RMB 6,000 ($900) buying a Toyota Land Cruiser Prado VX priced at RMB 560,000 ($84,000) is a longterm engagement. Beyond just a means of transportation, one’s ride reveals his or her status. More than an accessory, it is

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Model of the proposed central business district of Ramciel. Photograph by Brian Sokol.

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RAMCIEL JUBA

S O U T H S U DA N S E A RC H E S F O R N AT I O N A L UNITY BY MEANS OF A CITY For some South Sudanese, a new capital could signify a means of finding a multi-ethnic common ground; for others, it is merely a continuation of ongoing ethnic strife. Leben Nelson Moro

63 ‫ صفحة‬،‫ البوابة التاسعة‬،‫ جنوب السودان وعاصمته الجديدة‬:“‫ ومحاطة بكّل ما يلزم‬،‫”شاسعة ومؤاتية‬ On July 9, 2011, tens of thousands of people flocked to Juba’s Freedom Square, dancing and waving flags for the inauguration of the world’s newest country, South Sudan. The historic ceremony in a city designated as the new nation’s capital also created Africa’s sixteenth landlocked state and the world’s poorest country. Though accused of having overlooked decades of civil war in Southern Sudan, the international community, represented by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and others, bore witness to the birth of a new nation that it had formally approved.1 Celebrations lasted little longer than the stays of the international guests, as the nascent country needed to shift the focus to itself. With independence confirmed, South Sudan’s leaders were forced to address internal conflicts once ignored for the sake of a united front in opposition to the Sudanese government in Khartoum. South Sudan was now a country, but tensions among its ethnic groups threatened to unravel what had been gained. No more than two weeks after the inauguration, South Sudan’s political leaders announced one of their first

proposals toward domestic unity: the construction of a new, seemingly clean-slate capital city. Juba, it was announced, would serve only as a provisional capital until the new city, called Ramciel, was completed. Currently South Sudan’s richest and largest city, Juba sits on the White Nile about one hundred kilometers downstream from the Ugandan border and more than one thousand kilometers upstream from Khartoum, now the capital of another nation. Easily described as South Sudan’s most advanced city in terms of infrastructure and amenities, Juba functions not only as the capital but also as the place to do business in South Sudan. Most international banks and organizations that do work in the new country, including the United Nations, have their national bases here. Juba nevertheless struggles to provide basic modern infrastructure, remaining only a mark higher than the rest of South Sudan’s towns and villages. Permanent construction is usually reserved for government ministries, and tarmac roads remain scarce. Running water and electricity are not always assured.

S O U T H S U D A N S E A R C H E S F O R N AT I O N A L U N I T Y B Y M E A N S O F A C I T Y b y L E B E N N E L S O N M O R O

Aerial view of South Sudan’s current capital, Juba. One of the city’s major thoroughfares is only partially paved. Photograph by Brian Sokol.

Toward South Sudan's Independence.

1955

1956

1960

1972

1982

1983

2005

2011

2012

First Sudanese civil war begins.

The British depart Sudan.

Sudanese Armed Forces occupy Juba and other cities in effort to suppress Southern rebels.

First Sudanese civil war ends.

Sudanese President Jaafar Nimeiri decrees the division of Southern Sudan into three regions Equatoria, Bahr el Ghazal, and Upper Nile.

Second civil war breaks out.

Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) ends the second civil war between the Sudanese government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A).

After a referendum, South Sudan becomes an independent country. Two weeks after the inauguration of South Sudan, the ruling government announces that Ramciel will be the future capital of the country.

South Sudan appoints its first UN ambassador, who pledges to improve the country's "waning" image while the border between the country and Sudan remains volatile.

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“The historic ceremony in a city designated as the new nation’s capital also created Africa’s sixteenth landlocked state and the world’s poorest country.”

In recent history, Juba’s identity has been continuously juggled. During the joint British-Egyptian rule of Sudan, the city was the capital of Equatoria, one of three Southern provinces.2 The city was able to prosper to some degree thanks to trade along the White Nile. Nation-making, however, would keep the city unsettled. Even prior to Sudan’s independence from Britain and Egypt in 1956, the Southern provinces harbored violent resistance to the North. Sudan, in other words, endured civil war even before its brief union. Rather than becoming the hub of the South’s rebellion, Juba was occupied by Khartoum’s military as the launching ground for offensives against the Southern rebels, who made their camps outside the cities. In 1972 the first civil war ended, and by means of the armistice, Juba became the capital of the autonomous Southern region. With the start of the second civil war in 1983, Juba was reoccupied by Khartoum’s forces. To resist the North, Dr. John Garang de Mabior, a member of Southern Sudan’s largest ethnic group, the Dinka, had brought together many Southern Sudanese ethnicities (as well as some Northerners) under a united rebel force, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). The prolonged second civil war would not end until 2005, when Southern Sudan gained increased autonomy as part of the peace agreement. It was understood that Garang would continue to lead Southern Sudan toward either peaceful unity with the North or full independence, depending on the outcome of the selfdetermination vote slated for January 2011. But Garang’s plans were thwarted when, two weeks after assuming the position of First Vice President of Sudan and President of Southern Sudan, he died in a helicopter crash. His aspirations for Southern Sudan, however, continue to mold the new country. The inauguration festivities in 2011 took place in clear view of the mausoleum where Garang rests, but Garang had distanced himself long ago from the city, leading to his support for a new capital city.

policies. What came to be known as “Kokora” was the redivision of Southern Sudan into three distinct regions – Equatoria, Bahr el Ghazal, and Upper Nile – each of which was to have a separate administration and to answer directly to Khartoum. Although promoted as bringing political rule closer to the people, the policy, in practice, rendered Southern Sudan a splintered region. Local rule meant that the Southern Sudanese had “to return to their home areas, forcing many nonEquatorians out of Juba.”4 People from outside Juba, namely those not of the Bari ethnic group, were banished to areas of Southern Sudan that offered, at best, limited modern infrastructure and employment opportunities. Any ethnic mixing that had occurred before Kokora was constrained by a policy that highlighted ethnic differences and gave an economic bias toward the Juba-based Bari. Nimeiri’s policy was not successful in preventing Southern Sudan’s many ethnic groups from uniting in opposition to the North. Rather than return to their home regions as required by Kokora, many Southerners ousted from Juba joined the rebel forces. In contrast, the Bari people and others whose ethnic origins were in and around Juba were permitted by law to prosper from a monopoly on Juba’s urban opportunity. The Bari’s advantage stoked resentment among the other ethnic groups, thus adding an anti-Bari disposition to the developing rebel movement. While Nimeiri’s Kokora policy did not prevent a Southern rebellion, it nevertheless instilled bitter wrangles among the Southern Sudanese and, according to Mark Otwari Odufa, a columnist for a local paper, laid the foundation for today’s “unnecessary search for the capital of South Sudan.”5 The ethnic groups of Equatoria, which included the Bari, found Kokora beneficial for more than just protected access to Juba’s relative wealth. In principle, the policy also protected Equatorians beyond the city’s limits who found their farming areas and grazing fields threatened by cattle belonging to other ethnic groups, principally the Dinka. Aside from their encroaching cattle, the Dinka were feared for their domination of Southern Sudanese politics. This ethnic tension also helps explain why the Bari and other peoples of Equatoria were at first hesitant to join the rebellion, which to some seemed “bent on the destruction of the ‘Equatoria Region’ in order to impose Dinka

Redivision Revisited? Juba’s difficulties as a national capital for South Sudan have roots in ethnically based land allocation decisions made by the Khartoum government prior to the second civil war. In 1982 the Sudanese president, Jaafar Nimeiri,3 issued one of his most infamous divide-and-conquer

S O U T H S U D A N S E A R C H E S F O R N AT I O N A L U N I T Y B Y M E A N S O F A C I T Y b y L E B E N N E L S O N M O R O

Model of Ramciel, the proposed capital of South Sudan, in the planning offices at the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure in Juba. Photograph by Brian Sokol.

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“Releasing the nation’s future from ethnic tensions has become the chief reason for Ramciel’s champions to push for a politically and ethnically neutral site.”

hegemony.”6 For many, this fear stemmed from abuses committed by some elements within the rebel movement during the civil war. Nonetheless, people from Equatoria gradually turned against the Khartoum regime and lent support to the rebels as a result of more aggressive and unpopular policies, particularly the imposition of Sharia law. For the sake of the Southern Sudan rebellion, these ethnic differences were set aside, temporarily.

silence in the face of criminal land grabbing.”10 He claims that landowners are threatened with death by “land grabbers in uniform.” Officials for the provincial government have claimed that 80 percent of land grabbing was being committed by soldiers.11 With the majority of soldiers coming from the Dinka and the other larger tribes, the accusation implies an ethnic underpinning to the skirmishes. Conversely, people from other states have accused the Bari of obstructing land sales. The Bari population’s desire to protect its land from price escalation and foreign ownership has been perceived by outside factions as anti-development and counter to the national unity project. At the same time, Juba’s provincial government and the Bari people do not necessarily want to see Juba lose its capital status. To outside ethnic groups, it seems the Bari want to have it both ways: to control Juba and at the same time to lay claim to the nation’s capital. Releasing the nation’s future from ethnic tensions has become the chief reason for Ramciel’s champions to push for a politically and ethnically neutral site.

Land Grabbing in Juba After the war ended in 2005 and the rebel movement began to take the form of a government, the SPLA’s senior commanders, many of whom hailed from the Dinka region, convened in Juba to form the Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS). Ethnic confrontations began almost immediately, as development prospects fueled land speculation in the city. The situation was only exacerbated by a rapid population increase and a weak, unprepared land regulatory system. In 2005 some estimates had put Juba’s population at 250,000; by 2010 it had at least doubled to between 500,000 and 600,000.7 People displaced during the fighting returned to the city to reclaim property, which in some cases had been illegally occupied by others. Foreigners seeking economic opportunities also began to lay their claims in Juba. In February 2009, the Southern Sudan Legislative Assembly passed the Land Act, which revoked existing property laws, but the new law has not provided adequate clarity about land administration and ownership regulation.8 Confusion only encouraged more fraud and forced takeovers of land, or land grabbing. The result has been a city that many believe cannot handle the urban implications of being a national capital. Land disputes have undermined peaceful relations among Juba’s residents and recalled memories of past injustices. Jacob Lupai, a frequent political commentator from Greater Equatoria, warns that “land grabbing could undermine national cohesion.”9 Although no accurate figures exist, land grabbing is a significant concern for Juba’s main local ethnic group, the Bari, who had the most to lose in the new country’s heightened interest in their provincial city. The Bari worried about losing their land and viewed the national government as unhelpful in protecting their interests. Lupai accuses the national government of “absolute deafening

No Man’s Land or Just Another Man’s Land? It is said that before his death Garang had proposed founding a new city, an idea that was approved by the SPLM Leadership Council in 2003.12 Mark Otwari Odufa opines that the late Garang had known that the legacy of Kokora would continue to haunt people in Juba and had therefore wanted to “resolve the problem once and for all by deciding on Ramciel to be the capital of the South Sudan.”13 Ramciel’s backers believed a new city would not be weighed down by a history of war and occupation and could represent the synthesis of South Sudan’s various factions. A city without history, and perhaps one that started to define a South Sudanese history, it seemed, was the only way toward harmony and unity. Garang proposed a site for Ramciel in the Greater Bahr el Ghazal region, close to both Greater Upper Nile and Greater Equatoria regions. In due course, the proposed borders of the designated location were pushed further into the latter regions, allowing the site to be shared by all three regions. The argument was that the capital would belong to and benefit all. Tellingly, “Ramciel” is derived from two words from the Dinka language (Garang’s mother tongue), ram for “meet” and ciel for “middle”: “a central meeting

PORT SAID 1957: EGYPTIAN MODERNISM UNFURLED by MOHAMED ELSHAHED

Fig. 1 Woman standing before the administrative building of the Suez Canal Company, Port Said, published in Al Musawwar, 1957. All images courtesy the author.

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PORT SAID

CAIRO

P O RT S A I D 1 9 5 7 : EGYPTIAN MODERNISM UNFURLED The Suez Crisis led to terrific destruction in the city of Port Said, whose subsequent reconstruction by the Nasser regime would set in place a relationship between the state and modern urban planning. Mohamed Elshahed

71 ‫ صفحة‬،‫ البوابة التاسعة‬،‫ مركز الحداثة اﳌﴫّية‬:1957 ‫بور سعيد‬ The October 28, 1964, cover of the popular Egyptian magazine Akher Saa (Last Hour) shows an optimistic image of four smiling girls riding bicycles on a smooth, safe tarmac road (Fig. 2). In the background are onestory beach cabins. A smaller picture inserted at the bottom of the cover shows a girl holding a child in front of a vast field of collapsed buildings and rubble. The text reads, “Port Said 1956 and today 1964.” The magazine cover marked the anniversary of the Suez Crisis, which was as important for the city of Port Said as it was for Egyptian politics and its relationship to urban planning.1 Military attacks by British and French forces had left entire districts of the city destroyed, with hundreds dead and thousands homeless. The subsequent reconstruction of Port Said from 1957 to 1958 was the new Egyptian military regime’s first attempt at largescale urban planning and a critical test to prove its ability to rebuild, modernize, and develop Egyptian cities. The fast and successful reconstruction of Port Said in 1957 also marked a shift in the scale of government-

commissioned building projects, with the state becoming Egypt’s primary patron of architecture and planning. Port Said was founded in 1859 on the northern mouth of the 160-kilometer Suez Canal, then under construction.2 The new city was named after Muhammad Said Pasha, viceroy of Egypt, who had granted Ferdinand de Lesseps the concession to supervise the digging of the canal.3 With French planners at the helm of the design process, the city’s plan reflected contemporary French models for new towns. A grid was laid on the triangular tract of land between the canal to the east, the Mediterranean to the north, and Lake Manzala to the south.4 The planned development was conceived as a port town for administrators and merchants who were mostly French, British, and Swiss. In typical fashion of a colonial development, a separate district of higher density blocks was planned to the west to house the large labor population of mostly Greeks and Egyptians, designated by the Europeans as the “Arab district.”5

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PORT SAID 1957: EGYPTIAN MODERNISM UNFURLED by MOHAMED ELSHAHED

Fig.2 The October 28, 1964, cover of the popular Egyptian magazine Akher Saa (Last Hour).

