A workshop was held at the Centre for Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Birmingham (UK) on Friday 6 November 2015, on the theme "(Auto)-Mobility in the Global Middle East." The workshop surveyed the state of this emerging field of study and sketched future directions, in anticipation of a major conference, gathering original research, to be held in June 2016 in Birmingham. The Call for Papers for the June conference can be found here.

What follows develops the first part of the report, which dealt with the framing of the workshop and the main elements of its first panel, bringing into play three regional cases and the interconnections between imperial and state projects of (auto)-mobility on one hand, and the varied appropriations and contestations of those projects from below, on the other hand.

The second part of the workshop moved away from the framework of the region as unit of analysis to consider the case of a specific city, Beirut, delving into the rich variety of mobilities—from the work of Syrian refugees as delivery drivers to the articulation of political memory in the context of the commute—available through fine-grained urban history and anthropology. Through a close study of a single city and its siting in wider geographies, reflection was also fostered on the ways in which historical, sociological, geographical and anthropological approaches to (auto)-mobility may most effectively learn from one another, or combine in a specific research project.

From this tighter focus on one city, the final session then zoomed out, to benefit from the illumination of a comparative case and to interrogate the potential of global frameworks through a meditation on the evolution of the historiography on (auto)-mobility in recent years, and the disciplinary confrontations that have nourished its progress. In closing, a roundtable discussion then imagined a set of future possibilities for the field. 

Beirut Short-Cuts: Knowledge, Space and Time

The scale employed to organize the second panel was that of a specific city—Beirut—and its unevenly-gradated suburban, peri-urban, and rural adjacent spaces, which have been the object of significant research in recent decades. First, Kristin V. Monroe offered a paper, "Driving Then and Now: The History and Anthropology of Automobility in Beirut" meditating on her methodological tacking between anthropological and historical approaches to automobility in Beirut in the contemporary period, the 1930s, and finally the 1950s and 1960s. Analyzing the intersections of social class, sectarian geography and political disaffection in contemporary Beirut, she discussed the varied forms of social mobility and knowledge that could be accumulated in the city through practices of (auto)-mobility, for instance by Syrian refugees delivering fast food on scooters. She also noted the way her informants routinely harked back to the pre-civil war era in Beirut as a time of purportedly disciplined traffic and a stronger state, in ways that recall the Algerian nostalgia for the Boumediene era, and the terbiya (politeness and good manners) that purportedly characterized it.

Monroe had listened to her informants carefully, and followed their insistence on this orderly past back into archival research on the Chehabist (1958-64) and Mandate (c. 1918-1946) periods. She assessed the ways in which automobility became a means of demonstrating colonial state power in the Mandate period, despite the vulnerabilities Daniel Neep described in the ponderous columns of semi-motorized counter-insurgency forces. Monroe also discussed the ostentatious display of elite mobilities in both periods, as exemplified by the highly gendered exercise of a drive to the ancestral village, a practice that she argued "metropolitanized" the Lebanese countryside.

Monroe’s insistence on the need to respond historically to present-day informants—and, inversely, with an anthropological ear, to the murmurs in the archives– provided a model for tacking between disciplines in the approach to (auto)-mobility. And, as in David Sims’ attention to the virtual reality technologies of urban imagination in endlessly re-planned Cairo, she identified the intertwining of surveillance, information and data technologies with the built fabric of the city as a potentially useful site of further research. She also noted how contemporary eco-tourism, as a middle class practice that re-connected city and rural areas in terms of national environmental identity, could provide fertile ground for work connecting territoriality with the problematics of class formation and critical ecology.

In a complementary paper, "On driving—and not driving—in contemporary Lebanon: mobility, stasis and the decay of the commons," Andrew Arsan gave a thickly-described picture of the variegated practices and politics of (auto)-mobility in and around Beirut. He touched on numerous aspects of the situation, from the chameleon tactics of confessional display and cloaking deployed by taxi drivers, to the porous frontiers of vehicles in traffic, to the intermeshing of racialized class hierarchy, branded material culture and confessional signposting that police practical and discursive norms of (auto)-mobility. The macho of the boy-racer, the acumen of the taxi driver, the symbolic complexity of parking in the era of Solidere and car-bombing, and the symbolic re-appropriations of Mandate-era nursery rhymes in the slang of contemporary Lebanese rap by Ashekman (i.e. échappement/exhaust pipe): all were woven into Arsan’s tapestry.

He also noted the fierce engagement with issues of mobility on the part of Beiruti architects, critical urbanists and art collectives like Dictaphone, in a city where today to walk is (except perhaps during armed attack) often to mark oneself out as foreigner or migrant labourer. But he also flagged widespread nostalgia for urban pasts of greater inter-confessional solidarity and civic decency—as in the case of van number four recently analyzed on Jadaliyya by Amer Mohtar and Petra Samaha. Throughout the paper Arsan emphasized the way in which the trajectory and travails of Lebanese state and society become manifest in the everydayness of (auto)-mobility, and noted the unevenness of the geographies in play. Intimate knowledge of city-center backstreets is accumulated just adjacent to the most intensively surveilled bailiwicks of state power, just as in rush hour traffic ancient Mercedes taxis may nudge and block oligarchic SUVs.

