The Crisis of Heritage in Beirut: Corruption, Capital and Reconstruction
by Yasmina El Chami
On 4 August 2020, an enormous explosion at the port of Beirut shook a city of two million inhabitants, and shattered buildings and homes around a three kilometre radius, highlighting in the process the extent and criminality of decades of political corruption, negligence and clientelism. In many ways, it was a fitting end for the myth of the merchant republic and Mediterranean port-city that had animated Lebanon’s raison d’être since its earliest foundations. It exposed what had been scarcely covered up since the country’s creation in 1943, that the political system in place was unable to effect a working – never mind productive – vision or system of governance for the nation. The destruction has also engendered another wave of anxiety and fear for the quickly disappearing architectural heritage of the capital, which has been at risk for the last two decades (figs. 1, 2). As noted by leading Lebanese urbanists, the neighbourhoods most affected by the blast were already under threat – of gentrification, of replacement by new neoliberal real-estate investments, of forced ruination.[1] But the crisis of heritage in Beirut today runs deeper than a simple crisis of neoliberal capital, or a neglect of architecture’s value. What we continue to face in Lebanon is a crisis of political, economic and social identity, and also one of sovereignty.
1. Traditional houses in Mar Mikhael, destroyed by the 4 August blast. Credit: Carl Gerges.
Heritage in Beirut has been a major issue at least since the end of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1991), which left large parts of the city destroyed, and culminated in the complete expropriation of the core of the centre by Solidere, a real-estate company created specifically for the reconstruction.[2] Even before the blast of 4 August, the reality faced by the city’s historic built environment was dire, and highly contentious. It had been under constant threat, not only of gentrification – in particular in the neighbourhoods of Mar Mikhael and Gemmayzeh – but also of neglect and abandonment due to complicated inheritance laws, or from the more insidious fates of commodification and ‘museumification’ (fig. 3).[3] And whilst the immediate need is indeed the recovery of people’s homes and daily lives,[4] perhaps this final episode of urban violence is also a chance for a much-needed and long-term reconsideration of the meaning and value of ‘heritage’ in Beirut (figs. 4, 5). This is especially crucial if ‘heritage’ is to remain a lived and shared social experience, rather than a simple referent to an illusory ‘lieu de mémoire’.[5]
Only a few days after the blast, there were already reports of real-estate agencies beginning to scope out the site, hoping for an early advantage in the imminent speculation game that will no doubt affect the districts surrounding the port soon.[6] Understandably, the fear and precedent of Solidere is present in everyone’s minds. And yet, the architectural and spatial problems of its masterplan were never fully elucidated; its issues, spatial and social, have to do with much broader issues of political economy and identity, and a lack of vision for the city and the nation’s raison d’être.
2. Destroyed central hall in Gemmayzeh. Credit: Author.
3. Abandoned mansion in Sanayeh. Credit: Author.
When heritage is invoked in Lebanon today, it most often refers to a traditional domestic typology that was prevalent in the 19th century, the ‘central-hall’ house. But the central-hall type itself belongs to a history of imperial domination and contestation that is in dire need of further excavation and questioning. The traditional central-hall house, an Ottoman typology, was elaborated in the 19th century as a response to the growth of Beirut as a merchant port-city; it emblematised both this political raison d’être and a new mode of bourgeois citizenry.[7] It combined an Ottoman nine-square grid, Levantine arched windows, and French and Italian imported materials, reflecting the specific maritime economy of Beirut and the surrounding territory. It was also paradigmatic of the finely calibrated relationship between private and public spheres in this period, and embodied the familial and patrimonial structure of an Arab-Ottoman society.
Evolving from the open courtyard house, whose introversion represented the social diagram of an Arabic society formed around the individual family unit, the orientation of the central-hall house towards the street in the Ottoman period signified new modes of socio-economic exchange in which the relation between the individual and society became reliant on commerce and trade.[8] The transformation of the central hall to an office building during the French Mandate era, however, indicated that the individual unit had lost its meaning as a domestic urban structure. It was replaced by modern French administrative functions, epitomised by the French projects of urban planning that reshaped the city in this period (fig. 6).[9] This loss of structural significance was completed by the post-war reconstruction of the centre by Solidere, in which the central hall – if retained – was reduced to a facade hiding open building plans, to comply with generic office requirements and corporate needs.[10] Solidere’s masterplan in the city centre not only dispossessed its residents, it completely restructured the urban realm by transforming a type that had grown organically into an ‘image’ of heritage – albeit one that did not even critically reflect on its provenance and legacy.
In their early iterations, both in the late Ottoman and the French Mandate periods, the alterations to this ‘dominant’ domestic type had accompanied transformations to the overall urban plan of the city, and therefore had operated through iterations of scalar transformations, from that of the block, to the neighbourhood, to the city, and ultimately to the ‘nation’, which was more akin to a collection of provinces at that point.[11] However, in Solidere’s masterplan, the city was no longer constructed through a continuity of scalar relationships between the individual and society, between architecture and the urban. Its masterplan essentially laid out a detailed zoning plan for an entirely new city, claiming to be built on the remains of the previous one. It was designed as a series of intentional urban and architectural gestures and compositions, the references for which lay not in the symbol of the state but in the financial capital of the new joint-stock real-estate company.[12] To that end, the masterplan’s morphological and typological scale departed completely from the previous urban fabric of the city, eliminating in the process the scalar textures of tertiary and secondary street networks, varied functional open spaces, and interrelated domestic and commercial typologies.
