Beirut’s Forest: Pining Away the Public Space
06-08-2012
At the heart of the task of political foundations and the complex task of reconstruction in postwar scenarios is the question whether such new foundations are possible. Look only at Libya, where this week bandits briefly took control of the Tripoli airport, and we see the difficulty of founding new polities on the ruins of failed dictatorships. The repeated failure to build civil society in many countries only heightens the question: is postwar political foundation in the Middle East possible?
For want of a better example one can always turn to Lebanon: A surprising textbook case of both success and failure in reconstruction, while at the same time the political foundations remain unchanged and the political terms of negotiations have remained more or less unchanged throughout almost an entire century of regional and civil wars. The reconstruction of Beirut has been plagued by fierce criticism as much as by a relatively positive reception in light of the relative order wrought among the hostile parties involved.
While the reconstruction of Beirut is almost a fait accompli and there’s little room for anything but an academic debate, this refers only to the re-making of the historical downtown area around the iconic Martyrs’ Square area in compliance with 1991 National Master Plan by Dar al-Handasah and IAURIF for Solidere.
[caption id="attachment_6103" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Martyrs' Square, 1992-Photo by Alex Hofford"]
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Here it is crucial to place Solidere’s plans for Beirut in the context of the colonial visions of French planners spanning from 1932 through 1991 and from then to present day.
The Danger Plan (1932) was prepared under the French mandate by a French consulting firm and was the first systematic attempt to lay out an urban plan for the Lebanese capital; followed then by the Ecochard Master Plan (1943, right after independence) that was never mindful of Lebanon’s multi-confessional landscape and failed to account for the possible growth of the city which remained largely unregulated. The General Master Plan (1952) followed and is still considered the only planning strategy established on a legal basis.
Also based upon a French model, the master plan dealt mostly with broadening transportation networks and could hardly envision the expansion of the prosperous years 1958-1967 of the Shihab era during which Beirut experienced agitated expansion. The Plan Directoire Beyrouth et Ses Banlieux (1964) was also orchestrated by Ecochard and tried to limit the city’s expansion – predicting the risk of non-regulation and environmental hazard – but it was never applied. Two later master plans were introduced in 1977 and 1992 but the 1991 directive prevailed.
In this context two particular sites of memory are important in any attempt to re-shape the public spaces of the city in a postwar context; the first being the historical downtown (Martyrs’ Square) that divides the city between East and West and the second no less iconic Beirut Pine Forest (known in Arabic as Horch al-Sanawbar) that divides the city between North and South. The importance of these sites resides in that spite of the failed policy attempts to regulate and integrate them into systematic plans; they were both contested by the population of Beirut as public spaces in the broadest sense: Arenas of inter-confessional interaction.
Previously, I discussed the background of Martyrs’ Square in “Beirut: Reinventing or Destroying the Public Space?” in the context of Hannah Arendt’s ideas on the meaning of the public realm and the world as articulated in The Human Condition, and grounded the problem in the ambiguous legacy of the civil war in Lebanese political historiography and memory. Hereby I shall offer a brief discussion on Beirut Pine Forest and turn the discussion from the persistence of a public world to the question of enacting public spaces.
The Pine Forest originally comprised about 1.25 million square meters (now reduced to 330.000) in the 17th century and its viability as a public space precedes that of Martyrs’ Square (public garden was launched in 1879) as it is known that since the 1840’s the Ottoman rulers kept watch over the forest as a public entity and the Lebanese claimed administrative authority over it, turning it into municipal property around 1878.
The most relevant information on the forest – both historical and in terms of social practices – can be found in Fadi S. Shayya’s paper “Enacting Public Space: History and Social Practices of Beirut Horch al-Sanawbar” (2006). He tells us about the relevance of the forest throughout modern history, mainly derived from the celebration of “Horch el-Eid” during “Eid al-Adha” when large numbers of people gathered in Horch to celebrate the occasion of Muslim pilgrims coming home from Mecca after fasting during Ramadan and after 1840, festivities and activities of recreation, sports and folklore of Beiruti Muslims moved to the park.
During the world wars and long Lebanese civil war the forest was off-limits to the public and it was bombed and burnt out by Israeli jet fighters during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. After the end of the civil war around 1995 and in the context of postwar reconstruction the forest was “re-designed” (again in a joint French-Lebanese urban planning venture) and opened to the public, but since then the Municipality of Beirut – rightful owner of the park – has kept the forest off limits to the public and accessible only with special permission.