Fig. 3 Elevation of proposed Port Said Municipality by Foad Faraj, Al Imara, November 1941.

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When it opened in 1869, the Suez Canal created a connection between the Red and Mediterranean Seas, shortening the travel time from Europe to India from six months to six weeks. As a result, Port Said developed as a center of global transport, trade, and military movement.6 Its status as the headquarters for the Suez Canal Company also contributed to its significance. From the perspective of the rest of Egypt, however, Port Said was built in a remote, peripheral location. Its placement was not based on traditional reasons for founding a city: there was no access to fresh water, building materials, or even food. Everything had to be imported from afar to build and sustain Port Said. Until the sweet water canal was dug to bring Nile water to the area, water had to be stored in large tanks. Eventually, in 1904, the city gained a railway connection to Cairo. Sovereignty over the canal has been a contentious matter since the canal’s inception, complicating Port Said’s existence further.7 While the canal was built with Egyptian money, by Egyptian labor, and through Egyptian land, its impact on the French and British economies made control of the canal a desirable goal for both countries. Concerned by the 1881 Egyptian uprisings against the ruling government, the British government took advantage of the opportunity and sent troops to intervene and take control of the Suez Canal in 1882, a position it would maintain until Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power.

counterparts.10 In addition, he criticized the fact that the Port Said municipality had little power in the city and the private canal company only took care of its own districts. Faraj observed: “Port Said remains without a municipality building [dar al madina] despite the fact that the Suez Canal Company has erected a beautiful edifice for its headquarters. Perhaps the company should gift the building to the city as its municipality.” His argument for a municipal building comes as a nationalist call that “the city retains its Egyptian appearance,” to balance the presence of the foreigncontrolled canal headquarters (Fig. 3). Faraj proposed a municipal building with the following functions: a theater, an events space, meeting rooms, a reception hall, a library, a museum, offices, a ceremonial entrance, a clock tower, and a statue of King Farouk in front of the building. According to Faraj’s proposal, the Suez Canal Company would fund the construction of the building, centrally located on Abbas Square. Faraj then shifted to the urban scale and focused on the shantytown of Manakhein. According to Faraj, for twenty years, living conditions for the Egyptians residing there had been substandard, and the municipality had not taken concrete steps toward improving the situation. He referred to when the case was discussed, almost a decade earlier on November 2, 1932, by the national government in Cairo (majlis al wuzara), resulting in the commission of a comprehensive plan to rezone the entire city. New residential areas were then proposed for Manakhein’s residents.11 The municipality was to have razed old Manakhein and replan the district with a buildable area covering only 40 percent of the land. The plan, however, garnered no significant financial backing. Cairo offered Port Said only 5,000 Egyptian pounds toward the project, and the plan was never implemented.12 It would be another fifteen years before Port Said’s urban condition received national attention again.

From Divided City to Bombed City During the interwar period, the city became increasingly divided as the foreign residents associated with the Suez Canal Company grew richer and land prices rose. At the same time, the poorer, predominantly Egyptian labor population grew significantly in number after World War I as the city attracted rural migrants and became a safe haven for survivors of the Armenian genocide.8 The city did not cope well with population growth, as state funds were limited and the canal company only invested in its own properties and facilities, leaving the majority of the population on its own to build with limited resources. One result was a shantytown known as Manakhein, west of the “Arab district.” In a scathing 1941 article for the architectural journal Al Imara, the architect Foad Faraj voiced concerns about Port Said’s development.9 Eighty-two years after the city’s founding, this article was among the first to consider Port Said’s urban conditions in the national press. Faraj blamed the Suez Canal Company’s management for the poor and unjust conditions of the city’s Egyptian districts in contrast to their European

Gaining Port Said as Egyptian Ground While Egyptians had tried consistently in vain to rid their country of British occupation, that struggle intensified in the interwar period. The anti-colonial struggle took place in Egypt’s established urban centers such as Alexandria, Tanta, Mansoura, and Cairo. After Egypt’s 1952 military coup, British forces finally retreated from Cairo and other major Egyptian cities. However, British military forces remained alongside the British and French canal administrators, who continued to oversee the Canal Zone. For Egyptians, Port Said was on the national periphery, and little news about life in the city

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Fig. 4 Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Suez Canal on the cover of Al Musawwar, August 1956.

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made it to Egypt’s major cities. It was not until 1956 that Port Said became the center of Egypt’s struggle for independence. On July 26, 1956, the fourth anniversary of the military coup, Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company and replaced its foreign administrators with Egyptians. The August 3, 1956, issue of the popular Cairobased magazine Al Musawwar led with a story praising the Suez Canal’s nationalization (Fig. 4). Numerous pages presented the history of the canal and the events that led to its nationalization, as well as the peaceful transition of the Canal Company’s management to Egyptian hands. Interspersed throughout the issue were advertisements for various companies, from restaurants to hair products, congratulating Gamal Abdel Nasser for his heroic act. Through coverage of the Suez Canal’s return to Egyptian control, Al Musawwar introduced Port Said to a broader Egyptian public, which may have known very little about the city prior to 1956. Having lost control of the canal, British and French forces were keen to regain it. Encouraged by Great Britain, Israeli forces invaded Egyptian territory, leading the way for French and British forces to re-enter on the grounds of maintaining a cease-fire. From the end of October and into November 1956, Port Said became the focal point of military aggression by British and French forces. Without any Egyptian military presence in the area, Port Saidians had to fend for themselves, taking up arms to defend their city against bombardment, ground attacks, and arson (Fig. 5). By the end of 1956, entire districts of the city had been bombed; the shantytown of Manakhein was burned to the ground.13 While president Gamal Abdel Nasser emerged from the Suez crisis as a hero, Port Said emerged a damaged city with an acute housing crisis.

published an article in Al Ithneyn wa Al Dunya, one of Egypt’s most popular magazines, titled “If Cairo Were Destroyed” (Fig. 6). In the article, he suggested eight changes he would pursue if the opportunity to rebuild Cairo from the ground up presented itself. Karim laments Cairo’s survival of the Second World War: “Alas, Cairo was not damaged by war.” According to him, large-scale destruction would have offered the opportunity to rebuild the city based on the latest planning schemes. “World architects are busy designing the reconstruction of cities destroyed in the war. If we had the opportunity to destroy Cairo and rebuild it, where would we begin and what would we do?”14 Karim presents a few broad ideas for what he would have done: redesign the riverfronts, implement a forestation program in Cairo’s hills, “cleanse” unhealthy districts, replace tram systems with underground trains, remove military barracks and other state buildings from urban areas, and implement a program of tajmeel al madina, or urban beautification. Karim was neither the most celebrated nor most accomplished architect in Egypt during his early career. His better-known contemporaries, Antoine Selim Nahas and Ali Labib Gabr, practiced a form of modernism that combined elements from classical training with features of modernist design. Karim’s ambitions, however, lay in urban planning, but there had been little opportunity for his large-scale visions to be realized. Karim’s work as an urban planner materialized first outside Egypt. In 1947 he was appointed by the United Nations as a consultant for urban planning in the Middle East. His work included a plan for New Baghdad in 1947 and later work for Jeddah and the Al Zahra suburb of Damascus (Fig. 7). During this time his projects in Egypt were limited to apartment buildings, where he experimented with the notion of the urban villa: buildings as collections of stacked villas rather than flats. Since he was unable to practice his modernist vision of urban planning in Cairo, namely his proposal to clear entire districts to be replaced by modernist blocks in gardens, Karim published those ideas in a variety of popular media outlets. By the time of the Port Said crisis, Karim had made a name for himself as a competent urban planner in the Middle East, which likely helped him to gain an appointment as a consultant for what became the Port Said reconstruction plan. The rebuilding of Port Said allowed Karim and his team to implement his planning model of urban zones and his ideas of modern collective housing. However, the plan’s design is not attributed to Karim or any single planner; it is attributed to “the

A Transitional Moment for Egyptian Modernism Ideas about collective housing and urban planning in Egypt had existed on paper since the 1940s and had been publicized in Egyptian magazines such as Al Musawwar and professional journals such as Al Imara. Though there had been private, smaller projects which had implemented modernist proposals, such ideas had not yet been tested on a large, urban scale. Ideas published in architectural journals and executed at smaller scales became the bases for pursuing Port Said’s reconstruction. During the 1940s Sayed Karim, an architect and graduate of Cairo’s Foad University, published several visions of future Egyptian cities, though they remained in text form and lacked practical detail. In 1945 he

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Al Madfaiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s residence in Baghdad. (Opposite) Kahtan Al Madfai (right) with Shaker Al Anbari. Photographs by Tamara Abdul Hadi.

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K A H TA N A L M A D FA I : B A G H D A D ’ S V I S I O N A RY, O C TO G E N A R I A N A RC H I T E C T The southern marshlands, the dances of Kurdistan, and the linguistics of Arabic poetry all had an artistic origin – a convergence – which inspired the designs of Kahtan Al Madfai in the 1950s. This still rings true today for Al Madfai, an iconic figure in the intellectual life of Baghdad, who roots his architecture in such diverse influences as the human and natural landscapes of Iraq, quantum physics, and Islamic aesthetics. Shaker Al Anbari

81 ‫ صفحة‬،‫ البوابة التاسعة‬،‫بغداد ﰲ أفكار أحد رّواد حداثتها‬

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Finding Kahtan Al Madfai’s house on Maghreb Street in central Baghdad is not so easy. The small, wrought iron door hides behind a giant rock carrying traces of ancient carvings, and behind the iron door stands a mystical-looking blue stone arch. Not only the gate is difficult to find, but the house itself is obscured by restaurants, pharmacies, shops, and stalls littering the pavement on both sides of the street, selling almost everything one can imagine. On top of all this comes the hustle and bustle of cars and raucous children scaring pigeons into a clear blue sky. It feels as though the house of Al Madfai, one of Baghdad’s foremost architects, is a relic of a bygone time. Indeed, the capital seems to exist in a different era, moving to a rhythm other than the one Al Madfai has been accustomed to since the 1950s. Baghdad has changed a great deal, and so has Al Madfai, who is now more than eighty years old. But one undeniable truth remains: walking through that small door – Kahtan Al Madfai’s door – is nothing short of taking the first step in a journey into the history, identity, and soul of modern Baghdad. Inside, the traditional front yard acts like a buffer between the chaotic noise emanating from the street and the stillness surrounding the glass façade and narrow passageways of the house. When I arrived, the architect, a large man dressed rather simply, had a smile on his face. The halls were adorned with paintings by pioneers of Iraqi visual arts, such as Naziha Salim, Shaker Hassan Al Said, and Jawad Salim. Al Madfai, a painter himself, has kept eighty or more of his own paintings. His bookshelves are packed with hundreds of books in several languages, including Turkish, English, German, and Arabic. The tall octogenarian, who walks with a somewhat unhurried stride, likes to sit behind his desk, designing projects and architectural layouts. Only 30 percent of the projects preserved in his archives have been realized, according to Al Madfai. Nevertheless, he has remained, for fifty years, one of the most prominent figures of modern architecture in Iraq and the wider Middle East. Our conversation took place over many sessions on account of his age and my curiosity about his vast, rich world of experience. At the end of our discussions, Al Madfai revealed that he had donated his entire archive, including his blueprints, projects, books, slides, and a large number of images, to the Department of Architecture at the University of Baghdad for the benefit of future generations. The department is presently preparing a monograph about him, which gives him peace of mind. Today, however, he feels as though existence is closing in on him because of the cumbersome nature of age on the body. Such is life.

Shaker Al Anbari: You started by “landscaping” Baghdad. This suggests you had a deep relationship with the city, one that requires a comprehensive knowledge of history and urban planning, along with a vivid imagination. Why did you choose to begin by designing open spaces? What are the ideas and concepts that inspired you in designing these green sites?

Kahtan Al Madfai: It was human presence in nature that gave me this initial inspiration, in addition to historical topics of interest to my family. For instance, I inherited from my father his love for nature. He was a provincial mayor, and by virtue of his job, he had to travel to various parts of Iraq. As a child, I had diverse experiences in Baghdad, Mosul, Ramadi, and other places. I also inherited from my father a large library that included a number of books in Turkish, which he could speak fluently, and many other books in English. I am not fluent in Turkish, but one important thing my father bequeathed to me was his interest in Islamic heritage. My father could memorize any poem by only reading it twice.

SA: Did that heritage inform your architectural vision?

KM: It has added a great deal to it indeed. I for one find the roots of Arab thought to lie in language and religion too. I have conducted research on this subject. I have a file of research materials that I named The Divine Language. The languages of the Sumerians and the Babylonians were constructs that pertained more to religion than to linguistics. The sign for “house” was drawn as if it were a divine house. The Arabic language also inherently contains the fundamentals of philosophy, since the construction of sentences and semantic fields are intertwined.