Sara Fregonese’s comments on the panel, delivered from the disciplinary standpoint of critical geography, emphasized the artifactual geography of the Beirut streetscape and the utility of inquiry focused on the atmospheres and affects created around certain rituals, from the commute to the joy-ride. Methodologically, she insisted on the mobile artefact (the driver and his scooter as a type of centaur, perhaps) as an integral part of the wider urban assemblage, and not an object circulating external to that assemblage. Fregonese insisted too, in a vein reminiscent of the insights of Alltagsgeschichte, on the intermeshing of geopolitics and the everyday materiality of social life. Approaches to the latter, she argued, need not plead their methodological case in opposition to the former, but in terms of their ability to encompass the play of geopolitical power and legitimation. The diplomat and her chauffeur inhabit the same world, in this sense.

Cooking with Gas? Global Comparisons and Disciplinary Conflicts

The final panel changed scale again, moving to comparative and global perspectives. Simon Gunn began with a paper titled "The Car and the City: New Approaches to the History of Automobility in Britain and the West." Gunn recovered the car-system utopias and dystopias of Britain and France in the 1960s, noting just how much of these visions never came to pass, even as the number of cars on the roads increased radically. Gunn also noted the varied ways in which these changes hit home, and the absence of a sustained, global historiography on the issue, beyond narrow corporate and technical histories (though in the case of Ford or Volkswagen, work such as Stefan Link’s and Bernhard Rieger’s is changing this).

Gunn argued that the car must be consistently set into its infrastructural and wider experiential and subjective contexts, not least the centrality of car-making to the Fordist and Keynesian political-economy of the post-1945 North Atlantic. Gunn also made a methodological case for urban history’s enduring ability to attend to the specificities and unevenness of the car system’s evolution, implicitly posing the question of what mobility history can do that urban history cannot. One example of the latter’s fruitfulness is Kenneth Jackson’s insight that US suburbanization substantially pre-dated the automobile, even as the latter reinforced it.

The final paper, by Gijs Mom, "How to Approach Middle Eastern Mobility? Prolegomena for a Recipe," gave a panoramic overview of the key historiographical and inter-disciplinary debates that have shaped the evolution of mobility history as a field. Mom drew on a disciplinary combination of comparative literature, engineering and cultural history to provide a wide-ranging and provocative take on mobility history, a field that he argued had no accepted state of the art as recently as a decade ago. Skewering modernization theory conceits that pretend the automobile "fulfilled" a pre-existing need or diffused out from Detroit to conquer the world, Mom drew on Proust, Marinetti and even Dutch ‘cycling marriages’ to sketch the troubled gender and sexual politics of interwar motoring, and to brilliantly illuminate the structural homologies between driving and reading/writing experiences.
 
Methodologically, Mom emphasized the importance of trans-national, trans-modal and trans-disciplinary approaches, and identified mass phenomena all too seldom drawn into the ambit of enduringly Eurocentric renditions of the "rise of the automobile." These included the role of the bicycle, the distinct activity of "passengering," the Edgertonian persistence of older technologies and animals alongside the car, and the importance of race and settler colonialism. Mom also emphasized the importance of traffic engineering as a discipline in producing varied forms of structural and circumstantial risk, as Keith Laybourn and David Taylor have noted in their work on the deaths of child pedestrians.

The closing debate was framed by Frank Uekotter’s salutary reminder, from the stand-point of environmental history, of the inescapable importance of oil and energy to any meaningful account of (auto)-mobility in the Middle East: the overwhelming presence of oil in the existing literature cannot imply its exclusion from the development of new approaches, as new work by Sarah Yizraeli and Rosie Bsheer shows. With this in mind the workshop participants staked out some principal areas for further inquiry, looking ahead to June’s conference.

Conclusion: Roads Ahead

We concluded that still-influential master narratives of a "horse-to-horsepower," and "toy-to-tool" expansion of (auto)-mobility, based on a geography of Western genesis and rise and then a subsequent global diffusion, have been intellectually superseded. They have been replaced by an emphasis on what Pascal Ménoret summed up as the interplay of empire, capitalism and expertise in an interconnected global carscape. But the former narratives, for instance modernization theory’s characteristic dualism of static indigenous archaism and mobile colonial modernity, cannot be set aside altogether: they still need investigating, whether in terms of their social, intellectual and political histories, or in terms of the racialized, gendered and class-based forms of violence they promote.

As Samuel Dolbee argued in debate, sustained reflexivity about the status of the "Middle East" as a description or category of analysis is required as this field evolves. What really binds Riyadh and Beirut as sites of (auto)-mobility, for instance, or Tangier and Cairo? Ought we not think instead about apt trans-regional connections: the influence of Gulf driving culture on Egypt, or neo-liberal urban planning’s legacies between Islamabad and Riyadh, or the realm the South Korean chaebol Hyundai has carved out across the regional carscape?

