The founders of TandemWorks, Mayssa and Alia Badawi, are pleased to announce their inaugural project, Hammoud Badawi, in collaboration with theOtherDada (tOD) Integrated Architecture Lab, the Lebanese Center for Energy Conservation (LCEC), and UN-Habitat, as part of a scheme to rehabilitate the Beirut River. TandemWorks is a new, Beirut-based non-profit arts organisation which advocates social, cultural, and environmental change by means of multidisciplinary interventions in public places. Under the guidance of tOD’s founder and architect, Adib Dada, the strategy is informed by biomimicry (design inspired by nature) to restore the lost ecosystem, and bring Beirut River back to life. This will involve implementing green infrastructure systems around the river, and in the surrounding neighbourhoods, bio-diverse public parks, and a pedestrian bridge alongside the existing Yerevan Bridge, connecting Bourj Hammoud to Achrafieh, and Badawi. Perceived as underdeveloped and critical areas on the margins of Beirut, these neighbourhoods have a complex and rich history, and social fabric that has been adversely impacted by the implementation of the river walls.
 
The project can be divided into three distinct sections: Voice, Engage, and Share. In Voice, ongoing focus groups are organised around the neighbourhood’s relationship with the river and its urban context, with the dual objective of facilitating dialogue between the communities across the river, and providing a platform for their concerns to be publicly expressed. The second section, Engage, consists of a temporary art installation on either side of the river which will channel the natural sound of running water into the urban areas surrounding it, re-calibrating the way in which people view the river. This installation, by the artist Vartan Avakian, will be on site for one year. Finally, Share will be a one-off multilingual publication, which will be published, and freely distributed to the public, containing contributions from members of various practices and disciplines, including urban planners, architects, sociologists, researchers, artists and writers.

The Hammoud Badawi zine will be launched at Sursock Museum (Beirut), on 9 November 2015 from 4-5:30pm. The event features a panel discussion including Omar Fakhoury and Marwan Rechmaoui, moderated by Mayssa Fattouh.
 
More information about this event and the project in general can be found on the TandemWorks website.

In the following interview with the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS), Jadaliyya Co-Editor Ziad Abu-Rish discusses the history of electricty in Beirut during the early independence period, and some of the legacies and insights of the period. The interview was conducted over email, and first published on the LCPS website. It follows up on an earlier interview on the history of state instutituions in the early independence period.

Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS): The electricity sector in Lebanon, as both a public utility and as an employer, has garnered quite a bit of attention in recent years. Much of what is said about the history of the sector traces the origins of obstacles to adequate electricity generation and distribution to the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). What is your assessment of this claim based on your own research into the political economy of the early independence period? Also, in what ways can we speak about the changing nature of the electricity sector between the early years of independence and the eve of the civil war?

Ziad Abu-Rish (ZA): There is no doubt that the civil war period, including the various Israeli airstrikes, invasions, and occupations, featured the destruction (if not explicit targeting) of electricity infrastructure in Lebanon. There is also little controversy in asserting that the postwar political settlement(s) and various reconstruction efforts have failed to adequately address this destruction and its consequences for electricity production and consumption.

This being said, it would be historically inaccurate to claim that prior to the civil war the electricity sector adequately met the needs of Lebanese citizens, or that it was free of public criticism, competing private interests, or structural deficiencies. It is worth noting here that electricity generation and distribution in the territories that would constitute the Republic of Lebanon originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It was then that the Ottoman government, later the French High Commission, and then the Lebanese government, in collaboration with local municipal authorities, granted a number of specific concessions for the generation, transmission, and/or distribution of electricity in Beirut and other urban areas. It was not until 1964 that the Lebanese government created Electricite du Liban (EDL), which established a state monopoly over the electricity sector in the country.

This history (i.e., the individual concessions, their consolidation under a state monopoly, and its aftermath) has not been written about enough. However, there are a select number of scholars who have shed light on different parts of this history as it relates to broader questions of governance, business, and planning. This has particularly been the case with respect to the late Ottoman, French mandate, and late independence period. My own research focuses on the dynamics of electricity as a public utility in Beirut during the early independence period.

Electricity production in Beirut was initially generated to power the city’s tramway services, as lighting was covered under a gas concession. The original electricity concession was owned by Société Anonyme Ottomane des Tramways et de l’Électricité de Beyrouth (est. 1906), which began running the tramway system in 1909.  Economic and political developments over the course of the next two decades—which I discuss elsewhere, but pivot around World War I—resulted in the transfer of the rights and assets of the original company to a new one: La Société des Tramways et de l’Éclairage de Beyrouth (rendered in Arabic as Sharikat al-Tramway wa-al-’Inara fi Bayrut). The transfer highlights the changing technology of lighting of the time, from gas to electricity, as the new company also took over the original gas lighting concession. More broadly, it was during the mandate period that the company came to be known as Sharikat Kahruba’ Bayrut, an indication that electricity in and of itself had become the primary public utility service the company was providing to a complex array of domestic, commercial, and industrial consumers.

Reading newspaper articles, technical studies, and even general development reports published in the 1940s and 1950s, it becomes quite evident that during the early independence period issues of ownership structure, quality of service, and consumer prices regarding electricity were an important component of the public debate about political independence, economic development, public utilities, and corruption. Two technical complaints during this period were that of unstable voltage supply and frequent power cuts. Also important was the price of electricity. Consumers, reformist politicians, and rival businessmen had different yet overlapping interests in highlighting these issues and pressing for government intervention, which had been almost non-existent vis-à-vis electricity since independence.

So the claim that all was fine with the electricity sector prior to the civil war, or even that it was only after the major waves of rural-urban migration that the electricity sector became a contentious issue is simply not true. Whether it was the introduction of electricity, the uneven distribution and access to the electricity network, or the ownership, quality, and pricing of electricity, the sector was historically a subject of debate, conflict, and mobilization. This is of course to say nothing of the central place electricity occupied in the competing imaginaries that formed the early thinking behind and debates around the Litani River Project, which was the major government development project of the early independence period and which was eventually promoted as the solution to all the country’s electricity problems.

LCPS: Despite the endemic problems in the generation and distribution of electricity in Lebanon, it has been electricity workers and not electricity consumers that have organized the overwhelming number of protests and campaigns making demands of the electricity sector. Is this labor question relatively recent in terms of Lebanese history, and have consumers always had what appears to be a quiescent role?

ZA: This question highlights a number of issues. Historically, the workers in the electricity sector have always been active on the question of labor rights, and their unions have episodically been politically relevant social forces. However, we should note that the demands of electricity workers and forms of mobilizations have changed over time. In particularly, they have taken on a different dynamic in the postwar period, given—among other things—both the effective privatization of the EDL and the changing discourse and practice of sectarian allotments.

If workers’ mobilizations have been consistent across the history of the electricity sector, that of consumers has not. Prior to the civil war, electricity consumers (whether domestic, commercial, or industrial) were a major source of organized mobilization. This was certainly so at least during the late Ottoman, French mandate, and early independence periods. While more ad hoc protests characterized the late Ottoman period, the French mandate period alone featured three major consumer boycott campaigns in 1922, 1931, and 1935. These episodes featured the organization of boycott committees to try and pressure the company to lower its prices and improve the quality of its services. Since the same company provided for both electricity and tramway services in Beirut, in most cases the protests were simultaneously against both—thus seeking to use all available means to bring financial pressure on the company. During the early 1950s, a group of middle-class consumers and political reformers organized a major protest campaign that lasted approximately eight months and only ended when the government intervened to force the lowering of electricity tariffs, which was the main (though not only) demand of the protesters and campaign organizers. Even politicians and businessmen mobilized around the issue of electricity to improve their political standing or expand their economic interests. An example of this is when Camile Chamoun effectively nationalized the Beirut Electricity Company in 1953-54 as a means of bolstering his nationalist and reformist credentials. Another example is how private investors sought concessions to generate electricity and sell it to the company to supplement its below-demand production levels while also offering major profits. The power plants of Nahr al-Ibrahim and Nahr al-Bared were both the outcomes of such efforts and symptomatic of some of their legacies.

LCPS: Much of the debate about the electricity sector parallels the debate about privatization, market efficiency, and state capacity. In what ways does this represent continuity or break with historical debates regarding the electricity sector?

ZA: In the early independence period, the issue was that electricity provision was subject to private interests and therefore should be nationalized given that the state was viewed as the only genuine guarantor of public good. However, this claim itself was rooted in a very different set of normative and theoretical frameworks, when the role of states in managing economic development and securing public interests were valorised. Thus while the call for privatization of the EDL in the 1990s and 2000s has its roots in specific understandings of the capacities of the Lebanese state, it is also important to recognize that mainstream economic development has shifted significantly since the 1950s and 1960s, valorising markets much more so than states.

That being said, I do not necessarily find the debate very productive, especially in light of the mostly informal networks between state officials and private businessmen in Lebanon. For me, the interesting issue is how the discourse on the lack of a state in Lebanon (i.e., wayn al-dawla) is used to buttress an already-existing neoliberal argument about the efficiency of markets. The debate about public versus private ownership also renders the consumer a passive audience and victim of the debate and its outcome. Electricity in Lebanon is a business, and it is a politically salient business. Thus it might be more productive to consider ways of mobilizing consumers—whether against the state or the private sector—to demand better pricing and services regarding electricity, and to buttress this call with collective action that threatens both where it hurts: Incumbency for the government and revenue for the businesses.

[This interview was originally published on the website of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS)]

كان أدب الحداثة التجريبي، الذي ظهر في السنوات الأخيرة من القرن التاسع عشر، وتطور في القرن العشرين، فنَّ مدنٍ. كان فنَّ المدن ذات اللغات المتعددة، التي تميّزت بنشاط مكثّف، وحظيتْ بشهرة عالمية كمراكز للتبادل الفكري والثقافي، لأسباب تاريخية مختلفة. وقد تشكّل في هذه العواصم الثقافية (العواصم السياسية القومية الأوربية) جوٌّ غنيٌّ من الفكر الجديد والفنون الجديدة أحياناً، ولكن ليس على الدوام. وجذب هذا التطوّر الكتاب المحليين الشبان والكتاب الواعدين، وشدَّ أيضاً الفنانين والرحالة الأدبيين والمنفيين من بلدان أخرى. وتأسستْ الجمالية الجديدة في هذه المدن، بمقاهيها وأنديتها الليلية ومجلاتها وناشريها وصالاتها الفنية، وتجادلت الأجيال، وتنافست الحركات؛ وصارت القضايا والأشكال الجديدة مسائل صراع وحملات. وحين نفكّر بالحداثة لا نستطيع إغفال التفكير بهذه المناخات المدينية، وبالأفكار والحركات والفلسفات والسياسات الجديدة التي بزغتْ في برلين وفيينا وموسكو وسينت بطرسبرغ عند منعطف القرن وفي السنوات الأولى من الحرب؛ والتي ظهرت في لندن في الأعوام التي سبقت السنوات الأولى من الحرب؛ أما في زوريخ ونيويورك وشيكاغو فقد ولدت أثناء الحرب؛ ولكنها كانت موجودة في جميع الأوقات في باريس. 

كانت هذه المدن أكثر من أمكنة للقاءات تتم بالمصادفة ونقاط عبور. كانت بيئات توليدية للفنون الجديدة ومراكز للجماعة الفكرية، وللصراع الفكري أيضاً. وكانت تقريباً مدناً لها دور إنساني راسخ، وفيها مراكز فنية وثقافية تقليدية وأمكنة للفن والتعلّم والأفكار. ولكنها كانت أيضاً بيئات جديدة تنطوي في داخلها على تعقيد وتوتّر الحياة المدينية الحديثة، والتي تشدّد كثيراً على الوعي الحديث والكتابة الحديثة. (1) 

حدث دوماً ترابط وثيق بين الأدب والمدن. ففي المدن توجد المؤسسات الأدبية الأساسية: الناشرون والرعاة والمكتبات العامة والمتاحف والمسارح والمجلات، ويجري فيها أيضاً الاحتكاك الثقافي وتتوسّع حدود التجربة وتكثر الضغوط وتولد حالات الجدة وتنشأ المجادلات ويحصل اللهو وتتوفّر النقود ويخضع الأفراد للتغير السريع ويتدفق الزوار ونسمع لغط لغات عدّة وتسود تجارة الأفكار والأساليب وتسنح الفرصة من أجل التخصص الفني.

بيد أن الكتاب والمفكرين كرهوا المدينة لفترة طويلة، وحلموا بالهرب من رذائلها وتوسّعها الفوري اللامنتظم وسرعة خطوها، وكان نمط إنسانها أساس انشقاق ثقافي عميق تجلى في الجنس الأدبي الأكثر استمرارية، الشعر الرعوي، الذي انتقد المدينة واتخذ موقفاً منها، مما جعل الأمر يبدو وكأن أشكال الثقافة وغناها ينتمون إلى خارج النظام المديني. إلا أن الكتاب والمفكرين كانوا يأتون إلى المدينة باستمرار، ويقومون بأبحاث جوهرية في الفن والتجريب والتاريخ الحديث من أجل الاستخدام الأمثل لطاقتهم الفنية. وولّد الانجذاب إلى المدينة والنفور منها موضوعات ومواقف تجريبية عميقة في الأدب، ذلك أنّ المدينة غدتْ استعارة لا مكاناً. وفي الحقيقة، أضحت المدينة، بالنسبة إلى كتاب كثيرين، صِنْو الشكل. هكذا رآها بوب وجونسون وبودلير ودوستويفسكي وديكنز وجويس وإليوت وباوند. ولكن المدينة والأشكال لم يبقوا شيئاً ثابتاً كما توحي قائمة الكتّاب الغنيّة. 

إذا كانت الحداثة فناً مدينياً فإن هذا يعود جزئياً إلى أن الفنان الحديث صار، كزملائه البشر، عالقاً في روح المدينة الحديثة، والتي هي روح مجتمع تكنولوجي حديث. واستولت المدينة الحديثة على وظائف واتصالات المجتمع، وعلى السكان والحدود القصوى للتجربة التكنولوجية والتجارية والصناعية والفكرية. وصارت المدينة ثقافة، أو ربما التشوش الذي يعقبها. وباتت المدينة حداثة فعلٍ اجتماعي، ومركزاً للنظام الاجتماعي السائد ومولِّد نموّه وتغيّره.

هكذا امتلك الفن الحداثي علاقات خاصة مع المدينة الحديثة، نظراً لدورها كمتحف ثقافي وبيئة جديدة. وتأصّل الاتجاه الحداثي بعمق في عواصم أوربا الثقافية، كما قال لنا علماء الاجتماع، أي في تلك المدن التي تولت وظائف معيّنة وأصبحتْ مراكز للتبادل الثقافي، وأمكنة يُحافظ فيها على تراثات اختصاصات معيّنة وتتراكم المعلومات الهامّة ويكثر المختصون ويُحبّذ التجديد أكثر. وفي الحقيقة، كانت معظم عواصم الثقافة هذه مدناً حديثة نموذجية، تُحْدثُ التغيّر بقدر ما تولّد الاستمرارية. وكانت بؤراً للنشاط الفكري في وقت اتسعت فيه الأنتلجنسيا، واكتسبت وعياً ذاتياً أكبر كطبقة منفصلة، وشعرت بانفصال متزايد عن النظام الاجتماعي المهيمن، ووجّهت نفسها على نحو متزايد نحو المستقبل والإيمان بالتغيّر. وكانت هذه العواصم بؤراً للهجرة من الريف، وأمكنة للنمو السكاني، والتوترات النفسية الجديدة، والتقنيات والأساليب المبتكرة، ومناخات للتحرر والكشف، في مجتمعات صارتْ أكثر ديموقراطية وضخامة في المرحلة الثانية من الثورة الصناعية. وتحولت أيضاً إلى مراكز أفعال سياسية جديدة وتجمعات. وتبيّن لكثيرين في نهاية القرن التاسع عشر أن المدينة جزء من سيرورة تحلّل كليّ للعلاقات الإقطاعية والطبقية والالتزامات القديمة. وأثرت هذه السيرورة بدورها في الصورة الذاتية للفنانين وشجعتهم على البحث عن الجمال في السياق نفسه من الهرطقة والتحلل اللذين نربط بهما المدينة كما قال فردناند تونيز.( 2) 

لم تكن مصادفة أن القرن التاسع عشر كان القرن العظيم للتمدّن الغربي. ففي ذلك القرن، وبعد أن تحرر الكتاب والفنانون من الاعتماد على رعاة وطبقات ثقافية معيّنة في الجمهور الكلي وَجدوا أنفسهم في موقع يتميّز بالاستقلالية وغياب الهويّة الاجتماعية، وهو ما ندعوه اليوم بالاغتراب. وليس من قبيل المصادفة أيضاً أن المدن، كتجمّعات ضخمة للبشر في أدوار ومواقف متغايرة جداً، وكأمكنة للاحتكاك والتغيّر والوعي الجديد، تزامن نموّها مع رغبة بالجدّة الثقافية القصوى والإحساس بأزمة في القيم والتعبير أثرت في الفنون بصورة خاصة.

وفي الولايات المتحدة الأميركية، حيث تمكن رؤية ظاهرة التمدّن السريع في أشكالها الأكثر تطرّفاً، دعا جوسياه سترونغ المدن الحديثة، بمشكلاتها الاجتماعية القائمة ومصهر طبقاتها وسلالاتها وتغايراتها الاجتماعية ومزيجها الداخلي من التوقع وخيبة الأمل ونموّها الغامض "مراكز الحضارة العاصفة". وهكذا كانت هذه المدن: تُبدع الحضارة والثقافة وتدمّرهما في آن واحد معاً. أما الأصداء الشكلية للسيرورة فهي واضحة في شكل الفن الحداثي وغياب الشكل فيه وفي إبداعه وهدمه.

وتم التعبير في احتمالية نصوص الكتابة الحداثية وتعددها، وفي تصميم اللوحة الحداثية وشكلها، عن الفوضى الثقافية التي ولّدتها المدينة المزدحمة بالسكان والمتنامية على الدوام، برج بابل كثير اللغات والطارئ. ولم يكن فن الحداثة هو الفن الوحيد الذي وصل إلى هذه الحالة، فحالات الوعي هذه موجودة في الواقعية والطبيعية، ويمكن القول إن احتمالية المدينة الحديثة العصية على التعبير لعبت دوراً كبيراً في صعود الجنس الأدبي الأكثر واقعية وتحرراً وبراغماتية بين الأجناس الأدبية، وأعني الرواية. فقد صوّرت الرواية البيئة الخارجية، وحركة الجماهير، وعبرت عن الحياة الحديثة للمدينة وقواها. ونجد لدى ستاندال وبلزاك وديكنز وزولا ودوستويفسكي وستيفن كرين، مثلاً، أن الشكل الروائي يوسّع الاستعارة المدينية، أو يعبّر عن التجربة المدينية، من خلال موقف الصحفي والعالم الاجتماعي، والنبي الرؤيوي أو السريالي، ورجل الأقبية، هذه المواقف التي يمكن أن تسبر على نحو أفضل الاحتمالية والتنوّع ومبادئ الصراع والنمو في الحياة المدينية.

وقد قال جورج جيسينغ:"مقدّر عليّ أن أكون في لندن، لأنني يجب أن أبذل جهوداً كبيرة كي أجمع مادة جديدة ما”. وكانت المدينة مادّية بكل ما تعنيه الكلمة من معنى، إذ إن خصوصيّتها تولّد شكلاً فنياً. (قال زولا:"تؤلّف القصة نفسها وتحقّق الانسجام من خلال الملاحظات المجموعة، إذ إنّ كل ملاحظة تقود إلى أخرى عبر التحكم بالشخصيات، والخاتمة ليست إلا نتيجة طبيعية ومحتّمة). على أي حال، تبدو الحداثة وكأنها تطرح "النتيجة الطبيعية والحتمية"، كي تحلّ محلّ المدينة الحقيقية، البيئة المهيمنة مادياً للمؤسسات الصناعية الصغيرة والفنادق وواجهات العرض، التي يرى زولا أو دريسر، مثلاً، أنها الميدان الكلي للفعل والإرادة والرغبة البشرية، المدينة "غير الحقيقية"، مسرح الفجور والفنتازيا، والذوات الفردية الغريبة في تجاورات غريبة التي عبّر عن هويتها غير المستقرة أو المحسومة كلٌّ من دوستويفسكي وبودلير وكونراد وإليوت وبايلي ودوس باسوس. وكما يقول لنا ريموند وليامز، إن الرواية المدينية الحديثة تكشف وعياً "متوتراً ومتشظّياً، ذاتياً فقط، ولكنه في شكل ذاتيته يتضمن الآخرين، الذين هم الآن، مع أبنية وضجيج ومشاهد وروائح المدينة، أجزاء من هذا الوعي الفردي والمتنافس”.( 3) إن الواقعية تؤنسن فيما الطبيعية تُعلمن (من العلم)، ولكن الحداثة تُعدِّد (من التعددية)، وتُسَرْيِل (من سريالية). وفيما نرى أن المدينة في كثير من الفن الواقعي تخم متحرر، نقطة عبور إلى احتمالات تكتنفها آمال، وفيما نراها في كثير من الأدب الواقعي نظاماً شاملاً ينبض بالإرادة البشرية ويتجاوزها في آن، وغابة وهاوية أو حرباً، فإنها في الأدب والفن الحداثيين بيئة الوعي الفردي، الذي يومض من تحت الأرض، "المزيج الداعر لكل شيء" بحسب كوربييه وإليوت.(4)

تمتلك الكتابة الحداثية ميلاً كبيراً إلى الإحاطة بالتجربة داخل المدينة، وجعل رواية المدينة أو قصيدة المدينة أحد أشكالها الرئيسية.( 5) وعليه، إن “ذكريات من منزل الأموات” لدستويفسكي، و”الجوع” لهامسون، و“الأميرة كاساماسيما” لجيمس و”ماغي” لهام، و”ألكساندبلاتس” لدوبلن برلين، و“سينت بطرسبرغ” لبايلي، ورواية “العميل السري” لكونراد وقصيدة “هيو سيلوين موبرلي” لباوند ورواية ”ذئب البوادي” لهيسّه، وقصائد ماياكوفسكي ورواية “تريست” لسفيفو، وقصيدة إليوت “الأرض الخراب”، ورواية فرجينيا وولف “السيدة دالاوي”، وملحمة وليم كارلوس وليامز “باترسون”، ورواية “الغثيان” لسارتر، كل هذه الأعمال تنتمي إلى الأنواع الحداثية. وما يمتلك أهمية خاصة لديهم هو موضوع الطبيعة المدينية المغرية للمشهد الذي نعيش فيه، والذي توجد فيه المدينة، حيث فُرض علينا،"نسق حياة مبنيٍّ على مبدأ جديد كلياً"، يميل إلى جعل الفنان الحديث محلياً في المدينة، ليس لأنها مادته الحديثة، بل وجهة نظره الحديثة. واتخذ قسم كبير من الفن الحديث مواقفه، وحصل على منظوراته من مسافة معيّنة، كموقف المنفي، وحافظ على مسافة من الأصول المحلية، والانتماءات الطبقية، والالتزامات والواجبات المحددة لأولئك الذين لهم دور محدد في ثقافة متماسكة. وبانخراطه المتزايد في المدينة صار الفنان يقترب من وضعية المفكر.

وكما صارت الأنتلجنسيا الحديثة تشبه التجمّع اللاطبقي، وميالة إلى الجدّة، وتحاول أن تطوّر الوعي، وتروم تقديم نظرة عامة مستقلة ومستقبلية، هكذا صار الفنانون الحداثيون، الذين انفصلوا في غالب الأحيان، مثل ستيفن ديدالوس، عن الأسرة، والسلالة والدين لتوليد الوعي الذي لم يُبتكر لسلالتهم. وشجّع هذا كثيراً التساؤل الجمالي المتخصص، والاهتمام الهوسي بالصنعة والشكل، الذي يميّز جزءاً من الحداثة. وشجّع على استقصاء البيئة الاجتماعية التي خرجت منها الجدة الثقافية. وإذا كان أحد موضوعات الأدب الحداثي الانفصال والضياع، فإن الموضوع الآخر هو التحرر الفني، وهكذا لم يكن ديدالوس في “صورة الفنان شابّاً” هو الوحيد الذي أعلن الانفصال، بل هناك أيضاً بول موريل في رواية “أبناء وعشاق”، وجورج ويلارد في “واينسبرغ أوهايو”، وكثير من الأبطال الأدبيين الآخرين الذين قاموا في نهاية قصتهم بإعادة تعريف المدينة كأن البحث عن الذات والفن لا يمكن أن يتحقّقا في الوهج والانكشاف الوجودي للمدينة، حيث، كما عبّر جوليوس هارت عن ذلك في عبارة جميلة في قصيدته رحلة إلى برلين:"يولد المرء بعنف في برية الحياة”. (6) إن هذه الحبكة هي التي تعيد الفن إلى المدن، والمدن إلى الفن. ذلك أن الحداثة فن مدينيّ، أي فن مجموعة، فن تخصصي، فن فكريّ، فن لنظراء المرء الجماليين؛ إنه فن يعيد، من خلال السخرية أو المفارقات، سلطة الحضارة. وليست الحداثة مجرد فن مديني فحسب بل هي فن عالميّ: مدينة تقود إلى أخرى في الرحلة الجمالية المتميّزة إلى تحوّل الشكل. ويمكن أن يتمسك الكاتب بالمحليّة، كما تمسّك جويس بدبلن، وهمنغواي بغابات ميشيغان؛ ولكنه يُدرك من مسافة منظورَ منفيّ الجمالية العالمية.

 وقد يكون نوع الفنان الحداثي الذي عدّه جورج شتاينر مميِّزاً لعصرنا في كتابه “خارج الأرض” (1972) الكاتب "الذي لا منزل له"، الذي يتصور اللغة كمتعددة لغات، كما فعل وايلد حين كتب “سالومي” بالفرنسية، وكما فعل باوند في استخدامه للغات عدة في النص، وكما فعل بيكيت ونابوكوف، اللذان كتبا في أكثر من لغة واستقصيا طبيعة اللغة وعلاقتها بالواقع.(7) وهكذا نرى على نحو متكرر أن الهجرة أو المنفى هما اللذان يمنحان العضوية في بلاد الفنون الحداثية، والتي أدمن كثير من الكتاب العظام مثل جويس ولورنس ومان وبريخت وأودن ونابوكوف السفر إليها. إنها بلاد اكتسبت مشهدها الطبيعي، وجغرافيتها ومراكز جماعاتها، وأمكنة المنفى كزوريخ أثناء الحرب العالمية الأولى، ونيويورك أثناء الحرب العالمية الثانية. وصار الكاتب نفسه عضواً في جماعة متجولة باحثة عن الثقافة من خلال المنفى القسري (مثل نابوكوف بعد الثورة الروسية) أو من خلال التصميم والرغبة. ويمكن أن يصبح مكان صناعة الفن مدينة مثالية بعيدة، حيث يكون المبدع مركز اهتمام، أو تكون الفوضى مثمرة، ويتدفق “عالم الروح”. هكذا عبّر جورج مور عن روح أثرت في كثير من معاصريه الإنكليز في أواخر القرن التاسع عشر(8):

“فرنسا! لقد سمعتُ رنين العالم في أذنيّ وبهر ضياؤه عينيَّ. فرنسا! استيقظت حواسي كلها من سباتها كطاقم السفينة حين يصيح المراقب:"وصلنا إلى اليابسة!" عرفت مباشرة أنني يجب أن أذهب إلى فرنسا، وأعيش فيها، وأحصل على الجنسية الفرنسية. لم أعرف متى وكيف، ولكنني عرفت بأنني يجب أن أذهب إلى فرنسا…"

صاغت جرترود شتاين العبارة الملائمة:"يجب أن يكون للكتّاب بلدان: واحد ينتمون إليه وآخر يعيشون فيه"، وأضافت موضحة انتماءاتها الخاصة:" إن أميركا هي بلدي الذي جئتُ منه وباريس هي وطني الذي أسكن فيه”.( 9) إن البلد الذي يلجأ إليه الفنان يعالج النزعة المادية الطاغية للبلد الآخر، ويمنح شكلاً للمادة؛ فالعاصمة الثقافية هي الأكاديمية التي تشحن قدرة الفنان الحديث على العمل. وكانت العاصمة القومية هي التي تجذب الكتّاب للمجيء من داخل البلاد في بعض الحالات، وكانت العاصمة تنتقل في حالات أخرى إلى مكان آخر ثانية: برلين وباريس للكتاب الاسكندنافيين والروس، باريس للكتاب الأميركيين في العشرينيات.