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Further, language is the brainchild of people and society. The fundamental shapes for Plato were the sphere and the cube. According to Plato, the sphere had no direction. In Islam, there is no sphere; rather, there is a vector space, and this represents the Islamic response to Plato. For us, the sphere points in the direction of Mecca. We know no directionless spheres. This is where my philosophy in architecture began. When one enters the Al Mustansiriya University, for example, the perspective is a visual one rather than a spiritual one. It is these same principles that I had in mind when I designed the Beit Bunniya Mosque, opposite the railway building in Al Karkh. KM: I am more interested in the main part of the question than I am in its closing. I am against any political orientation as a principle of architectural philosophy. The work done at the Iraqi pavilion in 1954 at the Damascus International Fair was both exciting and impressive. The design had deep roots, thanks to my intimate awareness of the diverse life around me in Iraq. I had visited Kurdistan and saw the folkloric dances and the cooperative spirit among the people there and also observed the world of Al Ahwar (the marshlands) in the south. All these environments had one origin, which was artistic. There are elements that suggest there is a convergence among rituals, traditions, and ethics – and this is what I did in designing the Iraqi pavillion. The design was inspired by the human and natural geographical landscape that was Iraq. At the time, there were fourteen governorates, which we call provinces today. Iraq also has two major rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, under its stars and sky. I turned those symbols into architectural designs. The base comprised two columns while the ceiling was divided into fourteen spaces, and the subtext of that design was easily understood. I drew the royal emblem in green neon over the façade of the Iraqi pavilion. When the Revolution of July 14, 1958 broke out, Jawad Salim and I were sent to remove it. When we arrived in the wing, I asked Jawad, what shall we do with the emblem? Then an idea quickly came to me: I grabbed a brick from the ground and smashed the glass emblem, to Jawad’s shock and surprise.

SA: Your experience in designing the Iraqi pavilion at the 1954 Damascus International Fair seems to have been pivotal in your architectural career. After that watershed moment, your work became marked with an expressionist streak that relied on producing sharp impressions. Pavilions in international exhibitions usually seek to express a country’s identity, creative and cultural components as well as its horizons and future aspirations. You designed Iraq’s pavilion under the monarchy and decorated it with a royal emblem. Then after the monarchy was ousted in 1958 when the pavilion was still on display, you were taken along with the sculptor Jawad Salim on a private plane to remove the emblem from the design. Did this make you more aware of the significance of symbols associated with a particular political regime?

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KM: The most prominent of such works are the Finance Ministry building, the Beit Benya mosque in the Alawite area, and Sports City in Rusafa, whose design embodies the idea of “tolerance.” In addition, there is the Agricultural Engineers Association building, the building of the Iraqi Fine Art Association, and the monument and gardens of the July 14 Park in Kadhimiya. I also designed the home of the artist Nuri Al Mustafa in Al Mansur and the home of the late artist Faik Hassan in Al Sulaikh. Of course, there are many designs that were not realized for various reasons, such as the central post office building, and that distinguished design for Al Karkh Gardens, which I undertook in memory of the late Baghdadi poet Mulla Abboud Al Karkhi, who was a friend of my father’s. The design was inspired by his poem “Al Majrasha” (The Miller), which described the suffering of women. That was in the early sixties. But perhaps the work that best represents me is the design of the columns in the Opera Garden opposite the National Theatre. I take great pride in that work because I carried out a column design that is fundamentally modernist. Rendering the top in inclined form, which you see from more than one angle at the same time, resembles what Picasso did in his Cubist paintings. As for your question about the Freedom Monument by Jawad Salim, I have a critical opinion about it. Sculpture is not a two-dimensional painting but rather a complete unit surrounded by a space. What Jawad Salim sought to do through that monument was to convey the spirit of those days following the July 14 Revolution led by Abd Al Karim Qasim and also capture the demonstration slogans. It is the architect that helped him convey that spirit. Sculptures should not be two-dimensional. I have debated this with both Jawad Salim and Ihsan Shirzad. The architect behind the Freedom Monument was Rifaat Chaderchi, the concrete implementation was done by Ihsan Shirzad, and the two-dimensional work was done by Mohammed Ghani Hikmat, who helped Jawad in the realization. Because Jawad’s mural overlooks Liberation Square while its back has a view of Al Umma Park, it was proposed that this second side should be accentuated by affixing over it ceramic artwork by Mahmoud Sabri. But Sabri suddenly left Iraq, and the project was never finished, so the back of the mural remains bare to this day. For this reason, you see that the Freedom Monument from the front was done by Jawad Salim, while the back was supposed to have been done by Mahmoud Sabri. This, in my opinion, would have been sacrilege in the world of sculpture because it is not right that two works by two different artists should be placed on the same pedestal.

SA: The Liberation Square Monument designed by Jawad Salim represents his most established work in Baghdad. What structures do you think best immortalizes your architectural undertakings in the capital?

“I told Doxiadis that I was going to pursue a PhD at the German Bauhaus School and study architecture. He said, ‘I won’t allow you – you will stay with me to work on the housing project in Iraq.’ He went on to give me a car full of books and references on architecture. So I worked with Doxiadis, who was given the responsibility for the entire housing sector in Iraq.” 120

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KM: Evicting people from their homes to solve the problem of overcrowding in Baghdad is not a realistic or humane solution. But by persuasion, one can entice people to relocate. Overpopulation can be addressed gradually by establishing industrial and residential hubs, and centers for crafts around Baghdad, in Al Souaira, Fallujah, Yusifiyah, and other areas around the capital. Preference for work and housing in those centers would be given to people who come originally from those areas. I submitted a proposal along those lines to the current government, and I think they will approve it. I have developed plans to address the environmental and demographic situation for all regions in Iraq, and these plans are stored in my archives. There is a line that starts in the southwest of Iraq and makes its way north. The line consists of valleys that can be linked together, rendering it a low region that can collect water. This way, we could get a third river in Iraq with power generation plants that rely on solar power, which I term “hydro-solar generators.” The idea is to connect population activity to the features of the terrain. We can thus achieve growth without overexploiting nature. This is the modern trend, and this can and should apply to the capital Baghdad. In Iraq, we ought to build national parks for animals, plant trees in open and public spaces, and protect wild plants. Today, Baghdad has no identity, and this can be easily seen in its architecture, streets, and residential areas. In truth, even socially the city has no identity. This has everything to do with the rural-to-urban migration to the capital, the lack of planning, and the arbitrary manner in which the political authorities deal with a mega-city such as Baghdad.

SA: Once, during a lecture at the Al Mada Cultural Foundation, Rifaat Chaderchi said that Baghdad was not designed – nor suited – for this many people. Since one cannot evict half of the capital’s population, hypothetically speaking, what can be done to reconsider Baghdad’s urban landscape?

Al Madfai’s residence in Baghdad. Photograph by Tamara Abdul Hadi.

KM: I have all of Doxiadis’s books. He was charged with the gargantuan task of solving the problem of housing in Iraq. The issue of housing was raised by the British Embassy in Iraq, and it gradually made its way to the United Nations. There was a researcher at the United Nations, at the rank of consultant, tasked with solving this issue; however, he refused, claiming that he had turned to politics. At that point, the job went to Doxiadis. He came to Iraq, and I was invited to meet him at the British Embassy during a cocktail party there. After making his acquaintance and chatting, he asked me to work with him on the project, but I refused. I told him that I was going to pursue a PhD at the German Bauhaus School and study architecture according to the Bauhaus theory. He told me: I won’t allow you, you will stay with me to realize the housing project in Iraq. He went on to give me a car full of books and references on architecture. Then whenever he returned to Iraq from Europe, he brought me books

SA: You have experience in planning housing projects in the fifties, when you were inspired and influenced by Doxiadis, the Greek expert on housing and planning, and you carried out field surveys of urban and rural population centers in Iraq. What were the results of those surveys? How did these studies, which tackled geographical and social environments, influence your architectural methodology and your architectural applications? How does the imagination function in understanding places and urban spaces?

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HOME V by AHMAD MAKIA

The Makia family home in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Photograph by Clint McClean.

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Home V

AHMAD MAKIA 19TH STREET GARHOUDINIA, EUDOXIA, 60904

REPUBLIC GRACEANNE - SUPREME COURTS AL AARAS STREET PULU, GRACEANNE 2976

October 4, 2012

portal9journal.org V ‫اﳌنزل‬

Dear City of Corpses,

I hate how people romanticize you. They must have poor strategies of assessment. I find I judge you wisely because I have experienced you only in displacement. These feet never touched your soil. This body never littered your space, and these nostrils never inhaled your air. But still I think I know you best. You are the figment, atom, and particle of our foreign home. Your inspirations permeate every surface of this othered house, and I sense you in all of its weavings. We hang your glorious paintings on the wall, your music makes my parents swoon, and even your smell politely effervesces from my grandmother’s concoctions. You are a subject I know of in complete imagery and confused communication. People always seem to defend you with “there was a time when.” But really I don’t understand you in this manner. It is actually these memories that frustrate my current foreign home. My parents disciplined me that my roots of origin are from your earth. But this is funny and ambiguous because Mom and Dad never intend to experience your dead botany anymore. I think you destroyed their ecology too much. Your pollen, though, still drifts over the Gulf, and we use it in manifesting our foreign condition. Others of our kind have done this also. It is a curious and strange space. Our garden grows nargis flowers to differentiate our home in the Other’s land. These flowers are displaced and uprooted from their indigenous atmospheres, and they look somehow faulty in this placement. Faulty, just like the structure they beautify. And it is this cultivation, the one I name Home V, which personifies and imagines you. You created your own wonderful fallacy for sometime. It is that beautiful, secular, and cosmopolitan structure you supported and manifested with your sophisticated architecture. You had ambitious imaginations for being the modern(ist) space of the Middle East. But your ignorance to the Battle of Karbala1 and the Anfal campaign2 only came back to haunt you. Now you are militarized, divided, and in a constant state of decay. I applaud you; never has war seemed to carry such chic and artistic appeal. And you did well. You Arabized my Kurdish mother, and she belly dances excellently now. She accentuates and utters Arabic in perfection, and she is the ramification of your fascism. Father, on the other hand, becomes ever more

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defensive and resistant of his Shiite origins. He really struggles fighting against these subjugations. Muqtada Al Sadr and he do not get along. I think his religious barometer is running low now. My brother was stuck in your land for six months when you went through your Second Gulf War. We left him there because no one wanted us with an infant born in your territory. I think he suffers from a psychological glitch. Luckily, my sister was born in Canada. I hear that one day she could even run for prime minister. At first I started to read about your courage and patriotism. Thank you for being part of a scheme that tried to manage the words, “Arab,” “United” and “Republic.”3 You might have thought you were fighting for the righteousness of the Arab cause. But you surrounded yourself with enemies who slowly destroy you today. You witnessed some of the greatest undulatory structures of the Empire.4 And after its demise, you nurtured the Khawaja complex.5 These disciples corrected the city into petty urbanism and shadowed the urban motif behind its history. But Jose Luis Sert and Le Corbusier never managed to rectify your faults, did they?6 Writers and historians called you the modern nation state of the Middle East of that time. The glory you witnessed in architecture and culture battled those extant in Beirut and Istanbul. Cairene novelists and thinkers found no better readers than your patriotic citizens. But these moments are now archived and lost. And it is this hangover that saturates and frustrates my current foreign home. Home V is the extension of your myths. Inside it lies the nakedness of your deceit. Your landscapes are tainted with parched earth; my parents do not want our foreign home to illustrate your inflicted scars. Thus, they have invested in laborious cosmetic schemes to veil, dress, and mask the house until its gates. My family’s appearance is so well camouflaged that no indentations of their pain are palpable anymore. I owe you many thanks for letting us out of your territory. We have been persistent refineries of your crude oil. My mother even scolds me and tells me to cut my hair, shave my beard, and manicure my nails. I was also taught that bed sheets must match the drapery. The sheets should always be aligned and crust-free. Use coasters under my coffee mug, and clean after my spills. If I don’t, I would get a hurtful spanking. I must also ensure that the home furniture remains the way it is meant to be. And to be honest, I think you would be proud, as my current lush home has never ceased to disappoint with its perfected and sanitary appearance. I think my parents’ obsession with the furnishings of our home is actually your fault. I think you scarred any romantic pictures my parents had of home — thus their current edition of home must always be kept in such immaculate order. They recreate Home V in perfection for protection, not because of privilege. They want to shed the house of any scars that remind them of you. Your weight is heavy, you see. But, really, these efforts are futile. The walls in our house are filled with cemented cracks, and I only look at these breaks as pregnant with your ugliness. And certainly the constant maintenance costs us a lot. These walls are choked with your melodrama, and it is always finding ways to secrete back into the house. Our home still collects

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dust, and my mother has even hired help to keep it clean. We have learned to grow your flowers and even import exotic seeds from Holland to keep our garden green. But the stray cats still house themselves under this canopy. The visual and literary vocabulary of our library seems to wither alongside your status. These old and glorious photographs of you are getting iron-rusty. Your literature contains too many torn pages and dents, and your richness is only stacked away. These house vases keep breeding dead flowers, and now they seem to only grow cobwebs. We even remove the stains on the birch wooden tables and crystal chandeliers with potent European chemicals, but they do not seem to keep them clean. My parents gave up hosting your min-il sima7 and baklava, and now we decorate the coffee tables with colorful Parisian macaroons. But these sweets only seem to attract the meanest insects. In the traditional kitchen, we try to conceal your dirt. We mitigate your depressing mood by cooking culinary dishes that remind us of home. Stuffing and suffocating food is what we seem to do best. We have the klaicha, kubbat mosul, parda pillaw, dolma, and sheikh mahshi. The range of home cooking is always by coating and rolling other produce into clean and flat surfaces. It is like we are protecting ourselves from the bitterness and mess of your ingredients. Thus, we fry, boil, or roast it, to ensure the inside is dead of its rawness. And while the flesh cooks, the emotions evaporate. However, the family and I go on to consume these foods. Its digested remnants and particles oxidize in our anatomy; they linger and breed your cancerous cells. Your disease is fully colonized in one particular room of the house, and that is the salon. Its interior architecture is designed to segregate men and women through invisible lines of desire. In the conversations of the salon, your pathologies and symptoms are also infectious, and I am worried about their hereditary donations. Look at my female cousins: I like to call them AAPs (Arab American Princesses). These girls know no Arabic and revel in the life of the 90210.8 They wear bug-eyed sunglasses, drive sleek Porsches, and hold gigantic purses that outsize their anorexic bodies. You should come see these girls. They are the modern ones that despise the hijab, speak English, and dance on bar tables. We have come a long way, really! My other organs feel suffocated when your citizens come visit and talk to me in my salon. When they arrive with their children at our home, I hope to create a relationship because of our nationalistic bond. But then they come in, kiss me on the cheek, and sit down. And my anticipation is disappointed. They look at my house in admiration and jealousy. They stare and judge my dress. And then they patronize my broken Arabic. In all honesty, I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think they like me. My parents and their friends sit around in a circle, and they discuss you. They begin to converse about the homeland and share a collective, yet distant, memory of it. In this moment, an invisible gateway is erected. There is a direct negligence of present surroundings, and the conversation transports them back to a specific psychogeographic moment and history. Here, the situation suddenly undergoes apartheid, and nothing around them seems to relate anymore. But their children become intriguing subjects to me; they are my age and are experiencing adolescence. As we continue to communicate, we are completely separated, my hair is gelled, I listen to my iPod, and I also had sex before