Relatedly, the focus on cities, and especially capital cities, in existing histories that touch on (auto)-mobility, though understandable in terms of the concentration of infrastructure, population and passenger-distance covered, needs careful siting within wider, closely specified geographies. These geographies should include not just the suburban and peri-urban and ‘rural’ or ‘hinterland’ spaces of the kind Aaron Jakes has traced along the roads of colonial Egypt, but should also accommodate provincial towns, inter-village connections, the importance of borderlands such as the Iraq-Syria frontier and so on.[1] Long distance transport and its spatial imaginaries, such as the Beirut-Baghdad service of the Nairn Company in the 1920s, on which Kevin Martin is working, is one way to engage such topics.

Equally, analysis that connects anthropologically alert studies of (auto)-mobility with histories of migratory mobility is a promising way to conjoin two generally sundered fields. Taxi driving as a strategy of capital accumulation, one intended to propel a second generation’s social mobility through migration, is a good example—the reverse of this "double movement" might, as in Kristin V. Monroe’s work on Syrian delivery drivers in Beirut, be instantiated by taxi driving as a recourse of refugees de-classed by forced mobility.

But the recurrence of taxis in the agenda of researchers who perhaps sit in many of them is also problematic. Automobiles and other vehicles, from donkeys to Humvees, and from shared taxi to (motor)-bicycle, should be investigated together, as they shared and fought for road space, points of access, and even parking space in which not to move. These varied vehicles should be seen as both a political medium and as a type of everyday practice, both a means of routine formation and of norm policing within a wider car system. As Samuel Dolbee noted, the relegation of animals was never complete in the "Age of Speed," and indeed, as Lee Vinsel has shown, their brutal use in the development of impact biomechanics, and other disciplines fundamental to the developing metrics and risk hierarchies of (auto)-mobility, was crucial.

Studies of such everyday practices should strive to attend to the play of power and the construction of positionality and subjectivity, for instance through the exchange of glances Erving Goffman long ago identified in traffic, but should also recognize the importance of specific political-economies of labor, particularly for groups such as taxi drivers, hauliers, mechanics, retrofitters, and delivery workers, not to mention the gas station attendants Elisabetta Bini has led the way in studying between the US, Italy and the Third World.

Finally, as noted above, the history of energy and hydrocarbons cannot be set aside as accounted for thanks to recent work by Timothy Mitchell and others, but needs to be brought into more systematic dialogue with studies of (auto)-mobility, as do environmental history and critical ecology. Various topics, from the politics of pollution and eco-tourism to traffic engineering’s disciplinary attitude to energy issues, would benefit from such dialogue.

We will return to many of these issues in June 2016 at a larger conference gathering original research. Please find the CFP here and we encourage interested researchers to propose a paper.

[This is a two-part essay. To access Part 1, click here.]

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[1] See Aaron Jakes, "The Scales of Public Utility: Agricultural Roads and State Space in the Era of the British Occupation," in Marilyn Booth and Anthony Gorman, eds., The Long 1890s in Egypt (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2014), 57-86.

Mona Harb and Sami Atallah, editors,Local Governments and Public Goods: Assessing Decentralization in the Arab World.Beirut: LCPS-OSF, 2015. 

Jadaliyya (J): What made you put together this book?

Mona Harb and Sami Atallah (MH and SA): We wanted to write this book since we first met at a conference on local governments at the current Institut Français du Proche-Orient of Beirut in 2000, which led to a publication that remains a reference on the topic. Mona was presenting her work on local governments’ participatory practices in south Beirut, and Sami was speaking of fiscal decentralization in Lebanon. Fourteen years later, the opportunity to realize this dated, wild project materialized. We had authored a consultancy report on local governments and decentralization in Lebanon together, and published papers and reports separately. Mona had authored a paper in French on the municipalities run by Hizballah in Lebanon, while Sami had produced several reports on the issue, including a comprehensive document for ICMA. In 2014, while Mona was on leave from the American University of Beirut, she took up the offer made by Sami to lead a project on local governance in the Arab World, funded by the Open Society Foundation, at the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, which Sami directs.

We were both driven by our urge to produce critical knowledge on decentralization, beyond the normative discourse celebrating it as a panacea, while underscoring its potential opportunities to debunk authoritarian and centralized structures of government that make sure to undermine avenues for alternative power structures to emerge and challenge their actions. We were keen on a comparative approach, placing Lebanon in dialogue with other countries in the Arab world that were relatively well engaged in a decentralization process, or at least where local governments were elected and operational. We thus invited experts and scholars working on decentralization, local governance, and service provision in those countries, and asked them to author a paper according to a framework of analysis we devised, in order to enhance possibilities of comparisons across country cases.