ويستطيع المرء أن يرسم خرائط تُظهر المراكز والمناطق الفنية، والتوازن العالمي للقوة الثقافية، وهو لا يشبه توازن القوة السياسية والاقتصادية رغم أنه يتصل به على نحو معقّد من دون شك. وتتغيّر الخرائط كما تتغيّر الجمالية: إن باريس هي مركز الحداثة المهيمن بكل ما للكلمة من معنى، كنبع للبوهيمية والتسامح ونمط حياة المهاجر، ولكننا نستطيع الإحساس بانحدار روما وفلورنسة، ونهوض ثم سقوط لندن، وطور هيمنة برلين وميونيخ، وانفجار الطاقة القوي من النروج وفنلندة، والإشعاع القادم من فيينا كمراحل جوهرية في الجغرافيا المتبدّلة للحداثة، التي رسمتها حركة الكتاب والفنانين، وتدفق أمواج الفكر، وانفجارات الإنتاج الفني المهم.

وتتوضع في المدن الكبيرة قرى مدينية للفنون، وأمكنة للبوهيميين وحارات يتم السعي فيها وراء الوظيفة الجمالية كمونتبارناس وسوهو وقرية غرينيتش. ومن الملائم هنا تعريف روجر شاتوك الدقيق للمناخ في دراسته للحركة الطليعية الفرنسية، “سنوات المأدبة”، فهو يتحدث عن "محليّة عالميّة" لهذه الجماعات(10)، وهي عالمية لأن تأثيرها شعّ وحافظت على التواصل، وبسبب تأثير التواصل والاتصال صارت الحداثة حركة عالمية. ولم تعتمد كثيراً على الفعل في مدن معيّنة فقط بل أيضاً على استعداد الكتّاب لمواصلة الرحلة إلى المدينة التي بدأوها عبر مدن كثيرة. وهكذا فإن جرترود شتاين، التي انتقلت من الولايات المتحدة إلى باريس في 1903، ثم غدت بعد عشرين عاماً مؤثرة بقوة في جيل متعاقب، ربطت الرواية الأمريكية بالتكعيبية. وبصورة مشابهة، ربط ستريندبرغ، الذي انتقل إلى الجنوب، المسرح الاسكندنافي بالتعبيرية في أوربا الوسطى. وأطلق الأميركيون المنفيون التصويرية قبل الحرب، كما أطلق المنفيون من ألمانيا وأمكنة أخرى في زوريخ الدادائية.

وصارت باريس مدينة الحداثة الأولى في العشرينيات، وجذبت المهاجرين الروس، والدادائيين من زوريخ، وجيلاً كاملاً من الكتاب الأميركيين الشبان من ذوي الميول التجريبية. وحافظت المؤسسات الثقافية المرنة على المناخ الذي كان يحتاج إليه الكتاب الشبّان على نحو ملائم وشبه دائم، رغم التدهور الاقتصادي والأخلاقي بعد الحرب. والواقع أنها صارت بفوضاها واستمراريتها المدينة العالمية المثالية، المثقفة والمتسامحة، المحمومة والنشيطة، الجذرية ولكن المحتواة. وإلى حد ما، ورثتْها نيويورك بعد نشوب الحرب العالمية الثانية. ولكن الحداثة لم تكن حكراً على مدينة واحدة، فقد ساهم في تقطيرها كثير من العواصم والأمم والمساعي والأمزجة الفكرية والجمالية المختلفة.

ترجمة: أسامة إسبر

هوامش

1- ناقش هذا الموضوع مورتون ولوسيا وايت، المفكر إزاء المدينة (كمبردج، ماس، 1962).

2- فرديناند تونيس، Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (لايبزغ، 1887). ترجمه تشارلز بي. لوميس بعنوان الجماعة والترابط (لندن 1955).

3- ريموند وليامز، الرواية الإنكليزية من ديكنز إلى لورنس (لندن 1970). يوسّع وليامز نقاشه بشكل قيّم للموضوع في كتاب “البلاد والمدينة” (لندن 1973).

4- حول الموضوع المديني والقصيدة المدينية، انظر خاصة مونرو كي. سبيرز، ديونيسوس والمدينة: الحداثة في شعر القرن العشرين (نيويورك ولندن 1970”). انظر أيضاً مناقشة فرانك كيرمود لـقصيدة “الأرض الخراب”  كقصيدة تقارن بين مدينتين في مقالته "ت.س. إليوت"، في مقالات في الحداثة (لندن 1971).

5- من أجل المزيد من التعليقات انظر المقالات التي في هذا الكتاب التي ألفها جورج هايد (شعر المدينة) ودونالد فانجر (مدينة الرواية الروسية الحداثية). 

Sharon Rotbard, White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. Translated from Hebrew by Orin Gat. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.

As the “enlightened public” and guests from Dessau’s Bauhaus Institute celebrated UNESCO’s recognition of Tel Aviv’s “Bauhaus” White City as a World Heritage site in 2003, police brutally attacked the city's migrant workers. At the same time, the IDF executed Operation Rainbow in Rafah, destroying residential tower blocks, and causing fifty-eight Palestinian casualties. Sharon Rotbard, in White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa,thinks the relationship between these episodes. He constructs, with great success, the contradictory unity of the Black City—the socially, culturally, and racially despised in Tel Aviv, Jaffa, and Palestine—as against the White City.

White City, Black City, originally published in Hebrew in 2005, opens up new ways of thinking through the sharp contradictions in contemporary cities. It is written with admirable sobriety while being grounded in “anger and the urge to bring justice to the city.” This makes lines like “to this day it is unclear what happened to most of Jaffa’s residents” in 1948 strike all the harder. It also makes the moments where Rotbard cannot contain his rage—most notably, at “sentimental kitsch” of artist Dani Karavan, one of those most responsible for the White City's ideological construction—particularly striking. For rendering Rotbard's disciplined anger into English, the translator, Orit Gat, deserves considerable credit.

Rotbard, the founder and director of Babel, one of Israel's first independent publishers, lives in Shapira, a neighborhood now in Southern Tel Aviv and within the “black city,” though older than the city itself. He is an architect who has largely withdrawn from architectural practice in Israel. This rigorously moral stance towards architecture is key to the book. Rotbard explains that given the “problematic political contexts...of any possible architectural practice,” particularly in Israel, “writing has always seemed to me to be one of the few decent and effective ways to be an architect.”

The contrast between Rotbard's reorientation, from architectural practice towards writing and publishing and away from entanglement with the purposes of those with money to commission, and the career of Karavan is striking. Discussing the necessary dependence of Karavan's grandiose sculptures and land art on the state or big capital, Rotbard writes: “Karavan knows how to speak with authorities, politicians, and donors, and above all is capable of providing them with images and visuals that work, that are usable and easy to live with.”

Rotbard's first section on the White City as an ideological object is the most immediately engaging,and an impressive reinvigoration of ideology critique. Rotbard follows Bertolt Brecht's injunction to “start not with the good old things but the bad new things.” Instead of engaging directly with the architecture and succumbing to nostalgia for the “progressive” modernism of the 1930s, he addresses the transformation of the White City “from a name into a well-ordered ideology.”

Rotbard's critique has two moments: one functionalist, one genetic. The latter exposes the ideological object to history. The White City is, as Louis Althusser wrote, summarizing Marx on ideology, “an imaginary assemblage” abstracted from “concrete history…ideology has no history since its history is outside it.” It is assembled through its detachment from history through various practices and exclusions, above all those produced by disciplinary boundaries that sunder architecture from history and politics, treating the history of architecture as an autonomous history of “styles.” But as Rotbard argues, this serves “transparent political interests.”

This restoration of history, undermining disciplinary boundaries and refusing to start with the good old things, also parallels Lefebvre's “regressive-progressive method.” There, the retroactive force of the present discloses hitherto uncomprehended or ideologically denied aspects of the past. This is most notable in the link between white architecture and colonial whiteness, “architecture of the white, created by the white and for the white.” This retroactive power depends on the continued dominance of the colonial power in Israel/Palestine so that, in contrast to Dakar, Casablanca, or Algiers, whose white colonial moderrnism is tainted by its colonial associations, Israel is “one of the few countries in the world to canonize its colonial architecture.”

As Rotbard argues, “white architecture became the fantasy reflection of the modern movement, a fantasy that suggested innovation and which projected an image of the world as European, international, and universal, all at the same time.” He continues, “white architecture…arrived under the auspices of colonialism…and was unrolled as one of the chief agents of Europeanism and Westernism.” This suggests a spatial twist on Brecht’s Bad New Things/Good Old Things. Truth is grasped not at its spatial “origins” and theoretical intentions, but in its practices and the social relations determining it, which it reproduced, and continues to reproduce, outside metropolitan Europe.

Rotbard draws here on Frantz Fanon's observation that the colonialist “is the continuation of the metropolis. The history he writes is not that of the land he is using, but that of his nation, which loots, rapes, and starves.” The quotation’s beginning, “the colonizer makes history,” echoes Marx's “men make history but not under circumstances of their own choosing.” But it removes Marx's limits, and clarifies that the colonial-modernist new, symbolized by the tabula rasa of the “virgin dunes,” was never given but made through the violent insertion of Europe into Palestine. It is colonial power and the violent destruction of colonized lives and places that makes things new.

Alongside the disclosure of what was already there, the exposure of the ideological assemblage to history allows the undoing of claims of what was seemingly always there. The keystone of the ideological edifice of the White City is that its buildings are Bauhaus. Rotbard undermines this by exposing the evasions that made it possible. Even the official White history only mentions four Bauhaus graduates working in Israel, of whom only Aryeh Sharon would “convincingly leave his mark on Tel Aviv.” Sharon, however, poses a problem, because “as a dedicated student of the Bauhaus ideology, his straightforward and pragmatic structures have always been at odds with the stylized boxes which have come to be associated with Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus style.” Whilst the Bauhaus was committed to mass social housing, Tel Aviv's “Bauhaus” built “petit bourgeois three story apartment buildings.” “Stylization,” the idea of a “Bauhaus” style that excludes its ethical and social content, is central to the White City as an ideology.

Stylization through disciplinary fragmentation also underpins Karavan's “sentimental kitsch.” In that form, the survival of the “Bauhaus” as a style in Tel Aviv was a victory over Nazism: as Karavan writes, quoted by Rotbard, “a style survived here, a style that the Nazis wanted to exterminate exactly like they wanted to exterminate other forms of civilization. Tel Aviv survived, so in fact it overcame Nazism.” Karavan's notion of the redemption from Nazism through the survival of a style treats the suffering of the Holocaust as irrelevant compared to the survival of an architectural style. Equally, in the kitsch image of the “virgin dunes,” the Nakba that created the tabula rasa is effaced. In both cases, ideological redemption relies upon the exclusion of historical suffering, Palestinian and Jewish—Fiat Bauhaus, et pereat mundus.

The functionalist side of Rotbard’s analysis begins with the White City as symbol for “Good Old Eretz Israel,” a sentimental construction of increasing importance for Israeli liberals since Likud's first electoral victory in 1977, which meant

The legitimization of the “Other Israel”—that particular section of Israeli society which had always been seen and treated as secondary—[which] challenged the white European monopoly. There was a feeling that the old Labor elite had to recreate itself again socially and culturally as a response to these political transformations. This led the old guard to seek refuge in the drama of Desau’s “missed utopia,” investing in it as an allegory of the Zionist dream they believed had gone awry since Likud came to power…Looking west towards Desau actually provided some solace, it enabled those who had always dominated Israeli society, but who now felt divested of their Israeliness, the opportunity to console themselves in a familiar white European identity.

Moreover, Likud's victory saw the instigation of the Build Your Own House Program, which released land to allow any citizens to build their own homes. The exploration of the contemporary function of the White City thus leads to a sharp analysis of contemporary Israeli social contradictions.

The undermining of the previously dominant, Europeanized, Tel Aviv liberals saw taste become a battleground and part of an attempted re-assertion of the class and racial authority of secular liberal Ashkenazi against the Mizrahim, conceived of as an “Oriental Mob.” The White City's “stoic purity and values of order” was used against the “architectural cacophony, a mishmash of styles” initiated by Build Your Own House. Here the displaced material interests are obvious. Build Your Own House, by allowing any citizen to lease land to build their own home, undermined the Labor bureaucracy’s control, a situation that had meant that “one's link to the land was dependent on one's affinity with the ruling party.”

As the neoliberal urbanism of the 1980s intensified, submitting Tel Aviv to a “garish display of power being exercised by forces of business and state” the “good taste” of the “Bauhaus” became further mobilized. This became central in the work of the critic Esther Zauberg, for whom Tel Aviv's modernism represented “traditional values of urbanity and domesticity.” Zauberg's post-modern, conservative appreciation of modernism is rooted in the effacement of Palestinian architecture, with the White City as “the moment Israeli architecture began.” Therefore, “while European architects harked back to the medieval city, to the Renaissance and the Baroque, or to the vernacular and local traditions, the Israeli gaze towards the past rested on the very recent past, fixating on what would otherwise be classified as the most modernist moment in architecture.” Also key to the praise of modernism for embodying traditional values is its status as a “style”: the admired “Bauhaus” apartments were modernist in style, but untainted by the class hatred for modernist social housing.

However, accepting Zauberg’s opposition between the modest, domestic “Bauhaus” and the “vulgar” central business district would be naive. As Italian sociologist Marco d'Eramo argued in his polemic“UNESCOCIDE,” “the utopian environment dreamed of by the corporate elite...is composed of both financial districts and cultural-heritage museum-cities…both are fundamentally inanimate.” The 1990s saw the realization of both sides of this project: the construction of a corporate center, Ayalon City, and the “parallel hyperinflation of stories affirming the lasting historical pedigree of the White City.”

Rotbard's critique, ultimately, undoes the ideological assemblage of the White City through the exposure of its reified space—both physically and as an ideological construction—to history and the interests that determine it. A new, non-reified spatial configuration opens up: the dialectical opposition White City (Tel Aviv)/Black City (Jaffa, and, by extension, Palestine). The critique undermines Tel Aviv's traditional story, showing it, instead, determined by its relationship with Jaffa: “Tel Aviv has constructed itself culturally, ethnically, and historically according to Jaffa—as its split, as its dialectical negation.”

The moral core of White City, Black City, however,is in its move beyond ideology critique. Rotbard shows how the ideological construction fails through Tel Aviv's effacement of Jaffa and resists it through his moving the 1948 urbicide of Jaffa to the center of the history of Tel Aviv. Critique that limits itself to—rather than just starting with—the Bad New Things, the city as it has been made by capitalism, racism, and imperialism, however critical, becomes complicit in the effacement of the lives of those who were there before. Rotbard’s rigor, however, in focusing on the history of barbarism rather than the ideology of civilization poses slight problems for the book, at least superficially. For the story of Jaffa is a harder, longer, and knottier one to tell than that of construction of the lie of the Tel Aviv Bauhaus.

The material effects of ideology on Jaffa remain:

The blatant disregard for Jaffa and the Black City, as implied by their omission from Tel Aviv’s own official narrative, is translated in the municipality’s priorities...Everything unwanted in the White City is relegated to the Black City: all the inconveniences of metropolitan infrastructure...and finally a complete ragtag cast of municipal outcasts and social pariahs—new immigrants, foreign workers, drug addicts and the homeless.

This dumping of people, industries, and institutions—of material life—is the necessary precondition of the ideal “inanimate” city. This dumping of immigrants in Jaffa and Southern Tel Aviv has accelerated recently: “in the past decade the Black City has absorbed 60,000 refugees from Sudan, South Sudan, and Eritrea.” As a result,“the Black City has become a privileged playground for far-right politics and politicians” with religious authorities often sustaining and encouraging this process. In summer 2010 “twenty-five neighborhood rabbis from Tel Aviv...issued a common decree forbidding their community from renting or selling apartments or houses to non-Jewish people, in particular to African refugees.”

As well as the effects felt to this day, the cleansing of Jaffa did not come from nowhere: “the war between Tel Aviv and Jaffa, which would end with mortars and machine gun fire, began with leases and landscaping.” As the book’s subtitle suggests, architecture and urban planning, on the one hand, and war, on the other, are intertwined in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. However, their relation is not only inverted, but twisted and stretched: “White City is an example of how architecture, like war is the continuation of politics by other means. In turn we can classify a Black City as an example of how war is the continuation of architecture by other means.” What disappears in the Black City is politics. From the state emanates only force and administration. What the colonial power cannot achieve by architecture or administration it achieves by direct violence. In the White City, war and violence disappears, relegated to the Black City along with all the other inconveniences of metropolitan infrastructure. In the White City, the limits and needs of politics determine architecture and its narratives.

Rotbard shows the destruction of Jaffa had its origins in colonialism—both directly and through its incubation of Zionism. These emerge, intertwined, in Napoleon's siege of Jaffa in 1799, which saw, alongside a massacre by French troops, the first promise of Jewish sovereignty. Zionism's dependence on colonialism developed after 1919 under the British mandate. The ideology of the radically new White City aims to obscure that process, with Tel Aviv's growth dependent on British urban planning and infrastructure projects. The mandate period also saw an assault on Jaffa through reconfiguring the relation between city and countryside. Jewish settlements attached to Tel Aviv cut “the territorial continuity between Jaffa and its Eastern satellites…Jaffa was doomed...it was cut off from its rural hinterland.” Here Rotbard's displacement of the reified space of the White City, opening up the dialectical pair White City/Black City, goes beyond the urban character of the pairing, to think through the relation of country and city.

1948 saw the culmination of these processes, which colonialism had incubated for almost 150 years. The precise dates are important; Jaffa's surrender on 13 May 1948, two days before the founding of the state of Israel, “stands in direct contradiction to the State of Israel’s formal rhetoric that casts the responsibility for the War of Independence on the Arab states.” This further undermines the narratives of Israeli liberals for whom the “heroism” of 1948 can be detached from the illegality of the post-1967 occupation.

The urbicide, in which Jaffa, “was stripped bare of its heritage and left beaten, bruised and lifeless,” was not the end of Jaffa’s marginalization. Later, Jaffa was recreated as tourist kitsch; those buildings not destroyed, which once housed Palestinians, became “picturesque and exotic décor which, after a few years began to draw in tourists.” This Jaffa, as with Karavan's sentimental kitsch, relied on the exclusion of history, in this case the history of the buildings being inhabited. In the late 1950s a new process of cleansing began, this time of the post-1948 Jewish refugees living in Jaffa.

Jaffa's kitsch and the citing of the Tel Aviv “Bauhaus” as the beginning of local architecture both pivot upon the effacement of Palestinian architecture (and life) in Jaffa. Nothing is left but “the small collection of choice remnants, the Church of St. Petrus, Napoleon's cannon and the Andromeda rock in the sea. Jaffa has become everything but an Arab city...Tel Aviv has built itself a medieval crusader outpost.” When exposed to history and coupled with Rotbard's architectural sensitivity and polemical verve, the absurdity becomes clear. This leads to one of the book's strongest sections—the critique of “Tel Aviv's poor allegory for itself,” the Etzel Museum, which memorializes the paramilitaries responsible for the urbicide. Strikingly, this is the only point in the book where Rotbard undertakes extended architectural criticism proper. In the Black City (unlike the White), the relation between barbarism and architecture lacks political and ideological mediations. There is no gap here between ideology and the building.

The museum consists of a ruined Arab house enclosed within a glass box. This contradiction and its reconciliation—the “Oriental dwelling” preserved in and through the destruction of its context and “elevated” to architecture through its interaction with the “universal” form of the glass box—is inadvertently revealing. “The building tells the truth about the rape and murder of the city of Jaffa...but it lies at the same time by cloaking this bloody drama in 'architecture.’” The museum’s relation to the Orientalist tradition of the “Oriental Ruin” gives it a further charge:

the destruction of the Hellenistic relics...seemed to explain an Eastern inferiority eventually providing a justification for the continent's conquest. It was no different in Israel, where the image of the ruin was half a self-fulfilled prophecy and half an indication of things to come: the ruins of 1948 quickly assumed the role of those historic sites which had encouraged Westerners to “voyage East.”

The critique of the Etzel Museum, treating it as an allegory for the particular ideological practice of the White City on the Black City, widens the usefulness of White City, Black City beyond the history of Tel Aviv and Jaffa. This usefulness lies in its theoretical innovations, particular the use of Fanon for the analysis of urban contradictions, which are largely dissolved into the body of the book, but which become explicit in its conclusion.

This dialectical urbanism, arguing that colonialism is primarily about a spatial ordering, draws upon Fanon's argument, quoted in the final chapter: “there are cities for Europeans and cities for indigenous people.…The European city is a solid city built with stone and steel, it is lighted and asphalted....The colonized city is a hungry city; it is hungry for bread, for meat, for shoes, for carbon, for light.” The dialectical opposition between the white city (the city for Europeans) and the black city (the colonized city) is an opposition without possible mediation and reconciliation. In Tel Aviv and Jaffa's case, the impossibility of mediation is most evident in the rage of the White city directed nearly as strongly against the poor Southern Jewish neighborhoods, which could have mediated between Tel Aviv and Jaffa, as against Jaffa itself.

This theoretical framework is widely applicable. As Rotbard suggests, “today, the borders of a Black City and White City may be located anywhere.” This Fanon-derived urban theory is useful in an array of cities—whether in the advanced capitalist countries, London, Paris, New York, or in the Global South, notably Rio de Janiero and Medellín (Forrest Hylton has carried out a similar and similarly successful analysis of it), in which the economic processes of capitalism and the direct violence of the state impose a racialized spatial order.

Rotbard's response to what he considers to be the implications of Fanon's argument bears on the weaknesses of White City, Black City. They are a set of related difficulties around the relation of theory to practice, the book's characterization of modernism, and the possibility of justice as a radical break. For Rotbard, Fanon's arguments entail the total, terroristic negation of colonialism's spatial ordering. Rotbard's alternative to this is “to generate changes in the reality of the city without the usual use of physical power and sometimes violence; to change the city just by telling its story in a different manner.” In attempting this, Rotbard finds his “principles behind effective programs of resistance” in Homi Bhabha's argument. In Bhabha’s words, “the subversive moment is to reveal within the very integuments of 'whiteness' the antagonistic elements that make it the unsettled disturbed form of authority that it is,” attending to “the violence it inflicts in the process of becoming a transcendent force of authority.” This relates to the functionalist side of Rotbard's ideology critique, which he undertakes in the name of those groups—whether Palestinians, migrant workers, refugees, Israeli Arabs, or certain groups of Israeli Jews—who have been excluded from Israel's racialized modernity. The problem is that while a rigorous theoretical construction such as Rotbard's can reveal how Israeli whiteness is unsettled by these groups, this disturbance is conceived merely in opposition to whiteness. Its usefulness breaks down when it comes to constructing a practical program against Israeli whiteness, especially as the experiences, interests, and goals of those groups excluded from Israeli White Modernity are often antagonistic.

The utopian gap between the theoretical disruption of whiteness (and the justice of this disruption) and the impossibility of this happening in practice poses the question of how Rotbard conceives the relation of his bookto its epigraph from Hugo: “The book will kill the edifice.” In the afterword, Rotbard asks, “Did the book change the city?” He concedes that it largely did not, though a few readers “moved their apartments.” In one sense, this criticism of Rotbard is harsh. Dialectics, sadly, even when deployed as impressively as here, cannot break bricks. However, there is a more general theoretical problem: Rotbard, for all his achievements, struggles to imagine a positive radical change. The contrast with Fanon, who begins The Wretched of the Earth welcomingthe “tabula rasa which characterizes from the outset all decolonization,” is instructive. In Rotbard, by contrast, the new or modernity is presented as the violent insertion of the metropolitan into traditional communities, all of which “center around concepts of good behavior, with the aim of translating a basic ethos of righteousness and respect into practical interactions with the Other.” This claim, risking a slip into nostalgia for the good old things, is limiting, not least because its reference is not to a traditional rural community, but to pre-1948 Jaffa, a cosmopolitan city with, as Rotbard argues, numerous modernist buildings of its own. This total sundering of pre-1948 life in Palestine from modernity, furthermore, risks repeating the various alibis justifying Zionism.

This slightly odd claim also relates to a sometimes-casual characterization of modernist architecture. On the one hand, Rotbard is attentive to details in order to deny the alleged links between the Tel Aviv “Bauhaus” and the Desau Bauhaus. On the other hand, differences between quite divergent modernisms are effaced, with all modernism tending to be identified with colonialism. This misses how there are forms of modernism that offer a different modernity, including three that Rotbard mentions: the Desau Bauhaus ethic, centered on mass social housing and contrasted with stylization; early Soviet modernism, which is, despite often being undertaken by Jewish architects, uninteresting for the ideologues of the White City; and Brutalist social housing, which, in Israel's 1950s and 1960s version, Rotbard admires. There is a further useful counter-example, which bears on the analysis but which Rotbard does not mention: post-colonial modernism in Dakar, whose architectural modernity was not limited to French colonial buildings of the 1920s and 1930s. What is key to these modernisms is that the formally new was not imposed idealistically on matter but emerged from social practice, whether social democratic reformism, Communist revolution, or anti-colonial struggles. The Hugo epigraph, therefore, inverts things, making practice (whether destruction or construction) determined by theory, rather than vice-versa.

Perhaps Rotbard's turning away from any possibility of the new, a new that emerges not through theory but from practice, is a sign both of the limited political possibilities offered in Israel/Palestine at present, and also of how an overly exclusive focus on architecture whereby architecture is a social allegory, however critical, can tend towards an idealism and disregarding of social content. It is also perhaps a consequence of Rotbard's own biography: a tendency to overestimate the importance of thought or the literary, and his own social position as a (dissident) member of the Ashkenazi elite, intellectually but only intellectually on the side of the socially, culturally, or racially despised. The limits of this position are not unique to Rotbard; they are an issue across the Ashkenazi left. However, White City, Black City is, for all this, a book of very considerable merit and usefulness and an almost exemplary achievement.

“The sidewalk was like a mirror
Now, a sanitation worker collects the bodies of dead people […]
My memories died yesterday
But a tree smiling in Abu Nuwas has enlivened them”
– Iraqi poet Fadhil Abbas. 

This essay examines the ways in which the political circumstances of post-invasion Iraq have shaped the social and spatial realities of Baghdad’s key urban spaces, particularly Abu Nuwas Street. Since its American occupation in 2003, Baghdad has experienced securitization, sectarianism, and privatization undermining the public realm and restricting how people use their public spaces. Other cities in the region have experienced a similar urban situation. In Cairo, Egyptian governments since the time of Gamal Abdul Nasser have adopted a “state of emergency,” with the result that the city is transformed “into a battlefield, in which "national security" and the "war on terrorism" became justifications to control space and bodies” through state security apparatuses and interventions.[1] State-imposed physical security measures have, therefore, appeared: the Egyptian government during the presidency of Hosni Mubarak installed “metal walls” around major squares and sidewalks. These walls physically fragment the public realm of the city, restricting people’s movement and forcing them to “compete for space with cars.” The walls also resulted in the death of protesters during the January Revolution who “found themselves trapped behind the walls and were beaten to death” by the security forces. Both during the revolution and afterwards, the authorities erected blast walls around government buildings and closed off streets around the Tahrir Square. Also, in Cairo, private destinations appropriate the riverbanks of the Nile. Security restrictions by government and private security agents, and lack of official planning efforts to enhance public access to the river, disconnect the public from one of the city’s main assets.[2]

In Beirut, the public realm is shrinking. After the end of the civil war in 1990, state “infrastructure-led urban development” resulted in “real-estate dividends” benefitting the “ruling elites and their partners.” Public access to the city’s seashore has suffered from a “private takeover” in the form of “enclosed, high-end resorts.” Recently, “prominent investors” have fenced-off the Dalieh (a seashore “open access shared space” facing the famous Pigeons’ Rock) “in preparation for a major real estate development.” Also, mobility of city dwellers is “circumscribed through installations of barriers, blockades, checkpoints and the rerouting of traffic flow” mainly to protect the political elites from a “criminalized and differentiated public.”[3] City dwellers modify their movement in relation to certain areas and neighborhoods of the city which they consider receptive (or not) with regard to class, gender, nationality, religion, and/or sect.[4]

The role of public space as a site contested between the people and the authorities has been all the more important in these cities. Protests are the tip of the iceberg. In Baghdad, recent demonstrations against the corruption of the political elites have taken place every Friday in the al-Tahrir Square with protesters displaying banners and chanting slogans provocative to the ruling Islamist parties: “In the name of religion, thieves stole us.” In Beirut, too, activists have launched the YouStink Campaign, and the Martyrs’ Square in Beirut has been its main demonstration site. Before that, many of us witnessed on television and social media Egyptians protesting against Mubarak’s regime in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. 