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marriage. They stare at me while I and my other friends make jokes about last week’s drunken adventures. As if to distinguish ourselves all the more from them, we speak of these events in eloquent English. In the last eight years or so, we have used the salon so much more, and it is all in remembrance of you. These commemorations are funerals that merely bring your death closer. During this occasion, I do not feel sad for my family or myself. I actually feel sorry for the walls of the salon because you have shown them too much grief. They are always swallowing the audible screams and the mullahs’ recitation of the glorious barzakh.9 The salon becomes like an audition room for performances of melancholy, depression, and sorrow. And some look like they have been trained by the best acting protégés out there. I get too frightened to be in this atmosphere, it looks like the walls are slowly wilting. I prefer to hide in my room on my balcony with my other cousins. We find it is better to do other things, such as smoke and drink while our parents are busy performing. It also feels reproductively correct to perform our own roles of teenage vigilantes. We also smoke because in the salon everyone puffs away, like they are advancing their own death, just like you. Smoke is everywhere around me. The cigarette is transferred from one person to another, like our own post-colonial cultural method of the zakat.10 My grandmother, now awaiting her death, told me the British colonialists used to drive around her homeland and distribute cigarettes to find new markets for consumption. I am addicted now, and every time I light my cigarette, my grandmother shakes her head. I left Home V, because I felt my weight was only helping the earth swallow it. Home V is slowly removing the mask it wears. And when it does hydrate its face, your colors are vivid. Home V is apologizing because its servitude is almost deceased. And when I left, I went to construct my own imagined community. But in these isolated, cold landscapes, I still visited the shawarma and perfumed shisha shops. I also joined the Palestinian resistance groups. I found myself flourishing in the stereotypes of the Arab and still identifying with you. My name also ensures my relationship to an abstracted Arabic region. It carries such a generic tone, but I still think it is all I own. And really it is a heavy burden to carry. In the West, I am judged because of its Islamic derivations. In the East, I am questioned about the legibility of my Western passport. There was such a mocking tone when my name was said in these other landscapes. The Westerner never learned how to say it; they usually said “akhmad”. The Arabic “h” becomes a “kh” or a silenced “h,” almost like a whisper neglecting its full existence. It sounded like a persistent voice that erased you. And thus I rebelled; immersion in politics and philosophy radicalized me, and I wanted to fight for your cause. I left the centers of imperial production and control and moved halfway around the world to help you. But in Jordan, I realized the locals don’t really like us either. We apparently have inflated land prices and made it almost uninhabitable for the “original” people. But this is true; you have created a new subspecies termed the nouveau riche. They spout money, and their bellies are round and robust.

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Gold spans their arms, and their houses are filled with corrupted diamonds. In Syria, we are mostly refugees and have to choose between Jeramana and Sayeda Zaynab11 for means of identity. These camps ensure our political weight is carried with us no matter where we go. Most of your girls approached me to whore, and your men thought of me as their enemy. One even came up to me and said, “You studied in the ajnabis12 country, right?” Your refugees thought my counseling was part of a larger Americanizing scheme and they would never admit their poorness to me. All my previous failed attempts in the bedroom never matched the impotence of my experience in the humanitarian sphere. These refugees, though, did tell me something about you. They said that your Euphrates has turned salty. Soot is camouflaging the greenery of your palm trees. And that only your black gold matters. They also said that the etymology of your name translates as God’s gift. But really they felt they have nothing to bless you for. Communicating in your spaces no longer relies on using dialectical speech or body gestures. It has degraded itself to using other methods, such as throwing shoes. When I sit with them, they tell me that your public spaces and markets are constantly exploding with fireworks. But I ask you, what are you celebrating? With Best Regards, Ahmad Makia

1 A military engagement between

5 A postcolonial construct that

9 The barzakh in Islamic teaching

Hussein and Yazid in 680. This

viewed and understood as superior

between death and immortality. It

the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson

battle was regarded as a major

cornerstone for the birth of the

Shiite branch of Islam.

2 Anfal, which means “the spoils”

in Arabic, a term derived from a

sura of the Quran, refers here to

Saddam Hussein’s campaign in

1986–89 against the Iraqi Kurds whom he suspected of supporting

anything produced by the West is in Arab culture.

6 In 1957 the last King of Iraq

invited famous Western architects, including the Spanish Catalan Sert and the Frenchman Le

Corbusier, to redesign parts of

Baghdad. The latter’s envisaged

sports complex was intended as a means to win Iraq the chance to

the Iranians during the final

host the 1960 Olympic Games. When

3 A “United Arab Republic” was

died in 1965, the project fell

stages of the Iran–Iraq War.

the dream of pan-Arabists and

that bid failed and Le Corbusier into abeyance and only survived

briefly came to life when Egypt

in the form of a gymnasium named

between 1958 and 1961. The same

built in 1981.

Party when it ruled Iraq.

caramel, almonds, and dusted with

and Syria formed one country

dream of unity inspired the Baath 4 In fact Iraq has undergone one

empire after another, from the Abbasids to the Ottomans until the days under the more shortlived British Mandate in the early twentieth century.

in honor of Saddam Hussein, and

7 Iraqi sweet delicacy made with

white taheen (Arabic for “flour”). 8 Formally Californian zip code, but best known as the cult

American TV series featuring the

privileged carefree lives of West Coast teenagers.

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is the point of transference

is the temporary space where the soul rests until Judgement Day. 10 One of the five pillars of

Islam, zakat is charity that is

to be given by Muslim believers, usually to the poor and needy.

11 These peri-urban areas (slums) in Damascus that house the

marginalized of society have

become home to a large number

of Iraqis since 2003. Jeramana,

Christian and Druze, is a secular town. The very conservative Sayeda Zaynab is populated exclusively by Shiites.

12 Arabic word for foreigner, or Westerner.

HOME V by AHMAD MAKIA

Photograph by Clint McClean.

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CORRESPONDENCE

Photograph by Clint McClean.

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HOME V by AHMAD MAKIA

Photograph by Clint McClean.

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CORRESPONDENCE

Photograph by Clint McClean.

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Farouk Itani dodges his way around Beirutâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s main avenues, preferring alleys, even those riddled with potholes. Stills from video shot by Bachar Khattar during a taxi ride with Itani.

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FLANEUR

THE WIZARD OF CARACAS Phantasmic lovers stroll on the pages of the Mediterranean Sea, tree fairies bewitch, and ghosts, perched on their tombstones, gaze up at the stars – taxi driver Farouk Itani renders the city a collage of waking dreams. Rasha Atrash

91 ‫ صفحة‬،‫ البوابة التاسعة‬،‫ وأموات رومانسّيون‬،‫ ومنشار‬،‫جنّية‬

Farouk Itani stops his cab and points to where the fairy lives. His massive body leans over the passenger seat as he sticks his finger through the half-open window, gesturing toward the pine tree, or snoobar in Arabic, the namesake of this Beirut neighborhood. In the early mornings, the fairy used to let down her black hair over the denuded pine tree branches. She would flash her thighs from beneath her ethereal white robes and bear some cleavage tucked behind cones as worshippers flocked to the nearby mosque, aiming to distract them from their prayers. She would beckon them to sin before dawn, her emerald eyes luring them to pleasures surpassing both slumber and piety. One such mischievous vixen once transfixed Farouk’s brother, Rafik. As dawn was breaking, the imam of the mosque caught site of Rafik copulating with the pine tree with all his might.

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When their father got wind of it, he grabbed a bamboo rod and chased Rafik through the streets. In 1955, it was common knowledge that unions between man and jinn led to the birth of mutants, and the father feared that he would find himself with a mutant grandchild. But the pinecones spawned no mutant fruit. The tree shriveled and withered thanks to the neglect of the municipality. To this day, Farouk secretly greets the sprite every evening. Whenever he drives by, he laughs silently at the image of his brother going at it with the pine tree. The trees of Beirut are wicked, and they have never been kind. There used to be plenty of trees in the city, but they are few in number today. As the trees have dwindled, they have grown more bewitching, their spells more enchanting. They no longer sway in the summer breeze; instead, they collect dust and draw the frail ghosts of birds that sing only when God wills. Like those birds, Farouk Itani was once young and fit, with pearly whites and a carefully combed head of hair. A 1971 graduate of the Beirut Arab University Arabic Literature Department, Farouk always kept his nails trimmed and lived life to the fullest until he ended up in the driverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s seat of a taxi cab, ever enlightened. Day after day, he parks his car in the Caracas neighborhood. Day 142

FLANEUR

after day, he stashes the bundle of stubborn wires, like a metallic octopus, in the gap where the car radio used to be. He points his finger out of the window again and pulls on the parking brake, nearly melted by cigarette ash embers. But the car slowly glides along the asphalt slope, as though it’s gearing up for a round of skiing, the brake pads clearly worn down by years of bearing the weight of Farouk and his passengers. We’re in the Al Thalatha Qamhat (Three Wheat Stalks) neighborhood, and he points to the Umm Qassis tree, one of three in the area. In the olden days, they used to boil the grape-like berries of this tree into a sticky paste, which was slathered on branches for bird hunting, a favorite pastime and hobby – like fishing and ceramics – for the people of Beirut. The Umm Qassis, like the pine tree, is still alive, and Farouk points to it as he drives by every day. His left arm, tanned by the sun, reaches out the window, gesturing to the cab driver behind him to slow down – he’s about to pick up a passenger. Beirut’s trees are dark, especially in Farouk’s Caracas. At sunset near the coast of the purple sea, their shadows stretch long, like a widow’s veil caught unawares by the Mediterranean breeze, reaching the pavement on the other side, where Farouk’s uncle had his car parked 143

From Faroukâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s words, the city emerges as an image formed by a teenager assembling magazine cutouts, a collage to stick on the door of his closet. Stills from video shot by Bachar Khattar during a taxi ride with Itani.

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SOLDIERS FIGHT BETTER WITHOUT HOPE Alireza Mahmoudi Iranmehr

136 ‫ صفحة‬،‫ البوابة التاسعة‬،‫ الجنود أشّد بأًسا‬... ‫بﻼ أمل‬

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SOLDIERS FIGHT BETTER WITHOUT HOPE by ALIREZA MAHMOUDI IRANMEHR

You stroll toward the river, and you realize that the city has started a new game. The river is big, serene, and cold, and you feel the steam from your breath on your face. You’re hungry and empty. You walk along the river toward Si-o-Seh Pol. The bridge’s stone abutments are resting on their own shadows on the water, and through its row of thirty-three uniform brick arches, you can see the cloudy sky. The first time you crossed the bridge’s lower walkway, you were sixteen. You liked to imagine that the labyrinthine brick porticos were a kind of gateway through time so that, when you stepped from one to the next, you turned into a different person. Seventeen years have passed since that day, and it’s no longer strange that you have become a different person. You play with the empty cigarette packet at the bottom of your overcoat pocket and think of the photos of that other man, the photos you saw this morning on the wall of that light-filled bedroom. The big fountain in the middle of the river is still working, and the white column of water is still tumbling down in an arc in the wind. And you still like to think that these labyrinthine arches on the water are gateways and that, as you pass through them, lost memories will shift around in your mind, images and faces will change, and people you once knew will turn into other people. At sixteen, traveling by bus to a city you’ve never seen seemed like an attractive adventure. You were looking out of the bus window; the ridged mountains around the city blazed in the winter sun. You had your set of beliefs about life; in your rucksack, you had a novel by Arthur C. Clarke that told a tale of Earth being taken over by creatures from outer space and a collection of poems by Mehdi Akhavan Sales, whose verses spoke of profound human hopelessness. When the bus entered Esfahan, you were profoundly happy. You kept telling yourself that a hopeful life is only possible when you are unencumbered by hope. This was the gist of Akhavan’s poetry. His collection of poems had remained in your rucksack from when you were in the eighth grade. You thought again about Mitra and your final break-up the previous week on the banks of the artificial lake in Park-e Shahr. It seemed heartless that neither of you had felt any urge to cry, even for an instant. You’d now added to your set of beliefs a new belief, that love is like an iceberg: if you collide with it just after it has broken off and begun to drift in the ocean, it can sink a big ship, but later it shrinks so much that you can put it in the palm of your hand and watch it disappear. You stepped out of the bus and were invigorated by the fresh, freezing air. You headed for the taxi stand. The fact that you did not resemble any other sixteen-yearold boy, were traveling alone, had escaped in one piece from a bitter break-up, and knew the world’s secrets filled you with glee. You climbed into a taxi and asked to be dropped off at Si-o-Seh Pol. You arrived on time. The last rays were shining on the bridge’s towering walls, and the reflections of the crimson arches on the ancient river were losing color as darkness spread under them. You tossed your rucksack over