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

MH and SA: The book investigates the history, processes, and practices of decentralization, local governance, and the provision of public goods. It examines five country cases: Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and Yemen—selected because they have relatively older and more elaborate experiences of deconcentration and decentralization than their counterpart Arab countries. We asked authors to structure their chapters along three sets of issues: the making and politics of decentralization, the legislation and practice of service delivery, and the fiscal structures governing decentralization. In all three, we sought to understand the legal framework guiding the studied issue, its evolution over time, andits actual practice. We wanted to identify and qualify the gaps and hurdles that impede the implementation of a more decentralized and democratic system of regional and local governance, but also study how these gaps are being navigated and, perhaps, circumvented.

Five themes emerge from the country cases. First, colonial legacies and regional histories determine decentralization policies, as interactions and hierarchies between groups living in regions of the Arab world prior to colonial rule were very much regulated according to a decentralized architecture of power. Second, although states advocate decentralization, they more often than not are paying lip service to it, and even subverting it, coopting development aid to further consolidate central power. Third, at the level of urban management and service delivery, while many services remain centralized, several infrastructural and technical services are becoming more decentralized, engaging the private sector and civil society actors, generating poorly regulated, fragmented, and opaque multi-scalar configurations of governance, and generating problems of management, provision, efficiency costs, and inequality. Fourth, although municipalities significantly lack revenues, they are reluctant about collecting local taxes, even when they have the authority, in order to secure political loyalties and/or appease the population and prevent social tensions. Fifth, the chapters sketch the conditions under which local governments are able to innovate, and how some mayors and municipal councilors manage to negotiate the multiple legal, administrative, financial, and political constraints and provide public goods to their constituencies. Such conditions include leadership, networks, civil society dynamics, political competition, governance, and territoriality. Therefore, we argue that decentralization policies in the Arab world, while facing major challenges, still provide policy windows that may present opportunities for social, economic, and political changes, if mobilized adequately.

The book is organized in five chapters. Chapter one, on Tunisia, is authored in French by Sami Yassine Turki and Eric Verdeil, and discusses how the constitution drafted after the Tunisian “Spring” addresses matters of decentralization. Chapter two, on Morocco, is written by Ali Bouabid and Aziz Iraki, and investigates centralization tensions in the kingdom. Chapter three, on Yemen, by Omar Abdulaziz Hallaj, examines decentralization between “tides of unity and tribal approval.” The fourth chapter by Myriam Ababsa, on Jordan, in French, shows how decentralization and democracy are processes controlled by royal will. The fifth chapter, by Mona Harb and Sami Atallah, investigates the fragmented and incomplete journey of decentralization in Lebanon. We also wrote the introductory and concluding chapters of the volume.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous research, and how does it connect to your new research projects?

MH: I started researching municipalities when I was doing my PhD research, and was fascinated by those institutions where so many decisions impacting the livelihoods of people were taking place. In Lebanon, where planning and urban management are centralized, and where public agencies are dysfunctional and corrupt, I thought municipalities may operate as relatively more efficient planning institutions. I am not romanticizing local governance here, as I am quite aware that municipal councilors also have private interests they prioritize over the common good. However, I still see local governments as institutions where checks and balances are somewhat operational, especially via the local electoral process and the municipal law, which provides good mechanisms of public action.

I am also very interested in the role of development aid and policy mobilities in enhancing capacities of local governments, and providing opportunities to strengthen alternative power arrangements, outside hegemonic configurations of power. Lebanon is a very interesting laboratory in this respect, as numerous international organizations have been intervening to empower regional and local governments, and encourage them to develop their own city strategies and development plans—especially in the context of reconstruction, and now of the acute Syrian refugee crisis. I am currently investigating these issues through a grant I received from the LSE Middle East Center, co-managed with Romola Sanyal and Mona Fawaz. Some of our findings will be featured in the forthcoming City Debates 2016 conference.

SA: This book was a great opportunity to put together many of my earlier work into a coherent framework, and use it to also learn more about other decentralization cases in the Arab world. I first started studying municipal competences and revenues as ways to stimulate development back in 1997—one year before the post-war municipal elections of 1998 (the last municipal elections ones had been held in 1963!) Through my fieldwork, I was stunned to realize the extent to which localities were left neglected and politically stagnant.

My current research on decentralization falls into two strands. The first examines the factors that drive the performance of municipalities. This work is largely based on quantifiable data that I have been collecting on measures of performance, municipal revenues, sectarian composition, and other relevant variables for two hundred and fifty municipalities. Building on this work, Mona and I have written a paper assessing the factors that drive the performance of municipal federations using a mixed method approach of qualitative interviews and quantitative assessment of the federations’ heads and key officials, in addition to looking at the role of leadership and networking in influencing development. The second strand assesses the policy challenges facing municipalities, especially after the influx of more than one million Syrian refugees. I am interested in examining the capabilities and willingness of municipalities to provide public services, as well as the different modalities they have adopted to deal with the Syrian refugees.