In order to answer the question I am raising in this essay, I begin by tracing the history of the street since its construction, focusing on the socio-spatial practices of its users. I show how and when the street gained its significant image, which has persisted until the present in the accounts of city dwellers. Also, I identify its decline, which started around the time Saddam Hussein became a president, as a physical space used in ways related to its persistent image as a symbol of Baghdadi cultural and entertainment life in its height during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. I, then, go through the post-invasion (or “Post-Change” as some pro-invasion Iraqi intellectuals would like to call it) events, especially those having an impact on the urban spaces of the city in general and Abu Nuwas Street in particular.
   
Beginnings (1920s-1930s through 1968)

At the time of the construction of the street by the beginning of the 1930s, Baghdad had already been expanding beyond its old city, with new neighborhoods being established such as al-Wazeriya, al-Alwiya, al-Karrada al-Sharqiya, and al-Sa’doun. New types of buildings and facilities accompanied the expansion to fulfill the demands of the nascent state and society, such as airports, bridges, post offices, public-administration buildings, cinemas, and others. New urban elements were introduced, such as public gardens, green areas, and statues, and new laws passed, such as the Road and Building Law no. 44 of 1935.[5]

In continuation of its former status as a green place for the well-off and their summer residences,[6] the state-planned street maintained its upper-class characteristics. A road replaced the dyke along the bank of the Tigris. The remaining area adjacent to the river comprised a sidewalk and parks, whereas the other side of the street was a built-up area. The basic physical configuration of the street has not changed since its construction. Residents from various religious backgrounds (mainly Sunnis, Christians, and Jews) inhabited the upper part of the street close to al-Bab al-Sharqi, al-Battaween, and al-Sa’doun areas, and Shi’ite residents mostly inhabited the lower part close to al-Karrada.[7]

Abu Nuwas Street is an extension of the older, equally celebrated al-Rashid Street in terms both of their physical adjacency and the activities which took place there. If the cafés of al-Rashid Street were a haven for the intelligentsia during daytime then they spent their night on Abu Nuwas Street, drinking and eating masgouf (a Baghdadi delicacy of coal-grilled carp). They spent the evening in chirdagh (a tent on the sand swathes of the river) listening to music, drinking alcohol, and grilling.[8] Families, on the other hand, frequented casinos (not gambling places, but restaurants with occasional entertainment shows) mainly to eat masgouf, attend entertainment shows, and/or enjoy the presence of the river.[9] People crowded the open public spaces of the street, and the parks too. During the 1950s, the street, including its parks, casinos, and chirdagh, became an essential, leisurely destination for city dwellers and its image was strongly associated with the aforementioned leisurely activities.[10]

The Street under Ba’athist Rule (1968-2003)

After the 17 July coup in 1968, the ruling Ba’ath Party became increasingly concerned with security. The area of the Republican Palace across the river from Abu Nuwas Street became heavily policed as officials, including the then president and vice-president, Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr and Saddam Hussein respectively, resided in the area, making it more visible for the city dwellers as the regime’s headquarters. In spite of restrictions on civil liberties and political dissent, the 1970s marks a bright juncture in the street’s life for many Baghdadis. People continued to frequent the riverside casinos. In the publicly accessible strip of green areas along the river, individuals, couples, and families used the playgrounds and benches. Men hopped in and out of the bars along the other side of the street which was more active in the evening than daytime.

By the end of the 1970s and beginning of 1980s, the state carried out major projects across the city including two luxurious hotels (Ishtar and Palestine) and a residential project on the street. These projects aimed at reviving an “Arab and Mesopotamian grandeur” for the capital city under Saddam Hussein’s rule.[11] Also, the regime’s headquarters across the river consolidated their periphery by resettling loyal occupants (senior staff of the presidential palace) in the street’s residential project,[12] resulting in the demolition of many modern heritage buildings dating back to the 1930s and 1940s.[13]

The late 1970s and the 1980s mark the beginning of the gradual descent of the “golden days” of Abu Nuwas Street, due to rising police practices of a totalitarian state ruled by Saddam Hussein. “Then came the Iraq-Iran War isolating the street from many of its devoted goers … a list of prohibitions then was imposed,” the Iraqi journalist Baida’ Kareem wrote, “starting with no boating zones, no floating casinos, etc., and other measures controlling practices on land (no partying) and in water (no swimming to the other bank across the street).”[14] By then, the chirdagh had completely disappeared due to the state’s security restrictions. Moreover, in 1994, the state banned alcohol drinking in the street’s casinos, restaurants, and hotels after it launched “al-hamla al-imaniyya” (The Faith Campaign). As a result, alcohol drinking, which had been a main spatial practice for many street users, virtually disappeared, although some users defied the ban secretly. “The street died in the 1990s,” Baida’ Kareem states.

Occupation and Sectarian Violence: The Securitization of Urban Spaces and Sectarian-based Reordering of the City (2003-2007)

Shortly after the occupation of Iraq had begun, violence in Baghdad escalated until the many hotels where Westerners and officials resided, both on Abu Nuwas Street and elsewhere, became a target for the armed resistance. The occupation forces responded by erecting blast walls and razor wire to barricade the hotels, and by closing off the segment of the street where the hotels are located. Checkpoints guarded either end of the closed-off segment. At the same time, the Ba’athist regime’s quarters across the river became a US fortified zone famously known as The Green Zone. The perception of the quarters changed too. One Iraqi boy put it this way: “Saddam house … Now, Bush house.” Moreover, the occupation forces restricted access to the street’s riverbank “lest militants use it to mount attacks on the Green Zone.” In the meantime, the street is still rife with physical security measures constraining people’s practices and movement and preventing them from accessing the river.[15] One Iraqi expressed that Abu-Nuwas turned into “a street for the security forces.” 

The occupation authority (the Coalition Provisional Authority led by Paul Bremer) enforced political interventions which reproduced the sectarian-based inequalities which had existed before the occupation, with dire repercussions on the everyday life of city dwellers. The favoritism toward Sunnis who dominated the high ranks of the pre-invasion Iraqi state disappeared, and a new political power relation ensued in favor of the Shi'ite political parties.[16] The Ba’athist regime had manipulated ethnic and sectarian differences to control rebelling segments of the Iraqi population “in moments of crisis” such as the 1991 Shi'ite uprising.[17] As Damluji clarifies, “Hussein’s national policies did promote differential treatment of Iraqis based on ethno-sectarian identities, with visible impacts on the socio-economic and political status of some Shi’as living in the capital.” But, she continues, “Sunnis and Shi’as in the city continued to reside, socialize, and work in heterogeneous communities and neighborhoods as had historically been the case.”[18] However, during the occupation, and more precisely in the wake of the bombing of the holy Shi’ite al-Askari shrine in February 2006, Baghdad went through a sectarian-based demographic reordering in the form of a forced displacement campaign. Hence, the many previously mixed neighborhoods were homogenized into either Sunni or Shi’ite.

The CPA, headed by Bremer, executed a policy of “de-Ba’athification” of Iraqi society, including the dismantlement of all pre-invasion government entities, among them the ministries and security forces. These orders resulted in the disenfranchisement and political marginalization of many Sunnis who had held official posts before the occupation. The support of disaffected Sunnis for the Iraqi armed resistance increased. In July 2003, the CPA established the Interim Governing Council through an undemocratic process that involved no consultation with a broad spectrum of Iraqi political parties or local community leaders. Members were appointed to the council according to predetermined quotas, categorizing Iraqis along ethnic and sectarian lines and hence reinforcing the role these identities have played in post-invasion politics. The elections to the transitional National Assembly of Iraq, which took place in early 2005, replicated the same differentiations. The assembly was responsible for the establishment of a permanent Iraqi constitution and transitional government. A constitutional committee hastily drafted a constitution under pressure from the USA despite the withdrawal of the Sunni Arab representatives from the committee and the lack of consensus among the parties involved. On the other hand, the Shi’ite political parties dominated the transitional government. The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), through its armed militia the Badr Brigade, controlled the Ministry of Interior, and CPA Order Number 91 encouraged its members to enlist in the newly formed Iraqi police. By 2005, Al-Qaeda began targeting not only government forces, largely constituted by Shi’ites, but also Shi’ite civilians. Both Shi’ite and Sunni warring parties “identified vulnerable communities, families, and individual civilian residents in Baghdad according to sectarian identity, and transformed them into targets for politically driven retaliation attacks”.[19] Shortly after the bombing of the Shi'ite shrine in 2006, the strife between Sunni militas and Shi'ite militias supported by government forces escalated, reaching levels unprecedented in the preceding years of the occupation. This included mass forced displacement of residents of hitherto mixed neighborhoods, which eventually turned into homogeneous settlements. Sectarian violence decreased once many neighborhoods became homogenized, as Shi'ite militias consolidated their enormous territorial gains,[20] as well as due to the US “surge” military strategy and the incorporation of previously anti-government and occupation Sunni fighters into the so-called “awakening councils”.[21] The civil strife ended–or stalled–with the Shi'ite political organizations gaining ascendancy in the “political conflict over the right to rule Iraq, to share its resources and to define the meaning of the nationalist projects.”[22] Thereafter, the occupation forces implemented a plan to erect perimeter blast walls around Sunni and Shi'ite neighborhoods, further hardening segregation lines and exacerbating an already restricted mobility of city dwellers.[23]

In August 2009, the Iraqi government decided to lift the walls from all the closed-off streets in Baghdad “without exception” within forty days. This ambitious plan (or, political charade?) never took place, but the government did remove the walls from some commercial areas in central Baghdad to mitigate traffic congestion and facilitate better commercial activity for shops which the walls had isolated. In 2011, the Mayoralty of Baghdad declared that it had “prepared a plan to lift concrete barriers from all areas in the city,” and the official military spokesman of the Baghdad Operation Command had declared a similar plan earlier that year. Concurrently, the government lifted the walls from the Shi'ite al-Sadr City in Baghdad because, according to the same military spokesman, “the City witnessed security stability and considerable collaboration on the part of the community with the security apparatuses.”  

In the meantime, restrictions on mobility still take on a sectarian dimension, although it is less intense than that which resulted from the 2005-07 sectarian violence. Residents of the Sunni neighborhoods, such as al-Adhamiya and al-Ghazaliya, feel unjust treatment by the government because their neighborhoods are still walled in a dominantly Shi'ite city. Getting in and out of the walled Sunni neighborhoods through checkpoints controlled by dominantly Shi'ite personnel potentially entails inconvenience and intimidation. Consequently, Sunni neighborhoods have become an undesirable location to live in.[24] During Shi'ite rituals (i.e. the Mourning of Muharram and the Day of Ashura) or occasions of heightened political and security tension, restrictions get tighter.

With regard to Abu Nuwas Street, the area where it is located turned into a predominantly Shi'ite area in 2006.[25] Mostly low-income Shi'ite families squatted the residential buildings as the former occupants fled for fear of retaliation. Flags, banners, and posters conveying Shi'ite messages and symbols appeared in the post-invasion city as Shi'ite residents could not display such signs under the Ba’athist rule.

[Banners on the fence of a squatted residence in the southern section of Abu Nuwas Street, with inscriptions of “ya Hussein." Another hung on the building’s façade over the entrance inscribed with “ya Abbas.” Photo by Author].

The Reopening and “Redevelopment” of Abu Nuwas Street and Parks (2007-2012)

In November 2007, the occupation forces, in collaboration with the Iraqi government, re-opened the closed-off segments of Abu Nuwas Street and its parks. The US military and USAID provided a two million dollars fund to implement a “facelift” of buildings through Iraqi subcontractors. Shop owners received $2,500 micro grants. The renovation also entailed furnishing the parks with grass areas, footbridges, swings and benches. Several months after its re-opening, the street’s parks were receiving a large number of visitors: young men smoking hookah or sitting on the benches; children playing in the playgrounds while escorted by their parents; and people eating masgouf in the restaurants.[26]
 

[Two girls playing in the swings in the large park of Abu Nuwas Street in January 2014. Photo by Author.]

In November 2012, the Mayoralty of Baghdad launched a redevelopment project for the street which entailed the demolition of “some restaurants and cafés” and the construction of “a service and tourist [riverside] street and another for bicycles in the middle of the gardens.” The mayoralty constructed the two streets inside the park.[27] Some restaurants in the park were also demolished as they “were used in a wrong way” according to an official of the mayoralty, possibly referring to alcohol drinking and prostitution. The Iraqi owner of a carpentry workshop also perceived one of the demolished restaurants in the northern section of the park as a place which housed “improper activities.”[28]


Proliferation of Pseudo-Public Spaces in the City, and Proposed “Investment Projects” on Abu Nuwas Street

In the past few years, there has been a proliferation of pseudo-public destinations in Baghdad, namely, malls and restaurants/cafés. Also, many residential high-rise buildings in the form of housing complexes are under construction at the moment. The Baghdad Investment Commission is the authority responsible for issuing “investment licenses” for and coordinating with investors developing these projects.

The transition from a “centralized economy” to a “market economy” after the invasion, which both chairmen of the National Investment Commission and the Baghdad Investment Commission state as a fact, has opened the Iraqi real estate market for privatization by local and foreign investors. Efforts towards this transition started when Bremer’s CPA imposed “economic reforms” so radical that The Economist described them as a “kind of wish-list that foreign investors and donor agencies dream of for developing markets.” The CPA, through Order Number 37, set “individual and corporate income” taxes at 15 percent maximum. Its Order Number 39 allowed foreign investors 100 percent ownership of Iraqi assets and repatriation of profits, and permitted foreign investment “in all parts of Iraq” and all economic sectors except the natural resources sector. It also prohibited foreign investors from purchasing “the rights of disposal and usufruct private real property” but permitted them to lease or rent properties for no more than fourty years. This order, nevertheless, did not take effect. Regardless, the obligations set by the Paris Club in 2004 to substantially relieve Iraq from its enormous debts required the implementation of an IMF Emergency Post Conflict Assistance Program. One of the program’s main “underpinnings” is “the implementation of key structural reforms to transform Iraq into a market economy.” The IMF expressed in 2005 that the implementation of these “structural benchmarks” is “slower than envisaged” due to security. It stated, nonetheless, that the government’s 2006 program still “maintains a focus on macroeconomic stability, while… advancing Iraq's transition to a market economy.” In the same year, the Iraqi Council of Representatives approved the Investment Law No. 13 (amended in 2010) which repealed CPA Order Number 39. The law itself is no different from the occupation authority’s order, except that now the duration of rent or lease is fifty years maximum instead of forty, and Iraqi and foreign investors are permitted to own lands for the purpose of developing housing projects only. The law also stipulated the establishment of “national”, “region’s” (if applicable), and “governorate” commissions for investment.   

By December 2014, Baghdad Investment Commission had issued investment licenses for seventy “giant residential projects,” which will provide 130,000 residential units, and sixty licenses for “touristic projects.” The commission announced that the residential projects will “contribute to solving the housing crisis which has exacerbated recently,” and that the “touristic projects” aim to compensate for “the lack of touristic and hotel services” in the city. It claims that these projects “fulfill the needs of citizens, who are seeking comfort, recreation, entertainment, and shopping.” The commission, furthermore, conceives of“the phenomenon of commercial malls, which has been spreading,” as “a civilized aspect reflecting contemporary sensibility and urban development.” It ascribes the “widespread proliferation of such commercial malls” to its efforts.

Several malls have opened in the city: most notable are Mansour Mall and Maximall. Several large restaurants have also opened, including four riverside restaurants. Two of the latter are “floating restaurants” located on the street which is also officially called Abu Nuwas and was once the extension of Abu Nuwas Street discussed in this essay.[29] The other two are large restaurants/cafés composed of many gardens, halls, and riverside areas.

The dire security situation, as one manager of a mall expressed, demands searching people entering it. An Iraqi woman shared the same fear saying that “when [Mansour Mall] first opened … We worried that if someone blew up a bomb, there would be a massacre”. Some managers expressed that the “safety” of such places vis-a-vis the “unsafety” of the city’s open public spaces is the reason why people choose to hang out there for leisure and/or shopping. Another Iraqi woman concurred saying: “I can watch my kids playing safely and get whatever I need in the stores.” Another woman yet noted that “malls have not witnessed incidents of harassment of women and girls because most of their goers are families.” However, according to an Iraqi women’s rights activist, “the phenomenon [of sexual harassment of women] is increasing exponentially in public spaces such as gardens and parks."

In the first half of 2014, the Mayoralty of Baghdad, through its investment committee, considered a plan to designate five locations for investment in the riverside part of the street (see map below).[30] Two of these projects seem to have serious repercussions on the public space of the street in case they are implemented: the “floating restaurant” in the northern part of the large park; and the hotel in the whole location of the small park. Such privatization, if it is to take place, will erase important parts of a city with the few remaining riverside public spaces, and could potentially affect the adjacent park areas and the ways in which people currently use them. Men of various age groups use the northern section of the large park mainly for alcohol drinking, despite the inconvenience of prevalent moral codes and occasional raids by the police.[31] Activist groups and other–especially young–groups of men and women use the small park for cultural and entertainment events.[32]
 

[Location map of the proposed investment projects. Map by Author.]

Parallels between Past and Present, and the Introduction of New Urban Realities   

As is evident in one of the main open public spaces of the city, restrictions on the socio-spatial practices of street users which resulted from the policing of space by the Ba’athist regime until 2003, reappeared during the American occupation. Since 2003, very noticeable forms of securitization have existed, resulting in the same old restrictions as well as some new ones. City dwellers are still unable to access the river from Abu Nuwas Street for security reasons, namely, guaranteeing the safety of the fortified Green Zone across the river, a reason identical to that of the Ba’athist regime. Alcohol drinking is another case in point. As a result of the Faith Campaign, the state banned it, and people did it secretly. A rather similar situation is present today. The mayoralty invoked the immorality of alcohol drinking as one of the reasons behind its decision to demolish some restaurants in 2012. Now, this practice does not take place in restaurants. Rather, men of various age groups cautiously practice it in the northern part of the large park, despite security and moral constraints.

What makes the security situation direr still is the sectarian landscape of the post-invasion city. This reality is a recent one which came along with the occupation as a direct result of its political interventions, as demonstrated above. The constraining impacts of securitization of public space unequally affect city dwellers. In general, Sunnis have less leverage in negotiating their right to use and appropriate space. On Abu Nuwas Street, like elsewhere in the city, territory marking takes places along sectarian lines. Flags and banners conveying Shi'ite signs and messages exclude other markings on the street (i.e. Sunni markings).[33]

Despite these restrictive conditions, street users crafted opportunities from below, circumventing the security measures and making the public spaces in the street suitable for their purposes. They appropriate these places through everyday spatial practices, using tactics to lessen the dire effects of security and sectarian measures.[34] Activists, too, have striven to show an image of Baghdad different from that circulated in the media and related to war and violence by holding public events. These collective events (most famous is the “I am Iraqi, I Read” event) aim to convey messages related to love, peace and/or simply having fun.[35]

Therefore, public space in Abu Nuwas Street is contested. The aforementioned public events implicitly counter the political sectarianism and religious extremism ingrained in the reality of post-invasion Iraq.[36] For example, although perceptions of the Colors Festival (held in March, 2015 in the small park of Abu Nuwas Street) varied, some perceived it as being “morally disgusting” or as an act of “on-air prostitution,” “public and explicit insolence,” and others. The governor of Karbala said, commenting on the possibility of holding a similar event in the Shi'ite holy city, “such an event is not innocent, and its purpose is to spoil the youth and waste their energies through imported practices.” References to the ongoing war with ISIS usually accompany such derogatory comments to highlight the “inappropriateness” of the timing and content of such events. 

Although the leisurely socio-spatial practices which took place in the street in the 1950s-1970s era are no longer found today, perceptions about the street are still very much linked to that era. Many people celebrate the street as one for delight and enjoyment devoid of religious and/or sectarian associations and commercial imperatives. But this very celebration has made the street, as Pieri put it, a “contested window”,[37] in the late-1970s major (re)development projects as well as the recent investment plan. Tapping into the already significant symbolism of the street, as well as its location across the river from its headquarters, the Ba’athist regime implemented a number of major developments there. With regard to the recently proposed investment projects, whether these materialize the state’s need to control the practices in the parks’ public spaces, especially those which it perceives to be immoral such as alcohol-drinking or public events, and/or whether economic interests drive them, requires further investigation. In any case, they attest to the absence of any participatory planning practice sponsored by the pre- or post-invasion state. Hence, the absence of a meaningful democratic participation of city dwellers in planning one of the few remaining on-river open public spaces accessible to them. The decision whether or not to implement these projects is left exclusively to the mayor,[38] who, despite public scrutiny which would arise if they are implemented, can take the final decision.

Furthermore, the 2006 investment law has unleashed what appears to be a huge campaign of privatization, defined as the provision of destinations for a select public by private agents. These destinations are privately-owned and -administered spaces of consumption and “aggregation”–most commonly, malls–where the ability to purchase governs access, and where private security ensures predictability, regularity, and orderliness of users and their behaviors to ensure the “flow of commerce.”[39] In Baghdad, similar spaces offer a safer alternative to the traditional spaces of shopping, such as commercial streets, and recreation, such as parks, characterized by what seems to be an endemic lack of security. They also provide a more comfortable haven for women, who frequently suffer sexual harassment in the public spaces of the city. But, as Caldeira shows in the case of São Paulo, the proliferation of “fortified enclaves” creates a new model of spatial segregation, and transforms the quality of life, openness and free circulation, character of public space, and citizens’ participation.[40] In the case of Baghdad, it would be interesting to investigate whether the increasing number of privatized spaces for residence, consumption, leisure, and work is forming another layer of class segregation in addition to the sectarian-based segregation already in place. 

[The main body of this essay os extracted from my master’s thesis entitled Consolidating Socio-Spatial Practices in a Militarized Public Space: The Case of Abu Nuwas Street in Baghdad, which I submitted in September 2014 for the degree of Master of Urban Planning and Policy at the American University of Beirut. I would like to acknowledge the input of my thesis advisor Mona Harb, and of my thesis readers Ahmad Gharbieh and Caecilia Pieri. I would also like to thank Jadaliyya’s Cities Page Editors for their useful comments.]

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[1] Salma Abdouelhossein, “Urbanism of Exception: Reflection on Cairo’s Long Lasting State of Emergency and its Spatial Production” (paper presented at the RC21 International Conference on The Ideal City: between myth and reality. Representations, policies, contradictions and challenges for tomorrow’s urban life, Urbino (Italy), 27-29 August, 2015). Accessed at http://www.rc21.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/D2-Abouelhossein.pdf on October 12, 2015.
[2] Kondolf G.M. et. al., “Connecting Cairo to the Nile: Renewing life and heritage on the river” (IURD Working Paper No. WP-2011-06. Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning, University of California, Berkeley, 2011). Accessed at http://ced.berkeley.edu/~cairo/CairoFinalReport.pdf on October 10 2015.
[3] Kristin V. Monroe, “Being Mobile in Beirut,” City & Society, 23, no. 1 (2011), 91-111.
[4] Mona Fawaz, Mona Harb, and Ahmad Gharbieh, “Living Beirut's Security Zones: An Investigation of the Modalities and Practice of Urban Security,” City & Society, 24, no. 2 (2012), 173-195.
[5] Khalid al-Sultani, “Ru’ā Mi‘māriya” (Arabic) (Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, 2000).
[6]  Abd al-Razzaq al-Hassani, “al-‘Irāq Qadīman wa Ḥadīthan” (Arabic) (Saida: Maṭba‘at al-‘Irfān, 1958), 108.[7] Caecilia Pieri’s remarks for the author (February, 2014).
[8] “أبو نؤاس شارع السمك يقضي الليل وحيداً حالماً بالفرح,” Almada Newspaper, May 18 2012.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Abd al-Razzaq al-Hassani, “al-‘Irāq Qadīman wa Ḥadīthan,” 105.
[11] Caecilia Pieri, “Modernity and its Posts in Constructing an Arab Capital: Baghdad’s Urban Space and Architecture,” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 42, no. 1-2 (2008), 32-42.
[12] “Abu Nawas Development Project,” ArchNet (source: AKTC). Accessed at http://archnet.org/library/sites/one-site.jsp?site_id=701 on August 31 2013.
[13] Caecilia Pieri, “Sites of Conflict: Baghdad’s Suspended Modernities versus a Fragmented Reality,” in Re-Conceptualizing Boundaries: Urban Design in the Arab World, edited by Robert Saliba (Ashgate, 2015): 199-212.
[14] Baida’ Kareem “أبو نواس: تاريخ في شارع,” Aljadidah News Network, April 19 2009. Accessed at http://aljadidah.com/2009/04/6460/ on August 31 2013.
[15] Yaseen Raad, “Diverse Socio-Spatial Practices in a Militarized Public Space: The Case of Abu Nuwas Street in Baghdad” (paper presented at a conference entitled Radical Increments: Toward New Platforms of Engaging Iraqi Studies, and organized by Muhsin al-Musawi and Yasmeen Hanoosh, Columbia University, April 21-24, 2015).
[16] Mona Damluji, “Securing Democracy in Iraq: Sectarian Politics and Segregation in Baghdad,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 21, no. 2 (2010), 71-87.
[17] Derek Gregory, “The Biopolitics of Baghdad: Counterinsurgency and the Counter-City,” Human Geography 1, (2008), 6-27.
[18] Mona Damluji, “Securing Democracy in Iraq: Sectarian Politics and Segregation in Baghdad.”
[19] Ibid; it should be noted that Damluji’s work cited here has been key to my understanding of the political events and their impacts on the urban reality of post-invasion Baghdad. 
[20] Derek Gregory, “The Biopolitics of Baghdad: Counterinsurgency and the Counter-City.”
[21] The “surge” –officially known as the New Way Forward and declared by Bush in January 2007– has two characteristics different from the one preceding it, Operation Together Forward. The first is the considerable increase in troops (deploying extra 20,000 troops mainly in Baghdad), and the second is the incorporation of the “new counterinsurgency doctrine”. Such doctrine “defines the population as the center of gravity of military operations” (Ibid.). It also aims at prioritizing cultural awareness of American soldiers in relation to the context they operate in, in contrast to the previous counterinsurgency strategy that focused on tactical issues -smart bombs, unmanned vehicles, etc. (ibid.).
[22] Ibid.
[23] Mona Damluji, “Securing Democracy in Iraq: Sectarian Politics and Segregation in Baghdad.”
[24] A taxi driver in Baghdad told me that “no one wants to buy a home in Sunni neighborhoods nowadays” pointing out that living there is inconvenient due to the high security measures in place. 
[25] Also see: Joel Wing, “Columbia University Charts Sectarian Cleansing of Baghdad,” Musings on Iraq, November 19 2009. Accessed at http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-post.html (on September 2013). Check the strip of Abu Nuwas Street in the Baghdad 2006 map and how it turned into a Shi'ite area while the rest of the al-Karrada district was mixed.
[26] “شارع أبو نؤاس يستعيد المقاهي والمطاعم,” Al-Shorfa.com. April 1 2008. Accessed at http://mawtani.al-shorfa.com/ar/articles/iii/features/2008/04/01/feature-03 on April 30, 2014.
[27] It should be noted that the streets are not for public vehicular access. Rather, they are service roads used by garbage-collection trucks and military vehicles. Also, park users walk on them especially the one in the middle.
[28] Interview conducted by the author with an owner of a carpentry workshop in the northern part of the street (January, 2014).
[29] For photos, see the Facebook page of the Jadriya Floating Restaurant. Accessed at https://www.facebook.com/JadriyaRest/photos/pb.240773886105361.-2207520000.1445192845./250785498437533/?type=3&theater on October 18 2015.
[30] An official document reviewed by the author in June, 2014 at the Directorate of Design of the Mayoralty of Baghdad.
[31] Yaseen Raad, “Diverse Socio-Spatial Practices in a Militarized Public Space: The Case of Abu Nuwas Street in Baghdad.”
[32] Yaseen Raad, “The Production of an Alternative Image through Public Space,” in Logics of Space in the Middle East Today, edited by Mohamed Elshahed and Mona Damluji (Cairobserver, 2015): 24-25.
[33] Yaseen Raad, “Diverse Socio-Spatial Practices in a Militarized Public Space: The Case of Abu Nuwas Street in Baghdad.”
[34] Ibid.
[35] Yaseen Raad, “The Production of an Alternative Image through Public Space.”
[36] Ibid.
[37] Caecilia Pieri’s remarks for the author (September, 2014).
[38] An interview with employees of the Directorate of Design of the Mayoralty of Baghdad (June, 2014).
[39] Steven Flusty, “Building Paranoia,” in Architecture of Fear, edited by Nan Ellin (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997): 47-60.
[40] Teresa P. R. Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

This report seeks to stimulate a much-needed discussion on developing a better approach to assisting people in urban areas that have been affected by protracted armed conflict. Currently, some fifty million people worldwide are affected by armed conflict in urban areas, with knock-on effects that go far beyond the visible signs of destruction. Experience suggests that most of these people are more dependent on essential services than their rural compatriots, making them more vulnerable to service disruptions. At its most general level, this report seeks to increase awareness of the extent and nature of the impact of the deprivation of urban services during times of armed conflict, sometimes for decades in succession. More specifically, it calls for a move from traditional assistance paradigms to one that takes account of the longer-term realities and needs in urban areas affected by ongoing armed conflict.