Different political and bureaucratic issues have arisen around the issue of opening or not opening the forest to the public: At the time of Shayya’s paper (2006) most of the park remained closed and only accessible on certain dates and under certain rules. In 2005 Lebanese daily The Daily Star reported that the forest was withering away after the re-design in absence of a proper team to look after it together with lack of enough security to operate it and five years later, in an extensive report published by NOW Lebanon, it was said that through the forest represents 72% of Beirut’s green space, two thirds of it remain still closed to the public.
It should be noted here that according to official statistics, Beirut has fifty times less greenery than it is recommended by international environmental bodies and recently the American University in Beirut released a scientific study detailing the high levels of pollution in the city. As a part of the reconstruction plans orchestrated in the historical downtown, Solidere is scheduled to open a “Garden of Forgiveness” in the area, but this project comprises a mere 25.000 square meters and is meant to function more as a museum than as a public space that can be contested through interaction by the different communities of the city.
The approach to the reconstruction of Beirut – exemplified both by the historical downtown and the forest – is a critical example of the perverse relationship of Lebanon’s political establishment to both violence and power. In her book Architects Without Frontiers: War, Reconstruction and Responsibility, Esther Charlesworth mentions three major themes that can be learnt from the reconstruction of Beirut as policy failures: Lack of public consultation, apolitical architecture and the preference of process over product.
Aseel Sawalha on the other hand (author of “Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City”) argues forcefully that violence has been a major issue and guiding policy of postwar reconstruction. In his “Healing the Wounds of the War: Placing the War-displaced in Postwar Beirut” (published in the volume “Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World”) he discusses at length the “postwar state of emergency” in which the rush of reconstruction created internal displacement out of those who had been already displaced by the war into urban Beirut.
War-displaced residents were offered very modest compensations to move out of their homes in order to make space for the sprawling skyscrapers and luxury apartments on demand, what included also the legendary Valley of the Jews, in which there is a newly renovated synagogue but no Jews. Sawalha says: “Reconstruction means cleaning and organizing disordered spaces, repressing illegality, imposing aesthetic standards on what has become unsightly. As we will see, a lively public discourse on the war-displaced reinforces this enthusiasm for the modern, and the power relations underlying it, in many ways.”
From that time on begins a discourse split between “muhajarin” (displaced victims) and “muhtalin” (opportunistic occupiers) claiming both compensation and usually ruling in favor of the latter. He speaks about the case of an interviewed displaced victim: “Now that there is a legitimate state, we do not have to seek sectarian connections and alliances, he told me. Soon, though, Ali encountered obstacles, leading him to suspect that he had not asked the right people for help. The war time militias and associated mafias, rather than being eclipsed by the state, now operated within it, he concluded.”
Sawalha concludes his paper saying: “According to this article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Lebanese state and its institutions (the Ministry of the Displaced, the Central Fund for the Displaced), as well as the private developers and the public-private company Solidere, all violated the rights of Beirut’s war-displaced to a decent home, privacy and reputation. In effect they created more displacement, as their projects for reconstruction generated a series of postwar emergencies”.
While this is true for the private citizen, the displacement from the public space – exemplified by both Centre Ville and the Pine Forest – does not exactly help the Lebanese communities of Beirut to engage in a power-sharing argument or discussion that might alleviate the burden of violence. What role does architecture play or can play above the level of policy-making and the question is also begot of whether there is something that architects – in both cases – could have done better to prevent exclusion of the Lebanese from participating in the public space?
The question is purely theoretical. Charlesworth however brings up Foucault to say: “In his seminal essay, ‘Space, knowledge and power’, Michel Foucault engages in this broader debate on the social role of architects: Architecture in itself cannot solve social problems: I think that it can and does provide positive effects when the liberating intentions of the architect coincide with the real practice of people in the exercise of their freedom.”
Charlesworth lays out an interesting hierarchy of categories of roles that architects play in postwar reconstruction as such: Pathologists, Heroes, Historicists, Colonialists, Social Reformers and Educators. Her argument is that different architects, policies and companies exercised all of these roles at different times and in different ways. The facts of reconstruction remain albeit unchallenged; including the fact that the reconstruction of Beirut did bring hope to many people, even if it was a false and transitory hope.
The public space however – and here is where Hannah Arendt continues to be ultimately relevant – cannot be eliminated or weakened without inflicting a deadly blow on human plurality and as such it continues to be constantly contested in Lebanon. In February 2012 it was reported by Green Prophet that Lebanese activists democratically demand access to all of the Pine Forest because it is their inalienable right to public property – not to mention that people from many socially disadvantaged neighborhoods would have access to a public space of interaction with others – and in their demands, they realize the obvious: “Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance”.
-Arie Amaya- Akkermans