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your shoulder and headed toward the shadows under the bridge. As you passed underneath the first arch, you realized for the first time that cities can play games with people. On the other side of the arch, a girl was standing at the foot of one of the abutments, looking at the water as it flowed from the light of the dusk sky to the shadow of the bridge. She was standing exactly where you had been meaning to stand. One of her cotton sneakers had an orange shoelace, and the other, a light blue one. She lifted her head and looked at you. Then she stared back at the dark water under her legs and said: –Do you think it’s possible to cross over through the water? Instantly, you stepped into the river. It flowed quick and cold. You tried to stay upright on the smooth, slippery stones. The girl was looking at you, amazed. Her eyes were bright gray, or that’s how they appeared at dusk. When you reached the other side of the arch, you realized that an iceberg had broken off in the ocean and begun to drift … You play with the empty cigarette packet at the bottom of your overcoat pocket and think of the photos of that other man, who drowned three years ago at midnight. A narrow stretch of shiny seashells glowed on the dark sand in the moonlight. The barefoot man passed over them and moved slowly into the sea … You throw the empty cigarette packet into a waste bin and stop near the bridge’s stone abutments. In the deep bit in the middle of the river, freezing ducks have huddled together in a white mass. In between the distant trees on the other bank, shadowy figures stroll through the thin fog. Over the past seventeen years, you’ve had enough time to discover new secrets about the world: love may be like an iceberg, but even if it’s only floating in your mind, it can still sink a real ship after so long. You sit on one of the metal chairs near the bridge’s stone causeway and order a hot, thick soup. After the time you spent in that small apartment overlooking the river, with the orange sheets, you’re empty inside. You need warming up. The temperature has dropped, and the fog hides half the bridge and, now and then, the other bank. This morning, when you noticed that someone was following you, the air was clearer. Before the hotel restaurant opened for breakfast, you stepped out for a walk in the city’s streets in the morning hush. The shops around Naqsh-e Jahan Square were just beginning to open their shutters. The square was filled with light, and its vastness was dizzying. On the horizon, at the other end of the square, Masjid Shah’s blue dome and minarets blazed in the pale sunlight. In the crook of a portal, you drew a hand over bricks that had become worn-down and black over the centuries. Along the square’s pedestrian walkway, you strolled past the leisure carriage horses as they nodded off in the winter sun. You took out the half-full cigarette packet from your overcoat and searched for the lighter in the other pocket. Life was slowly starting to stir in Naqsh-e Jahan Square when you sensed that you were being followed. You looked behind you. A young woman quickly turned her head and gave the impression

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SOLDIERS FIGHT BETTER WITHOUT HOPE by ALIREZA MAHMOUDI IRANMEHR

of looking in the window of an antique shop. You stopped and looked at the enamelwork, goblets, and vases in another shopfront. The woman didn’t move. You started off again, and she followed you. Ahead, the sun was shining through the clouds on the black pillars of the tall portico of Ali Qapu’s palace, above your line of vision. You stopped and glanced back. The woman’s eyes were still fixed on you. They did not resemble the gray eyes of seventeen years ago. Whoever it was, it was not her, the girl whose face you’d only seen in the final moments before sunset, the girl with the different-colored shoelaces. You still remember clearly how the sky was darkening quickly. You were standing in front of her, and your toes were growing numb in the water. You said: –Would you like us to cross over like this together, under the bridge? The girl laughed and eagerly took your hand. You moved along the lower walkway from one domed, four-columned archway to the next. Then to the next, and the next. The cold water had soaked your trousers and hers to above the knees. You told her that building the bridge this high was a trick used to reduce the water pressure on the abutments, and that you liked to think that as you passed through each archway, you would turn into a new person. The girl laughed and squeezed your hand tighter … You took another cigarette out of the packet. You walked past Masjid Shah’s massive doorway and the big stone pillars of the gateway to its ancient polo field. The young woman was still walking behind you and staring at you. On your third visit to Esfahan, in a covered bazaar, you saw the reflection of a woman’s eyes in an antique shop window. She was standing next to you and looking at a set of engraved goblets. You were breathing in the cold, bitter scent of her perfume. The woman headed toward the closed end of the bazaar, and you followed her. You were twentyone. You were certain that you didn’t know this woman, but following her among the multicolored goods hanging along the shops’ entrances eased a needless sorrow … The woman was following hard on your heels. After smoking four cigarettes on an empty stomach, you were feeling nauseous. Life is a joke that sometimes makes you take it seriously in a frightening way. You considered stopping and asking her what she wanted from you, but you kept walking. Asking is against the rules. Seventeen years ago, too, you had thought the rules of the game determined that, on the other side of the river, you would stand face-to-face with the gray-eyed girl under the last archway, silently. In the wintry river, you could no longer feel your legs below the knees. It had grown dark, and you couldn’t see the color of her shoelaces under the water. You were holding her hands. The water was rushing between your ankles. The memory of brushing the lips of a gray-eyed girl, even at sixteen and in the labyrinth of an ancient bridge’s pillars, would fade were it not woven into and altering with the architecture of the city. When the girl drew her hands out of yours and laughingly climbed the steps to the bank, you thought you

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would find her again the following morning amid the pillars and archways. With your heavy rucksack, you headed for the small hostel where you’d reserved a room. You showered and read Akhavan Sales: A group of shackled people turn a huge boulder in order to read the secret written on its other side. But on the other side, too, they find the same phrase: “Turn me, and thou willst discover my secret on the other side!” You thought that this must be another game, with its own rules: turning a huge boulder to read a secret that doesn’t exist. The next morning, you had breakfast at the hostel and went back to Si-o-Seh Pol, but you didn’t know who to look for. You walked back and forth a few times through the short passageways at each end of the bridge. You’d gaze at people’s faces, searching for gray eyes. A girl with a blue rucksack looked familiar from behind. You followed her all the way across the bridge. The girl suddenly stopped and looked at you in surprise. Then she turned and walked away … At the end of Naqsh-e Jahan Square, you stopped again and played with the lighter at the bottom of your pocket. The young woman was closer now. You could smell her warm, sweet perfume. You strolled toward Chehel-Sotun Palace and didn’t look behind you anymore. You wondered if the city had changed the rules of the game yet again. You walked through the old plane trees toward Chehel-Sotun’s portico, its roof visible above the tall trees. The reflections of the crimson columns and the mirror-works above the palace’s entrance trembled on the pool’s green water. Already seventeen years ago, as you roamed around Esfahan, you realized that you were strolling around a city of mirror-works and reflections: bridges reflected on a serene river; twenty crimson columns mirrored by twenty columns on a pool’s surface; domes reflected in the pool in the middle of Naqsh-e Jahan Square; and the image of two gray eyes reflected only in your mind. You climbed the steps to the palace’s main portico and passed in between the seated stone lions, with the wooden, crimson columns resting on their backs. In front of a big depiction of a battle scene covering the wall all the way up to the high ceiling of the palace’s central hall, you became certain that the rules of the game had changed. In the display window of a cabinet containing three ancient swords, you saw the eyes of the young woman standing beside you. –Is it you? You looked at her, dazed. This is exactly what you had wanted to ask her. You probed her big, black, moist eyes. They showed no signs of that gray color at dusk. You said, softly: –Who? She stared at you silently. Then she lowered her head and went toward the grand hall. You caught up with her on the palace’s portico. –Who am I supposed to be? –It’s not you … Your voice is different.

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FROM THE STRUCTURE TO THE PAGE: THE RETURN OF THE ARCHITECTURAL JOURNAL by JOHN JERVIS

(Previous and above) ARCHIZINES at the Architectural Association (AA). Photographs by Sue Barr. Courtesy of the AA School of Architecture, London.

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REVIEWS AND CRITIQUE

FROM THE STRUCTURE TO THE PAGE: THE RETURN OF THE ARCHITECTURAL JOURNAL

John Jervis

‫ عودة مجلّة العامرة‬:‫من اﳌبنى إﱃ الصفحة‬ portal9journal.org

In the last few years, print publishing, always a risky business, has faced a perfect storm of nemeses. Alongside declining print runs and fragmented markets, the industry is faced with the rise of aggressive, monopolistic distributors, growing competition from both free content and piracy, rising costs for offshore production, and chronic indecision about how best to exploit new technologies. Yet one genre is proudly defying the trend – there has been an explosion of independent architectural journals. Elias Redstone’s magisterial ARCHIZINES show at London’s Architectural Association,1 for instance, brought together a selection of sixty such journals from a far wider pool. Most had been launched in the last five years, and their print runs range from a mere thirty copies up to twenty thousand or more. A cynic might ascribe this proliferation to architects twiddling their thumbs during a prolonged global recession. The onward march of affordable short-run printing and desktop publishing certainly make the architectural journal an attractive outlet for young architects, frustrated by their roles as over-trained, underemployed cogs in large machines that are increasingly focused on survival rather than creativity. Yet there is more to this burst of activity than economic woe. The term “architecture” has long embraced writing, drawing, and photography, and many of the journals among this new outpouring could also be classed as architectural projects – their concern with both the details and the totality of effect produced by materials, design, and internal organization is certainly reminiscent of the achievement of built form. The appeal of creating a coherent, attractive physical package is obvious, allowing architects to make an aesthetic statement at a moment when many are denied this opportunity in their primary role. The resulting journals are thus a delight to handle – thick matte papers abound, formats and internal structures are inventive, and the quality of layout and typography is gen-

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erally high. Karel Martens’s designs for OASE, the renowned bilingual Dutch/ English journal on architecture and urban design, published three times a year, are an obvious touchstone. Even “lo-fi” examples, spewed out of cheap digital printers, are often witty homages to their fanzine predecessors from the 1970s music scene. At the same time, ambitions are more extensive than mere delight in tactility. Existing architectural publications have ossified: architecture books are widely perceived as fit only for the coffee table; the self-selecting, opaque world of the peer-reviewed journal is inaccessible to all but a few; mainstream journals are now little more than decor magazines or promotional brochures. In addition, most of the new breed of editors, despite acknowledging the role that blogs have played in introducing new voices to architectural discourse, actively reject the medium as prioritizing instant gratification, lacking the permanence, depth, or selectivity of the print journal. Now, it is claimed, an exciting new crop of outlets for innovative architectural writing and image-making has finally emerged. Does the reality match up? The range is broad, so generalization is risky. Some examples, such Preston Bus Station or the America Deserta Revisited series, are slim yet likeable art projects. PIDGIN, run by Princeton University School of Architecture’s graduate students, embraces an alternative approach to imagery with a pleasing lack of reverence. The polished magazine Block attains the inclusive appeal of The Architectural Review of the 1950s, with its diverse range of subjects couched in elegant, jargon-free prose. There are numerous political journals, many somewhat polemical, but the best do ensure that Western dominance – so prevalent in both architectural writing and practice – is briefly overthrown. In Canada’s Scapegoat, for instance, Mona Fawaz of the American University in Beirut gives a revealing interview on Hezbollah’s recent approach to urban

FROM THE STRUCTURE TO THE PAGE: THE RETURN OF THE ARCHITECTURAL JOURNAL by JOHN JERVIS

planning in the city. Another subset of journals act as lively publicity brochures for their practices – What about It? from WAI Architecture Thinktank includes a witty taxonomy of “shapes of hardcore architecture,” including “Blow-Up Fonts,” “Stacking Boxes,” and “Ziggurat-Polis.” The real, substantive core of the journal boom, however, is made up of variants on the text-driven compilation dedicated to a single theme. These often gather articles through a call for entries, and most reject overly prescriptive approaches to length, images, language, footnotes, formats, and even fictionalization. Few of the articles thus assembled would find natural homes in academic journals, yet the very inventiveness that contributes to this exclusion also ensures their interest to the reader. One of the best of these “forums” or “compendiums” is Bracket, a collaboration between the Archinect website, which serves as a network for the architectural community, and InfraNet Lab, a blog that studies the relations between infrastructures and materials. Bracket’s first issue, “On Farming,” is styled as an almanac, collecting over 40 articles that provide perspectives on the interaction between contemporary farming and globalization, on alternative economies, on resource management, and more. The range is sometimes overwhelming, but the existence, diversity, and ambition of the magazine is something to be celebrated, whether your eye happens to fall upon an enlightening historical introduction to agricultural urbanism, proposals for fog farming in Luanda,2 a more poetic piece about a poplar plantation in Oregon, or a quick-reference food matrix for the small producer, all ingeniously illustrated.

Slightly more frayed at the edges, but enjoyably so, is San Rocco, a collaborative journal based in Venice. Its first issue adopted the theme of islands, a rather baggy concept that allowed for the inclusion of, for instance, an illuminating history of the Architectural Association in the 1960s before the arrival of Alvin Boyarsky, and in particular its “Department of Tropical Architecture.” At the other extreme, it stretched to accommodate an entertaining cautionary tale detailing a final meeting between Francisco Scaramanga and his architect to discuss plans for his island base in The Man with the Golden Gun. There are many other worthy examples, but this type of journal also provides areas of concern. A primary aspiration often cited by editors is a desire to take discussions about architecture out of the university or practice and on to a wider audience – to engage in a real conversation with society. Another is to move away from the superficiality of recent discourse, providing a platform for more substantial, considered writing about the role of architecture in society. These goals have a tendency to conflict, perhaps most obviously in the area of the language. The refreshing diversity of content and tone in these journals is welcome. However their editors, seeking to justify the theme of their own particular issue or journal and, on occasion, wishing to enhance academic or professional résumés, have a tendency to ape the language of established peers, adopting academic jargon. In addition, names such as Guy Debord, Gilles Deleuze, and Georges Perec are cited with prodigious frequency to add intellectual luster but, thanks to their ubiquity, succeed only in raising a wry smile. In 1988 the celebrated

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American-born, Scottish-based theorist and landscape architect Charles Jencks offered a partial defense of the then recent increase in the opacity of architectural discourse, or “incomprehensible architalk.” This new combination of industry terminology and post-structuralist theory was, in Jencks’s view, a mixed blessing. Despite its ungainliness, it served as necessary protection for the creative freedom of the architect against the overbearing power of the developer and planner in the construction industry. Such self-analyses in the matter of language have largely been abandoned in the years since – academic parlance is firmly established and has become almost an end in itself. The temptation for editors of new journals is clear, and there is an associated risk that journals will gravitate into the academic orbit. The beautifully produced and conceived Candide from Aachen University and MIT’s admired Thresholds have now become peer-reviewed at risk of being subsumed into wider academic publishing, attracting credibility and heavyweight contributors but losing the freedom that gives them much of their vivacity and any real possibility of achieving wider conversations. A related matter is that of design. Bracket’s elaborate appearance is impressive, complete with special color, die-cut chapter openers, multiple paper stocks, and a large belly band wrapped around the cover, yet contributes little to clarifying the structure (one that is supposedly inspired by web design). Nor does it aid legibility, with the text – the supposed reason for all this care – taking a back seat amidst astonishingly long paragraphs and shifting typefaces. This is not a small point: the journal may have been reward-