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

MH and SA: We conceived this book for a large public to read: students, scholars, policy-makers, as well as anyone interested in issues of local governance and decentralization. The chapters are illustrated with several tables, diagrams, graphs, maps, and photos, in an effort to visualize and enrich the arguments made. We made sure to invite authors who privilege a grounded and critical approach to researching decentralization and local governance, away from normative frameworks of analysis praising decentralization as a panacea, or demonizing it as a tool for political and territorial division. We wanted to debunk these stereotypes, and privilege a rigorous understanding of decentralization as a set of legal, institutional, financial, and political arrangements that improve the effectiveness of processes of governance and promote inclusion and equity.

We hope the book will encourage future research on decentralization, regional and local governments, service provision, and urban management. We lack basic knowledge on municipal institutions, on the sociological profiles of municipal councilors, on local stakeholders’ networks, on policy tracings, etc. With this book, we want to open up the debate on decentralization, and call for more substantive and informed research on these questions, so that we can critically understand the roles of elected local and regional governments in the ongoing socio-economic, urban, and political dynamics of towns, cities, and regions in the Arab world.

Excerpts from Local Governments and Public Goods: Assessing Decentralization in the Arab World

From “Introduction: A New Framework for Assessing Decentralization in the Arab World” (Mona Harb and Sami Atallah)

In the context of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, decentralization was partially put in place by colonial authorities to control the power of strong local leaderships. After the establishment of independent nation-states, governments favored social welfare policies to gain support and legitimacy, often privileging authoritarian rule. During the 1980s and 1990s, socio-economic challenges made these policy choices more difficult to sustain. Progressively, structural adjustment policies and neoliberal reforms drastically altered the socio-political system in place in favor of the governing authorities and their associated elites, and at the expenses of the low and middle-income categories. Poverty levels increased drastically. Governments in the MENA region continued advocating decentralization, often under the auspices of foreign donors, but very little effective decentralization of authority was being implemented (Bergh 2012). “Deconcentration” was the actual dominant practice, which namely served to strengthen the central government’s domination (Jari 2010). This led to a major crisis of accountability between different levels of governments as well as vis-à-vis citizens. Simultaneously, on the ground, local governments were gaining more and more strength and demanding more loudly their rights to manage their own affairs. The Arab uprisings loudly demonstrate to this growing significance of the local and territorial scale of politics.

Many MENA countries depend on international aid, which widely advocates decentralization policies. Foreign donors operate in the context of multi-level governance and globalization, which are often very disconnected from the specifics of the local context (Jari 2010). This gap leads to major inequalities in the elaboration and implementation of decentralization policies that benefit the already powerful groups (and local governments) at the expense of the more marginalized communities who do not master the jargon of international development. Thus, these decentralized policies often change the responsibilities and capabilities of political actors in ways that are frequently in opposition to their aims of better governance, as they are not associated with administrative accountability and protective legal mechanisms (Batterbury and Fernando 2006). Additionally, local opposition groups can get more radicalized in reaction to decentralization policies that threaten their power, and strongly contest and prevent decentralization reform (Poteete and Ribot 2011). In summary, decentralization produces a new complex landscape of powers that blocks its development aims. Central actors impede the transfers of power to the local level, or they partially transfer authority to the parties they have control over, resorting to selective implementation of laws, threats of violence and claims that local actors are unable to meet their responsibilities. NGOs and entrepreneurs strategically position themselves as intermediaries between the central government and the local administration, but they are accountable to neither.

[…]

The book is organized in five chapters. In chapter one, Sami Yassine Turki and Eric Verdeil discuss how Tunisia has embarked, since the uprisings, on a substantive discussion of decentralization involving experts and community groups who are drafting a constitution regulating service delivery and urban management on various territorial scales. In chapter two, Ali Bouabid and Aziz Iraki investigate the story of decentralization in Morocco, highlighting the sustained efforts of the monarchy to control ongoing decentralization reforms. Omar Abdulaziz Hallaj, in chapter three, presents an alternate story: Yemen is the only studied country where decentralization has a historical, social and political legacy that was consolidated constitutionally, and where centralization initiatives are actually needed. Chapter four presents the Jordanian case, within which, Myriam Ababsa tells us, the King pushes for both centralization and decentralization, depending on donors' policies and tensions with tribal and Islamist opposition groups. In chapter five, we examine the Lebanese case and show how decentralization is only partially achieved, yielding mixed outcomes and a fragmented landscape of more or less efficient service delivery.

[…]

From Chapter One: “Tunisie: La constitution (du printemps) ouvre le débat sur la decentralization” (Sami Yassine Turki and Eric Verdeil)

…un des grands enjeux de la décentralisation concerne la transformation des modes d’action des entreprises de services urbains en réseau. Dotées d’une légitimité historique en tant que bras armés de l’Etat pour développer et moderniser le pays, elles fonctionnent de manière très sectorielle et uniforme à travers le pays (ce qui ne veut pas dire qu’elles rendent un service de qualité identique partout, loin s’en faut), ne rendant compte qu’à leur tutelle, et en peinant à prendre en considération les intérêts locaux et municipaux.

