Beirut dreaming

Note: I wrote this post in early 2020–as a revolution was unfolding in Lebanon–as a way of keeping record of thoughts and photos from the time I’ve gotten to spend in Beirut particularly in the last five years. Then I sat on my hands not knowing whether I should be another white person with super unique reflections about the Middle East (somewhat endearing because probably a total of five people will read this post), then the pandemic started and everything feels irrelevant and pointless anyway, so here we are. It’s hard to see how the economic crisis that was already engulfing Lebanon is going to do anything other than deepen catastrophically with Covid-19. Still, I hold out hope that in Lebanon as with everywhere else, the pandemic will allow us to lay a foundation for a different kind of world.

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When I found myself with some spare time on my own in Beirut in 2013–the first time I visited as an adult–I grabbed one of those old-timey paper maps and set off walking. Starting in Hamra, I was aiming for the spot on the map labeled ‘Beirut souks’. I imagined–in what can only be described as a flight of orientalist fancy–that this must be the traditional souk (marketplace) that can be found across Middle East cities from Palestine to Morocco, where residents of all kinds gather to buy anything from vegetables, sweets and soap to clothing and leather goods, in a colorful cacophony of sights and smells and [insert remainder of Orientalist fantasy here].

When I arrived at ‘Beirut Souks’ I was incredibly confused to find what appeared to be a high-end shopping mall boasting fashion boutiques from Prada to Tommy Hilfiger. I realized I had forgotten the tiny detail that most of downtown Beirut was obliterated during the civil war of 1975-1990, and the original souk was at the heart of that obliteration. After the war, the destruction of the downtown area was used as a pretext to implement a very particular regeneration plan under the tutelage of Solidere, the company of then-prime minister Rafic Harriri. Rather than rebuilding the souk as it had been before, most of the previous residential and commercial tenants were pushed out to make way for global brands and wealthier tenants, ensuring the downtown area became one geared mainly toward the wealthiest residents and visitors.

Beirut ‘Souks’ (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

I’ve since had the privilege of visiting Beirut yearly over the past five years. I’ve come to understand that downtown Beirut exemplifies conflicts over ownership and the failure of particular urban dreams that are visible across the city. While the downtown area may have once felt like a glitzy regeneration scheme, much of it now also feels like a ghost town, with numerous abandoned storefronts. Part of this is due to enforced security and road closures because of the nearby Lebanese parliament, but it must also surely reflect the failure of such an urban model to actually respond to residents’ needs.

Downtown ghost town

Across the city, power struggles are visible in the contrast between modern new-build projects and the staying power of older, often deteriorating buildings. Beirut retains a large number of beautiful (imho) old buildings exhibiting various architectural styles, sometimes many at the same time, such as traditional Lebanese architecture along with French art deco. Many of these structures are deteriorating and/or completely abandoned. Some were abandoned during the war and the owners never returned; because of Lebanese inheritance law and a lack of an eminent domain policy (if I’ve understood correctly), if the owner is not identified then the building cannot be touched. Some buildings have arguably deteriorated due to the old rental laws, which froze old rental contracts after the civil war. These helped to safeguard social diversity in historic neighborhoods, but in the absence of the state ensuring affordable housing options, the crumbling buildings are now luxury development opportunities waiting to happen.

A mixture of many architectural styles

At the same time, shiny new high-rises and luxury developments are springing up everywhere. The speculative nature of urban development is obvious: loose capital floods in, apparently a large portion from the gulf countries, leading to luxury apartment developments, which often then sit there empty, as the point was never to house people but to park money. Such buildings would perhaps not seem so egregious if it weren’t for the fact that most of the city’s poorer residents–including hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees–have been relegated to overcrowded and unsafe housing, refugee camps or homelessness.

High-rises and new architecture contrast with old and sometimes crumbling buildings

In other parts of the city, disputes over ownership have stopped any redevelopment plans in their tracks for years. The most obvious example is perhaps the old Holiday Inn, open for a year before it was ransacked in the civil war and taken over by various militia groups (today, the Lebanese army has a base there). While many residents and developers alike want to see it demolished, it remains standing so many years later, pockmarked by bullet holes and explosions. The only thing competing interests could agree on was to take down the Holiday Inn sign, to appease the anxious hotel chain.