Some of the report’s main messages include:
1. The relief-rehabilitation-development paradigm is counterproductive in contexts of protracted conflict in urban areas
2. Urban services are based on interdependent people, hardware and consumables.
3. “Urban” extends beyond the city.
4. Urban services are interconnected.
5. If not dealt with in time, “vicious cycles” may render the restoration of a service unfeasible.

Report authors include Jean-Philippe Dross, Mark Zeitoun, Javier Cordoba, Evaristo de Pinho Oliveira and Michael Talhami. The full report can be downloaded here. 

يذكّر اسم مدينة الإسكندرية المصرية خارج الشرق الأوسط بصور منارة المدينة، التي هي إحدى عجائب العالم القديم السبع، أو بمكتبة الإسكندرية القديمة. وترمز كلٌّ من المنارة والمكتبة إلى عصر ذهبيٍّ للثقافة والمعرفة. وإذا ما وضعنا الصرحين التاريخيين جانباً، نرى أن الغرب نظر إلى هذه المدينة الساحلية كواحة للتسامح الديني والثقافي والسياسي، وكملاذ كوزموبوليتاني (عالمي) حقيقي، لكنه يختفي. وتستعيد وسائل الإعلام الناطقة باللغة الإنكليزية اليوم، وعلى نحو متكرر، صوراً مشابهة غامضة عن ماضي الإسكندرية. فالأحاديث عن المدينة تبدأ بوصف كوزموبوليتانية “سابقة” أو “كوزموبوليتانية كانت موجودة مرة”. أما النبرة فهي “نبرة حنين” بشكل متواصل إلى هذه الكوزموبوليتانية المتلاشية، وهو حنين تتم مقارنته مع “صعود السلفية” في الإسكندرية، الهوية الدينية المرتبطة بالمدينة منذ الثورة المصرية في 2011.

حين نفكّر بهذه الخطابات الرائجة عن الإسكندرية، والتي ينشر معظمها “غرباء” عن المدينة، وتبزغ داخل المدينة أيضاً على نحو متقطّع، (1) ينبغي أن نطرح عدة أسئلة كي نفكك هذه التصويرات: هل سبق أن كانت الإسكندرية كوزموبوليتانية، وهل ما تزال هكذا اليوم؟ ولماذا هناك ميل لمجاورة حقبتين تاريخيتين متخيلتين للإسكندرية (“الماضي الكوزموبوليتاني السابق” و”الحاضر السلفي”، على حساب فترات تاريخية أخرى؟ أعالج هذه الأسئلة فاحصاً صور إسكندرية كوزموبوليتانية في الأدب الغربي، ومقارناً هذا الوصف مع استبصارات جمعتُها من فترات مطوّلة من الوقت قضيتها في الإسكندرية منذ ثورة 25 يناير، ومن عمل باحثين آخرين اقترحوا طرقاً بديلة لتعريف الكوزموبوليتانية الإسكندرانية. 

تتسم جماعة كوزموبوليتانية، أو مكان كوزموبوليتاني، بتبادلات ثقافية ذات طابع تعددي، وتسامح وشعور مشترك بالانتماء إلى جماعة كونية، مما يقود غالباً إلى ازدهار الحياة الفكرية والفنية. وتتوضع رؤية كوزموبوليتانية في قلب كثير من الأعمال الأدبية التي غذّت الخيال الغربي حول الإسكندرية، مثل كتاب إي.م. فورستر “الإسكندرية: تاريخ ودليل” (1922)، وأشعار قسطنطين كفافيس (تقريباً من 1891- 1904). وصوّرتْ رواية “رباعية الإسكندرية” (1957- 1960) المشهورة للورانس داريل، على نحو مشابه، حياة الكوزموبوليتيين التي صاغتها بيئتهم، والذين كانوا يتنقلون من حفلات الرقص الجميلة في فندق سيسل إلى حفلات العشاء في الأتوال، ومن قصص الحب في شقق الدبلوماسيين والمفكرين الأوربيين إلى عوالم المتعة في المواخير على شاطئ البحر.

إن القصص الأدبية أرشيف خيالي ويجب ألا تُعدّ أنثروبولوجيا أو علم اجتماع. مع ذلك، عاش المؤلفون الثلاثة في المدينة: كان كفافيس إسكندرانياً من أصل يوناني، وعمل إي.م. فورستر في الإسكندرية مع الصليب الأحمر أثناء الحرب العالمية الأولى، وعاش داريل في المدينة لمدة أربع سنوات في أواخر الأربعينيات. كانوا ضمن هذا الجو. وليست الطريقة التي يصورون بها الإسكندرية خيالية فحسب، بل متعلقة بالسيرة ذاتية أيضاً في بعض النواحي. وقد أغنت هذه الأعمال الأدبية الخيال الغربي عن الإسكندرية (حققت روايات داريل أفضل المبيعات وأعيدت طباعتها عدة مرات)، لكن تصويرها لكوزموبوليتانية الإسكندرية يجب ألا يُعتمد كتمثيل لكيف جرب معظم سكان المدينة المدينة الساحلية، أو على نحو أسوأ، يجب ألا يُنظر إليه على أنه يشمل كل الجماعات التي دعت هذا المكان وطناً.

في الحقيقة، إن العرب (2)، مغيّبون في هذا التصوير الكوزموبوليتاني. ففي رباعية داريل، ما يدعى بـ“الحي العربي” هو مكان القاذورات حيث يعيش أشباه بشر يتضورون جوعاً. ذلك أنّ دارلي، الشخصية المحورية في الرواية، يتنزه في “الشارع المظلم الملطّخ بالعرب”.(3). وحين يسمع العربية، تبدو غير مألوفة، وتُنطق بصوت نشاز مليء بـ “التعنيفات”. بالإضافة إلى الذين أشير إليهم بأنهم “عرب”، تتضمن روايات داريل وصفاً موسّعاً لعاهرات سوريات، استؤجرن ليمتّعْن الدبلوماسيين والمفكرين الأوربيين الفقراء، وأحياناً اتُّهمْنَ بأنهنّ سبب “الأمراض التناسلية” التي تنتقل بسرعة. ما يشار إليه بأنه”كوزموبوليتانية” في هذا السياق إقصائي ضمنياً، ومتأصل في الطرق الاستعمارية في رؤية “الآخر”. إنه موزاييك من المتع الأوربية والطبقية الليبرالية التي تخفي أغلبية عربية تمر أنشطتها دون أن تُلاحَظ، والتي يُحط من قدرها ـ حين يقر بها بشكل وجيز ـ وتوصف بأنها قذرة. إن الكوزموبوليتانية محدودة في مداها، ومحملة بالدلالات الإثنية والطبقية.

[أحد الشوارع المزدحمة في حارة العطارين، الإسكندرية. تصوير محمد قطب.]

[لقطة لمطعم ديليس في الإسكندرية الذي افتتح عام 1922. تصوير محمد قطب.]

ينظر هؤلاء المؤلفون إلى “الكوزموبوليتانية الأوربية” كمتلاشية فيما هم يجربونها. ويرى خالد فهمي  أن الإسكندرية رُبطتْ على الدوام بـ “الخسارة” في الخيال الغربي، واعتُقد أنها في حالة تدهور دورية. ويذكر فهمي كيف أن إي.م. فورستر في كتابه “الإسكندرية: تاريخ ودليل” يحمل مسؤولية هذه الخسارة للفتح “العربي” لهذه المدينة في 682. وتنظر هذه القراءة المتمركزة أوربياً للتاريخ إلى الفتوحات كبداية “ألف عام من الصمت”، ألفية مظلمة يُعتقد أن حكم الخديوي العثماني محمد على باشا (الذي حكم من 1805 إلى 1848 ) قاطعها لمدة وجيزة. أما الفترة الطويلة الممتدة بين 682 و1805 فهي ممحوة من التاريخ، فيما حُطَّ من قدر العهود الفاطمية والأيوبية والمملوكية والعثمانية الأولى على أنها غير ذات صلة. إن ما دعي بالكوزموبوليتانية عادت بالتدريج إلى المدينة ووصلت إلى أوجها أثناء الاحتلال البريطاني لمصر. لهذا السبب، يُذكر النصف الأول من القرن العشرين، إعادة تأهيل المشروع الاستعماري، من أجل التسامح مع اليهود واليونانيين والطليان والأوربيين الآخرين، وينتهي، بحسب هؤلاء الرواة، مع مشروع ناصر السياسي. ففي فيلم وثائقي لهيئة الإذاعة البريطانية (بي بي سي) يعود إلى عام 1977 عنوانه “روح المكان”، يعود داريل إلى المدينة، ويندب الموجة الثانية من الكوزموبوليتانية التي انتهت. ويشير فهمي أن داريل شجب الإسكندرية لأن الحياة الثقافية غادرتْها معبراً عن مخاوفه من “أن ثورة ناصر الاشتراكية القمعية دمرت المدينة”.      

بعد عقود، واصل الصحفيون والكتاب استحضار ما يدعى بالكوزموبوليتانية التي صورها أولئك المؤلفون. لكن اليوم، بدلاً من لوم مشروع ناصر القومي والاشتراكي على فقدان الكوزموبوليتانية، يحمّلون الصعود المفاجئ للسلفية المسؤولية عن ذلك. وتهيمن هذه الثنائية الجديدة على التغطية الغربية للإسكندرية في وسائل الإعلام. ذلك أن جيمس تروب جسّد هذا الخطاب الثنائي في مقالة نشرها في كانون الأول\ديسمبر 2014 في مجلة “فورين بوليسي” بعنوان “المنارة تبهت” يصف فيها الإسكندرية بأنها كانت “مرة القلب الكوزموبوليتاني النابض للعالم العربي، لكنها الآن قاعدة السلفيين المصريين، مقر حركة إسلامية متشددة ربطت ثرواتها برئيس البلاد الأوتوقراطي الجديد”.  وبعد أن درستُ الحركة السلفية (والتي تُعدَّ الدعوة السلفية ممثلها الرئيسي) في الإسكندرية وكتبت عنها في السنوات القليلة الماضية، أستطيع أن أشهد بأن صعود الحزب، والمنظمة الدينية التي خلفه، مثيران للانتباه ومليئان بالتعقيدات في آن. وهما يستحقان بالفعل الانتباه الصحفي والبحثي.  فضلاً عن ذلك، إن وجود الحركة وأهميتها في المدينة يجب ألا يشوّها رؤيتنا للإسكندرية، التي تفور بحركات وديناميات متعددة، وأحياناً تبدو متناقضة ظاهرياً. إن التفكير بالإسكندرية بأنها كانت مرة مدينة كوزموبوليتانية صارت مرتعاً للسلفية اختزالي ومضلل. وكما أشار عمرو علي في محاضرة مؤخراً: “إن إحياء هذه الكوزموبوليتانية السابقة، والإشارة بشكل غير نقدي إليها، فعل واع يتم في ضوء تركيبة ذهنية أمنية”. إن هذه التركيبة الذهنية الأمنية تنظر بهوس إلى مجتمعات الشرق الأوسط من خلال عدسات حركاتها الإسلامية. 

لا شك أن هناك حركة سلفية قوية في الإسكندرية. فالدعوة السلفية، العمود الفقري للحزب السلفي الرئيسي (حزب النور)، تأسست في الإسكندرية في السبعينيات، وجعلت المدينة قاعدة لها منذ ذلك الوقت. وقد فاجأ حزب النور النقاد حين احتل المرتبة الثانيةبعد الإخوان المسلمين في الانتخابات البرلمانية المصرية في 2011 بعد أن حصل على 27٪ من الأصوات. وبعد صيف 2013، قرر حزب النور والدعوة السلفية الوقوف مع حكومة عبد الفتاح السيسي المدعومة من الجيش، فيما عارضا بقوة الإخوان المسلمين. وقد تحدت هذه الاصطفافات السياسية المفاجئة كيف نفهم علاقات السلفيين مع الجيش المصري ومجموعات إسلامية أخرى، ولفتت أيضاً انتباهاً معتبراً إلى الحركة السلفية.

حين يدرس الصحفيون الحركة السلفية يتجولون في شوارع حارات ميامي وأبي سليمان أو المندرة، باحثين عن شخصيات تؤكد فكرة مسبقة عن مدينة صارت سلفية ومتجانسة، وتمدّ في عمر فكرة التدهور الدوري للكوزموبوليتانية الإسكندرانية. (4) يناقشون شظايا من تاريخ الإسكندرية، ويسيرون بتوق في دهاليز فندق سيسل، الذي يجسد هذا الماضي الخيالي ومركز هذا النزوع إلى الحفلات في روايات داريل. وما يزالون ينخرطون في التاريخ بطريقة انتقائية غير مدركين، على الأرجح، للدلالات الإقصائية للرؤية الأدبية الكوزموبوليتانية. 

من الصعب معالجة الخيال الغربي حول الإسكندرية. ذلك أن العودة إلى حوليات الأدب الأوربي قد تكون إدمانية، وطريقة سهلة لإرواء ظمأ الحنين. وكما يقول عمرو علي، إن “العالم الغربي ينظر إلى الإسكندرية بالطريقة التي ينظر بها العالم العربي إلى قرطبة. إنها تلهب الخيال. فالإسكندرية هي مخطط أو برنامج عمل للحضارة الغربية”. (5) إن الاستغراق في الذكريات عن مقاه مليئة بالأوروبيين (والتي حُظر دخولها على المحليين المصريين الذين ليسوا من النخبة على الأرجح)، وعن سائقي تاكسي يتحدثون اليونانية، وبحارة بريطانيين ينزلون في المرفأ من أجل بعض الراحة، يعني تجاهل تاريخ غالبية الإسكندرانيين. وأكيد أن هذا الحنين إلى الكوزموبوليتانية لا يفعل أي شيء كي يضيء وجود حركة دينية كالسلفية التي، فيما هي متأصلة ومشهورة، ليست متجانسة داخلياً ولا مهيمنة في المجتمع. وتأتي إدامة هذه الطرق في تخيل المدينة على حساب محو فترات طويلة من التاريخ، وتنطوي على مجازفة تمجيد الثقافة الأوربية. 

[سينما ريو الإسكندرية. تصوير محمد قطب.]

[سينما ريالتو حيث تقع الكابينا الآن، الإسكندرية. تصوير محمد قطب.]

 يستطيع المرء القول إن الإسكندرية تُظهر اليوم عدداً من السمات الكوزموبوليتانية، هذا إذا فصلنا المصطلح عن الدلالة التي ورثها من أعمال داريل وفوستر وكفافيس. فالإسكندرانيون يواصلون الشعور بأنهم ينتمون إلى جماعة كونية في الوطن، لكن طموحاتهم وإبداعهم يتجاوزون في الوقت نفسه حدود مدينتهم، ويدفعونهم إلى إعادة ابتكار طرق لسكن مدينتهم وتاريخها. وتعاود الإسكندرية إحياء الحياة الفنية في أمكنة القرن العشرين الأولى المهجورة التي أعيد تأهيلها وبعثها من جديد وفُتحت للجميع، مثل الكابينة، والتي هي مكان فني لجماعة يقع في غرفة الكونترول المهجورة لسينما ريالتو المغلقة الآن، أو وكالة بهنا، وهي مركز مخصص للسينما يقع في ما كان مرة مكاتب توزيع الأفلام العائدة لعائلة بهنا. وهناك عدد كبير من الكتاب والمترجمين والباحثين الشبان يدعون الإسكندرية وطناً حتى ولو شعروا لوقت وجيز بخيبة أمل في الأزمة التالية للثورة، ويواجهون غالباً العواقب الوخيمة للتوظيف النادر.

إن مدينة مصر الثانية هي موضع لبارات مخبأة من الصعب العثور عليها (مثل سبيت فاير)، وزوايا المساجد (بعض الحارات مثل باكوس فيها دزينات من الزوايا). ذلك أن الإسكندرية موقع مقاومة. فيها أصوات محلية مكافحة (نادراً ما غطاها الإعلام) والكثير من النشطاء العامين مثل ماهينور المصري، وكلهم يواصلون الاحتجاج من أجل إطلاق سراح السجناء السياسيين والدفاع عن اللاجئين والقتال من أجل المجموعات المحرومة من حق الانتخاب. واليوم، يلتقي في الإسكندرية مهاجرون من أنحاء الشرق الأوسط وأفريقيا جنوب الصحراء الكبرى، ويهدف كثيرون منهم إلى مواصلة طريقهم إلى أوربا، بينما يقرر البعض البقاء. إن المركّب الإثني والثقافي الجديد للمدينة ليس ناجماً عن الهجرة القسرية فحسب، بل أيضاً عن طرق السفر العالمية الجديدة. وقد التقيت مؤخراً بدزينات من المراهقين الأندونيسيين الذين يرتادون مقاهي جديدة في شارع فؤاد، حيث عاش داريل مرة، وهم يعيشون في الحارة ويدرسون في مركز العربي. 

في كتابه الجديد يتحدث سامولي شيلك عن بالغين شبان جاؤوا بالأصل من قرية خارج الإسكندرية، لكنهم إما يعملون في المدينة أو يعيشون في حارة المندرة الشرقية. ومن خلال استقصائه لغموض التزامهم الديني، ولأحلامهم وتطلعاتهم، يحاول استقصاء معنى الكوزموبوليتانية. وفي ضوء هذا العمل الإثنوغرافي يرى الكوزموبوليتانية سيرورة فعل وخيال، متأصلة في “طلاقة الحركة والانتماء إلى العالم”. فالإسكندرانيون هم كوزموبوليتانيون لأنهم “يطمحون إلى جعل الحداثة العالمية لهم، دون أن يصبحوا متجانسين أو مرتبطين بشكل كامل بالمعنى الذي أثارته العولمة”. (6)

إن أحياء الطبقة العليا والسفلى في المدينة، التي تنتشر على الكورنيش وتتنامى في الصحراء، تتاخم بعضها بعضاً على نحو جميل. ذلك أن الإسكندرية توجد خارج الثنائيات المزيفة، دون جيوب طبقية محددة وحدود جغرافية أو تاريخية واضحة. ويعيش الإسكندرانيون في مدينة ساحلية تتسم، بطبيعتها، بحركة الأشخاص والأفكار. وهم فخورون بهويتهم، ومتأصلون في تاريخ كوزموبوليتانية متعددة الطبقات، ويواصلون مد يدهم نحو العالم الذي خارج مدينتهم. وتعيش المدينة صراعاً متواصلاً كي تعرّف هويتها ومستقبلها، وتفهم ماضيها في آن واحد معاً. أما بالنسبة للغرباء، وبعض الموجودين في الداخل (بما أن الحدود دوماً ضبابية)، فإن فهم جوهر المدينة المتغيّر وتجريبه مشروطان برفض الذكريات الاستعمارية حول الكوزموبوليتانية، وتجاوز الرؤى المانوية للتاريخ.

[ترجمه عن الإنجليزيةأسامة إسبر]

Robert Saliba, editor, Urban Design in the Arab World: Reconceptualizing Boundaries. London: Ashgate, 2015.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Robert Saliba (RS): The idea for this book was initiated in the wake of City Debates 2012, an international conference on contemporary urban issues that I organized in May at the American University of Beirut. The conference, entitled Reconceptualizing Boundaries: Urban Design in the Arab World, asked: “How are the changing paradigms of urban design in the wake of the new millennium impacting the making and shaping of cities in the Arab World?” This book was conceived to bring together the wide diversity of approaches that appeared during the conference, not as conference proceedings, but as a synthesis of, and critical reflection on, the ideas presented. As such, it seeks to share with the wider academic community the broadening discussion that is developing among theoreticians and practitioners of urban design throughout the region.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

RS: An extensive body of literature has been produced over the last three decades on urbanismin the Middle East, but without a specific focus on urban design as an emerging autonomous field. This book provides a critical overview of the state of contemporary urban design in the Arab world, a discipline that has witnessed a remarkable development due to the accelerated pace imposed by postwar reconstruction, environmental degradation, and the competition among cities for world visibility and tourism. It conceptualizes the field under four major perspectives—urban design as discourse, as discipline, as research, and as practice—addressing the following questions: How can such a diversity of practice be positioned with regard to current international trends in urban design? What constitutes the specificity of the Middle Eastern experience in light of the regional political and cultural settings?

This book is also about urban designers “on the margins,” and how they narrate their cities, how they engage with their discipline, and how they negotiate their distance from, and with respect to, global disciplinary trends. As such, the term “margins”implies three complementary connotations. On the global level, it invites speculation on how new conceptualizations of center-periphery originating from post-colonial discourse are impacting contemporary urban design. On the regional level, it is a speculation on the specificity of urban design thinking and practicewithin a particular geographical and cultural context (here, the Arab World). Finally, on the local level it is an attestation to a major shift in urban design focus, from city centers to their margins, with unchecked suburban growth, informal development, and disregard for leftover spaces.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous research?

RS: Among the works published that investigate environmental design in the Middle East, beginning largely in the 1980s, there has been an overlap between the design and planning disciplines under the umbrella term of “urbanism.” The book is an attempt to reflect on three complementary questions. First, what importance has been specifically given to urban design in the discourse on development, redevelopment, and reconstruction? Second, to what extent has the published professional and academic work emphasized the unique role of urban design as a key discipline in “reinstating urbanity,” and in giving shape to the diverse types of settlements throughout the Arab world? And, third, what constitutes the specificity of the emerging field of “urban design”in the Middle East?

The literature on urbanism in general, and on urban design in particular, has revolved mainly around three axes: the geographical, the historical, and the thematic, with many works articulated around comparative city profiles (Elsheshtawy 2004 and 2008; Bianca 2000). Historical studies have focused on postcolonial practices, and the domestication of Western design models during colonial, independence, and contemporary periods (Nasr and Volait 2003). Most of the thematic studies have concentrated either on postwar reconstruction or on urban conservation (Al-Harithy 2010, Saliba 2004). Although built-environment professionals coming from backgrounds in architecture, landscape, and physical planning mostly wrote these studies, I argue that urban design itself has rarely been positioned as a key starting point for investigation. Instead, the studies tend to merge the physical, the legislative, the political, and the socio-economic under the umbrella term of “urbanism” in an effort to be comprehensive. Furthermore, most of the research in this category follows an empirical approach, favoring case studies, and a comparative perspective in order to deduce applicable lessons. This may be traced to the fact that urban design invites short- to medium- term physical intervention, and rarely allows time and space for reflective thinking. This book builds on this large body of work in order to articulate the contours of an autonomous field of practice—urban design—that has its own specificity, and which is clearly demarcated from the subsidiary fields of planning and architecture.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

RS: The book is primarily aimed at academics and practitioners in the environmental design fields, and all ancillary and related fields, including architecture, planning, landscape, and urban design, among others. Beyond academia, the comprehensive review of current practices that the book provides has a high relevance for corporate developers, public sector agencies, international planning firms, and local municipalities throughout the region.

Because of its relevance to contemporary issues, the book is also certainly important material for teaching urban design methodology to planning and design students, as a necessary part of both undergraduate and graduate curricula. This extends beyond regional universities: programs in architecture and urbanism across Europe, the United States, and other regions have made it a point during the last two decades to conduct design workshops on the Middle East for their students. This thus appears to be a timely volume: the politics of post-war Baghdad, the Arab Spring, and the Syrian Uprising have focused international attention on the region. Not only is the content of this book directly linked to the above political issues, but also it comes at a time when academics and professionals are closely watching cities of the Arab world to identify key economic and cultural trends with respect to globalization, future cities, marketing, tourism, real estate, and emerging financial markets.

Excerpt from Urban Design in the Arab World: Reconceptualizing Boundaries

The title of this book incorporates two problematic yet promising concepts: Urban Design and the Arab World. The first designates, “a [young] discipline that has been unable to develop any substantial theory on its own” (Cuthbert 2003: viii), and the second remains an elusive term, geographically, politically, and ethnically. Despite these qualifications, urban design is a lively and strong emerging discipline profoundly anchored in professional practice, real world projects, and future visions. Moreover, the Arab World despite its geographical ambiguity, is an emblematic term profoundly engrained in common parlance, academic discourse, and media diffusion, that generally brings images of a region rampant with constructed and ambiguous national identities, overwhelming wealth and poverty, religious mix, and most recently the Arab uprisings, a bottom-up revolution shaking the foundations of pre-established long standing hierarchies. Accordingly, the Arab World is a prime territory for questioning urban design as a discipline in flux, due to its abundance of sites of globalization, sites of worship, sites of conflict, and sites of contestation. Such diversity invites a multiplicity of opportunities for shaping, upgrading, and rebuilding urban form and civic space while subjecting global paradigms to regional and local realities.

[…]

For the past two decades, the image of the Middle Eastern city has wavered in the public and professional imagination between two extremes: the global hub and the postwar city, the first exemplified by Dubai and the second by Beirut. Between the two, a vast array of intermediate landscapes exists, ranging from suburban informal settlements to metropolitan new towns and expanding holy cities. Over the past two decades, diverse attempts to classify these landscapes were made in built–environment literature. In 2004, Elsheshtawy differentiates between traditional, fringe, and oil rich cities, with all three categories merging historical, geographical and economic designations. Four years later he simplifies his classifications to struggling and emerging cities, referring to the great divide that exists between the burgeoning Gulf cities and traditional centers like Cairo or Damascus, with the influx of money and development models from the former to the latter termed as gulfication or dubaization.

As explained above, the focus of this book will be on urban design as a distinctive discipline; it will be articulated around four tracks related to urban design thinking: the discursive, the hybrid, the operational, the visionary. Each track will be problematized in view of its global relevance and regional specificity and I will focus on how such constructs intersect with sites and practices and bring forward urban design issues of ideology and context. The book ends with a prospective section advancing future agendas for urban design in the region.