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ing to produce, but the approach adds significantly to production time and expense, doing little to ensure that the finished product reaches out beyond likeminded colleagues with time and money to spare, their buttons pressed as much by titillating design as by unusual content. Apartamento, founded in Barcelona in 2008 to provide an “alternative perspective on interiors,” is rare in having an astonishing print run of twenty-two thousand. It has achieved distribution in Barnes & Noble and glamorous department stores; most journals are not as lucky in their distribution channels. Almost all rely solely on their mailing list and one or two specialist art shops in university centers. This raises the question of what is achieved by lavishing so much care on the physicality of these immaculate objects, which carry their precious cargo of words on an occasional basis to a small, immediate, and privileged audience already engaged in similar architectural conversations. Contact with wider society, or even with architects outside of Western institutions, is seldom realized. The past impact and continuing allure of the “little magazine”3 was brilliantly explored by a traveling exhibition that began in 2006 at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, and culminated in the book, Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines, 196x–197x, in 2010. Yet to attempt to replicate this movement today is a retrograde step. The new wave of such magazines exists in a world where the role of print has changed – it is becoming necessarily a luxury product, an add-on to or collaboration with the digital environment. Many of the new journals do have some degree of presence on the web, and

almost all utilize it as a marketing tool. However, most defend the print format with passion. With news websites now providing rolling headlines, print journals are championed as a forum for the exploration of subjects in depth, shaping debates rather than reporting them. The prolonged, collaborative process of their production is seen as the ideal mechanism for reflection, discussion, experimentation, theory, or discourse, neglected by so many in popular architectural practice and print. Even restrictions of reproduction quality are embraced as allowing space for the imagination. Citing the creative benefits of this “go-slow” production ethic bolsters the intellectual primacy of print. Despite the intelligence and leadership evidenced online by bloggers such as Geoff Manaugh or Owen Hatherley, the message seems to be that “real” writers, whether academics, critics, or architects, have as their ultimate goal the medium of print, only achieving final validation when they leave a permanent trace. Yet, as the ongoing enthusiasm for the ARCHIZINES exhibition and, more particularly, its website among the editors of these very print journals proves, it is the joy of recognition – of leaving behind the micro-world of the physical magazine and conversing with a global network that shares the same passions – that can guarantee that this movement attains the same vibrancy and force as its 1960s predecessor. Challenges remain to achieving this wider communication, but the internet must now play a fundamental role, whether through exploiting existing eBook and website formats or pioneering new models, redirecting the capacity for innovation so evident in this new generation of print journals. Architecture

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is witnessing an explosion of excellent and diverse writing and image making, linked to a newfound confidence in its own centrality as a discourse. It seems unfortunate that much of this finds its outlet in a series of beautiful scrolls, to be lodged in the libraries of a few architectural professionals, practices, and schools. Having been created more through enthusiasm than financial probity, their content deserves to be shared in a similar, inclusive vein. The process may be riskier, failures may result, but the goal is so much greater.

1 ARCHIZINES was exhibited from November 5 through December 14, 2011.

2 Fog farming, which relies on the condensation and collection of fog to obtain potable water in mainly rural settings, was hypothetically applied to the arid urban environment of Luanda in Angola. 3 Aided by the rise of small presses and new technologies, an upsurge in literary magazines or “little magazines,” as opposed to the larger, more commercial variety, took place in the 1960s and 1970s.

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Royal Opera House of Muscat. Photograph courtesy of the Royal Opera House.

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ROYAL OPERA HOUSE OF MUSCAT

Katherine Hennessey

،‫ البوابة التاسعة‬،‫دار اﻷوبرا السلطانّية ﰲ مسقط‬ 153 ‫صفحة‬

Gazing at the soaring ceilings, embellished teak, and gold leaf accents, a firsttime visitor to the new Royal Opera House Muscat (ROHM) in Oman might be forgiven for overlooking the foyer’s less conspicuous treasures. While the balustrades, colonnades, and glistening marble in the foyer dazzle the eye, there lies an unassuming exhibition of antique musical instruments tucked behind the central staircase. Among these are two ceramic horns in the shape of Chinese dragons, delicately painted in turquoise, gold, and sapphire, their necks sinuous and their faces fierce. But we are offered no hint of the paths that these instruments have traveled nor of the music they might produce in the hands of a maestro. The dragons seem a fitting symbol for Oman’s lovely yet enigmatic Opera House. Since its inauguration in October 2011, ROHM has hosted a spectacular series of performances, featuring artists of global repute, such as Placido Domingo, Renée Fleming, Andrea Bocelli, Yo-Yo Ma, and renowned orchestral and ballet companies. By whichever measure one takes – the technological sophistication of its design and construction, the aesthetic standards of the building and of the performances it hosts, or the resources at its disposal for attracting creative talent – ROHM is an extraordinary edifice. It is a monumental, multi-million dollar testament to the Sultan of Oman’s passion for classical music and the performing arts. As Michael Kaiser, President of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, predicted in a recent blog post: “If managed properly, the Royal Opera House Muscat has the potential to change the way the arts are viewed and practiced in this nation and this region of the world.” Yet Kaiser’s phrase hints at underlying and unresolved questions about ROHM: what constitutes “proper management” for such a unique structure? What is the purpose of the Royal Opera House, its function, and its essential identity as an institution? What place does it aspire to hold in Omani culture and society?

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Oman and the Arab Gulf have rich traditions of song and instrumental music. Oman’s local music culture features instruments such as the mizmar, zamr, and qasabah (similar to an oboe, clarinet, and flute, respectively), in addition to the oud and a variety of drums. But these musical traditions have little if any relationship to opera, which, despite the genre’s populist roots, has long been the province primarily of the cultured, upper, and upwardly mobile middle classes in the United States and Europe. So why build an opera house in Muscat? The Royal Opera House has been hailed as a culminating triumph of Sultan Qaboos Bin Said’s reign, which marked its forty-second anniversary this summer. The congratulatory advertisements placed in the local papers by Omani corporations, featuring an image of the Sultan superimposed over a photo of the Opera House, attest to ROHM’s cachet as a symbol of Qaboos’s accomplishments. The gleaming façade of the Opera House suggests the ideals of purity and transparency, the lack of corruption that Sultan Qaboos in his speeches urges public officials to uphold, while the building’s opulent interior bespeaks the Sultan’s oft-repeated aspirational vision of Oman’s citizens: “a model for others to follow … adopting every new enlightened idea, benefitting from sciences and new technology and at the same time always preserving … [their] traditions and authentic customs.”1 Though clearly indebted to the Sultan’s personal affinity for classical music, ROHM also fits neatly within a larger political agenda, which dictates portraying Omanis to the world as educated, open minded, sophisticated, and engaged in prestigious artistic and intellectual pursuits. The choice to construct an opera house, in particular, harmonizes well with the Sultan’s strategic positioning of his country as a quiet mediator between East and West. The potential for cultural tourism no doubt also precipitated the Opera

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1 Sultan Qaboos bin Said, “Speech of His Majesty at the Opening of the 5th Term of the Council of Oman, 3lst October 2011,” Ministry of Information, Oman, accessed November 17, 2011, http://www.omanet.om/english/h msq/hmsq11.asp. 2 See Oman Airports Management Company, “New Muscat International Airport Facts,” accessed January 30, 2012, http://www.omanairports.com/se eb_newterminal.asp. 3 Dhofari Gucci, “Oman’s Grand Mufti Condemns Opera House,” Mideastposts.com: the voices of the Middle East, December 7, 2011, http://mideastposts.com/2011/12 /07/omans-grand-mufti-condemn s-royal-opera-house. 4 See Dhofari Gucci’s blogpost cited above and the subsequent comments. Dhofari Gucci, “Oman’s Grand Mufti Condemns Opera House,” Mideastposts.com: the voices of the Middle East, December 7, 2011, http://mideastposts.com/2011/12 /07/omans-grand-mufti-condemn s-royal-opera-house. 5 Archinomy, “Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre by Zaha Hadid,” accessed December 4, 2011, http://www.archinomy.com/casestudies/295/abu-dhabi-performin g-arts-centre-by-zaha-hadid. 6 Architecture Studio, “National Theatre of Bahrain,” accessed December 4, 2011, http://www.architecture-studio.fr/ en/projects/bhr1/national_theatre _of_bahrain.html.

7 “Dubai Opera House by Zaha Hadid,” June 6, 2008, http://www.designboom.com/we blog/cat/9/view/3045/dubai-oper a-house-by-zaha-hadid.html.

House’s construction. A gigantic expansion of Muscat’s international airport has already begun, intended to increase its capacity from 5.7 million passengers in 2010 to 12 million by 2014, with a staggering 48 million projected for later stages.2 An opera house that can attract the likes of Domingo and Bocelli could help to draw visitors to Oman, especially from the multitude of foreigners who live in or visit nearby Dubai. An Omani tourist visa is currently free to visitors of certain nationalities in conjunction with a visit to Dubai. Given this potential tourist influx, the selection of architectural firm Wimberly Allison Tong & Goo (WATG) for the building’s construction makes perfect sense: the firm markets its work as “destination design,” and its portfolio includes many of Oman and the Arab Gulf ’s poshest resorts, including Abu Dhabi’s Emirates Palace, Dubai’s One&Only Royal Mirage, and ShangriLa’s Barr Al Jissah Resort and Spa in Muscat. It is a sensible decision on the part of the Omani government to diversify the economy by increasing tourism infrastructure, but it does put the Opera House in a potentially awkward position with regard to programming: is its primary intended audience tourist, expatriate, or Omani? Educated in Britain, the Sultan professes openness toward participatory democracy, freedom of religious practice, and the integration of women in the Omani workplace, among other ideas that coexist uneasily with the traditional and more conservative Ibadhi underpinnings of Omani culture. The Opera House may in fact represent an attempt by the Sultan to shape Oman’s culture in the direction that he favors, despite a certain degree of opposition. For instance,

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Sheikh Ahmed Bin Hamad Al Khalili, the Grand Mufti of Oman, recently provoked a heated debate when consulted about the propriety of visiting ROHM. He opined that, given the edifice’s intended purpose to promote music and dance, it is not acceptable for a Muslim to visit or even to admire the architecture.3 Omanis are remarkably consistent in their enthusiasm for Sultan Qaboos and the benefits of his reign; only the rare voice raises suspicion that a decision by the Sultan might conflict with Islamic principles. But there are suggestions in the Omani blogosphere that other doubts exist about the Opera House as a positive influence on Omani society, including a quiet boycott of ROHM by some Omanis who feel that the undisclosed sums lavished upon the edifice could have been better spent elsewhere.4 Yet the Sultan is by no means alone in the Arab Gulf in his willingness to invest vast sums in creating infrastructure for the performing arts. In fact, the inauguration of the Royal Opera House in Muscat has taken place at a time of unprecedented proposed investment in performance spaces. In 2007, Abu Dhabi announced the construction of a vast performing arts complex on Saadiyat Island, a collaborative effort between the Guggenheim Foundation and the Tourism Development and Investment Company of Abu Dhabi. The design, by Zaha Hadid Architects, encompasses five separate performance spaces, including an opera house, a concert hall, and a drama theatre.5 Bahrain has commenced construction of a National Theatre, which is to be inaugurated during Manama’s yearlong celebrations as 2012 Capital of Arab Culture. The plans by AS Architecture

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Studio include a 1,000-seat auditorium, smaller 150-seat theatrical space, and exhibition area.6 Still another opera house, also designed by Zaha Hadid and with a seating capacity of 2,500, is the proposed centerpiece of the Lagoons development complex in Dubai. The blueprints for this arts complex also include a playhouse, gallery, academy of fine arts, and six-star hotel.7 Yet the economic crisis has forced a number of such development plans to be scaled back or placed, perhaps indefinitely, on hold. Doubts remain about the availability of adequate funding for the Abu Dhabi performing arts center, as well as for the Dubai Opera House.8 The blueprints for these performance complexes may ultimately meet the same fate as the Baghdad Opera House, artfully designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for King Faisal II of Iraq but never brought to fruition due to the latter’s deposition in 1958.9 Qatar, too, has constructed a grandiose performance space in its National Convention Centre. In 2010 this Gulf nation completed the construction of an “opera house” and a drama theatre in its Katara Cultural Village complex, which served as venues for the Doha Tribeca Film Festival in 2011. Descriptions of the Katara Opera House tout its suitability for theatre, film, and performances by the Qatar Philharmonic, but to date no full-scale operas have been staged there. Looking beyond the Arab Gulf to the larger Arab world, ROHM currently has a pair of regional rivals (with a third on its way: construction will supposedly begin in 2012 on the “King Abdullah II House of Art and Culture” in Amman, also designed by Zaha Hadid). The first is Cairo’s Egyptian Opera House, which was founded in 1869 by Khedive Ismail to

celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal. The original Opera House in Cairo hosted the world premiere of Verdi’s Aida in 1871 and functioned for a full century before being destroyed in a fire in 1971. It re-opened its doors in its present incarnation in 1988 and has since been an integral part of Egypt’s National Culture Center. The second, the Damascus Opera House, has a dual history much like that of Cairo’s. The original site of the Opera was a French colonial-era building, but it found a new home in Dar Al Assad for Culture and Arts, planned by Hafez Al Assad and inaugurated by his son Bashar in 2004. Dar Al Assad contains an Opera Theatre, a drama theatre, and a multipurpose auditorium. The opera houses in Cairo and Damascus possess storied pasts and strong reputations, and ROHM seems to have drawn inspiration from the successes of each – for example, inviting Reham Abdelhakim, an “official singer” from the Cairo Opera House, to perform on the ROHM stage, and including in its inaugural repertoire Turandot and Swan Lake, both staged in recent years in Damascus. Though arguably indebted to their programming models, the Royal Opera House in Muscat clearly surpasses both of these institutions in terms of technological innovation. The acoustics of ROHM can be precisely adjusted for each performance, using sound-reflecting panels in the ceiling, reverberation chambers, and removable sound-absorbing panels along the walls. It is the first opera house to use the Mode 23 multimedia system, which allows each spectator to select a language in which to view the performance’s subtitles from a screen on the back of the seat in front of her. Most astonishing of all, however, is the ease