Dans ce cadre, trois enjeux émergent. Le premier est une réflexion sur une plus grande régionalisation des critères et des modes d’opération dans les différents services urbains en réseau, afin de mieux prendre en compte les spécificités locales en termes de mobilisation des ressources, et des besoins et pratiques des consommateurs résidentiels ou industriels. Face à ces disparités régionales, l’Etat doit-il mettre en oeuvre une péréquation qui est parfois aveugle et contre-productive, ou au contraire, faire varier les contributions respectives et encourager des pratiques distinctes? Ces questions commencent à être pointées, notamment par des associations écologistes, mais aussi par les revendications d’habitants qui se sentent dépossédés de leurs ressources en eau.

[…]

Un deuxième élément de réflexion a trait à l’échelle pertinente d’une telle gestion différenciée sur le plan géographique. Ici, l’eau et l’assainissement doivent fonctionnellement être alignés sur les mêmes découpages, qui ne sont pas nécessairement les mêmes pour l’électricité et le gaz. Dans tous les cas, l’échelon municipal est à coup sûr inadéquat par rapport à des logiques pluricommunales, comme pour les déchets. Mais le modèle régional, qui permet des économies d’échelle et une concentration de l’expertise, dispose aussi d’une forte légitimité. Un troisième élément d’évolution, qui s’imposera rapidement à la discussion au fur et à mesure de la décentralisation des compétences d’aménagement vers les municipalités, a trait aux formes de concertation entre ces dernières et les opérateurs de services, de façon à mieux associer les municipalités et les habitants aux opérations d’amélioration du cadre de vie, et aussi de façon à éviter que des opérations sectorielles n’aillent à l’encontre des choix de planification municipales. Cela implique de penser des arènes de discussion adéquates, ainsi que l’émergence au sein des municipalités, de départements techniques capables d’identifier et de défendre leurs intérêts de maîtres d’ouvrage.

[…]

From Chapter Four: “Jordanie: La décentralisation par décision centralisée et la démocratie par volonté royale” (Myriam Ababsa)

…Tout l’enjeu des politiques de décentralisation conduites en Jordanie est d’arriver à une formule qui favorise les Jordaniens, tout en créant de l’emploi et en sauvegardant la paix sociale, et ceci en limitant l’émergence des groupes islamistes à la tête des municipalités les plus urbanisées. Mais en parallèle, le gouvernement annonce la volonté de faire participer la société civile à l’échelle locale aux décisions prises. Le processus de décentralisation relancé à partir de 2005 s’est heurté à des conflits institutionnels entre les trois ministères en charge et à des pesanteurs juridiques pour établir les modes de scrutin des représentants des conseils de régions. Les municipalités jordaniennes souffrent d’un manque d’autonomie financière etdécisionnelle. N’offrant plus que des services de collecte d’ordures, d’entretien de la voirie et d’éclairage, elles ont de plus en plus de mal à lever les taxes foncières et professionnelles, qui sont sous évaluées pour ne pas “léser” les intérêts des élites économiques qui tiennent les conseils municipaux. Les liens se sont progressivement coupés entre les citadins et les édiles, du fait d’une absence d’information sur les politiques urbaines. Les annonces de consultation en vue d’une meilleure participation attirent peu l’intérêt des citoyens, le faible taux de participation aux élections municipales en témoigne. La loi municipale doit être révisée pour que les municipalités puissent formuler leurs besoins et élaborer des politiques de développement local adaptées. A part Amman et Aqaba, aucune n’a une politique de marketing urbain capable d’attirer des investisseurs.

[Excerpted from Mona Harb and Sami Atallah, ed., Local Governments and Public Goods: Assessing Decentralization in the Arab World (Beirut, LCPS-OSF, 2015),by permission of the authors and publisher. The book can be downloaded in English/French here, and in Arabic, here.]

[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]

War, Conflict, and Urban Protest

The Yemeni City of Taiz is on the Brink of Famine, the U.N. Warns "The city is a significant battleground in the nearly yearlong conflict between the government of President Abdel Rabbo Mansour Hadi, which is supported by a Saudi-led coalition, and Houthi forces, which have ties to Iran. Humanitarian groups have called for investigations into human-rights abuses by all sides in the conflict."

Voyage au cœur des sit-ins de 2016 [in French] Journalists and militants Abdelmajid Haouachi et Gorkem Duru write for Nawaat about the continued protests in the small size interior towns of Tunisia, where young people protest the lack of jobs and the inaction of the government.

"Homeland : Irak année zéro:" Bagdad, ville ouverte [In French] French film critic Mathieu Macheret, writing for Le Monde, acclaims the film Homeland: Irak année zero by director Abbas Fadhel.

A Geography of Revolt in Alexandria (Egypt) Youssef El Chazli takes us inside Alexandria’s revolt in January 2011 and contrasts it to the better-known story of the anti-Mubarak uprising of 25 January 2011 in Cairo, showing us the ways in which the protest in Egypt’s “second capital” ballooned because of the geographically transgressive choices of its protesters.