Section I: The Discursive

Re–Conceptualizing the Boundaries between the Diverse and the Conflictive

…This track investigates how the diversity of design positions during the last two decades has created a dynamic, and reactive regional dialogue through an increased fluidity in the transfer of ideas and concepts between the emerging and struggling cities on the margins. Here, urban design is conceived of as a catalyst for change, as a channel for importing and domesticating models, for creating regional paradigms, and for interrogating mutual perceptions between international and local practitioners. Is such a diversity of positions promoting replication, collage, hybridization or innovation? Is there an emerging geography of design exchange with its regional centers and peripheries, its own instruments of regionalization, and an autonomous discourse? Are we moving towards a “discursive urbanism,” one that is more accepting of the complexities and multiplicities shaping urban form in the Arab World? This first section of the book investigates four types of discourse that have strongly emerged since the 1990s: the cultural, the participative, the corporate, and the greening or ecological. Each brings its own logic to urban design, both as ideology and as praxis.

[…]

Section II: The Hybrid

Blurring Boundaries between Design Disciplines

The interlocking disciplines of architecture, urban design, and physical planning are being challenged in their ways of thinking and shaping city space by new patterns of physical urbanization and growing environmental concerns. Emerging disciplines such as ecological landscape design (covered in chapter six by Jala Makhzoumi as underlying the greening discourse) and landscape urbanism (covered in chapter seven by Lee Frederix as a tool to investigate socio–cultural networks in marginal spaces) are providing alternative means for conceptualization that stress ecology over morphology; network surface over urban form; and the confluence of architecture, landscape, city, and infrastructure. These dynamic and integrated visions are emphasizing the holistic and the interdisciplinary, while widening the scope of design investigation. Concurrently, attempts at grounding urban design theory in the social sciences are leading to a new understanding of urban space, locating it at the intersection of social theory, human geography, and cultural studies.

[…]

Section III: The Operational

Bridging Boundaries between Research and Practice

As a profession-oriented discipline, urban design defines itself through operational research and reflective practice. With the waning of Modernism, design research has retracted from the universal to focus on the regional and the local, and has expanded its scope from the morphological to the ecological, communal, and speculative. Practice itself has acquired an evaluative edge with the increasing accountability of the designer to the community and to the market, as well as the mounting public expectations with regard to sustainability and participation. How is urban design ‘on the margins’ responding to these global challenges? How is recent design–based research reflective of paradigmatic shifts in urban design thinking? And is there an active engagement between urban design research and professional practice?

[...] 

Section IV: The Visionary

Crossing Boundaries between the Utopian and the Real

The urban design project has always been a mediator between idealized pasts and idealizing futures and a channel for importing and domesticating modernity. As mentioned above, for the past two decades, the ideals of the city in the Arab World shifted from a quest for the local, national and regional to a “preference for internationally-prevalent models.” (Al-Asad 2008: 26) These models range from a fascination with Western imagery of commercial strips, towers and avant-garde high-tech deconstructivist architecture on one hand, to packaged historical landscapes for tourist consumption on the other. However, the physical, social, and cultural geography of the Arab world is too diverse to be encapsulated in two extreme representations. The vast extent of intermediate landscapes encompasses a huge diversity of sites of globalization (figure 1.1), sites of worship (figure 1.2), sites of conflict (figure 1.3), sites of contestation (figure 1.4), and so on. What are the underlying dialectics that connect and differentiate these diversified landscapes? Are the margins still a colonial testing ground for the ideals of the center, or just a market for overused and discarded ideas and concepts? How are the dreams of globalization being subjected to a new emerging political consciousness and to the immediacy of the here and now?

[Excerpted from Robert Saliba, editor, Urban Design in the Arab World: Reconceptualizing Boundaries, by permission of the editor. © 2015 Ashgate Publishing. For more information, or to purchase the book, click here. Online orders can benefit from a discount using this number: 50CPB15N] 

[This is a monthly roundup of news articles, and other materials related to urban issues in the region, and beyond. It does not reflect the views of the Cities Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send recommendations for inclusion in the Cities Media Roundup to cities@jadaliyya.com, mentioning "Roundup" in the subject line. We also welcome your submissions to the Cities Page: please check details on cities.jadaliyya.com]


Urban and Real Estate Development

Video: Middle-Income Housing in Dubai
Sun and Sand Developers announce their affordable thirty-two unit housing scheme pilot project in Dubai Industrial City, as part of Cityscape Global 2015 exhibition.

Gated Community Security in Dubai
Arabian Business reports that the recent introduction of ID cards in the Nakheel villa has angered community residents, many of whom have been denied entry to their own houses.

Housing Policy in Qatar
Lesley Walker reports for Doha News on the publication by the Qatari ministry of Municipality and Urban Planning of a series of interactive maps highlighting districts where housing for foreign migrant workers is banned.

Egypt’s Public Policy on Informal Settlements
Sarah Sabry comments for Mada Masr on the decision to close down the Egyptian ministry of Urban Renewal and Informal Settlements, and shifting its portfolio to the ministry of Housing.

Integrated Affordable Housing in Egypt
AHI interviews Omar al-Hitamy about Haram City, the flagship affordable housing project of Orascom Housing Communities. The project currently houses nine thousand families, but is under strain following the arrival of survivors of the Duweiqa rockslide.


War and Cities

Urban Services during Conflict
This report presents the experience and challenges of providing services during armed conflict in urban settings, as encountered by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), proposing new recommendations.

The Indomitable City of Nablus [in French]
The French journal Revue Ballast covers the spatial history of Nablus. This detailed report portrays the city not just as a space of occupation and neoliberal development, but as a site of social dynamism and resistance.

The Syrian War Economy
Henri Mamarbachi, writing for Orient XXI, analyses the factors which have influenced the development of the Syrian war economy, including the pre-war drought and Iranian financial support.

“New Palmyra” Models the Temple of Bel
Architect magazine covers the New Palmyra project, run by a Syrian activist with the aim of constructing 3D models of demolished or threatened Syrian buildings. The first "reconstructions" of the Temple of Bel have already been released.

Syrians in Zaatari Camp Longing to Leave
Al-Jazeera English reports from inside Jordan's largest refugee camp, which has developed into an informal city with a bustling economy, and discusses some of the pressures facing its residents.

Photo Essay: Life on Hold in War-Shattered Sanaa
A powerful collection of photos, posted on Al-Jazeera English, depicting slices of everyday life in today’s Sanaa under siege.

Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon Between Radicalization and Moderation [in French]
Anne-Marie El-Hage covers a new report by Nicolat Dot-Pouillard for the WAFAW programme (When Authoritarianism Fails In The Arab World) concerning the spatial politics of governance in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.


Urban Heritage, Past and Present

Renovating or Gentrifying Downtown Cairo?
In this interview by Rana Kemaly for Community Times with the Ismaelia Investment Company, we learn about the ongoing renovations of Cairo’s downtown, and the claimed attempts to prevent its gentrification.

Alexandria’s Underwater Museum
The Egyptian government has revived plans to built an underwater lighthouse off the coast of Alexandria to allow visitors to explore the remains of sites such as the famous Lighthouse, which remain submerged.

Beirut’s Dalieh and Heneine Palace Added to World Monuments Watchlist 2016
The World Monuments Fund has recently placed Beirut’s Heneine Palace and the Dalieh waterfront in Raouché on its 2016 Watchlist of sites in danger. Dalieh’s addition comes after a civil campaign to raise awareness of threats to the site. See here for Dalieh, and see here for Heneine Palace.

Renovation of the Sursock Museum (Beirut)
Stephanie d’Arc Taylor reports in The Guardian on the transformation of the Sursock Museum into a center for modern art.

Urban Graffiti: Beirut
E.V. Bramley reports for The Guardian on Beirut’s urban graffiti, featuring the work of Yazan Halawani whose work figures on many walls across the city, telling its tales and materializing its shared memories.

Photo Essay: The Battle for Beirut's Skyline
An Al-Jazeera English photo essay providing glimpses into the spaces of Beirut’s architectural heritage which activists are struggling to save.


Resistance and Urban Protest: Beirut

Beirut’s Street Protests: Culture Clash?
Halim Shebaya analyzes for The World Post the Beirut’s street protests, arguing they can be framed as a clash of cultures over issues of civil and political rights.

The Lebanese Waste Protests: A Prelude to War? [in French]
Talal Salman, writing in Le Safir Francophone, contemplates the possibility that Lebanon’s waste crisis and the ongoing anti-government protests might spark a new civil war.

Ten Lessons From The Lebanese Waste Crisis [in French]
L’Orient Le Jour discusses some lessons to be learned so far from the waste crisis, including the importance of governmental accountability and responsibility and the connections between environmental and socio-economic concerns.

The Death of Beirut’s Center – A Long-Term Perspective [in French]
Céline Haddad, also in L’Orient Le Jour, places the consequences of the waste crisis in a historical perspective, arguing that the commercial slow-down of the city center dates back to 2006.

Liberate the Municipal Fund
Sami Atallah, the executive of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, calls for the return of funds to municipalities as a way of both tackling the waste crisis and decentralizing political power.


Featured Resources

Book Review: Planetary Urbanization [in French]
Matthieu Giroud reviews Neil Brenner’s new book Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, highlighting the major conceptual advances the book provides, as well as some areas in which it is lacking.

Essay: Praising Walter Benjamin’s Dirty, Sexy Cities
Stuart Jeffries writes for The Guardian an essay building on Walter Benjamin’s analysis of life in Marseille, Naples and Moscow, vis-à-vis cities in the context of new global urban development projects.

Project: Weaponized Architecture
In this entry, Leopold Lambert features an architectural project that was presented for the Weaponized Architecture initiative, which proposes an (illegal) Palestinian shelter and an agricultural platform.

Featured Discussion: Asef Bayat on the Politics of the Square
A.C. Phnuyal reports on Asef Bayat’s recent presentation at New York University’s Urban Democracy Lab on urbanity and political contentions.

Photo Contest Call for Entries: The Civil War in Lebanon
The International Committee for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) is organizing a youth photo contest to commemorate the civil war anniversary in Lebanon, and calling for entries. Deadline: 30 November 2015.

Call for Papers: States and Decentralization [in French]
A call for articles on the subject of “states and political territories: debating decentralization” for a themed issue of L’Anne du Maghreb. Deadline: 15 January 2016.

Call for Papers: IASTE, Legitimating Tradition, Kuwait
The fifteenth biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE) will be held in Kuwait City from 17-20 December 2016. Deadline: 15 February 2016.

Call for Papers: Global Histories of Refugees
A call for conference papers on the topic of the history of refugees through the 20th and 21st centuries. The conference will take place in Melbourne between 7 and 8 October 2016. Deadline: 31 March 2016.

Recently on Jadaliyya

الاسكندرية كمان وكمان [in Arabic]
In this Arabic translation of the original article, Laurence Deschamps-Laporte discusses the various orientalist discourses and imaginaries about Alexandria and the nostalgia for the city’s cosmopolitanism, arguing that this cosmopolitanism has been reinvented.

ICRC Report: Urban Services During Protracted Armed Conflict
This report assesses the effects of protected armed conflict on infrastructure in urban environments, and calls attention to the fact that those who are most affected by the collapse of services are often those who need it most.

A Spatial History of a Main Baghdadi Street
Yaseen Raad's article covers the changing spatial and social realities of Baghdad, and Iraq, by examining the history of Abu Nuwas Street from its role as a place of entertainment in the 1950s and 1960s until the sectarian divisions of the present day.

Whitewashing Colonialism
Tom Gann reviews Sharon Rotbard's book White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa.

مدن الحداثة [in Arabic]
A translation of a Malcolm Bradbury article, in which he argues that the experimental art and literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was fundamentally an urban phenomenon.

LCPS Interviews Jadaliyya Co-Editor Ziad Abu-Rish on Electricity in Early Independence Lebanon
In the light of Lebanon's increasing resource crisis, the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS) interviews Jadaliyya co-editor Ziad Abu-Rish on the development of electricity provisioning in Lebanon's early years.

TandemWorks Launches its Rehabilitation Scheme of Beirut
An announcement from TandemWorks, a Beirut-based non-profit arts organization, on the forthcoming launch of a multilingual publication which forms the third and final part of an architectural intervention project. The event will take place on 9 November 2015 at Sursock Museum.

NPR's Here and Now Interivews Jadaliyya Co-Editor Rosie Bsheer About Redevelopment in Mecca
In the wake of the Mecca stampede which killed over 700 pilgrims in September 2015, Rosie Bsheer talks to NPR about the motivations behind the redevelopments which have taken place in Mecca since the 1990s.

L’Institut interdisciplinaire d’anthropologie du contemporain/Laboratoire d’anthropologie urbaine (IIAC/LAU) et le Centre de recherche Europes-Eurasie de l’Institut nationale des langues et civilisations orientales, avec le soutien de l’ED 265 Langues, littératures et sociétés du monde de l’INALCO, organise ce séminaire mensuel, qui est un lieu de formation et d’échange pour les chercheurs et les étudiants en Master et Doctorat. Il vise à contribuer à la réflexion sur les notions et les pratiques d’urbanité et de citadinité dans le contexte des villes méditerranéennes en plaçant au cœur de l’analyse les différentes formes de cosmopolitisme, de patrimonialisation, d’identification et de territorialisation qui définissent ces sociétés urbaines. Le qualificatif de méditerranéen ne postule pas l’existence d’une quelconque "aire culturelle" aux contours bien délimités. Il permet de souligner une perspective historique marquée par les héritages de l’empire ottoman et de l’expansion coloniale européenne sur la rive sud de la Méditerranée. Il invite aussi à s’interroger sur les relations entre aire culturelle et formes d’urbanité.

Le programme de cette année sera consacré à la question du visible et de l'invisible dans la ville en tant que ce qui est montré ou caché, ce qui est considéré comme intime ou public, est un critère comparatif des urbanités.

Responsables :

• Meropi ANASTASSIADOU (CREE/INALCO), meropi.anastassiadou@inalco.fr
• Maria COUROUCLI (IIAC-LAUM, CNRS/EHESS), maria.couroucli@cnrs.fr
• Franck MERMIER (IIAC-LAUM, CNRS/EHESS), franckmermier@yahoo.fr
• Timour MUHIDINE (CERMOM/INALCO), timour.muhidine@gmail.com
• Jean-François PÉROUSSE (CNRS/IFEA), jeanfrancoisperouse@gmail.com

Fréquence, horaire : mensuel, le 1er lundi du mois (sauf exception), à partir de novembre 2015, de 17h00 à 19h00
Lieu : INALCO, 65 rue des Grands Moulins, 75013 Paris, métro Bibliothèque François Mitterrand. Salle 3.15.

Programme 2015-2016

Lundi 2 novembre 2015, 17h00-19h00, salle 3.15

Introduction : Les faces cachées des villes
Méropi ANASTASSIADOU, CREE/INALCO et Timour MUHIDINE, CERMOM/INALCO
Encore ou assez ? Les migrants entre humanité et déshumanisation
Hakan GÜNDAY, Istanbul

Lundi 7 décembre 2015, 17h00-19h00, salle 3.15
Récits d'une ville oubliée. Lectures arabes d'Alexandrie de 1882 à nos jours
Elena CHITI, Université d'Oslo

 Lundi 11 janvier 2016, 17h00-19h00, salle 3.15
Des routes migratoires aux rues marchandes. Réfugiés syriens à Beyrouth
Emmanuelle DURAND, IEP Toulouse
Rendre l'exil visible ou invisible. Des stratégies d'adaptation différenciées. Enquête auprès de jeunes syriens en Île-de-France
Julie SASIA, IIAC-EHESS/CNRS

Lundi 1er février 2016, 17h00-19h00, salle 3.15
Bir al-Sabe' : le projet de fonder une ville pour les Bédouins
Raed BADER, Université de Birzeit

Lundi 7 mars 2016, 17h00-19h00, salle 3.15
Les jeunes de rue des cités HLM : entre résistances collectives et exploitations mutuelles ?
Thomas SAUVADET, Université Paris-Est Créteil

Lundi 4 avril 2016, 17h00-19h00, salle 3.15
Istanbul : les processus d’invisibilisation des pauvres sur les secteurs péricentraux
Yoann MORVAN, IDEMEC/CNRS
Le su et le vu : commentaires sur l'alcool et le visible à Istanbul
Nicolas ELIAS, Musée du Quai Branly

Lundi 9 mai 2016, 17h00-19h00, salle 3.15
Guerre des mémoires et lieux de mémoire à Athènes et Beyrouth. Enjeux académiques et représentations politiques
Maria COUROUCLI, LAUM/IIAC-CNRS/EHESS & Franck MERMIER, LAUM/IIAC-CNRS/EHESS

Ce séminaire est organisé par Habib Ayeb (Université Paris 8), François Ireton (CNRS) et Vincent Battesti (CNRS). Il aura lieu deux fois par mois le mercredi de 15h à 18h à l’Université de Paris 8 Vincennes à Saint-Denis (bâtiment D, salle D008, rez-de-chaussée, station de Métro "Saint Denis-Université", terminus de la ligne 13).

Parmi les slogans, revendications et mots d’ordre qui ont fleuri durant les contestations et soulèvements qu’ont connus certains pays d’Afrique du Nord et du Moyen-Orient durant les années 2011-2015 (à ne considérer que la période inaugurée par la chute de la dictature en Tunisie et en Égypte), nombre d’entre eux (le "pain", la justice sociale, la dignité) concernaient la structure sociale et ses inégalités en leurs différentes dimensions (rapports sociaux économiques de production et de répartition des revenus et des ressources, rapports sociaux de genre, accès aux biens et services publics en matière de santé, d’éducation et autres, etc.). Or ces aspects économiques et sociaux, à propos desquels des revendications, mobilisations et grèves sectorielles et épisodiques avaient souvent devancé le déclenchement des soulèvement de 2011, ont nettement moins retenu l’attention, dans les médias comme dans les travaux de sciences sociales, que les aspects proprement politiques—certes fondamentaux—des soulèvements (évolution des rapports de forces politiques) et des revendications (demande de démocratie, d’un État de droit, de respect des libertés individuelles et publiques et de démission des dirigeants).

Le séminaire Les révolutions en Tunisie et en Égypte: et si on parlait d’autres choses…  (année académique 2014-2015–douze séances et deux journées de clôture) s’est consacré à ces deux pays d’où est "parti" le processus révolutionnaire. L’idée avait été d’explorer les "causes" sociales et économiques qui étaient en partie à l’origine de ce processus et d’examiner comment celui-ci avait été vécu. La ressemblance étonnante du déroulement des évènements dans les deux pays, au moins jusqu’à la fin juin 2013, justifiait ce choix et offrait un "cadre" pour une démarche comparative visant à mettre en relief ce qui relève des réalités et des conditions locales et ce qui relève des dynamiques globales. Les riches et pertinentes contributions des intervenant(e)s ont, à chaque fois, provoqué des débats tout aussi enrichissants qui ont permis de mieux saisir certaines réalités locales et de discuter les analyses proposées.

Le bilan positif de cette première année du séminaire nous incite à le prolonger pour l’année académique qui vient (2015-2016), tout en l’élargissant spatialement à l’ensemble des pays de l’Afrique du Nord et du Moyen Orient qui ont connu des processus similaires et, thématiquement, aux dynamiques des inégalités socio-économiques et spatiales. Ainsi, nous proposons d’élargir les analyses et le débat autour du thème suivant: "Dynamiques et inégalités socioéconomiques et spatiales et soulèvements au Maghreb et au Moyen-Orient".

Lors des soulèvements récents (et même là où la contestation n’a pu s’exprimer ouvertement), les structures économiques et sociales ont été stigmatisées pour leur caractère inégalitaire, voire discriminatoire, et perçues et jugées explicitement comme injustes par les manifestants et des fractions importantes de "l’opinion publique" non directement mobilisée. Ce séminaire veut—en réaction à cette tendance à la focalisation sur les seuls aspects politiques, qui reflète en partie les priorités des acteurs prééminents des soulèvements—présenter, en une douzaine de séances de trois heures et deux journées finales, des descriptions fines et contextualisées et des analyses, explicitement fondées en théories, des dynamiques inégalitaires récentes (avant, pendant et après les soulèvements—quand il y en eut et sans préjuger de leur reprise éventuelle) de certains aspects précis de ces structures socioéconomiques et spatiales.

Dans l’analyse de l’évolution de ces structures, l’on tentera de démêler les différents facteurs, contraintes et processus à l’œuvre dans la production-reproduction des inégalités qui les caractérisent, parmi lesquels—bien évidemment mais pas exclusivement — le poids des politiques économiques et sociales menées par les régimes qui ont fait l’objet de contestations, exprimées en termes d’injustices sociales par les différents groupes sociaux parties prenantes des événements. Le politique n’est donc nullement évacué des préoccupations du séminaire, mais il ne sera pas considéré—comme il le fut souvent par les acteurs des événements—dans une relation simple de cause à effet, même s’il est largement intriqué avec l’ensemble des facteurs ayant déterminé les évolutions économiques et sociales inégalitaires récentes considérées.

L’accent sera donc mis dans ce séminaire sur les inégalités, leurs « croisements », leurs systèmes et leurs dynamiques, ceci dans les différents domaines de la vie sociale des pays arabes : inégalités (a) de ressources, de conditions, d’accès, de chances, de statut ou de "capabilités", (b) dans les domaines économiques (revenus, emploi, allocation spatiale des–et accès local aux–ressources…), dans ceux de la santé, de l’éducation, etc., (c) entres catégories socioprofessionnelles (CSP) bien sûr, mais aussi de genre, ethniques, et entre entités spatiales (différentes régions dans un même pays ou quartiers dans une même ville). On insistera sur les inégalités liées, formant « système », ainsi que sur les inégalités croisées qui rendent compte de l’existence de populations particulièrement défavorisées, marginalisées, voire stigmatisées (par exemple, en croisant genre, CSP, ethnie et région : les femmes ouvrières agricoles d’origines étrangères—minorités "visibles" ou "invisibles"—dans une région périphérique).

Si les inégalités de genre sont souvent évoquées s’agissant des pays arabes, une certaine vulgate–qui s’explique en partie par des problèmes techniques de mesure des inégalités de revenus–veut que les inégalités économiques, elles, y soient modérées (de "type asiatique", par contraste avec le "type latino-américain") ; or des travaux récents, renouvelant la méthodologie de leur mesure, ont remis en question cette vulgate (ceux de Alvaredo et Piketty sur le Moyen Orient et l’Égypte en particulier, par exemple). Nous tenterons de faire le point sur ce débat et d’explorer la dynamique de ces inégalités durant les vingt-cinq dernières années, en restituant leur véritable ampleur. Les inégalités sociales devant la santé et l’éducation, quant à elles, sont globalement peu explorées dans les pays arabes, mais quelques travaux approfondis et novateurs ont été effectués dans ces domaines, concernant en particulier le Maroc, dont leurs auteurs rendront compte. Tout en se focalisant essentiellement sur les résultats empiriques de ces recherches sur les inégalités et leurs facteurs explicatifs, l’on ne négligera pas d’aborder, de manière le moins technique possible, les méthodes employées pour les mesurer et les théories qui forment le cadre de leur explication, de manière à montrer les difficultés concrètes (techniques, institutionnelles et politiques) qui concernent les recherches sur ces phénomènes cruciaux dans les pays arabes. Une séance sera consacrée à une description comparée des niveaux actuels et évolutions récentes des inégalités économiques, de santé et d’éducation dans les différents pays arabes, ceci sur la base de l’Indice de développement humain ajusté aux inégalités (IDHI), mis au point récemment par le PNUD.

Par ailleurs, à côté de cette thématique majeure des inégalités, pour être en prise sur une actualité agitée tout en maintenant le nécessaire recul analytique, certaines autres séances du séminaire tenteront d’apporter des éclairages partiels sur les transformations brutales des structures socio-économiques et démographiques des pays arabes qui connaissent actuellement des conflits internes extrêmement violents, tels la Syrie, l’Irak, le Yémen et la Libye; ceci bien que les conditions matérielles et politiques qui y règnent rendent difficiles la description et l’analyse de ces bouleversements structurels qui auront, quoiqu’il arrive, un impact durable sur l’avenir de ces pays.

Calendrier du premier semestre (5 séances)

Mercredi 14 Octobre 2015
Présentation générale du séminaire par les organisateurs
Habib Ayeb : Soixante ans de politiques agricoles en Tunisie : origines et dynamiques des processus de dépossession des petites paysanneries tunisiennes.
(H. Ayeb est géographe, enseignant-chercheur au Département de géographie, Université Paris 8 Vincennes à Saint-Denis, Laboratoire Mosaïques, UMR LAVUE–ex-GECKO)

Mercredi 28 Octobre 2015
Omar Bessaoud : Agriculture, paysannerie et monde rural en Algérie à l’épreuve des politiques libérales (1990- 2015).
(Omar BESSAOUD est économiste, administrateur scientifique et enseignant-chercheur au CIHEAM-IAM, Montpellier)

Mercredi 18 Novembre 2015
Virginie Collombier : Compétition, négociation et exclusion dans la Libye post-Qadhafi.
(Virginie Collombier est politologue, chercheuse au Centre Robert Schuman–Institut Universitaire Européen, Florence, et au Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Center (NOREF), Oslo)

Mercredi 2 Décembre 2015
François Ireton : L’évolution des inégalités sociales (économiques, d’éducation et de santé) dans les pays arabes : sources, mesures, analyses des situations actuelles et des tendances récentes (1980-2012).
(François Ireton est socio-économiste, ingénieur d’étude (retraité) au CNRS)

Mercredi 16 Décembre 2015
Eric Verdeil : Luttes sociales au prisme d’une écologie politique urbaine. Le cas de l’énergie : Liban, Jordanie et Tunisie.
(Eric Verdeil est géographe, spécialiste de géographie urbaine, chercheur au CNRS, UMR Environnement Ville Société (Lyon), et chargé d’enseignement à l’Institut des Sciences Politiques (Paris))

[Source: https://habibayeb.wordpress.com/2015/08/10/mais-que-veut-donc-le-peuple/]

The jury held its official deliberation on Saturday 30 May 2015 at the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut.

The jury members included Jad Chaaban (AUB); Habib Debs (URBI); Marwan Ghandour (Iowa State University); Hans Kienle (University of Stuttgart); Jala Makhzoumi (AUB); Nizar Saghieh (Legal Agenda); Jad Tabet (URBI, UNESCO); Andreja Tutundzic (IFLA); as well as deputy jurors Wafa Charafeddine (CDR) and Mona Harb (AUB).

The jury unanimously elected Jad Tabet, an architect, urban planner and member of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, as chair. Deputy jury members were given the right to vote through a unanimous vote. The chair announced that all twenty submitted entries were accepted based on respecting the criteria of anonymity, and submission of materials within the timeframe.

Following the review of all entries, the jury members agreed to retain any entry that received a minimum of one vote. After two rounds of voting, seven entries were shortlisted, listed by alphanumeric order: fb, f2, 3a,5a0, 53, 6a0, and 7d.

The jury opened the floor for a discussion on the shortlisted entries with the advisory group of experts (geology, marine ecology, and archaeology), competition steering committee, and other Dalieh Campaign core members. 

The final review was based on evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of each submission according to the competition criteria: sensitivity to urban context; reaffirming the historical identity of Dalieh as a space for the public; functionality, flexibility, and economic feasibility; ecological and environmental sustainability; institutional framework addressing property and managerial/administrative concerns; innovation and creativity; and clarity and completeness of the submission.

Three winning entries were selected through a majority vote listed by alphanumeric order: fb, f2, 6a0.