The old Holiday Inn (photo by Gregor Rom)

Elsewhere, in a quiet corner of Mar Mikhael, an increasingly trendy and gentrifying neighborhood historically important to Beirut’s Armenian community, I saw the old Laziza brewery being bulldozed in late 2017. A huge pit was carved out to make way for yet another block of luxury apartments. But in the middle of the whole thing there lingered an old yellowed building, apparently unable to be torn down because the owners have not been found. I don’t know how the new development went forward, if it did go forward, whether developers demolished the building anyway, or simply built around the structure leaving an old building of traditional architecture to spoil the planned modernist landscape. (Beirut residents might know what became of this stubborn outlier.)

The old Laziza brewery, and the surrounding block which was demolished except for a stubborn yellow building.

This is my first new year in five years not spent in Beirut and I’m in no position to properly comment on the incredible revolution unfolding in Lebanon, that began in October 2019. Suffice to say I was not expecting it, considering that there always seemed to be so much apathy towards politics in Lebanon–understandable considering the decades of corruption that have meant that seemingly simple things like continuous electricity and reliable trash collection have never been guaranteed.

But now the streets are being taken over with protests and occupations (and in classic Beirut tradition, epic dance parties) demanding an end to corruption and a more democratic political system. The movement has been reclaiming the city’s privatized spaces. A different dream is emerging. In this moment, it seems possible that maybe Beirut’s glitzy exclusive buildings and enclosed spaces are not a harbinger of the future but will become, like the crumbling Holiday Inn, a relic of the past.

For further exploration:

Ronnie Chatah’s walking tour is one of the best things I’ve done in Beirut and is where I learned many of the things in this post. Hopefully the tours will be up and running again soon: https://www.bebeirut.org/walk.html

Citylab: Beirut’s Protest City is a Rebuke to the Privatization of Public Space: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/10/lebanon-anti-government-protests-beirut-martyrs-square/601180/

Article about the flattened Laziza brewery and planned luxury apartment project: https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/07/24/farewell-lebanon-s-first-brewery-beer-beirut/

Gregory Buchakjian is a Lebanese artist who photographs and documents abandoned buildings in Beirut, whose work has been exhibited at the Sursock Museum and elsewhere : http://www.buchakjian.net/installation/abandoned-dwellings-inventory/index.html

Aljazeera documentary on the Holiday Inn and Lebanon’s civil war: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DTGFcjRrQ4&t=635s

Recent Vice video about Lebanon’s economic crisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHiuyUiUAp8

Does property serve a social function? Re-imagining real estate in Brazil and beyond

Does property serve a social function? You might think the answer is “yes, of course”. The purpose of a house, for example, is to house people, to serve as a space in which to create a home. These days, though, it seems that houses are more often used as a financial good rather than to serve a direct use like that of providing shelter. This is evident in the vast international system by which land and property are bought and sold according to the supply and demand of the “property market”. In many national contexts, you cannot really be secure in your housing situation until you own your own house. This in many ways dictates patterns of urban development: people will buy or rent property in areas where the property value is low enough that they can afford; meanwhile, wealthy developers have every right to buy up property and profit off of it as they see fit—after all, they paid for it.

But this is not an inevitable process; in fact, it reflects only one interpretation of what we call “property”, one that fulfills a trajectory of urbanization that seems near impossible to challenge. It is therefore not surprising that the concept of the “social function of property” whereby property must fulfill a social function and cannot merely be used for profit, is increasingly taken up by social movements fighting for the rights to land and housing around the world.[1]

São Paulo is one city where the contradictions of the “property market” are especially apparent, and groups contesting the situation particularly active. The housing deficit is currently estimated to be at 230,000 homes.[2] Meanwhile, there are hundreds of vacant buildings in the city center. In response to this, dozens of sem-teto or “roofless” movements have formed, demanding the right to secure housing and undertaking occupations of vacant buildings to draw attention to the housing crisis. These occupations not only highlight the current urban reality of unequal property ownership, but also put into question the very concept of property.

The private ownership model of property

In his work Unsettling the City, Nicholas Blomley highlights the hegemony of what he calls the “ownership model” of property, where there is generally one definable owner to a clearly delineated piece of land, and property almost exclusively means private property. Private property indicates a certain form of power that seems to have “an independent, nonstatelike quality”, as the idea that someone can exclusively claim a parcel of space is taken for granted.[3] This model came to dictate what kind of property we are supposed to value–i.e., private, owner-occupied, etc.–which in turn raises the overall perceived value of this kind of property, in a process seen as uncontestably determined by “the market”. But only those who are able to buy into this market get the right to property.