The destruction of Sur: is this historic district a target for gentrification? David Lepeska writes for the Guardian on the destruction of Diyarbakır's historic Sur district, and the connections between the military and economic aspects of Turkey's repression of the Kurds.

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The city where war is the best employer: life in liberated Aden Ghaith Abdul-Ahad describes daily life in Yemen's Aden, where the apparent "liberation" of the city from the Houthis has not led to an increase in stability.

Rupture du barrage de Mossoul : Le scénario catastrophe qui pèse sur l’Irak [In French] Press report about the risk that fighting between ISIS and the Iraqi army might result in the collapse of the Mosul dam, already lacking basic maintenance, flooding Mosul and the Euphrates valley as far as Baghdad.

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Iraq Begins Construction on Baghdad Wall "The Iraqi government has embarked on the construction of a wall around Baghdad to protect the capital from terror attacks that have been ongoing since 2003 and to isolate it from hotbeds in the northern and western parts of the country. Sunnis object to the move, fearing the wall will deepen internal divisions."


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Egypt’s New Capital City: Construction of First Phase to Provide 1.5 Million Jobs An official announcement that construction has restarted on Egypt’s new capital project after an Emirati company withdrew over disagreement about the project’s cost. They have been replaced by the China State Construction Engineering Corporation.

Rawabi, la Palestine urbaine [In French] Press report for Le Monde about the arrival of the first residents in the long awaited and contested urban project developed by a Palestinian businessman, and the difficulties he had to cope with especially to deliver basic services.

Le roi mécontent de l’évolution urbanistique de Casablanca [In French] Aziz Badda reports for the website 360.ma about the recent pause in urban projects in and around the medina of Casablanca, between heritage, living conditions and speculation.

Bayt Lothan Closing Down, Turning into a Mall (Kuwait) Bayt Lothan, a non-profit organization that has become an important community center hosting a variety of workshops and events, is being evicted from their current property in Salmiya (Kuwait).

Allies and Morrison to Masterplan New City District in OmanArchDaily reports that architectural firm Allies and Morisson is chosen to design the masterplan of Al-Irfan, a new city district of Muscat, Oman, after a competition organized by the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Something is Rotten in the State of Tunisia This is a country whose government seems unwilling or incapable of conducting desperately needed reforms, and whose economy is flat, where living conditions for the majority have deteriorated since they overthrew their erstwhile dictator, Ben Ali, five years ago.

La hausse de la taxe sur l’essence partie pour être enterrée [In French] Philippe Hage Boutros reports for L’Orient-Le Jour on the public controversy surrounding the tax increase, proposed by a member of the Lebanese Parliament to compensate the financial loss for the budget due to the decline of gasoline prices, and its likely final withdrawal in 2016.
 

Ecological Issues

What Happened to Beirut’s Shoreline Walk? Habib Battah reports on the Solidere’s plan to implement a Shoreline Walk, a series of interlinking gardens retracing the original coastal outline of the Beirut—still missing in action.

Morocco Inaugurates First Phase of World's Largest Solar Plant Once all phases are complete, it is to be "the largest concentrated solar power plant in the world," and produce five hundred megawatts of electricity, providing power to more than one million Moroccans by 2018, its developers said.

Algérie: La gestion des déchets doit être transformée en une filière économique [in French] Several Algerian public officials consider the economic potential of an integrated approach to sorting and recycling solid waste.

Rabat aura sa cité verte: Green Tech Valley [in French] Moroccan group Marita, in association with the Islamic Band for Development, launches a 3.5 hectare urban project dedicated to high technology and medical activities, in addition to luxurious retail and residential development, along the Bou Regreg River in Rabat.

Bou Faour part en guerre contre les municipalités contrevenantes [In French] Health Minister Bou Faour denounces Lebanses municipalities that burn solid waste instead of dumping them, reports L’Orient-Le Jour.

Les ordures de Beyrouth continueront d’être collectées, assure Chbib As the solution of exporting solid waste to Russia proved marred with corruption and stalled, the quest for local solutions restart while threats of lack of available space for temporary storing looms, L’Orient-Le Jour reports.

Oil-Rich Persian Gulf Looks to Renewables to Avert Water Crisis Anna Hirtenstein reports for Bloomberg about the connection between the rising need of water in the Gulf countries and the planned use of renewable energy to address it.

The French NGO Gret, currently active in Mauritania, has released two reports about its activities in the water and waste waste sector: Les métiers de l’eau et de l’assainissement: Portraits d’acteurs en Mauritanie-Projet Aïcha and Améliorer l’accès à l’eau et à l’assainissement en Mauritanie: Pour une plus grande implication des communes dans les services d’eau et d’assainissement [both in French].
 

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Sevan Nişanyan için izan talep ediyoruz! / The Sevan Nişanyan Question

[This petition was first published on 28 February 2016. For more information, or to sign the petition, click here. More information about Sevan Nişanyan’s court case can also be found here. The English text has been lightly edited for stylistic purposes.]