After finalizing its selection, the jury lifted anonymity. The winning entries are:

• (Fb) The Last Resort: Amer Nabil Mohtar, Hayat Gebara, Sandy El Sabsaby
• (f2) Daliehⁿ: Fadi Mansour, Candice Naim, Lea Helou, Ali As’ad, Roula Khoury, Scapeworks
• (6a0) Not Just About Dalieh: Adib Dada, Raya Tueny, Reine Chehayeb, Yasmina Choueiri, May Khalifeh

The shortlisted entries are: 3a, 5a0,53, 7d

• (3a) Land Integrity: Raji Khalil Ghannam, Elias AbouMrad, Joseph Chalhoub, Josiane Hindi, Dounya Saleme
• (5a0) Take it or Leave it: Mohammad Al Zein, Razane Hanna, Maha Issa, Moustapha Itani, Afaf Merhebi, Ramzi Mezher, Reem Mezher, Tamar Sarkissian
• (53) A Window on the Horizon: Hala Younes, Claude Montfort, Cynthia Garios, Nayla Geagea, Sahar Moawad, Yasmina Chami, Leen Chamlati, Bernard Kadissi
• (7d) Revealing Dalieh: a Coastal Threshold: Joanne Hayek, Antoine Atallah

Jury Comments on the Winning Schemes

fb: The Last Resort
The entry has a bold framework of intervention. It introduces social and economic activities that welcome a diversity of users. It presents a clear circuit that follows the geomorphology of the site at the interface of the two main ecological domains. Its strength is in introducing elegant, temporary, and lightweight material interventions  without having a negative impact on the natural environment of the site. 

f2: Daliehⁿ
The entry has a clear methodological approach that is ecologically centered. It has the potential to be used as a framework for a national park. The maps show a serious understanding of the natural and cultural layers present on the site highlighting the importance of the process over the product. The entry provides useful policy and design guidelines for future interventions.

6a0: Not Just About Dalieh
The entry has a unique vernacular landscape approach, which capitalizes on the cultural history of the site while simultaneously providing practical design interventions. The entry also introduces the role of education in shaping ecologically-sensitive social practices on the site. This pragmatic approach gives a realistic feel that can be put to use by an array of activist groups.

When we started working on the ''Revisiting Dalieh'' competition about a year ago, our goal was to involve the largest number of people in shaping visions for the location of Dalieh of Raouche, as a starting point for a public debate about the common spaces in the city. We wanted to present alternative visions to the current practices along the Lebanese coast, serving as models or pilots for the design, management, and sustainability of similar spaces. We also wanted to raise public awareness about the importance of the environment, and the respect for nature and its components as they are, as a fundamental right, not to be truncated. On the other hand, we wanted to clarify, and share the future possibilities of Dalieh as a starting point for a debate with officials and the government.

Indeed, the ''Revisiting Dalieh'' competition raised several challenges: environmental, functional, and institutional. These challenges invited us to question the prevailing land management practices in Lebanon, and consider ways to safeguard our environment, and protect our common spaces, and human rights. The competition also raised a fundamental question: How can we stop these spaces from falling in the hands of private investors, and how can we ensure the sustainability of these spaces in the public domain for the benefit of all citizens?

Today, after we have received the proposals, we would like to open a lively and productive debate about Dalieh in particular, and public spaces in general.

On more than one occasion and through more than one message, we have invited all to take part in this debate, starting with the governor, the municipality of Beirut, and the Higher Council of Urban Planning. In fact, this was the Civil Campaign’s main request since its inception: to open a lively and serious debate sponsored by officials with the participation of everyone, so that everyone's diverse interests and concerns are taken into account, and not just the interests of a single party and their perspective, to the detriment of the perspectives and interests of all the others.

The Civil Campaign calls now particularly on the Council of Ministers and the Higher Council of Urban Planning to take part in this debate, which concerns the future of our city and the right of its citizens; moreover, we demand from them not to approve any private project for Dalieh.

We know that, while we are striving to save Dalieh through a transparent and participatory process, landowners are lobbying through the Council of Ministers to build a private resort, going beyond the possibilities of exploitation of this land, which will require an exceptional decree. We know that this project requires planning and a new vision for this coastal zone. Instead of master plans for Dalieh, we seek to prevent any form of construction on one part, and only allow construction within a specific exploitation factor (fifteen percent surface exploitation, twenty percent total) on the other part. The project’s owners are suggesting an exploitation factor of sixty percent surface exploitation, and one hundred percent total, to build shopping malls, private luxury residencies, hotels, a marina and parking areas.

To us and to all the citizens of Beirut, this scenario embodies and explains how savage construction was possible all over the Lebanese coast. The rule became the violation of master plans before these are replaced by laws that are in reality only tools benefiting a few investors’ power, and dominance over the city's population, and their relation with the natural heritage of their city, with all that this link allows in terms of social and cultural cohesion to multiple categories of the population.

Since the beginning, the Civil Campaign united to maintain the possibilities of public life in Beirut, and to protect the waterfront of the city as a common space, and as an area of social diversity and natural habitat. The need for participatory tools devoted to decision-making relating to our everyday spaces in Beirut is becoming crucial, and more than urgent. Therefore we are ending this message with a call to all the citizens of Beirut and those who love it. Stand by our side in order to:

• Demand from the Higher Council for Urban Planning not to approve any private project for Dalieh.
• Demand from the Council of Ministers not to approve any exceptional decree giving the project owners the possibility of a different investment to the one permitted in the current guide for master planning in Beirut.
• Demand from the municipality of Beirut, its governor, and its civil society to assume their responsibilities to protect Dalieh by proposing alternative plans for the site based on the results of the competition.
• Express our belonging, all of us, to the common spaces of the city and claim our rights to protect and save our environment and the natural heritage of our city.

Long live Beirut—a city defined by its public and shared spaces, its cultural and natural heritage, a city that is open to all its population, and its lovers. 

Thank you. 

The Civil Campaign to protect the Dalieh of Raouche
www.dalieh.org
www.facebook.com/dalieh.org

In June 2015, The Civil Campaign to Preserve the Dalieh of Beirut announced its open ideas competition results at the Lebanese Ministry of Environment. The Civil Campaign is a coalition of individuals invested in safeguarding Beirut’s livability, advocating for the protection of the city’s seafront as a shared space and open access zone. The campaign had launched its open ideas competition on 24 March 2015, under the patronage of the Lebanese Ministry of Environment, the American University of Beirut’s Asfari Institute for Civil Society and the Nature Conservation Center. The competition called for participants “to articulate creative, sensitive, and environmentally sustainable design proposals for the conservation and future development of Dalieh.”

On 30 June 2015, the competition jury–composed of architects, landscape architects, an economist, and a lawyer–met and shortlisted seven entries out of the twenty submissions. The jury then selected three winning entries, featured below.

Jadaliyya Cities Page editors have endorsed The Civil Campaign to Preserve the Dalieh of Beirut since its launch, and continue to do so. We have published on Cities in December 2014 the Campaign’s Open Letter to Mr. Rem Koolhas, to which Mr. Koolhas responded in the comments section—a response that was later disseminated on social media, and in other e-zines. We hope the results of this open idea competition will inform Mr. Koolhas and other designers who may become involved in plans to develop the Dalieh of Beirut into a commercial venture to reconsider their commitments, and take a firm position against any real estate developments on this remarkable site that do not respect and conserve its ecology.

By publishing the winning entries of the Dalieh’s open ideas competition on Jadaliyya, we are disseminating to a wide public the range of alternative possibilities to develop the Dalieh of Beirut in environmentally sustainable ways that respect the site’s urban history, socio-spatial practices, and ecology. We hope this information will mobilize more urban activists to rally the cause of the Civil Campaign. The statement by the minister of environment to declare Dalieh a natural reserve demonstrates the range of impact such mobilization can have on the built and natural environments. The recent inclusion of Dalieh on the World Monuments Watch 2016 list is an additional testimony. We also hope the case of Dalieh will mobilize the political consciousness of urban dwellers of Beirut, and other Lebanese cities, against the increasing impunity of real estate development across Lebanon which is robbing us all of shared spaces, and instigate waves of collective action to reclaim rights to the commons. The recent protests in Beirut, associated with the garbage crisis, have incorporated such actions, as urban activists removed forcefully the fence that was installed around Dalieh earlier this year, and appropriated the open areas of Zaitunah Bay.

In this bundle, we feature the the campaign’s press release about the competition, the competition jury’s report, the campaign’s background report on Dalieh, as well as the three winning entries’ presentation texts and maps.

• Dalieh Civil Campaign’s open competition press release
• Dalieh Civil Campaign’s open competition Jury Report
• Dalieh Civil Campaign’s open competition Background Report
• Dalieh Civil Campaign’s Competition’s Three Winning Entries

The Syrian army’s officer corps has remained intact despite the immense pressure of nearly four years of civil and military conflict, a fact that has prevented the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Asad’s regime. The military housing system is a crucial aspect of this cohesion: it reveals the world Syrian officers inhabit, their relations with the regime and wider Syrian society, and the reasons why so few have defected so far. 

While there have been defections in the infantry, no major fighting unit has broken away en masse, as defection on this scale would have required the participation of middle- to high-ranking officers. Indeed, the core of the officer corps continues to stand by the Asad regime. The fact that a majority of officers are drawn from Syria’s ‘Alawi community has often been noted as the primary, even singular, factor in the army’s cohesion since 2011. But this explanation overstates the role of sectarian affiliation.  

Army officers have access to a benefits system that links nearly every aspect of their professional and personal lives to the regime, and this places them in an antagonistic relationship with the rest of society. Dahiat al-Asad, or “the suburb of Asad,” northeast of Damascus and the site of the country’s largest military housing complex, reveals how this system works. Known colloquially as Dahia, the housing complex provides officers with the opportunity of owning property in Damascus. As many army officers come from impoverished rural backgrounds, home ownership in the capital would have been beyond their financial reach. Military housing has offered them an opportunity for social advancement, but the community that officers and their families inhabit within Dahia also fosters a distinct identity that segregates them from the rest of Syrian society, leaving them dependent on the regime. 

The benefits Dahia provides come at a steep cost. With the move into military housing, officers effectively complete their buy-in, linking their personal and familial fortunes to the survival of the regime. All the trappings of an officer’s life, and the social respectability it provides, are thus granted by and dependent on the regime. In 2000, when then-President Hafez al-Asad died, many officers in Dahiat al-Asad sent their families back to their home villages to wait out the succession outcome. The families only returned once Hafez’s son Bashar was confirmed as the new president. Officers had understood that their life in Damascus was contingent on the Asad regime’s survival, rather than on their status as state employees or military personnel.

Syria’s military housing programs were greatly expanded during the 1980s, but in the decades since, they have not fostered a sense of solidarity among officers from different sects, especially ‘Alawites and Sunnis. Nonetheless, military housing benefits had the de facto effect of drawing officers together to protect their common financial interests after the start of the 2011 uprising.  

Dahia’s haphazard development suggests that its role in cementing regime loyalty was not a deliberate choice but rather an inadvertent outcome of years of mismanagement and nepotism. The regime has thus been able to capitalize on the suburb’s internal corruption and isolation from wider Syrian society to strengthen its ties with the officers living there and secure their unyielding loyalty. As the uprising descended into full-scale civil war, the ghettoization of the officer corps has played out in the regime’s favor and prompted many officers to regard the revolution as a personal threat to their assets and livelihood. 

Protecting a beneficial system, rather than adhering to strict ideological loyalty, is what has kept the Syrian officer corps largely intact. While there have been individual defections among officers living outside of the military housing system, as of mid-2015 there has been only one recorded instance of an officer leaving Dahiat al-Asad to join the opposition—and he was already retired.[1] The neighborhood has morphed from a residential area into something more akin to a fortified military base—one that officers perceive as defending them collectively, and by extension the entire army and Syrian regime. 

Dahiat al-Asad: The President’s Gift

Two systems of military housing exist in Syria. The first provides officers and their families with accommodations in army compounds during active service—such as the Qatana housing area in Damascus, Rayan in Homs, and Saida in Daraa—without conferring ownership. The second system is a state-subsidized home-purchase program that enables officers to purchase homes at discount prices in designated housing areas run by the Syrian army. In theory, any officer could apply for military housing, but the success of an application depends largely on securing favors from those with the de facto power to bestow or withhold property. 

Dahiat al-Asad is by far Syria’s largest example of the state-subsidized home-purchase program. Others are located in Deir Ezzor, Aleppo, and Tartus.[2] In 2003, the army ended the program through which new officers could apply for home ownership in military housing complexes, replacing it in 2005 with a loan program that allocates officers one million Syrian pounds (nearly twenty thousand US dollars at the time) that is paid off monthly via salary deductions. This restricted the supply of housing in Dahia and in areas under the same military housing system, making existing homes all the more coveted and valuable.  

It is unlikely that Dahiat al-Asad was originally part of the regime’s long-term plan to preserve officer cohesion. Initially, it simply provided homes to army officers, and later it became the target of commercial property investment and speculation. That the officer corps would be steadfast in its support of the regime was not a foregone conclusion when the uprising began in 2011, but the regime built on decades of mismanagement, corruption, and patronage to ensure its loyalty and to turn Dahia into a bastion of military and ideological support. 

Haphazard Development  

Dahiat al-Asad was first established in 1982 after Hafez al-Asad issued an executive order to establish housing for officers and their families.[3] The archway at the suburb’s main entrance still declares it “the gift of President Hafez al-Asad to the officers in the Syrian Arab Army and their families.” 

Dahia’s construction began under the auspices of the Military Housing Establishment (Sharikat Iskan al-Askari), but the Institution for the Implementation of Military Construction (Moassat Tenfez al-Inshaat al-Askaria) assumed responsibility for the project in the late 1980s. The Military Housing Establishment, under the purview of the Defense Ministry, is the overarching institution responsible for military housing in Syria. While it does not carry out actual construction, it is the lead contractor for military housing, and it is ultimately responsible for all work undertaken in Dahia. The Institution for the Implementation of Military Construction is effectively a real estate firm and general contractor that manages many public and private sector projects. 

Construction was meant to take place through a series of multiyear development plans that involved coordinating with various government institutions in order to bring in necessary services. Then-Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass laid the first stone of the housing complex in 1985, and officers began moving in by the early 1990s. As of March 2011, it covered some two hundred and fifty hectares and housed more than one hundred thousand residents.[4]  

Contrary to popular belief, Dahia is not a luxury residential area nor is it home to high-ranking officers. Despite its growing population, most areas of Dahia lack key public service provisions. The supply and quality of services have often lagged far behind other neighborhoods in the Syrian capital, due to the lack of coordination between military housing institutions and the civilian government that dispenses services.[5] The streets need repair, and water and electricity cut out frequently. While there is much unused land, the neighborhood lacks public spaces or a large park. Public transportation to and from Dahia is also insufficient given its population size and location. The first government bakery in Dahia only opened in 2014, and until 2009, a large garbage dump servicing the neighboring town of al-Tal had only operated near the suburb’s entrance. Burning trash was common in Dahia, and the suburb’s dump site often attracted packs of wild dogs.[6] 
 

The Civilianization of Military Housing 

Economic reforms during the 2000s spurred rapid real estate price inflation and an investment rush into Dahia, which exacerbated the suburb’s chaotic infrastructural development. This process was also facilitated by Dahiat al-Asad’s unique status. Contrary to the rest of Syria, real estate in Dahia is not registered with the Ministry of Local Administration. Rather, the Institution for the Implementation of Military Construction owns the land where the suburb sprang up and thus holds full decision-making authority for new construction projects and property sales. Thanks to this special status, the institution has broad leeway in contracting new construction projects for civilian housing and for private firms, with most of the latter being owned by regime members and their affiliates. During the 2000s, the institution became flush with cash following the Dahia construction boom, in turn drawing in a new wave of regime-affiliated personnel and the corruption that came with them.

Thanks to the institution, Dahiat al-Asad also received a large influx of civilian residents during the 2000s. Although there are no official statistics available, interviews with residents suggested that in 2011, roughly sixty percent of the suburb’s residents were officers—including active and retired officers, secret service members, and other security personnel—and forty percent were civilians. Subsequent interviews with both civilian and military residents confirmed a notable change in the neighborhood’s composition during the run-up to the 2011 uprising. Dahia had become more civilian and had ceased to be, in the view of its residents, a place for officers and their families alone. 

This civilian influx made the officer corps more business savvy as the Dahia property boom in the 2000s had increased the value of homes there. Officers began viewing their homes as financial assets. In Dahia’s more wealthy areas of Jowiyyeh or Amjad, for example, home prices reached as high as thirty million Syrian pounds (roughly six hundred thousand US dollars before the uprising began) or more, even though most salaried officers could not afford an apartment worth more than two million Syrian pounds (forty thousand US dollars) after even thirty years of service. 

Nonmilitary families moving into Dahia, especially during the five years before the uprising, made many Damascenes believe the area had become a residential suburb of Damascus like any other. One former civilian resident noted, “By 2007, we could no longer say that it was military housing.”[7] But the uprising-turned-civil-war showed how Dahia’s new civilian feel was merely a veneer for what was in effect a military neighborhood.
 

The Officers’ Ghetto 

The Benefits System 

The army has traditionally framed the purchase of a home in Dahia as a lifelong commitment to the regime. Upon graduating as a second lieutenant—the starting officer rank in the military—cadets would begin a ten- to fifteen-year waiting period, during which five to seven percent of their salary was withheld as an eventual down payment on a home. During this time, military personnel and their families often stayed in practically cost-free temporary military housing. Officers invariably need influential connections to eventually purchase a unit in Dahiat al-Asad, and that acquisition normally takes another twenty years to pay off via monthly salary deductions. 

Dahia almost entirely hosts only middle-ranking officers. The vast majority of the officer corps there is ranked between major and major general, with less than a dozen of the latter living in the suburb. Higher-ranking officers live in elite areas inside Damascus. 

For many officers, military housing has given them a unique opportunity for rapid social ascent. The typical army officer living in Dahiat al-Asad is lower-middle class—regardless of his sect—and hails from the countryside or from coastal areas where economic prospects are dim. ‘Alawi officers mostly come from the coastal areas of Jableh, Latakia, and Tartus, whereas Sunni officers tend to come from the rural outskirts of large urban centers such as Aleppo, Daraa, and Raqqa. Yet both ‘Alawi and Sunni officers share a similar socioeconomic upbringing and thus similar aspirations of upward mobility. The military is one of the few avenues open for these young men that offers them a degree of status, a decent wage, and the prospect of home ownership (in the capital, no less, which many view as the pinnacle of personal success). A home in Dahia was also seen as a place where officers can live while serving out their career, and later as a home to retire in. 

Moving into Damascus also improves the social lot of an officer’s entire family. Housing in Dahia provides an officer’s children with the opportunity to grow up and study in the capital. One retired brigadier general, who had lived in Dahia for thirty-five years, at first in temporary army housing but later in his own home, talked about the benefit that living in the suburb had for his four children. “After I took possession of the apartment, our life became more stable and we had [better] hope for the future of our children. As we lived in the capital, our children would study at Damascus University,” he said. The officer mentioned other benefits such as free access to army hospitals anywhere in the country for his entire family—including Tishreen Hospital, Syria’s most advanced, which is also located in the suburb.  

There are other perks that living in Dahia provides, and these can be seen upon entering the homes of officers. Army-issued soap and blankets, bread procured from special military offices, and gasoline coupons are all given to officers at discount prices or free of charge. Officers also receive free subscriptions to all three official government newspapers (Thawra, Tishreen, and al-Ba‘th). And each officer receives a certificate of completion of military training signed personally by the Syrian president, along with a photograph taken with the president that is typically hung on the living-room wall. 

These may not sound like the sorts of luxuries a resident of a rich central Damascus district would covet, but the officers value these perks because they come largely from lower-middle class and rural backgrounds.

A Sort of Solidarity  

Besides the material benefits, the military housing system is central to cultivating a shared identity among middle-ranking officers, as living in Dahia is a comprehensive, all-encompassing lifestyle. Living together with people who are all adapting to city life helps build a sense of solidarity. Dahia is also the space where officers can showcase their social achievements—which many then jealously guard. 

But living in Dahia causes officers and their families to be caught between two worlds: the city on the outskirts of which they live and the villages from where they come. In the capital, they are considered to be from the countryside, and in their ancestral towns and villages, they are considered urbanites. This liminal identity strengthens their attachment to Dahia and all that it represents. This hybrid identity is felt most strongly among the officers’ children, who grow up in the suburb and have their identity anchored in it.

Segregation From and By the Wider Society  

The benefits officers have access to, along with the shared identity nurtured in Dahia, effectively “ghettoizes” officers within the suburb’s perimeter. Dahiat al-Asad has few official or unofficial relationships with its neighboring areas. In the 1980s, there was little interaction between Dahia and the adjacent suburbs of Barzeh, Douma, and Harasta. Following economic reforms in the 1990s and 2000s, some Douma and Harasta residents opened small businesses in Dahia, including supermarkets, vegetable markets, and butcher shops. But these forms of commercial or social interaction were the exception, not the norm. Dahia students would be sent to the Ba‘th Party’s vanguard camps (muaskar lel-talai) in Douma, and, because the suburb remained administratively part of Harasta, its residents would go there to get a number of official services and paperwork completed. 

The army benefits and the officers’ socialization in Dahia give them an incentive to stay where they feel welcome. The colloquial and derogatory term for Dahia residents is the “army of sandal-wearers” (“jaysh abu shehata”), because they are regarded as being from uneducated, rural, and lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Aware of this perception, officers tend to see few viable options for themselves outside the military in Damascus cultural life, where they expect to be treated poorly.

The divide between Dahia and non-Dahia residents has only grown since the 2011 uprising. To wider Syrian society, a person who lives in Dahia is inescapably associated with the regime. This reinforces a defensive attitude among these officers in Dahia vis-à-vis the rest of society. Whether or not officers personally support the Asad regime, their residences in Dahiat al-Asad, their places in the military, and often their sects and backgrounds all play a role in cementing a perception among the officer corps that opposition supporters would target them.

 
Bonds Beyond Sect 

Sect plays no formal role in the Syrian army or in Dahia, as this would run counter to the regime’s secular claims. Yet military housing has not bridged the divides among officers of different sects. Division and mistrust has persisted and has even grown stronger between ‘Alawites and non-‘Alawites since the uprising began. Even in each sect, there are divisions along regional and familial lines. 

The military housing system has, however, de facto aligned all officers in defending the benefits and status conferred on them by living in Dahia. Though most officers are ‘Alawite, there seems to be little perceptible difference between them and non-‘Alawite officers in the way they worry about outside threats. Indeed, many officers have shed their overt sectarian affiliation in order to encourage unity among the officer corps. 

For instance, one Sunni major, originally from Daraa but who now lives in Dahia, views himself as an officer first and foremost. When asked to choose between his belonging to Daraa or Dahia, the officer unequivocally said, “I’m from the Dahia community” (“ana min ahel al-Dahia”).[9] Though he noted that the security services committed violent acts, the officer blamed the opposition for fomenting chaos. He maintained that Dahia remained safe even after 2011, but that the uprising has affected him personally because it was against the army institution broadly, to which he belongs and identifies with.

Sect and place of origin are still relevant to life in Dahia. When demonstrations began in Daraa in 2011, Sunni officers avoided grouping and socializing with each other to prevent arousing suspicion. One Sunni officer, for instance, was suspected of sedition, and he made significant efforts to prove that his loyalty to the army superseded his loyalty to his home region. The officer received a Facebook message saying that a fellow officer had accused him of insulting the president and supporting the uprising in his home province. The message frightened the officer, and he followed the chain of rumors about his disloyalty back to its original source, taking great pains to prove the accuser otherwise. He even hung a large photo of President Asad on his balcony to underscore his allegiance to the regime.[10] 

Sect has played a different role for ‘Alawi officers. The uprising deepened their sense of isolation from non-‘Alawites, causing them to rely even more on the army for their defense. The memory of the Muslim Brotherhood’s rebellion from 1976 to 1982—during which a 1979 attack on the Aleppo artillery school left many ‘Alawites dead—colored their views of the 2011 protests. For them, the uprising was a replay of that earlier Brotherhood rebellion, when their sect, the army, and the regime had all come under fire.[11] 

The 2011 uprising had the effect of driving ‘Alawi officers even closer to the army without necessarily strengthening ties between them and ‘Alawi civilians. One ‘Alawi officer described the predominately ‘Alawi Esh al-Warwar neighborhood near Dahia as follows: “Esh al-Warwar is close to Dahia, but I [have] never been there. They are street people [shabeen].” Before the uprising, the officer and his family used to say that the ‘Alawites of Esh al-Warwar were “cattle and gypsies” (“baqar wa shrashih”).[12] The daughter of another officer in Dahia expressed similar sentiments about ‘Alawites from Esh al-Warwar: “The ‘Alawi officer is closer to the Sunni officer than he is to an ‘Alawite from Esh al-Warwar, because they say the ‘Alawites of Esh al-Warwar are lower than them. My mother speaks badly about those people in Esh al-Warwar. The community [negatively] affects the ‘Alawi image in the capital.”[13]  

The relationship between these two ‘Alawi communities has somewhat evolved since the uprising began. ‘Alawi officers’ sentiment in Dahia toward their neighboring ‘Alawi community morphed to some degree from hostility to pity, in part reflecting the uptick in sectarian solidarity after the conflict erupted. After Esh al-Warwar came under attack from rebels in the neighboring area of Barzeh, ‘Alawi officers in Dahiat al-Asad began describing people from Esh al-Warwar as “poor,” “simple,” and “deserving of pity and protection.”[14] However, officers in Dahia did not rush to support the residents in their fight against the rebels, nor, as the conflict evolved, were new linkages developed between the two ‘Alawi communities despite their shared position on a sectarian border.
 

The Regime’s Countermobilization Stronghold

Even though the initial opposition protests in 2011 were political in nature and were aimed specifically at altering regime policy, the isolation of Dahia residents led army officers and their families to believe that protesters posed a threat not only to the regime but also to them personally. As the uprising unfolded, officers shared the same belief—regardless of sect or political ideology—that defending themselves and their interests from wider society was a priority. 

The uprising made Dahia residents more suspicious of neighboring areas. Officers would routinely tell their children not to let taxi drivers know they were from Dahiat al-Asad or that it was their final destination. Rumors were common, including one unconfirmed story about criminals from Douma kidnapping and later killing the daughter of an officer from Dahia. Another unconfirmed account in Dahia describes a taxi driver kidnapping, killing, and decapitating a young man from the suburb.[15]  

The officers’ separation from the rest of society allowed these rumors to spread. In Saida, near Daraa, for instance, where officers also live in a military compound, Air Force Intelligence Directorate agents began reporting to residents that protesters from nearby villages were planning to attack the military housing complex in retribution for the siege of Daraa.[16] In response to these rumors, the military officers and their families in Saida created defense plans and prepared for a potential ambush from would-be attackers even though the battle never materialized. Fears that “maybe the Doumanis or Barzawis [families from towns adjacent to Dahia] will do the same” were expressed frequently and openly in the suburb.[17]  

The 2011 uprising strengthened the perception among Dahia officers that the area’s defenses needed bolstering. Under these auspices, Dahiat al-Asad’s military identity has been fully reasserted. The suburb was turned into a military platform from which to launch attacks on neighboring pro-opposition areas. Military infrastructure that had been blended into the residential area before the uprising were suddenly put into full use.[18]  For instance, both a property belonging to the Water Resources Ministry and a school for traffic police were used as artillery positions to launch shells at rebels in neighboring Harasta and Barzeh. These sorts of actions reveal the army’s dominance over Dahia and the perception among residents that the regime holds ultimate control over the area. While the militarization of neighborhoods has happened throughout Syria, the transition has been quicker and more thorough in Dahia, which as of 2015 resembles a military base.

In June 2012, as the Free Syrian Army advanced toward Dahia, regime personnel began organizing officers’ sons (mostly ‘Alawi) into the National Defense Forces (NDF), a vigilante group tasked with the suburb’s internal security. As shelling by the rebels became routine, the NDF erected checkpoints throughout the area, and its military vehicles became omnipresent. DShK heavy machine guns were occasionally mounted on the backs of pickup trucks and tanks used to patrol the suburb.  