Solidere’s masterplan was therefore a complete departure from the historic, incremental process through which a single domestic type had effectively shaped the city until the civil war – namely, through the repetition of the same structural organisation of space, reflective of the relationship of the family unit with a specific merchant society, embodied in the ‘central hall’ at a series of different scales. Instead, what was proposed in Solidere’s centre was an architecture that relied on the facade as a container and image of ‘heritage’, with little connection between the scale of its architectural organisation and that of the surrounding city. What Solidere ultimately failed to do after the war was to understand the significance of architectural space in the articulation not only of an urban realm, but also of a sustainable political economy and identity for the city, and for the capital. In other words, it failed to propose a much-needed socio-political basis on which the fraught nation could reconstruct itself.
4. Recovery efforts by newly formed coalitions of NGOs in Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhael. Credit: Author.
5. Destroyed central hall that housed a series of restaurants and a bakery in Mar Mikhael. Credit: Author.
Solidere’s neoliberal model is one that has spread to Achrafieh and other areas of Beirut in the past two decades, and it is the threat of another Solidere that is gripping architects and urbanists again today. But the superficial treatment of historic types has not been limited only to Solidere’s area of operation, and ‘heritage’ buildings in recent decades have been treated in a similar way across the city and the Lebanese territory (fig. 7). This indicates that the predicament facing historic typologies runs deeper than Solidere’s legacy.
The reality is that the central-hall house – a single-family domestic unit – has long expired as a productive typology. Even when its interiors have been preserved, its functions have changed drastically, and it is no longer able to contain contemporary domestic needs and conditions, or the realities of the city’s transformed economic model. Where central-hall types have been preserved, they have been transformed into boutique hotels, expensive stores, or restaurants and cafes. The only sustainable function for these buildings today is then as commercial enterprises, in which their historic aspect increases their retail or entertainment value. In other words, their real-estate value precludes their survival as anything but an image or a commodity. There is then a real need to question the continued relevance and significance of the central hall, both as a historically constructed typology loaded with political implications, and in terms of its ability to sustain contemporary – let alone future – possibilities for the city.
6. Evolution and transformation of the historic urban fabric of Beirut and its associated dominant type, the central hall. Drawn by author based on maps by May Davie.
7. Residences Ibrahim Sursock by Ziad Akl Architects. Credits: Pietro Savorelli.
The old fabric of Beirut and the streets of Mar Mikhael did indeed offer some of the last spaces in which heritage was practised as a lived reality, rather than as a memory – in which the scale of the urban, dependent on this historic domestic type, still allowed the kinds of social relationships precluded elsewhere in the city (fig. 8). But it is our duty as architects and planners to question the kinds of relationships we do want to preserve and sustain in our city, to consider the precise way in which architectural forms and urban types carry such relationships, and to envision new modes of producing them that can also address contemporary architectural, political and economic exigencies.
The central-hall type represents the last time an attempt was made at articulating a productive identity for the city, albeit one that was developed prior to the formation of a Lebanese nation, and that reflected broader geopolitical and imperial needs and ambitions. Tragically, no other vision has since been elaborated, and the city carries these expired domestic types as pathological legacies, emblematic of both the tragic past century and the continued inability to formulate a new sovereign vision. The issue of heritage hints to an essential lack of urban and political vision, which today confronts us once more.
Heritage and architecture are deeply political spatial articulations of programmes that are able to carry and project new possibilities for the city. The present moment facing Lebanon is not only about our architectural heritage, but also, and more crucially, about the possibility of elaborating – perhaps for the first time – a productive cultural and political identity, a foundation on which the meaning of heritage itself is predicated. If we are truly to recuperate architecture’s potential to reclaim a city and a nation we need to be able to rethink both a productive political economy and new forms of social and urban living that make sense within the prevailing limitations of our time. Only then can we begin to challenge the forms of future real-estate development as well as the fate of the old central halls, if any remain.
8. Textured fabric of Mar Mikhael and Gemmayzeh. Credit: Carl Gerges.
Notes:
1. See the work of the Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut at www.beiruturbanlab.com.
2. Solidere stands for Société Libanaise pour le Développement et la Reconstruction du Centre-ville de Beyrouth.
3. Robert Saliba, ‘Historicizing Early Modernity, Decolonizing Heritage: Conservation Design Strategies in Postwar Beirut’, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, 25.1 (2013), pp. 7–24.
4. See Mona Fawaz, ‘Beirut Needs a People-Centred Recovery’, The New Arab (15 August 2020), online: https://english.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/2020/8/15/to-pre-empt-disaster-capitalism-beirut-needs-a-people-centred-recovery; and Howayda Al-Harity, A Participatory Recovery of Post-Blast Beirut, The Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (21 August 2020), online: https://www.lcps-lebanon.org/agendaArticle.php?id=188.
5. Pierre Nora, Rethinking France: Les Lieux de Mémoire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 2–20.
6. ‘Beirut is Not for Sale’, Public Radio International (03 September 2020), online: https://www.pri.org/stories/2020-09-03/beirut-not-sale-besieged-residents-fend-developers-investors.
7. Michael Davie, ed., La Maison Beyrouthine aux Trois Arcs: Une Architecture Bourgeoise du Levant (Beirut: Academie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts, 2003).
8. May Davie, Beyrouth 1825–1875: Un Siècle et Demi d’Urbanisme (Beirut: OEA, 2001).
9. For a detailed typological analysis of the buildings of the French Mandate see Robert Saliba, Beirut City Center Recovery: The Foch-Allenby and Etoile Conservation Area (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2004).
10. Yasmina El Chami, Beirut: From City of Capital to Capital City (MPhil Dissertation, London: AA Projective Cities, 2013).
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
Yasmina El Chami is an architect and final-year PhD Candidate in the Centre for Urban Conflicts Research (UCR) at the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral research looks at the spread of missionary educational institutions in 19th-century Lebanon, and their role in the urbanisation of Beirut. She holds a BArch from the American University of Beirut, and an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design from the Architectural Association in London. This January she will be taking up a Scouloudi-Doctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research, London.