People did not always conceive of property in this manner. This particular understanding of property arose to prominence out of a desire to provide order to the city, beginning with the colonization of land. Indigenous groups did not usually conceive of property in the same way as their colonizers, and so a new, more regulated, interpretation of property was necessary in order to physically “settle” the land: “the colonization of land, the physical substance, could not have proceeded without the simultaneous colonization of property, the mental structure for organizing rights to land.”[4] Adrian Blackwell describes how this ownership model then enabled property to be carefully partitioned and therefore easily exchanged in a capitalist market:

The secret of capitalist property lies in the way in which the most grounded and immobile of things—land—can be made to move through its financialization and exchange-ability, while this same property is rendered absolutely solid, reified, as each absentee owner decides who can and cannot enter it.[5]

Thus property has come to be viewed as a parceled good to be bought and sold. Brazilian scholar and planner Raquel Rolnik argues that housing is viewed increasingly as an investment asset in a globalized financial market, rather than as a social good. She explains how, rather than a means to distribute wealth, housing has become a “means to wealth”, where “the value is the possibility of creating more value, which depends on the speed and number of transactions capable of generating value appreciation”. While ideas of housing as commodity confronted various national welfare models in different national contexts, many governments around the world have mobilized a range of policies to “extend market discipline, competition and commodification”.[6] The result has been urban enclaves created for the wealthy and international elite, with the poor confined to peripheral areas (or, in the North American case, “inner city” areas), often with limited basic services and employment opportunities.[7] Clearly in Brazil as elsewhere, this has meant the growth of informal settlements, forming part of an agenda which Rolnik asserts is “to create an urban scenario where the poor don’t exist and at the same time ‘unlock’ the value of land”.[8]

Viewing property and the real estate market as natural and self-evident has a de-politicizing effect. It masks the actors and social processes involved in deciding the “value” and accessibility of property. It assumes that the value of property lies only in its exchange value, and that this value is to be decided by the “market”. It makes it very difficult to imagine that property could be understood in any other way.

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Mapping contested space: A walk in downtown São Paulo

Downtown São Paulo, the center of the largest city in the Americas and heart of Brazil’s industrial expansion, is a contested space. For many decades the area has come to be seen as deteriorated, with hundreds of vacant buildings as a result of many of the older enterprises relocating out of the city center. Since the 1990s, housing movements (often known as “sem-teto”–“roofless”) have been asserting their right to decent housing in central areas, while other forces aim to “regenerate” the area in the typical manner that privileges property owners and the elite rather than those that are truly in need of housing and access to the city.

This is a map I made based on a transect walk in downtown São Paulo with a professor in urban planning who was kind enough to accompany me, pointing out various types of structures that offer clues to the story of the city center. On our walk, we saw previously vacant buildings occupied by housing movements, older historic buildings from when the center was previously an elite space, newer “cultural” projects aimed to attract investment to the area, and indeed new apartment buildings with less-than-affordable rent aimed to attract the city’s newer business elite. It is difficult to tell the whole story with a limited map and photos (many occupations and developments are not included here), especially when the situation is in constant flux. In mid-September, one occupied building I had seen on the Avenida São João was raided by military police, carrying out a judicial order to vacate the building. It is clear that the future of the city center remains undecided.

O centro de São Paulo, o centro da maior cidade das Américas e o centro da expansão industrial do Brasil, é um espaço contestado. A área foi percebida como degenerada nas últimas décadas, e movimentos de moradia (ou “sem-teto”) afirmam o direito á moradia digna na área central. Entretanto, outros poderes tentem criar um modelo de regeneração que beneficia proprietários elites e não as pessoas que mesmo precisam de acesso á moradia e á cidade.

Aqui apresento um mapa baseado num passeio no centro de São Paulo que eu fiz com um professor de planeamento urbano, que me acompanhou para que eu pudesse melhor perceber a história do centro. No passeio vimos prédios anteriormente vazios agora ocupados pelos movimentos de sem-teto, edifícios historicamente para o elite, projetos ‘culturais’ com objectivo de atrair novos investimentos na área, e prédios com apartamentos novos construídos para o elite mais recente. É importante notar que todas as ocupações e desenvolvimentos não são incluídos, e a situação está sempre a mudar. Em setembro, a Polícia Militar invadiu uma ocupação na Avenida São João para executar a reintegração de posse.

Neste clipe de áudio, o professor Comaru da Universidade Federal ABC introduz a história da moradia no centro, desde o século 19 até os movimentos sem-teto atuais:

Continue reading “Mapping contested space: A walk in downtown São Paulo” →

CITIES LIKE DREAMS

Tag: regeneration

Beirut dreaming

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