Insecurity and sect-based militarization compelled civilian residents (and Sunnis in particular)—who had migrated into Dahia during the economic boom of the 2000s—to leave the suburb. The reverse was true of military families: one resident remarked that, for him, the sounds of war were “pleasing” because it meant they were in the thick of the fight against the “conspiracy” aimed at the army and the country.[19] 

Once the conflict began, the defining criteria for belonging to Dahia became explicit association with the Asad regime and its symbols. Before the 2011 uprising, pro-regime paraphernalia was no more common in Dahia than most other parts of the capital. But walking through the streets of the suburb since then, the transformation is palpable. Syrian flags and posters of Asad are ubiquitous, with pro-regime groups delivering speeches and holding routine public rallies. Posters of martyrs killed in the fighting are also common. Discussions about the war in Dahia tend to fit with the regime’s narrative, often miming Syrian state media. It is common to hear that “everything is well in the country, there are no problems,” along with stories about how “infiltrators,” “terrorists,” and a “foreign conspiracy” are trying to destroy Syria.[20] 

Sons of officers have begun to prominently display pictures of the president with slogans such as “we love you” (“minhabek”) while patrolling Dahia and blasting pro-regime songs from their car stereo systems. These sons—many of whom did not enlist—are generally more vocal than their fathers in expressing the need to defend Dahia. That is in part a reflection of their torn identity as neither belonging to Damascus nor to their ancestral villages. This cohesion among Dahia youth has played out in various other ways, including the formation of new political organizations such as the Lions of the Asad Suburb (Asood Dahiat al-Asad) and paramilitary groups such as the NDF. 

Fighting on the side of the regime effectively became the defining criteria for belonging to Dahiat al-Asad. A civilian resident reported that military personnel who moved to the area as late as 2007 are considered to be “original residents” as of 2015, while the few civilians who have been living there since the 1990s—longer than the majority of military families—have become “outsiders.”[21] This fact was driven home when the NDF began making lists of all Dahia residents in early 2014, but it would only enter the homes of nonmilitary families for head counts. Yet joining the NDF was one way for civilians to “belong” to Dahia. One Dahia resident recalled how a Syrian-Palestinian civilian, who was unable to join the army because of his dual nationality, instead joined the NDF and began to speak with a rural ‘Alawi accent in order to prove his loyalty.[22] 
 

Surveillance

Regime personnel had long ago infiltrated the private firms tasked with constructing and allocating homes in Dahiat al-Asad. As a result, the determining factor in allocation is rarely the official process, with personal ties to the regime being the most important factor. This allowed corruption and surveillance to thrive in Dahia, with the two reinforcing each other. 

The Institution for the Implementation of Military Construction, which is responsible for real estate and construction in Dahia, informally conducts surveillance to protect the regime’s interests. Officially, the institution operates under the Syrian state’s military and is not accountable to the country’s judiciary. Major General Riyad Salman Issa, who is also known as Riyad Shalish and is the cousin of President Bashar al-Asad, has been its director since the late 1980s. Ali Saqr, a regime figure, ran the Office of the First Assistant to the Director for years. Though Saqr is not a commissioned officer—his official military rank is warrant officer first class—he oversaw important administrative tasks in Dahia, making him both powerful and feared among the suburb’s officers.[23] 

Corruption has been the regime’s main tool for both co-optation and surveillance in Dahiat al-Asad. In the case of Saqr, his office was effectively the key to everything from home allocations to business and construction permits—none of which were granted without connections (wasta). Officers as high ranking as brigadier generals would have to go through Saqr and his office to secure their home allocations. As a result, officers who officially outranked Saqr were forced to curry favor with him in order to receive what was, by all rights, their due. (Saqr was replaced in October 2007 with a civil engineer as part of the regime’s economic reform program to give the institution a more bureaucratic, rather than military, appearance.)[24] 

In Dahia, officers often spy on one another, informing regime personnel about pertinent information or people who criticize the regime. In part for this reason, criticizing the regime or the president in public is rare in Dahia, unlike in most other parts of the country where there is at least some tolerance for it. In one incident during the 2000s, a fifteen-year-old girl living in the suburb published a magazine detailing the government’s failure to provide services in the neighborhood. Shortly afterward, her mother received a call from the Office of the First Assistant to the Director, warning her to desist or face retribution. This is the sort of response most Syrians in Damascus would normally associate with the regime’s intelligence services. Shocked by the call, the mother asked the daughter, “What did you do in the school to have Ali Saqr call me?”[25] 

Corruption has become entrenched in Dahia through the military housing system. An officer knows that improving his lot in life—including his job, salary, and housing for him and his family—is based largely on his ability to befriend key regime personnel. This cronyism has helped foster an environment where officers vie for influence by snitching on each other and backstabbing their colleagues. This has created a general atmosphere of myopic self-interest in the army and regime at large.


Conclusion 

The Syrian military was not the only beneficiary of state-subsidized housing. Over several decades, public sector teachers, workers, and numerous other state employees acquired homes through similar projects. Dahiat al-Asad simply offers a window into the wider ways in which the regime provided benefits to state employees before 2011 and insight into how these benefits, whether by design or default, have kept those employees from openly resisting the regime. 

In the army, sectarian ties alone do not account fully for the loyalty of officers. Clearly, ‘Alawites hold the most important commands, but many non-‘Alawi officers have not defected, which suggests that other factors have held them back.[26] A close look at the workings of Dahiat al-Asad indicates that the benefits awarded to officers and their families—many of whom come from humble origins—tie them to the army and the regime, irrespective of any religious or ideological concerns. However, the diversity found within Dahia has not resulted in the erasure of sectarian identity and its replacement with a new, corporate officer identity. Conversely, it is Dahia’s networks and patronage system that have created a shared interest in compelling people of various backgrounds to remain loyal to the regime. The uneven public services and byzantine regulations governing the neighborhood suggest that it has prevented defection because it has de-professionalized officers, making them dependent on informal back channels for basic services and compensation, rather than a formal military hierarchy that could weather civil strife. 

For decades, one of the Asad regime’s strongest instruments for retaining control of the army and other state institutions has been to corrupt officers by providing them benefits on a personal, rather than institutional, basis. By awarding housing as a matter of discretion and not as an entitlement, the regime has ensured that officers and their families have had little choice but to stay in the ranks and remain loyal. And because officers have acquired status and benefits as individuals, not as a corporate group, this has encouraged rivalry among them, discouraging the kind of networking and trust that would be necessary were any officers to try to lead whole units to defect. 

Most Syrian army officers have spent years trying to rise above their lower-middle-class origins and acquire the privileges Dahiat al-Asad offers them and their families. Yet in attaining these privileges, they have signed away almost all plausible options ever to leave Dahia. And it is not just the officers’ own futures that are at stake but the fortunes of their entire families. For this reason, almost all defections from the officer corps since 2011 have involved officers who were not invested in the military housing system. 

The extent and manner of the dependence of army officers—and other state employees—on the regime for their livelihood, upward mobility, and their families’ well-being reveals a crucial social component that has shaped their behavior since the uprising broke out. This same calculus will also shape their response to any political transition, should this come to Syria.
 

[This article was originally published by the Carnegie Middle East Center. It was prepared as part of the 2014–2015 Renegotiating Civil-Military Relations in Arab States: Political and Economic Governance in Transition Project run by the Carnegie Middle East Center.]
 

Notes

[1] Author survey with Dahia residents, 2015. 

[2]None provides housing for noncommissioned officers.

[3]Directorate of Culture in Damascus Countryside, “Arab Cultural Center in Dahiat al-Asad” [in Arabic], last accessed 14 September 2015, www.doc-dc.gov.sy/center.aspx?id=39.

[4] Author interview with an employee of Damascus Province, Damascus, May 2012.

[5] “Suburb of Harasta Out of Time and Space” [in Arabic], Tishreen, 12 March 2006, www.tishreen.news.sy/tishreen/public/read/93299.

[6] “Suburb of Dahiat al-Asad Suffers From Poor Services” [in Arabic], Tishreen, 19 October 2006, http://tishreen.news.sy/tishreen/public/read/88809. 

[7] Author interview with a former Dahiat al-Asad resident, Beirut, March 2014.

[8] Author interview with a retired brigadier general, Damascus, Syria, June 2012. 

[9] Author interview with a Syrian Arab Army officer (via Skype), July 2014.

[10] Author interview with Dahia al-Asad officer (via Skype), September 2014.

[11] The Aleppo artillery school was attacked early in this rebellion, with prominent ‘Alawi civilians, such as scientists and doctors, later being targeted, which led to the sense that ‘Alawites as a sect, rather than the army or the regime, were the true targets. The rebellion, which was centered in and around the city of Hama, ended in 1982 after the Syrian army laid siege to and destroyed large sections of the city with tanks and artillery, killing thousands of people in the process.

[12] Author interview with the wife of a Dahia officer, Damascus, August 2012. 

[13]Author interview with a daughter of a Dahia officer (via Skype), September 2014.

[14] Author interview with ‘Alawi officers from Dahia (via phone), November 2014.

[15] Author interview with a Dahia resident (via phone), Beirut, Lebanon, June 2014. 

[16] See interview with former member of the Air Force Intelligence Directorate, “Interview With Intelligence Official Afaq Mohammed Ahmad,” YouTube video, 17:15, from a segment televised by France 24 on 18 November 2012, posted by “France 24 / FRANCE 24 Arabic,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4RWZP-QEIk. 

[17] Author conversation with officers’ families, Damascus, Syria, February 2012. 

[18] This included military storehouses that had been discreetly spread throughout Dahiat al-Assad and held ammunition, weapons, medical supplies, blankets, and other military gear.

[19] Author interview with a Dahia resident (via Skype), September 2014.

[20] Author observation in Dahia, May 2011. 

[21] Author interview with a civilian Dahia resident (via phone), October 2014.

[22] Author interview with a Dahia resident (via Skype), October 2014.

[23] Saqr’s office was also responsible for recruiting the sons of officers into the NDF, with Saqr’s own son heading the Lions of the Assad Suburb.

[24] Hilal Aoun and Ahlam Islmail, “Dahiat al-Asad: Associations Bypass the Plan,” [in Arabic], Thawra, 7 June 2009, http://thawra.sy/_print_veiw.asp?FileName=6715202220090705212911.

[25]Author interview with a Dahiat al-Asad resident (via phone), July 2014. 

[26]For estimates of the ratios of ‘Alawi and Sunni officers, see Hicham Bou Nassif, “‘Second-Class’: The Grievances of Sunni Officers in the Syrian Armed Forces,” Journal of Strategic Studies 38, no. 5 (2015), 626–49.

The Civil Campaign to Protect the Dalieh of Raoucheh authored a competition brief to guide all participants to the competition in elaborating and proposing their entries. It is available in English and Arabic on the Campaign’s website.

In addition, the Civil Campaign authored a rich background report providing text, narratives, images, testimonies, analytical maps, and legal references about the site. It includes information about the Civil Campaign beginnings, progressive growth, and timeline of actions to date. The report comprises maps and legal documents about the zoning laws governing the Dalieh site, in addition to regulations that altered its use. It has a rich spatial and historical analysis of the socio-cultural practices within Dalieh, in relation to the urbanization of Beirut, and representations related to the place—all mapped. It includes geomorphological, biodiversity and archeology maps, and images that demonstrate the ecological and historical wealth of the site. It contains a section analyzing the planning institutions, and the governance structure overseeing the site. The full report can be downloaded here.

It is worth noting that this report formed the basis of an application by the Civil Campaign to place Dalieh on the 2016 list of endangered sites identified by the World Monuments Watch, a component of the World Monument Fund (WMF)--a private, international, non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of the world’s architectural legacy and cultural and natural heritage through calling international and local attention to its importance. On 15 October 2015, the WMF announced that Dalieh had been selected as part of this list—a major achievement for the coalition, which celebrated the news through the publication of this video below, and a press conference from which we cite this excerpt. 
 

The successful listing of Dalieh on the World Monuments Watch: 

• First, confirms its importance as a shared social space and as a natural heritage site of high cultural and environmental significance; hence, as a site that requires attention and protection at the international, regional and national level.
• Second, supports the demands of civil society, and city dwellers in general, for the right to the sea, nature, and a livable environment; and constitutes, at the same time, a new incentive for concerted and integrated efforts to free Dalieh from the clutches of real estate developers and powerful group—after it was symbolically freed in the past few weeks when the popular movement groups removed the fence that surrounded it.
• Third, has a moral significance, and adds a new dimension to its ownership. The notion of heritage is tightly linked with the notion of public good, which means that the protection of Dalieh, and other significant heritage sites in Lebanon, is a national obligation and s collective responsibility. 

We, members of the civil campaign to protect Dalieh of Roauche, are committed to our responsibilities towards our natural and cultural heritage. Starting from Dalieh of Raouche we are striving to raise awareness regarding its importance and to protect it from all dangers, including encroachments on the marine public domain and amendments to zoning regulations at the expense of the environment and our right and the right of future generations to enjoy what is collective property for all. We also take the opportunity of the listing of Dalieh on the World Monuments Watch to remind all ministries and concerned public entities of their responsibilities towards this site and the entire Lebanese coast, and the need to enact and implement laws and measures that ensure its sustainability and pubic use. We especially request as a matter of priory from: 

• The ministry of Public Works and Transportation: to rehabilitate the site, including the fishing harbor, and remove all rubble and barbed wires that obstruct free public access. 
• The ministry of Environment: to pursue the decree that it proposed to classify the site as a Marine Protected Area, and to push the Council of Ministers to sign and issue it. 
• The Higher Council of Urban Planning and Beirut municipality: given their authority in urban planning and design tools, not to approve any special project proposal on the site.
• The council of ministers: not to approve the issuance of any exceptional decree that grant site owners additional built-up areas that is not in accord with the current zoning regulations of Beirut.
• The ministry of Culture: to work on listing the site as an archaeological and cultural heritage site of significance at the national and eastern Mediterranean level.
  
  …
  Dalieh is ours, reclaim it.

Last June 2015, The Civil Campaign to Preserve the Dalieh of Beirut announced its open ideas competition results at the Lebanese Ministry of Environment. The jury selected three winning entries from twenty submissions. The selection was made on the basis on the projects’ sensitivity to the urban context, reaffirming the historical identity of Dalieh as a space for the public, functionality, flexibility, and economic feasibility, ecological and environmental sustainability, the institutional framework addressing property and managerial/administrative concerns, innovation and creativity, and clarity and completeness of the submission.

Winning Entry: The Last Resort
Amer Nabil Mohtar, Hayat Gebara, Sandy El Sabsaby

Jury Comments: This entry has a bold framework of intervention. It introduces social and economic activities that welcome a diversity of users. It presents a clear circuit that follows the geomorphology of the site at the interface of the two main ecological domains. Its strength is in introducing elegant, temporary, and lightweight material interventions without having a negative impact on the natural environment of the site. Read the description here.

 

Winning Entry: Daliehⁿ
Fadi Mansour, Candice Naim, Lea Helou, Ali Assaad, Roula Khoury, and Scapeworks: Karim Bacha and Jane Nassar

Jury Comments: This entry has a clear methodological approach that is ecologically centered. It has the potential to be used as a framework for national park. The maps show a serious understanding of the natural and cultural layers present on the site highlighting the importance of the process over the product. The entry provides useful policy and design guidelines for future interventions. Read the description here.

 

Winning Entry: Not Just About Dalieh
Adib Dada, Raya Tueny, Reine Chehayeb, Yasmina Choueiri, May Khalifeh

Jury Comments: This entry has a unique vernacular landscape approach, which capitalizes on the cultural history of the site while simultaneously providing practical design interventions. The entry also introduces the role of education in shaping ecologically-sensitive social practices on the site. This pragmatic approach gives a realistic feel that can be put to use by an array of activist groups. Read the description here.

 

”قد تدوم أساسات مبنى لألف عام، بينما يستوجب تغيير هيكل السطح بعد ألف شهر. وقد تدوم التمديدات الصحية لألف أسبوع، والدهان الخارجي لألف يوم، واللمبة لألف ساعة. يجب أن تُفهم المباني من خلال مقاييس زمنية مختلفة تتغير أثناءها“.¹

لطالما كانت العمارة أداة فعالة في تشكيل حقائق على أرض الواقع، وفي مساعدة مختلف البرامج السياسية والإيديولوجية على تخطي حيز الأفكار النظرية والمجردة، لتصبح بذلك واقعاً ملموساً يحيط بالأفراد ويتداخل مع حياتهم الآنية ورؤيتهم للمستقبل. وبالمقابل، فعند فشل تلك الإيديولوجيات والبرامج، تصبح تلك العمارة تجسيداً مادياً وملموساً لذلك الفشل من خلال مبانٍ أقرب ما تكون إلى صروحٍ لأفكار منتهية الصلاحية أو نموذج لما يجب تجنب فعله، على أحسن تقدير.  

منذ نهاية السبعينيات، لم يعد بالإمكان فهم نتاج العمارة ودور المعماري بمعزل عن المنظومة الرأسمالية العالمية والديناميكيات الناظمة لها. إذ أصبحت قيمة المباني مرتبطة بشكل أساسي باعتبارات الموقع، والمساحة، والعائد المالي المحتمل لبيعها، حيث يكفي ألا يعاني المبنى من خلل تقني فادح حتى تصبح جودة التصميم المعماري (الفراغية، والجمالية، والوظيفية) ثانوية في تحديد قيمته، تتخطاها قدرته على تحقيق الربح.²وبذلك، باتت المشاريع العمرانية والبناء الشامل أو البناء واسع النطاق (Mass Construction) أحد أهم المحركات الأساسية لعجلة الاقتصاد، في معادلة تتحول فيها المباني إلى سلعة، وتستقل فيها القيمة التبادلية عن القيمة الاستعمالية، ولا تأتي عملية البناء فيها كاستجابة للنمو السكاني العالمي وإنما كنتيجة لتجاذبات العرض والطلب في الأسواق العقارية. ورغم أن انتشار البناء واسع النطاق ليس مرتبطاً بشكل حصري بالرأسمالية العالمية، حيث يمكن تعقبه في فترات سابقة، ابتداء من الثورة الصناعية ومرورا بالحربين العالميتين، وضمن برامج سياسية مختلفة سعت إلى توفير أبنية سكنية سريعة البناء ومنخفضة التكلفة،إلا أن حاجة الرأسمالية العالمية، في العقود الأخيرة، إلى خلق أسواق جديدة من خلال التوسع المناطقي وهاجس التجديد المستمر أصبح الناظم الأساسي لديناميكيات البناء والهدم، والذي يروج له دائما في إطار التقدم والازدهار.

تتطرق هذه المقالة إلى ديناميكيات رأس المال وأثره في الانتاج المعماري في القرنين العشرين والواحد والعشرين. نستعرض فيها ظاهرة هجران المباني المتزايدة في العالم وخصوصيتها عن فترات سبقتها. ونحاول فهم هذه  الظاهرة  من خلال تتبع الفكر الذي يحصر التفكير في المستقبل بالتقدم وانعكاسه على النظرة الكلاسيكية للخط الزمني لحياة المباني وعملية التصميم المعماري. كما تبحث المقالة في أجزائها اللاحقة في آليات احتواء منظومة الرأسمالية العالمية لطروحات معمارية مختلفة كالعمارة البيئية، وإعادة الاستخدام التكيفي للمباني، ومشاريع إعادة الإعمار، وعمارة اللجوء المؤقتة في سبيل تحقيق الأرباح المادية.

وأخيرا، نستعرض إمكانيات مختلفة للتفكير في دورة حياة المبنى منذ إقرار بنائه، والتي تتخطى مفهوم التقدم الخطي وثنائية النقاش الذي يضع العمارة الحديثة والمعاصرة مقابل العمارة التاريخية في محاولة لتفضيل أحدهما على الآخر. وعليه، يكمن التحدي في كيفية تصميم حيوات متعددة للمبنى الواحد، مناسبة لمجتمع النمو والتراجع الدوري كوسيلة للتعامل مستقبلا مع إرث البشرية المبني. إذ بات من الضروري الآن الحديث عن عمارة تأخذ في الحسبان إمكانية فشل البرنامج الذي بنيت من أجله لتخدم الحاجات المتغيرة للمجتمع في جميع مراحله (مراحل التراجع إضافة إلى مراحل التقدم)، مختلفة بذلك عن تلك الرؤية الطوباوية التي قدمها لنا مشروع الحداثة الذي لم ير في المستقبل سوى التقدم والتطور. إن التسليم بحتمية هجر عمران بأكمله عند انتهاء البرنامج الإيديولوجي الذي بني من أجله، أصبح ترفاً وعبئاً بيئيا ووجودياً لمجتمعات دائمة التغير وكوكب محدود الموارد. 

أطلال الرأسمالية   

صدر في العام 2014 كتاب بعنوان ”على المباني أن تموت“ لستيفن كيرنز وجاين م جاكوبز³، والذي يبحث في مفهوم موت المبنى، ويطرح نقاشاً يبدو ضرورياً وملحاً أكثر من أي وقت مضى حول التفكير في النهايات المحتملة للمباني، وما يترتب عليها من إعادة تفكير في عملية البناء بحد ذاتها، نظراً للكمّ غير المسبوق من الإنتاج المعماري. فبعدما كانت الطبيعة صاحبة الدور الأجلّ في فناء العمارة وتحولها إلى أطلال، باتت المباني المهجورة في عصرنا تتحول إلى مخلفات^.4

يجول اليوم الباحثون والمصورون لتوثيق مئاتٍ من مباني القرن العشرين المهجورة في أنحاء العالم؛ ابتداءً من محطات الطاقة، وأماكن السكن العامة، والأسواق التجارية، ووصولاً إلى مدنٍ كاملة، كديترويت مثلاً، للبحث في السبب وراء هجرها، أو احتفاءً بها، أو أملاً في إيجاد طرق لإعادة استخدامها. وقد نقف قريبا أمام أطلال ”المدن ما بعد الصناعية“ المعتمدة على اقتصادٍ خدماتي متمثل بالزحف العمراني منخفض الكثافة - من أسواق تجارية، ومجمعات سكنية، ومجتمعات مسوّرة، ومقرات شركات – لتختفي كالسحر فاسحة المجال لغيرها، أو تُرمى كالسلعة عديمة الفائدة.

أتاحت التكنولوجيا إمكانية فصل الإنتاج المعماري عن سياقه الجغرافي، متيحة بذلك المجال أمام المعماريين التغاضي عن المحددات البيئية المحيطة. وهو ما ساعد على خلق ذلك الفراغ الذي يطلق عليه ريم كوولهاس ”الفراغ الميت“ (Junkspace)، أي ذلك الفراغ الزائد عن الحاجة، صنيع الحداثة، والذي ينتج الكثير منه في سبيل الرخاء والمتعة، ويعتاش على أي اختراع يسمح له بالتمدد. هذا الفراغ هو فراغ تراكمي، متعدد الطبقات، ”خفيف الوزن“، لايمكن تذكره لأنه من الصعب فهمه أو استيعابه:

”الفضاء الميّت هو مجموع إنجازاتنا؛ ما قمنا ببنائه هو أكثر مما عمّرت كل الأجيال السابقة مجتمعة، وإن اختلفت المقاييس، فنحن لا نخلف أهرامات. وفقا لإنجيل القباحة الجديد، هناك بالفعل فضاء ميّت قيد الإنشاء في القرن الحادي والعشرين أكثر من ذلك المتبقي من القرن العشرين [...] الاستمرارية هي جوهر الفضاء الميت، فهو يستغل أي اختراع يمكّنه من التوسع، ومن تواصل فراغي سلس: المصعد، ومكيف الهواء، ورشاش الماء، والأبواب المقاومة للنار، وستارة الهواء الساخن ... وهو دائماً داخلي وممتد، ونادراً ما تستطيع تصور حدوده. وهو يروج التوهان بأي وسيلة (مرآة، مواد تلميع، صدى) ... الفضاء الميت محكم الإغلاق ومترابط، ليس من خلال هيكلٍ ما، وإنما من خلال قشرةٍ  كالفقاعة.

[...] نصف البشرية تلوث لتنتج، ويلوث النصف الآخر ليستهلك. إن مجموع التلوث لدول العالم الثالث مما تنتجه عوادم السيارات، والدراجات النارية، والشاحنات، والحافلات، والمصانع المستغلة للعمال تتضاءل أهميته إذا ما قورن بالحرارة المتولدة من الفضاء الميت [...] الفضاء الميت هو فضاء سياسي: إذ يعتمد أساساً على الإزالة الجذرية  للقدرة على النقد باسم الراحة والمتعة. فالراحة الآن هي العدالة الجديدة، حيث باتت دول مصغرة بأكملها تعتمد الآن على الفضاء الميت كبرنامجٍ سياسي، وتؤسس لأنظمة من الارتباك المُهندَس، وتحرّض على سياسة الفوضى الممنهجة.”⁵

[هيروشيما، تشرين الأول/ أكتوبر 1945. تصوير إيتش. جيه بيترسون]

عن تصميم التراجع

حتى وقتٍ قريب، استطاع المعماري رسم خطٍ زمنيٍ لمبناه، بدءاً من إنتاج المخططات الأولية للمبنى. إذ يبدأ عمر المبنى الافتراضي بالتناقص منذ لحظة تشييده إلى أن يُهجر ويتهالك نتيجة توقف صيانته، ومن ثم  يُهدم لتشييد بناءٍ آخر مكانه. وفي بعض الحالات، قد ينجو المبنى من الهدم، وقد ترتفع قيمته التاريخية أو الثقافية، وقد تتزايد معها قيمته العقارية، وقد يصبح في نهاية المطاف معلماً على لائحة المباني الواجب الحفاظ عليها.

أضعف هذا التفكير ضمن أطر التقدم والنمو الخطي من قدرة العمارة على تخيل سيناريوهاتٍ مستقبلية واتخاذ إجراءاتٍ استباقيةٍ لها، كما حَصَر دورها في التحضير لواقع أكثر تقدماً والأمل في تحقيقه. وفي ظل التفكير المبني على مفهوم التقدم كغايةٍ بحد ذاتها، يصبح وضع الخطط التحسبية للسيناريوهات الأكثر تشاؤماً متنافياً مع الإيمان المطلق بالإيديولوجيا أو البرنامج الذي يتم البناء من أجله. وينعكس ذلك على عدم قدرة المعماريين على تخيل هذه النهايات ضمن مراحل الإنتاج المعماري. فمن الوارد عند إعداد مخططات معمارية لمبنى ما، أن تضم الرسومات، بالإضافة إلى مخططات المبنى الذي سيتم بناؤه في المستقبل القريب، مخططاتٍ للتوسع، بصفة ذلك السيناريو المستقبلي المرجّح. ما ليس وارداً هنا هو وجود مخططات لتقليص حجم المبنى أو تفكيكه لاعتبار ذلك شكلاً من أشكال سوء الطالع، رغم رجوح احتماليتها في العديد من الحالات. ولربما ينبع ذلك من حلم ٍ داخل الكثير من المعماريين بأن يصمد إنتاجهم المعماري أمام الزمن تماماً كما صمموه، ليصبح مثالاً حياً ومساهمةً شخصيةً لحقبةٍ تاريخيةٍ معينة بتمثيلاتها المختلفة، وذلك على افتراض أن المعماري هو المتحكم الأساس بمصير مبانيه.

إن تاريخ الاقتصاد الرأسمالي قائم بجوهره على فكرة النمو الخطي، وبأن ما تحتاجه البشرية الآن هو نمو اقتصادي لامحدود إلى أن يُشبع الكل بالثروة  دون التشكيك في عواقب هذا الطرح وجدواه.⁶وقد تلخص عبارة المعماري والمفكر سيدريك برايس (1934 - 2003) الشهيرة "التكنولوجيا هي الحل، ولكن ماذا كانت المشكلة؟"⁷موقف العديد من دور العمارة في خدمة هذا النمو، ومن تسخير التكنولوجيا لإنتاجٍ نهم من المباني ذات التصميم الثابت بدلا من تسخيره لإيجاد حلولٍ لمشاكل قائمة وإنتاج مبانٍ قابلةٍ للتكيف وإعادة التنظيم الذاتية. 