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with which the performance space can be completely reconfigured to suit various presentation styles. Rather than having a dedicated concert hall with a separate space for operatic and theatre performances, ROHM adjusts a single area to provide the acoustics and stage space proper to each performance. Each component part of the theatre, from the proscenium to the ceiling, can be raised, lowered, or reconfigured as necessary to optimize acoustics; the concert stage area, including the organ, slides back twenty meters on railway tracks to create room for the expanded stage, wing, and backdrop space needed for theatrical performances. Even the angle of the boxes in the auditorium can be adjusted, to account for the widening or narrowing of the stage area. Despite these elements of state-ofthe-art technology, the overall effect of the theatre is antique elegance rather than obtrusive modernity. The plush seats are covered in velvet – gold violins on a red background – and the walls and ceilings in elaborately carved teak. Acoustic panels are hidden within carved wooden mashrabiya screens; those on the ceiling are painted to blend seamlessly with the rest of the décor. Even the libretto screens seem designed not to steal focus from the performance. The theatre is warm in color, lavish in materials, stately in proportions. As an audience member for two very different types of performance, I was impressed by the crystalline balance of the acoustics, the intimacy and warmth of the theatre, and the aesthetic accomplishments of both productions. For the ballet Giselle, which played to a mixed audience of expatriates and Omanis, the stage was set in “theatre mode”: the orchestra from

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8 Christopher Sell, “Zaha’s Dubai Opera House set to be cancelled,” Architects’ Journal, April 23, 2009, http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/n ews/daily-news/-zahas-dubai-operahouse-set-to-be-cancelled/5200881.a rticle. 9 See Joseph M. Siry, “Wright's Baghdad Opera House and Gammage Auditorium: In Search of Regional Modernity,” The Art Bulletin 87, no. 2 (June 2005): 265-311, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25067172. 10 See Emma Williams’s interview with Makhar Vaziev, director of the Teatro alla Scala ballet company, in “Tragic Romance Comes to Oman,” theweek, November 16, 2011, http://www.theweek.co.om/disCon.a spx?Cval=5781. 11 See Nadia Muhanna, “Damascus Opera House on [sic] Limelight,” Daily Press News, http://www.dpnews.com/en/detail.aspx?articleid=8 3883; Damascus Opera House, “Releases,” accessed January 4, 2012, http://www.damascusopera.com/en /releases-en.

12 Brett Egan, telephone interview with the author, November 24, 2011. 13 Sunil Vaiyda, “Royal Opera House Lowers Ticket Prices,” Gulf News, December 27, 2011. http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/oma n/royal-opera-house-lowers-ticket-pri ces-1.957636.

La Scala sat in the pit area below the stage as their music wafted into the audience. In contrast, the Umm Kulthum tribute concert was performed in “concert mode,” with a shallow stage that foregrounded the singer and orchestra. The audience was overwhelmingly Omani, and to their delight, contralto Reham Abdelhakim opened her performance by praising the splendor of the new Opera House and her joy at being invited to sing. The Cairo Opera House’s Selim Sahab Arab Music Ensemble accompanied Abdelhakim. The first half of the performance, the songs “Enta Omri” (You Are My Life) and “Arooh Limeen?” (Who Can I Turn To?), received polite applause as the Cairene diva struggled to connect with her audience. Both she and the audience seemed re-energized, however, by the second half of the performance: “Sirat Al Houb” (Love Stories) and “Al Atlal” (Ruins) struck a chord with us all. The exterior of the Opera House and the interior spaces that lead to the theatre complement the grandeur of the auditorium. Here, the main building materials are marble, travertine, and “Omani Desert Rose” limestone; timber accents – screens, handrails, ceiling panels – are painstakingly carved and hand-painted in a traditional technique known as zouaq. The official published description of the architecture of ROHM boasts, “Virtually all of the magnificent interior finishings of the Opera House – on walls, doors, windows, floors, and ceilings – have been produced in Oman.” (Given the cadres of migrant laborers in the country, we are left to imagine how much of it was actually produced by citizens.) The beauty of the structure is undeniable, and the emphasis on traditional

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techniques and locally sourced materials seems to further a sense of Omani pride, of national self-confidence. But does the Opera House place Omanis in the position of spectators and guardians of a quintessentially foreign cultural achievement? Or does it allow them to assume the role of connoisseurs, or better yet creators and contributors to hybrid culture? Omani artistry is on vibrant display in ROHM’s exterior spaces, but what has taken place on the stage, at least in the inaugural season, is overwhelmingly foreign. This is not necessarily a criticism, considering that the first half of the season brought some of the world’s best known performing artists to Oman: Domingo conducted the Arena di Verona orchestra for a performance of Puccini’s Turandot and later provided his own concert, “Placido Domingo Sings to Oman.” Fleming and Bocelli each sang to sold-out crowds, and the world’s most illustrious orchestras and ballet companies were invited to choose a performance that would best exhibit their talents.10 The repertoire for the first half of the inaugural season incorporated a number of classics of Western performing arts, including Carmen and Swan Lake. There were Middle and Far Eastern elements as well: a South Korean ballet, a performance by Lebanese soprano Magida Al Roumi, and the concert in tribute to the legendary Umm Kulthum. But though the Royal Oman Symphony Orchestra accompanied Domingo during his concert, no Omani performers figured prominently in the first half of the inaugural season. The calendar for the second half of the season (January through March 2012) highlights one partially Omani perfor-

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mance: “Exhilarating Rhythms: Classical Drumming from Oman and Japan,” featuring traditional Omani musicians and their Japanese counterparts – one listing out of a total of twenty-six. The other performances span the globe, from Macedonia to Argentina, from Inner Mongolia to South Africa, with heavy emphasis on Russia and Eastern Europe as well as Egypt. The most intriguing performance on the 2012 calendar is the Cairo Opera House production of Praxa, or the Women’s Parliament, an Arabic musical adaptation of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata. In the classic Greek comedy, the eponymous female protagonist convinces the women of Greece to refuse to have sex with their husbands until the latter agree to end the Peloponnesian War. (One wonders whether the Grand Mufti will venture to comment on the propriety of attending that production.) But when might we see more Omanis on the ROHM stage? ROHM seems strangely disconnected from the vision of the Royal Symphony Orchestra, founded by Sultan Qaboos in 1985, which prides itself in having all Omani performers and hires expats only occasionally, in teaching rather than performance capacities. ROHM also differs in this regard from its rivals in Cairo and Damascus, which tout the promotion and training of Egyptian and Syrian artists, respectively, as a central part of their mission. Witness, for instance, the July 2011 production of an Arabic version of Oliver! at the Damascus Opera House, which recruited Syrian orphans as cast members, or the resources dedicated to the “Syrian Musicians and Singers” recording series.11 Rather, ROHM collaborates closely with the Kennedy Center for the Perform-

ing Arts in Washington, DC; the current CEO of the Opera House, Brett Egan, is also director of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at Kennedy. Egan notes that ROHM has no formal training programs. While there will be master classes, the imperative of the Opera House, as Egan states, “is to present, but not necessarily to train, artists.” He praises ROHM’s potential to act as a “gateway to the world, bringing world traditions to participate in the life of the opera house.”12 But if ROHM brings the world to Oman, who brings Omanis to the world? A more recent announcement from the ROHM Board promises a five-year training program for Omani artists, though the details have not yet been released.13 These divergent stances regarding ROHM’s role in cultivating Omani performers suggest that debate about these goals continues at the highest levels of ROHM administration. Mr. Egan’s title is “Interim CEO”; he is slated to return to the Kennedy Center, though the institutional partnership will remain in place. One important question for the ROHM in the near to intermediate future, therefore, is whether it will be able to attract highly competent permanent administrators and a sufficient number of professionally trained personnel. The inaugural season has not been without glitches: ROHM experienced a surprising degree of administrative turnover in 2011, including the departure of the previous CEO in August, leading to Mr. Egan’s hire, and the more recent of ROHM General Director Iman Al Hindawi. Many of the current staff members are young and endearingly enthusiastic but occasionally seem overwhelmed by their responsibilities; the ROHM website has also encountered

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numerous technical difficulties, which have resulted in inconsistent availability of webpages and have curtailed online ticket sales. These problems can be resolved. But the more formidable difficulty lies in the vision for ROHM as it relates to Oman itself. Is this a world-class Omani performing arts center, or is it simply a world-class performing arts center in Oman? For the moment, ROHM seems to have left that enigma to the side, focusing instead on ensuring a slate of eminent performers and a high and consistent level of artistic finesse in its performances. Yet like the ceramic dragon trumpets in their display case, the question remains at the very heart of the building – coiled in pregnant silence amid the magnificent decor.

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Dora Maurer, Seven Twists, 1979, 23x23 cm, silver print. Image courtesy of Vintage Gallery, Budapest.

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UNTITLED (12TH ISTANBUL BIENNALE)

Sam Thorne

،‫ البوابة التاسعة‬،)‫بﻼ عنوان (بيناﱄ اسطنبول الثاين عﴩ‬ 163 ‫صفحة‬

Over the last few years, a sense of doubt has crept into conversations about the practice and future of biennials. The mood was captured by the title of a three-day conference held in Bergen in September 2009: “To Biennial or not to Biennial?” This question – with its clanging allusion to Hamlet’s soliloquy – extends the debate beyond curatorial, artistic, or financial imperatives into the existential realm. Jens Hoffmann, director of the CCA Wattis in San Francisco and co-curator of the 12th Istanbul Biennial, has been a strident critic of recent biennial practice and active in his attempts to combat what Hans Ulrich Obrist once dubbed “exhibition amnesia.” Most prominently, he co-founded The Exhibitionist in 2010, a biannual “journal of exhibition making” whose inaugural issue included not one but four essays on the 11th Istanbul Biennial (2009). Hoffmann emphasized his familiarity with the Istanbul Biennial’s recent history in his co-authored catalogue essay, and in an unassuming way, the title he selected with co-curator Adriano Pedrosa – Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial) – did away with both the bombast of Hou Hanru’s 2007 edition (Not Only Possible, But Also Necessary: Optimism in the Age of Global War) while aiming to efface the city-centric rhetoric of Charles Esche and Vasif Kortun in 2005 (titled simply Istanbul). Many of the early responses to Untitled have focused on its use (or misuse) of Félix González-Torres: the late CubanAmerican artist’s work was taken as a “point of departure” by the curators, and the format of his titles was mimicked by Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial). But relegating the exhibition’s locale to parentheses is representative of the Biennial’s most significant shortcoming: its suppression of both the city itself and the local specificities of previous editions. Since Dan Cameron’s edition in 2003, the biennial has expanded further out into Istanbul’s urban fabric, occupying historical sites and often working outside of the white cube. In 2011, it was

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shrunk back to its central two venues, Antrepo no. 3 and 5, two former customs houses on the banks of the Bosphorus, which have been used in every biennial since René Block’s in 1995. In collaboration with the architect Ryue Nishizawa, Hoffmann and Pedrosa divided the spaces up into five node-like group exhibitions and fifty-five solo shows. Between these open-air pavilions ran skinny corridors of corrugated iron, dead spaces that partially ruptured the contiguity of the network of white cube-like galleries. Much of the talk at the opening focused on the exhibition design: What did it mean for a biennial to look like a museum? Was this an implied critique of the inconsistent program at the adjacent Istanbul Modern, a kind of temporary museum of international quality? Or was it simply symptomatic of how supposedly progressive biennials and their curators cling to prevalent exhibition formats that have withstood the test of time, irrespective of location and intent? Inserting art works into crumbling, “exotic” locales is surely a questionable response, but was this an improvement? The 12th Istanbul Biennial amounted to an abandonment of site or context specificity. It did not aim to make viewers question the location or become aware of the conditions that led Stephen Kinzer to claim – in an essay published in The New York Review of Books one month before the exhibition opened – that: “Politically Turkey has changed more in the last ten years than it did in the previous eighty.” Certainly, no exhibition should be forced or expected to bear witness to contemporaneous historical circumstances, but as Elena Filipovic has argued in The Biennial Reader, biennials’ “specificity is precisely their potential to be specific.” Though the biennial was conceived of and researched during the Arab Spring, opening just as its neighbor Syria teetered on the brink of civil war, with refugees camped on Turkey’s southern border, the exhibition’s context was acknowledged by no more than a few paintings (by Mona Vatamanu and

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Florin Tudor). The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was a more frequent point of reference, indicative of the alacrity with which the biennial channeled prepackaged conflict of days gone by, and the squeamishness it displayed regarding the uprisings on Turkey’s borders and across the Mediterranean, not to mention the country’s growing diplomatic presence in the region. This was a biennial predicated on retrenchment rather than experimentation, as Hoffmann and Pedrosa eschewed the discursive strategies that have characterized biennials for the last decade. For example, the intensive lecture programs that have been a staple of large-scale international exhibitions since Catherine David’s documenta in 1997 were pared back to a one-day conference. Also turning away from socially engaged work and documentary film, the emphasis of Untitled was on the photographic document, textiles, and text-based archival work. The turn-of-the-millennium period that spawned expansive, expensive, and sometimes experimental biennials, such as Francesco Bonami’s 2003 Venice Biennale – which Hoffmann has described as “a pivotal moment in the development of curatorial practice” in September 2011’s frieze – has clearly come to a close. The 12th Istanbul Biennial posed the argument that lucidity and structural legibility are today quite radical things – a somewhat depressing wager, though not an unwelcome one. This led to certain successes: the catalogue is a model of clarity, and the exhibition itself boasted simply titled, manageably sized group shows and straightforward solo presentations. The best of these – including shows by Dóra Maurer, Greta Bratescu, Zarina Hashmi, and Füsun Onur –