ظهرت في النصف الثاني من القرن العشرين حركات معمارية دعت إلى طرح رؤية لعمارةٍ "وقتيّة" تتغير مع مرورالزمن، وتتيح للمستخدمين حرية إجراء تغييراتٍ وتعديلات تتناسب مع كيفية استخدامهم للمبنى عوضاً عن مبانٍ ثابتة نجهد في إعادة تكييفها لحيواتنا المستقبلية. فمثلاً ينتقد برايس، أحد المنتمين إلى هذا الفكر، الميل اللامتناهي لإدراج المباني على قوائم الحفظ في المملكة المتحدة. ليس في هذا تقليل من شأن المباني التاريخية كمبان حيوية يمكن تطويعها لحياة معاصرة بدلا من إحلال عمارة أخرى مكانها، بل هي رغبة في التفكيرفي قابلية ملايين المباني المشيدة في القرنين الأخيرين على استضافة وظائف ومستخدمين جدد في ظروف اقتصادية واجتماعية مغايرة. فالحقيقة بأن ما يُشيّد من المباني الآن هو لخدمة حقبة زمنية معينة لتختفي بعدها كما اختفت غيرها على مدى التاريخ، ولكن هذه المرة كسلعة في إطار عملية إنتاجية استهلاكية لا محدودة وتوسعٍ عمراني مطرد.

في العام 2009 نشرت النيويورك تايمز مقالة تنعى فيها مبنى ”فرع البنك“ أحد البرامج المعمارية التي أنتجها التضخم الأخير في الصناعة المالية. وكما منازل الماكمانشينز(McMansions) التي هُجر العديد منها بسبب عجز مالكيها عن تسديد ثمنها، انتشرت فروع البنوك في كل زاوية في مدن وضواحي الولايات المتحدة لخدمة حمى قروض الإسكان والنظام الائتماني المُسبب للأزمة المالية العام 2008. وبعد وقوع الأزمة، ونتيجة رقمنة الخدمات المصرفية عبر الإنترنت ظهرت التساؤلات حول جدوى الحاجة إلى هذا العدد الهائل من فروع البنوك بعد الآن. وفي عام 2010 نشر الطالب كريستوفر تورو جوينون مشروعاً بعنوان ”عمارة منأجل التراجع“ والتي يقترح فيها جوينون نموذجا تصميميا لمصرف يمكنه التحول بقليل من التدخل ليخدم الحاجات المتغيرة لمجتمع ”ما بعد النمو“ وأبعد.⁸إذ تتحول خطط الطوارئ المصممة للبنك إلى إجراءات تشغيلية عند أحداث أو تحولات أساسية في الاقتصاد المحلي.

ترتكز فكرة جونيون على توفير تصميم قادر على الاستجابة لاحتياجات المصرف المختلفة التي تتغير بتغير النظام الاقتصادي. فالنسخة الأولى من التصميم تضم برنامجاً وظيفياً يشمل بشكل أساسي قاعات لإجراء معاملات بنكية، صرافات آلية، خزائن إيداعات، استشارات مالية ومكاتب. أما النسخة الثانية لنفس التصميم المقترح فتضم قاعة للمزاد العلني، وسوقاً للمقايضة، ومخازن للسلع، وهو برنامج أكثر ملائمة في حالة الاقتصاد المتراجع. أما بخصوص المبنى نفسه، فهو قادر على تطويع نفسه للانتقال من البرنامج الأول إلى الثاني: فعلى سبيل المثال، يمكن إزالة الوحدات الخشبية المكونة لقاعة المعاملات البنكية عندما لا يعود هناك حاجة لها واستخدامها في بناء وحدات سكنية، كما يمكن إزالة صفائح النحاس التي تغطي المبنى واستخدام عائد بيعها في دعم البرنامج الجديد، حيث أن قيمة النحاس تعد أكثر ثباتاً من قيمة العملات المصرفية المتأرجحة باستمرار وفقاً لاعتبارات الأسواق المالية. فنرى هنا أن تقليص فراغات المبنى لم يتم عن طريق الهدم، وإنما عن طريق عملية تفكيك مبنية على زيادة كفاءة استخدام الموارد إلى حدها الأقصى.            

”ليس السؤال هو ما نوع المبنى الذي نحتاجه، بل إذا ما كنا فعلا نحتاج إلى مبنى“؟⁹

يعبر سؤال برايس الشهير عن أزمة التفكير المعماري في السياق الرأسمالي لاعتبار أن حاجتنا لإنتاج المباني هو أمر مسلّم به. وهنا تصبح المفاهيم المتعددة حول ديمومة المباني او انتهائها إشكالية خصوصا عندما يصبح  بالإمكان تحقيق عائد مادي كبير من مجرد امتلاك مقدّرات مادية (سواء كانت على شكل أسهم أو عقارات)، ويتخطى بذلك الربح الذي يمكن تحقيقه عن طريق التملك ذلك الذي يمكن تحقيقه عن طريق العمل. تشكل هذه الحقيقة أحد أهم التناقضات الكامنة في نموذج السوق الحر الاقتصادي الذي تم التسويق له كطريقة لتحقيق الفرص المتكافئة والخلاص من القيود الطبقية. فقد باتت المباني أحد أهم أشكال رأس المال الثابت الذي ترى انعكاساته في مدن كثيرة عبر العالم وفي المنطقة أيضا كما يحدث في بيروت مثلاً التي باتت تعاني من نقص في الإسكانات لذوي الدخل المتوسط والمحدود، في مقابل مئات الشقق باهظة الثمن غير المستخدمة لملاك أثرياء من اللبنانيين والعرب.

أسهمت السياسات الاقتصادية النيولبرالية التي رسخها رونالد ريغان ومارغريت تاتشر في نهاية السبعينات في تعزيز فكرة المبنى كشكل من أشكال رأس المال عن طريق خصخصة الملكيات العامة ورفع شعار ”حق الشراء“. وقد أدت المناداة بـ”حق الشراء“ إلى إخضاع قطاع الإسكان لسيطرة القطاع الخاص في معادلة لا يرتبط فيها تملك المنزل بالضرورة بحاجة السكن، وإنما بكونه استثماراً جذاباً.¹⁰

أتاحت السوق الحرة المجال لتدفق رأس المال بشكل مستمر نحو الأماكن التي تحقق أعلى ربح ممكن. ونتيجة تخطي قيمة المبنى الشرائية قيمته الوظيفية، أصبحت حاجة الرأسمالية للتوسع وخلق أسواق جديدة والاستثمار في التغيير هي المولّد الأساسي للبناء والهدم وفرض الهجران. ”فالحقيقة بأن كل ما تبنيه المجتمعات البرجوازية يبنى من أجل الهدم، ليتم تدويره أو استبداله في عملية مستمرة قد تدوم للأبد بأشكال أكثر ربحية من أي وقت مضى.“¹¹لذا فبالنسبة لديفيد هارفي فإن ”التدمير المستمر هو عملية مركزية بالنسبة للرأسمالية، وفهم هذه الحقيقة هو خطوة أولى مهمة نحو تشكيل سلوك بيئي صارم اتجاه العمارة.“¹²

ومن جهة أخرى، لم تسلم الأحياء التاريخية ومجتمعاتها في مدن عدة حول العالم من حي سولوكولي في اسطنبول إلى بروكلين في نيويورك من تحكم القطاع الخاص في الأسعارالعقارية لمبانيها. حيث يسعى المستثمرون إلى إعادة الاستخدام التكيفي للمباني التاريخية المتداعية ورفع سعرها في السوق العقاري مسببة بذلك ترحيل سكانها من ذوي الدخل المحدود لعدم قدرتهم على تحمل تكاليف ارتفاع المعيشة والإيجارات واستبدالهم بسكان من الطبقات المتوسطة والعليا فيما يعرف بعملية "الاستبدال الطبقي" أو ”الاستطباق“ (Gentrification). يصبح المحرك الأساسي لهذه العملية هو انحدار قيمة المباني العقارية والاجتماعية إلى أدنى مستوى ممكن حتى تمر في مرحلة تحسين لاحقة ترفع عنها "الوصمة الاجتماعية" وترفع من قيمتها العقارية. ¹³

إن ما يميز المنظومة الرأسمالية، في المثال السابق والأمثلة اللاحقة، هي قدرتها العالية على تطويع نفسها لاستيعاب متغيرات جديدة، بما فيها تلك التي وجدت لتخطيها أو محاربتها. فقد استطاعت المنظومة الرأسمالية احتواء العديد من طروحات العمارة البيئية، وإعادة الاستخدام التكيفي للمباني التاريخية، وإعادة الإعمار، والعمارة المؤقتة في محاولة لتحويل مضامينها من حلول فعلية وطارئة إلى أفكار رمزية ذات أجندة ربحية. 

[هيروشيما، 1945. تصوير شيغيو هياشي]

الرأسمالية الخضراء

حظي مفهوم العمارة الخضراء مؤخراً باهتمام متزايد في تعليم العمارة وممارستها. وعلى الرغم من وجود عدد من التجارب التي استطاعت استحداث برامج متكاملة غير مقتصرة على تقنيات وعناصر معمارية، وإنما على رؤية فكرية ونمط حياة بديل لمستخدميها، إلا أن العمارة الخضراء لا تزال إحدى المجالات المعرّضة باستمرار لإعادة الانخراط في نفس المنظومة التي تقوم بمقاومتها، حيث تهيمن مفردات ”توفير الطاقة“، و”إعادة الاستخدام“، و”المواد العضوية والمحلية“ وغيرها على التعريف السائد للمبانى الخضراء. وتستضيف الكثيرمن المباني الخضراء المعاصرة، المزودة بأسقف خضراء، وأنظمة لتكرير المياه الرمادية، أنماط حياة وإنتاج شبيهة بمثيلاتها من المباني غير الخضراء، في إطار الفهم الخطي للنمو الذي يفرضه التفكير الرأسمالي، ويعطي الختم الأخضر شرعية لبناء مدن كاملة، ويمنحها حصانة من أية مساءلة حول حاجة مجتمعاتها لها. 

يرتكز الهوس المعاصر بالتوعية البيئية -حسب المفكر السلوفيني سلافوي جيجيك- على استعدادنا التام للشعور بالذنب والمسؤولية اتجاه مصير الكوكب. حيث أن شعورنا بالذنب، وإن كان مزعجاً، يبعث على التفاؤل، فهو يوهمنا بأننا نمسك بزمام الأمور، وأنه بوسعنا حصر الضرر الذي قمنا بإحداثه عن طريق تغيير سلوكنا. وبالفعل، فإن العديد من الشركات الرأسمالية سارعت إلى استحداث ما يسمى بـ”الاستهلاك الواعي“، بحيث توفر سلعاً صديقة للبيئة مع إمكانية دفع مبلغ إضافي بسيط مقابل شراء الرضا عن الذات والتخلص اللحظي من الذنب مع مواصلة الأنماط الاستهلاكية نفسها. ¹⁴ 

كما تقدم نعومي كلاين شرحاً مغايراً للفرضية التي تدعي أن التدهور البيئي الناتج عن سوء استخدام المصادر الطبيعية وتدميرها سببه الطبيعة البشرية اللامبالية والأنانية، والتي تُركت على سجيتها للتصرف دون إدراك العواقب، مؤدية إلى إخفاق جماعي، فتقول: ”نحن عالقون لأن الإجراءات التي من شأنها تجنيبنا الكارثة المُحتّمة، هي مُهدِّدة لمصالح أقليّة نخبويّة تحكم قبضتها على اقتصادنا، وقراراتنا السياسية، ومعظم وسائل إعلامنا الرئيسية“.¹⁵أو بعبارة أخرى، تصف كلاين الأزمة البيئية بصراع ما بين رأس المال والكوكب، حيث أن الانبعاثات الكربونية في القرن الواحد والعشرين-على سبيل المثال- تنشأ بمعظمها من جمهورية الصين، إلا أن المسبب الحقيقي لتلك الانبعاثات هو ليس النمو السكاني في الصين أو الاستنزاف غير المسؤول للموارد الطبيعية من قبل الصينيين، وإنما هو نتيجة لتركيز رأس المال الأجنبي واستغلاله للعمالة المحلية غير المكلفة. وبالتالي، فإن إلقاء اللوم على البشرية كمسبب للضرر البيئي الحالي يساهم في تشتيت الانتباه عن المسبب الحقيقي لها (رأس المال والاقتصاد النيولبرالي) ويضعف من إمكانية إيجاد حلول فعالة ومؤثرة لسبب المشكلة وليس أعراضها، أو كما يقول أندريا مالم في مقالته ”أسطورةالأنثروبوسين“: "إلقاء اللوم على الجميع هو شكل آخر لعدم إلقاء اللوم على أحد".¹⁶

وعليه، فإن النظر إلى الكوارث البيئية كنتيجة لمنظومة اقتصادية مهيمنة يستدعي بالضرورة أن يقوم الفكر المعماري البيئي في إعادة النظر في  المسببات الحقيقية  للضرر البيئي وإيجاد حلول جذرية لتخطيها.

الهدم الخلاّق وعمارة ما بعد الحرب

كما تحدثنا سابقا، لم تعد معايير، كتداعي المباني وانتهاء عمرها الوظيفي، العامل الوحيد للهجران والهدم. فالإفلاس، وأزمة الرهن والقروض، وإغلاق المصانع والشركات، وتراجع شعبية مناطق معينة، باتت عوامل هامة في تحديد حياة المباني وقيمتها العقارية، وفي هجران البيئات المبنية بشكل عام. وهذا بحد ذاته دافع أساسي لانتقال رأس المال إلى جغرافيات أخرى، لإنتاجٍ معماريّ آخر، في عملية غير مستدامة من البناء والهجران، لإثراء فئات معينة، وفي فهم ملتوٍ لعملية الهدم الخلاق (Creative Destruction)، التي استخدمها الاقتصادي شومبيتير، في خمسينيات القرن العشرين، لوصف النمو الاقتصادي، القائم على عملية تراكمية مستمرة من تطوير التكنولوجيا، واستبدالها بما هو أكثر تطوراً، فهو هدم يعقبه بناء، ومن هنا تم وصفه بالخلاّق.¹⁷

وفي هذا السياق يتغير أيضاً مفهوم إعادة الإعمار بعد التدمير واسع النطاق أثناء الحروب والكوارث الطبيعية. فبعد الحرب العالمية الثانية، اعتُبرت إعادة الإعمار طريقة لإنعاش الاقتصاد، وتلبية حاجات مجتمات ما بعد الحرب، برعاية من الدولة. أما الآن فقد تحوّلت مشاريع إعادة الإعمار في الجنوب العالمي إلى مجال ربحي للشركات العالمية غير الخاضعة لسيطرة أو رقابة الدولة كما في لبنان والعراق وأفغانستان والبلقان وغيرها.

فمثلاً، بدأ التخطيط لإعادة إعمار العراق بعد ستة أشهر من بدء الغزو الأمريكي العام 2003. وبلغت حصيلة ما أنفقته الولاياتالمتحدة(حكومة وقطاعاً خاصاً) حتى شهر حزيران 2012 ما قيمته 60 بليون دولاراً أمريكياً، جاعلة منه أكبر مشروع إعادة إعمار تقوم به الولايات المتحدة خارج أراضيها، منذ مخطط مارشال الذي نفذته في أوروبا في أعقاب الحرب العالمية الثانية.¹⁸توزعت مشاريع إعادة الإعمار في العراق ما بين البنية التحتية، والأجهزة الأمنية، والهيكلية الاقتصادية والسياسية، والمؤسسات القانونية، والمساعدات الإنسانية. وشملت البنية التحتية، ومحطات توليد الماء والكهرباء، إضافة إلى المدارس، والشوارع، والمشاريع السكنية. وبعد مرور أكثر من عشر سنوات على بدء المشاريع، تبدو إشكالياتها واضحة أكثر من أي وقت مضى. 

وبغض النظر عن الفشل الذريع لتلك المشاريع في تحقيق أهدافها المعلنة، والكم الهائل من الأموال المهدورة (حوالي 8 بلايين دولار أمريكي)، فإن الغاية هنا هي الإشارة إلى التناقضات الكامنة وراء ظاهرة إعادة الإعمار من قبل دول قامت هي نفسها بالتدمير، وتوضيح الأبعاد التي تأخذها فكرة الهدم في هذا السياق. وقد ساهمت سيطرة شركات القطاع الخاص على هذه المشاريع في تمكين الشركات الأجنبية من السيطرة على موارد العراق الاقتصادية، وجعلت من إمكانية التطوير المحلي فكرة بعيدة المنال.  

ومن جهة أخرى، لم يعد ارتباط المنظومة الرأسمالية بالحروب والكوارث الطبيعية مقتصراً على قطاع شركات السلاح والنفط، وشركات إعادة الإعمار فحسب، بل بات يشمل أيضا شركات تصنيع سكن اللجوء للمجتمعات المنكوبة. مثلاً، اختارت المفوضية العليا للأمم المتحدة لشؤون اللاجئين في العام 2013 شركة سويدية لتصنيع وحدات سكنيةمؤقتة للاجئين تعمل بالطاقة الشمسيّة من مواد مُصنعّة وتقنيات حديثة صالحة لثلاث سنوات. يتم إنتاج هذه الوحدات ضمن عملية تصنيع معقدة داخل منظومة التجارة العالمية، حيث يُصمّم النموذج السويدي في أوروبا، ومن ثم يتم تصنيعه في إحدى دول آسيا، ومن ثم شحنه إلى الدول المستضيفة للاجئين، دون الأخذ بعين الاعتبار مصير تلك الوحدات عند انتهاء صلاحيتها، وأثر مخلفاتها على البيئة. وفي محاولة عولمة سكن اللجوء هذه، يبدو من الصعب استكشاف سبل أخرى لسكن معتمد على مواد وعمالة محلية. كما أن هذا النموذج لا يعطي الفرصة بمساهمة حقيقية للاجئين في بناء مسكنهم والتي تتطلب الكثير من الحراك والمشاركة المجتمعية، وتسهم في التخفيف من المعاناة التي سببتها الكارثة. 

عن عمارة تَحسبيّة (استباقية)

ولكن ماذا لو توفرت نهايات أخرى للمباني؟ ماذا لو ابتدع المعماري أثناء التصميم تصورات مستقبلية أخرى للمبنى؛ تلبي احتياجات زمن ذي سياق اجتماعي واقتصادي مختلف يتداعى فيه البرنامج الذي بني من خلاله، وتصورات تسمح للمجتمع -مستقبلا- بتغيير تكوين المبنى تبعاً لحاجاته المتغيرة، فلا يكون مجرد وعاء للبرنامج؟ وكيف يختلف هذا عن ذلك المجال المتنامي في تكييف المباني وخصوصا التاريخية منها، لاستخدامات ووظائف غير التي صممت من أجلها؟

يكمن الجواب في هذا النقاش المتزايد حول أهمية دور المعماري في إنتاج عمارة "تحسبيّة" مصممة لتتغير باستمرار خارج ذلك الخط الزمني الحتمي لحياتها، في سبيل عمارة تتيح الفرص وتمكّن من التغيير في عالم متغير، يصبح فيه الدور الأساسي للمستخدم وليس للمعماري.

ظهر مصطلح العمارة التحسبيّة (Anticipatory Architecture) في أوروبا عقب انتهاء الحرب العالمية الثانية، عندما اندمج التطور التكنولوجي للثورة الصناعية بفكر الحداثة المهتم بمفاهيم"التقدم"و"المستقبلية" لبناء مجتمعات ما بعد الحرب في أوروبا.¹⁹حيث سعى معماريو الحداثة إلى استغلال التطور التكنولوجي من أجل إنتاج عمارة تستبق التغيير، وتكيّف المبنى حسب الاحتياجات والبرامج المتغيرة لمستخدميه، والظروف البيئية من حوله، حيث تهتم عملية التصميم باستيفاء المبنى لاحتياجاته التكنولوجية أكثر من الاهتمام بمضامين معمارية تاريخية سابقة. 

ورغم طوباوية الطروحات المعمارية في تلك الفترة، التي رأت مستقبلاً واحداً وهوتقدم البشرية من خلال التقدم التكنولوجي، والدمج بين الآلة والعمارة لبناء مجتمعات صناعية منتجة في دولة الرفاه، إلا أنه من المهم التمعن في مفهوم العمارة المتغيرة آنذاك. ففي العمارة الحديثة، استُخدم بدايةً المسقط الأفقي الحر في المواقع الصناعية، لاحتواء التغير السريع لأنماط وخطوط الإنتاج، والتي انعكست أيضا عند لوكوربوزييه في رؤيته للوحدة السكنية كامتداد لروح العمل الصناعي والمنطق المستمر للتغير المكاني. وبذلك يصبح الفراغ غير المتخصص والمحايد وسيلة الرأسمالية في احتواء أية أوضاع غير متوقعة، حيث أن "الصفة العامة التي يمتاز بها هذا الفراغ من قابلية للتطويع، وعدم التخصصية المرتبطة ارتباطاً وثيقاً بصفة مميّزة للنوع البشري؛ وهي انعدام الحدس التخصصي الذي ينتج عنه صعوبة التنبؤ بأفعال وردّات أفعال الإنسان. وكلما اعتمد رأس المال على هذا الجانب من الطبيعة البشرية لاستغلال القوى العاملة، كلما استدعت الحاجة إلى أن يكون الفراغ محايداً لاحتواء مختلف الأوضاع التي لا يمكن التنبؤ بها." ²⁰ 

أما في سياق مجتمعات ما بعد الصناعية، فيقصد بالعمارة التحسبيّة تلك العمارة ذاتية التوازن، وذاتية التعديل، والتي لا تنتهج عملية تصميم لإنتاج مبانٍ ثابتة لتخدم وظيفة معينة، لفئة مستخدمين محددة، ولفترة زمنية محددة. وهنا تختلف النظرة إلى المستقبل عما كانت عليه في مشروع الحداثة بعد الحرب العالمية الثانية، فمفهوم العمارة التحسبية الآن يتوقع تراجعاً للمشروع أو الفكر الذي بُنيت من خلاله، ويوفر سيناريوهات مختلفة لتهالكها كالتقليص وتغيير الاستخدام، بدلاً من الهجر والهدم والإحلال. وبذلك تعتمد العمارة التحسبيّة على استخدام تكنولوجيا العصر لهذا الغرض. 

على المبانى أن تموت، ولكن كيف؟ 

في النهاية، فإن قدرة الرأسمالية على احتواء الطروحات المذكورة سابقاً، يمكن ردّه إلى كون هذه الطروحات تتعامل مع أعراض الرأسمالية وليس مع فكرها. وقد تكون الخطوة الأولى نحو تغييرٍ جذري، بطرح مغاير لمبدأ التقدم الخطي، ونظرة بديلة لسير الزمن من خلال نموذج النمو والتراجع الدوري. فوفقاً لنظرية هوارد وإليزابيث أودم²¹عن أنظمة المجتمعات البشرية، فإن المبادئ التي تحكم الأنظمة الطبيعية والبيولوجية تحكم المجتمعات البشرية كذلك، من خلال تكرار دورة النمو والتراجع. ومن هنا، فإن النمو الخطي غير المحدود، بغض النظر عن مدى التقدم التكنولوجي، يتنافى مع ديناميكية أنظمة المجتمعات.

يعرض الثنائي أودم دورة حياة للأنظمة بصفة عامة، مكونة من أربع مراحل، تعمل كل منها وفق استراتيجية مختلفة: الأولى هي مرحلة النمو، والتي يقوم فيها النظام باستهلاك الموارد المتاحة إلى أن يصل إلى أقصى درجاته تعقيداً. تتبعها مرحلة الذروة، وهي مرحلة انتقالية، يقف عندها النمو لعدم توفر المصادر اللازمة لاستمراره، ويعمل فيها النظام بكفاءة تكفيه لأن يستمر بالعمل مع استهلاك الحد الأدنى من المصادر، حيث يقوم بتجميع وتخزين المعلومات تحضيراً للمرحلة الثالثة وهي مرحلة التراجع. خلال هذه المرحلة، يصغر حجم النظام تدريجياً وتزداد عمليات إعادة التدوير الداخلية، حيث تقوم بعض الأنظمة بتطوير وسائل لتخزين معلومات عن نفسها لتساعدها في عملية النمو عندما تكرر الدورة نفسها. أما المرحلة النهائية فهي إعادة الإحياء، وتبدأ عندما يتخطى إنتاج النظام المصغر للموارد استهلاكه لها، ويصبح هناك تراكماً كافياً للموارد، فتبدأ مرحلة النمو من جديد. ويمكن ملاحظة هذا النمط في عدة أنظمة ابتداءً من دورة حياة النباتات ووصولاً إلى تعاقب القوى السياسية العالمية. ²²

تمتاز العمارة التحسبيّة أيضا بالتراكمية. حيث أن دوريّة حياة المبنى تتضمن مرحلة تخزينه لمعلومات عن نفسه في نهاية كل دورة، تحضيراً لتلك التي تليها. ومع استمرارية الدورات المتعاقبة، يحدث تراكمٌ معرفيٌّ، مرتبطٌ باستجابة المبنى الفراغية لتغيرات محيطه خلال المراحل المختلفة، مما يُعزّز ويُغني عمليات الإنتاج الفراغي اللاحقة. فبالإضافة لاستجابته للتغيرات الاجتماعية، والسياسية، والاقتصادية، يصبح المبنى جزءاً مشاركاً في إحداثها.       

يمكن الاستدلال مما سبق على أن نموذج التقدم الخطي يتقبل مبدأ التراجع الجزئي في سبيل تحقيق التقدم الكلي في المحصلة، وأنه ينظر إلى التراجع كمرحلة لا بد منها لتحقيق التقدم في النهاية. في حين أن النظر إلى حياة الأنظمة كدورات متكررة هو خطوة أولى للتفكير في المبنى ككائن عضوي متغير كما المجتمعات، وقادر على التكيف مع مختلف مراحل النمو والتراجع، وعلى تخزين معلومات ذاتية في كل مرحلة، لتحقق تراكمية هي أساس دورات حياته اللاحقة. مما يستدعي التفكير في الأدوار المترابطة بين المعماري والمستخدم، لإيجاد عمارة تتفاعل مع هذه الدورية وتستفيد من الإمكانيات التي تتيحها.    

تهدف عملية هدم المباني، ضمن السياق الرأسمالي، إلى توفير أرضية مستوية نظيفة مستعدة لاستقبال المخططات التطويرية اللاحقة، حيث يتم الترويج لكل من البناء والهدم كوسائل لإتاحة فرص التقدم. إن رؤيتنا لكل من البناء والهدم كأدوات للتشكيل الفراغي ستختلف عند الإدراك بأن العمارة هي وسيلة لحجب الاحتمالات بمقدار كونها أداةً لإتاحتها. فقرارات "عدم البناء" أو "تفكيك البناء" هي أيضا أدوات للتشكيل الفراغي، وترتبط بشكل وثيق بالاحتياجات المتغيرة والموارد المتاحة. 

الهوامش:

[City Talks provides a platform for conversations around the social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental transformations that define the historical and contemporary geographies of the Middle East, and beyond. Bringing together voices from critical scholars, activists, and artists, it seeks to explore the ways racialized, gendered, and class-based social orders come into being, materialize, and are resisted through the fabric of bodies, space, and time.] 

In this first installment of City Talks, Omar Jabary Salamanca and Nasser Abourahme discuss with Timothy Mitchell his latest work and his ongoing thinking around questions of urban political economy and political theory. More specifically, we learn about his use of the term capitalization and what it might mean for thinking about the built environment. Mitchell also reflects on the role of public space during the Arab uprisings, issues of urban and rural informality, as well as the ways the ‘material turn’ and close attention to the technical help us see colonialism in different ways. 

Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist and historian. His areas of research include the place of colonialism in the making of modernity, the material and technical politics of the Middle East, and the role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge in the government of collective life. Much of his current work is concerned with ways of thinking about politics that allow material and technical things more weight than they are given in conventional political theory.  Educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he received a first-class honours degree in History, Mitchell completed his Ph.D. in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984. He joined Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years at New York University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies. At Columbia, he teaches courses on the history and politics of the Middle East, colonialism, and the politics of technical things. 
 

City Talks: Timothy Mitchell on the Materialities of Political Economy and Colonial History

Theme and Time Markers: 

00:00:07 | Representation, colonialism and the city
00:01:54 | Political economy, capitalization and the city
00:14:35 | Capitalization vs. renterism or rent economies
00:21:14 | Provincializing materiality
00:26:09 | The “material turn” and colonialism
00:32:47 | Methodological encounters with the archive
00:39:43 | Reading the archive in non-representational ways
00:43:15 | Arab Uprisings and public space
00:50:26 | Urban (and rural) informality