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comprised compact overviews of work from older women. Likewise, the appropriation of González-Torres as a patron saint was at points elegant. Each of the five central group shows adopted a title or theme of a work by the artist, who died from AIDS-related illness in 1996, two years after his partner and frequent subject Ross Laycock. González-Torres’s work itself was not presented but reproduced in the catalogue and described in a wall text, framed by the curators as an inspiration “in the way that a poem, a piece of music, a political event, or theoretical concept can serve as a starting point for a curatorial endeavor.” This made for an easily navigable, lucid exhibition structure, but also resulted in a fraught set of thematics. Of course, curators often elect a specific figure as a particular inspiration: the concurrent 11th Biennale de Lyon (curated by Victoria Noorthoorn) and Dublin Contemporary (curated by Jota Castro and Christian Viveros-Fauné) each claimed different versions of W. B. Yeats’s radical credentials (not to mention taking the same line of his poetry as their respective titles), while the previous edition of the Istanbul Biennial, curated by the Croatian collective What, How & for Whom, leaned heavily on Bertolt Brecht. But never has the work and, more crucially, the life of a single figure been woven so insistently into the fabric of a biennial. At its most egregious, this curatorial conceit amounted to a crass instrumentalization of González-Torres’s legacy. In their catalogue essay, Hoffmann and Pedrosa argue that GonzálezTorres’s geographical liminality (he was Cuban by birth and lived in Puerto Rico before moving to New York) and his enigmatic work helped guide curatorial

REVIEWS AND CRITIQUE

decisions. But in one of the more problematic group shows – Untitled (Ross) – it was difficult not to think that the artist’s sexuality was the more important form of liminality for the curators. Here was a slew of artists, all but two men, most – such as Tom Burr, Colter Jacobsen, Ira Sachs, Collier Schorr, and Tammy Rae Carland – American, some of whom happen to be gay. The extreme subtlety of González-Torres’s work, its evocation of bodily presence and absence, of devotion and loss, was transmuted into a litany of empty beds and often naked (male) bodies. Aside from this group, there were relatively few North American artists in the biennial, with most of the artists coming from or based in Latin America, the Middle East, or Eastern Europe. This was a welcome shift from the Eurocentrism of Bice Curiger’s roughly concurrent Venice Biennale (in fact, there has yet to be a non-Western curator of Venice). Tellingly, though, the US artists included in the Istanbul Biennial were mostly confined to Untitled (Ross) and Untitled (Death by Gun). Undoubtedly the most problematic of the five group shows, the latter was a parade of corpses and weaponry, including photojournalism by Eddie Adams, Weegee, and Mathew Brady and iconic pieces by Chris Burden, Roy Lichtenstein, and Raymond Pettibon. Few will be critical of Hoffmann and Pedrosa’s approach to regional representation, but their vision of the world feels irresponsible in its limiting of issues as broad in range as AIDS and gun violence to the US. Over the last five years or so, innovative exhibition making has gradually shifted from the biennial to the museum. Institutions such as the Van Abbemuseum

in Eindhoven, in particular their 2011 collaboration with the International Art Academy of Palestine in Ramallah, or SALT’s two recently opened spaces in Istanbul itself, are increasingly considering new ways to work with archives, collections, and audiences. Meanwhile, Hoffmann and Pedrosa consciously sought to break out of the accepted modes of biennial making that have developed over the last fifteen years and did so with significant recourse to those of the museum. However, if this was a biennial adopting the guise of a museum, it was the guise of a rather outmoded institution. Hoffmann and Pedrosa’s statement of intent – to pay “renewed attention to the importance of the exhibition itself ” – need not preclude any of the things that they have denied themselves, such as local engagement and innovative exhibition practice. In stripping away the excesses of recent biennial practice, they are not questioning received forms so much as dismantling whatever it was that made biennials specific and relevant in the first place.

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ARABIC INSERT

F RO M T H E WA L L E D T O W N O F E I G H T G AT E S TO T H E A RC H I T E C T U R E O F T H E C I T Y Sociologist and historian Waddah Charrarah delves into the two-hundred-year story of how Beirut spilled out beyond the confines of a walled town and began to encompass the suburbs of the surrounding hills. Waddah Chararah

It took nearly seven decades for Beirut to leave its gates behind. Once a walled town of narrow alleys, families, craftsmen, and small natural harbors, it started to formulate various new networks of interconnection. These decades of transition began with the campaign of Ibrahim Pasha in 1830-40 and continued until the turn of the twentieth century. This period witnessed the establishment of the Beirut-Damascus Road at the end of the 1860s and the modern foundations of the port in the late 1880s. A new municipal council took over control of the city’s urban planning, along with its expansion and organization. The council did away with the tightly packed, interconnected shops of the narrow Fashkha market street, which ran from Bourj Square to Bab Idriss, and established Tareeq Al Mulahimin (Sailors Street) as its parallel to the west, making room for agencies and offices of multinational corporations to set up shop. Before the destruction of the wall as a material, architectural, ideological, and social entity, the gateways, or portals, stood watch over the alleys, roads, and markets of the city. They watched over the city night and day, over the commercial and social relations between its interior and exterior. The city’s heart before the wall was destroyed – or left to collapse – used to be Al Amri Mosque, where men of learning were taught, where they passed down knowledge, prestige, and influence through generations within their homes, families, and children. When the Petit Serail was constructed and modeled after the Grand Serail on the hill overlooking the sea, it was established near the cemetery of the eastern Kharija Gate, one of the wall’s gates that stood opposite the central Bab Idriss. Cemeteries are fixed points outside of a vacillating and always changing reality. Bachoura – first the cemetery, then later the namesake of a neighborhood – was a suburb close to the walled town. Bachoura was adjacent to the wide square outside the city walls. The square was given the strange name of Aal Sour (Along the Wall), a literal expression of its location and place. The suburban square was, one might say, the mother of the gateways. It was a stage for the celebration of public festivals, before these celebrations were relocated to Horsh Snobar (the Pine Forest Park) in the distant secondary suburbs. Festivals, be they religious, folkloric, or popular traditions, are a suburban space vis-à-vis the centrality of everyday life, with its monotonous timekeeping and religious strictures. During festivals, either in the square or in the coastal area of Ramlet Al Baida, people of the city could do what they forbade themselves and their children from doing under normal circumstances, in the interior space of the walled city. Playing, dancing, and mixing together were partially permitted, along with song, intimate glances, and perhaps even physical affection; their clothes were elegant and decorative, the bonds of neighborhood and familial identity loosened. Translated by Eyad Houssami Read the full translation by Sam Wilder on portal9journal.org.

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W H E R E M A J N O U N ROA M S Majnoun is at the edges and margins of the city, in its neglected and desolate areas. It is in those spaces and hidden corners that we find ourselves before a city that we have never seen before, a city that never ceases to surprise us in its peculiarities that hold the passage of time Illustrations by Hatem Imam Introduction by Fadi Tofeili

Since we first began sharing stories about Majnoun, his poetry, and his mad love for Leila, “there has always been a degree of uncertainty” about him, he who allegedly first “spun these tales.”1 Whatever we heard about Majnoun was clouded in doubt and ambiguity, for “no one knew if he was real, if he ever existed, if he was a poet or not, if his name was Mazahim Bin Al Harith or Mouazh Bin Kalaib or Mahdi Bin Al Mulawah or Qais Bin Al Mulawah or who knows what.” Even his affiliation to a tribe or ethnic group remained nebulous and unknown in a time of Arab history when such communal identities were self-evident. But when it comes to the delusion and imagination of Majnoun’s tales, storytellers are all of the same mind. Majnoun’s stories and poems were compiled by Esfahani in the fourth century of the Hijri calendar, or in the eleventh century AD. The poems and anecdotes of spurious sources thus fell upon the communal consciousness. People then began building on the body of work by appending their own pertinent stories and passing on the tales so that each contributed to the “structure of the communal imagination.” Delusion and imagination, both contentious matters of dispute and quarrel, became part of this “communal structure ... a circumstance of kinship, affiliation, and social ties.” Majnoun, or so we are told, was led by his madness to insanity, “for he went wild and went the way of beasts, eating only foraged herbs and drinking water with deer, all unfazed. His madness drove him from his homeland in Najd2 until he reached the borders of the Levant,” leaving behind his neighborhood – its corners, children, and happenings – and wandering off like a vagabond. He cut off all links with civilization, Bedouin or otherwise. So we did what they always used to do: just as they spread the stories and tales way back when, so have we, too, continued the legacy by following Majnoun’s mad imagination today, roving between places, sectors, towns, cities, and the open country – a strange, uncharted course. Majnoun is at the edges and margins of the city, in its neglected and desolate areas. It is in those spaces and hidden corners that we find ourselves before a city that we have never seen before, a city that never ceases to surprise us in its peculiarities that hold the passage of time. Translated by Eyad Houssami

1 Waddah Chararah, Akhbar Majnoun Bani Aamir li Abi Al Faraj Al Asbahani wa Bazheelahu Akhbar Al Khabr li Waddah Chararah [The Tales of Majnoun Bani Aamir by Abi Al Faraj Al Esfahani with the Supplement Chronicle of Tales by Waddah Chararah] (Beirut: Dar Al Jadeed, 1990). This section of Portal 9 is based on Chararah’s book. Majnoun means “the mad man” in Arabic. 2 Najd refers to the vast plateau that spans the central region of what is now Saudi Arabia.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Muhammad Abi Samra is a Lebanese journalist and novelist whose latest book is Trablous: Sahet Allah wa Mina Al Hadatha (Tripoli: Allah Square and the Port of Modernity). Hazem Al Ameen is a Lebanese writer, journalist, and the author of Al Salafi Al Yateem (The Orphan Salafi). Shaker Al Anbari is an Iraqi novelist who lives and works in Baghdad, and his latest novel is Najmet Al Bataween (The Star of Bataween). Joumana Al Jabri has partnered on a number of projects that contribute to advancing dialogue for the Arab region including TEDxRamallah 2011, Khatt’s Typographic Matchmaking in the City, and Al Manakh: Gulf Continued. Sophia Al-Maria lives in Doha, Qatar, where she works at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. Rasha Atrash is a Lebanese journalist, writer, and the author of Saboun (Soap). Shumon Basar is a writer, editor, and curator. Youssef Bazzi is a Lebanese poet, writer, and the author of Yasser Arafat Looked at Me and Smiled. Pooja Bhatia is a writer who lived in Haiti from 2007 to 2011. Waddah Chararah is a Lebanese writer, sociologist, and the author of Ahwaou Beirut wa Masarihouha (Beirut’s Passions and Platforms). Kareem Elgendy is an architect and sustainability consultant based in London and the Founder of Carboun, an initiative promoting sustainability in the Middle East. Mohamed Elshahed is a New York University doctoral candidate in Middle East Studies writing his dissertation on mid-twentiethcentury urban and architectural development in Egypt, and he blogs at Cairobserver.com. Tahire Erman, PhD, is an associate professor of urban studies in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.

Malu Halasa writes books on the Middle East and is Editor-at-Large of Portal 9. Katherine Hennessey holds a PhD in English, with a concentration in Irish theatre, from the University of Notre Dame in the United States and has lived in Sanaa, Yemen since 2009. Mohammad Houjeiry is a Lebanese writer, journalist, and the author of Manamat Haifa (Haifa’s Dreams) and of the forthcoming books Al Raqs Al Sharqi wa Al Siyassah (Belly Dancing and Politics) and Saam Beirut (Beirut Boredom). Hatem Imam is a visual artist and designer who works and lives in Beirut, Lebanon. Alireza Mahmoudi Iranmehr is a Tehran-based writer and literary critic. John Jervis is United Kingdom Editor of ArtAsiaPacific and is currently writing about cities in the 1960s. Omar Kholeif is an Egyptian-born, United Kingdom-based writer, curator, and Reviews and Critique Editor for Portal 9. Ahmad Makia is a writer and researcher, and he is currently an editor at The State. Khaled Malas is an architect from Damascus. Leben Nelson Moro is Acting Director of External Relations and Assistant Professor at University of Juba, South Sudan. Giorgos Moutafis is an Athensbased photojournalist whose work has been published in international magazines and newspapers, and for the past year he has been following the uprisings in the Arab world. Nat Muller is a Rotterdam-based independent curator and critic working at the intersections of aesthetics, media, and politics, as well as (new) media and art in the Middle East, and she recently curated the Abraaj Capital Art Prize.

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Bert de Muynck is an architect, writer, and co-director of MovingCities, and he lives and works in Shanghai, China. Manal Nahhas is a Lebanese journalist who lives and works in Beirut. Youssef Rakha is a writer and photographer living in Cairo, and he is the author of the forthcoming novel, Al Tamaseeh (Crocodiles). Hazem Saghieh is a Lebanese writer and journalist, and his latest book is Al Baath Al Souree: Tareekh Moujaz (The Syrian Baath: A Brief History). Mohamed Soueid is a Lebanese writer and film director. Sam Thorne is Associate Editor of frieze magazine and is based in London, United Kingdom. Michael Ulfstjerne is an anthropologist and PhD candidate at the Institute of Comparative Cultural Studies at Copenhagen University. James Westcott is a writer living in Rotterdam and the author of When Marina Abramovic Dies: A Biography and co-editor of Project Japan: Metabolism Talks. Brian Whitaker has performed a variety of jobs at The Guardian including, most recently, seven years as Middle East editor and currently the Comment is Free editor, and he is the author of Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East and What’s Really Wrong with the Middle East. Sarah Lily Yassine is an urban planner currently working on public space projects in Beirut with 4b Architects and on a proposal for the derelict railway stations of Lebanon.