Sevan Nişanyan iki yılı aşkın bir süredir cezaevinde. Kesinleşmiş toplam cezası 11,5 yılı aştı. Henüz sonuçlanmamış diğer davalarla birlikte bu sürenin yakın zamanda 25 yılı aşma ihtimali var.

25 yıl az değil! Bir ömrün üçte biri...

Topluma, bireye, çevreye ya da doğaya zarar veren kişiler elbette cezalandırılırlar; ne de olsa her topluluk var olabilmek için kendini kötülüklerden korumak zorundadır.

On küsur yıla mahkûm olduğuna ve bu süre 25 yıla çıkabileceğine göre, Sevan Nişanyan bu topluma geri dönüşü olmayan çok çok büyük kötülükler yapmış olmalı... Akıl ve mantık böyle söylüyor. Çünkü katiller bile bu kadar ceza almıyor.

Sevan Nişanyan ne kötülük yapmıştır da yaşamının geri kalan yıllarını cezaevinde geçirmeye mahkûm edilmiştir? Yaptıklarını sayalım:

Sevan Nişanyan, Şirince’de güzellik üstüne güzellik yaratmıştır. Ve sadece güzellik yaratmıştır. Yüzlercesi gibi yok olmaya yüz tutmuş eski bir Rum köyünü yaşatmakla kalmamış, köyü ihya etmiş, dünyaya, ülkemize ve turizme bir değer kazandırmış, Şirincelilere ekmek kapısı açmıştır.

Şirince’nin sırtında İlyastepe adında, tek katlı beş on kerpiç evden oluşan küçük bir köy yaratmıştır. Mutlaka gidilip görülmesi gereken yerlerden biridir, âdeta bir masal âlemi.

Doğaya ve canlıya zarar vermemiştir, tek bir ağaç kesmemiştir, tek bir hayvan doğramamıştır. Hatta tam tersine; yaptığı konutlar etrafını saran yeşillikten yüz metre öteden fark edilmemektedir. İlyastepe bugün bir kuş cennetidir. Domuzundan keçisine, ördeğinden tavus kuşuna kadar onlarca hayvan türüne ev sahipliği yapmaktadır.

Başlı başına birer mimari başyapıt olan Matematik Köyü ve Tiyatro Medresesi’yle eğitim ve kültür hayatımıza çok önemli katkıları olmuştur.

Bugüne kadar eşi benzeri olmayan kapsamda bir Türkçe etimolojik sözlük hazırlayarak Türkçeye ve bilim dünyasına büyük değer katmıştır.

Anadolumuzun köylerinden şehirlerine kadar binyıllardır değişen yer adlarının öyküsünü ve tarihini iğneyle kuyu kazarak yıllar süren bir çalışma sonucu bir araya getirmiştir.

Yanlış Cumhuriyet adlı kitabıyla ve sarsıcı çıkışlarıyla düşünce ve algı dünyamızı zenginleştirmiştir.

Bütün bunlardan rant da elde etmemiştir. Nitekim bugün Sevan Nişanyan’ın ne bir evi, ne bir arabası, ne de bankada beş kuruş parası vardır.

Kimsenin kılına zarar vermemiştir. Kimseyi işinden, eşinden, aşından, yerinden yurdundan etmemiştir. Tam tersine, Şirince halkı Sevan Nişanyan sayesinde turizmden elde ettiği gelirle gayet mutlu yaşamaktadır.

Ve Sevan Nişanyan daha nice güzel, yararlı ve doğru işler yapmıştır da, 25 yıllık mahkûmiyeti hak edecek ne kötülük yapmıştır?

Sevan Nişanyan imar yasasına muhalefet, çevre kirliliği yaratmak, mühür bozmak gibi suçlardan hüküm giymiştir. Kaçak ve çirkin inşaattan geçilmeyen ülkemizde bu yasalardan dolayı cezaevinde olan bildiğimiz kadarıyla bir başka mahkûm daha yoktur.

Olağanüstü mimari güzellikler yaratan Sevan Nişanyan, hiçbir estetik kaygı gözetilmeden inşa edilen ucube adalet saraylarında yargılanarak hüküm giymiştir! O adalet sarayları yok olsa insanlık hiçbir şey kaybetmez, ama Sevan Nişanyan’ın yaptığı evlerden birinin yıkılması bir cinayettir.

Sevan Nişanyan’ı hapse atarak sadece kendisini değil, araştırma yapmasını da engelleyerek Türkiye’yi ve insanlığı eserlerinden mahrum ediyoruz.

Sevan Nişanyan’ın asıl suçu, görevini yapmayarak halkını umursamayan devlete isyan etmektir, yani sivil itaatsizliktir.

Devlet, 30 küsur yıl önce Şirince’yi tarihi sit alanı ilan etmiştir ve böylece köyde çivi çakılmasını yasaklamıştır. Bu gibi durumlarda devlet bir yıl içinde yeni imar yasasını yürürlüğe koymak zorundadır. Çünkü o yörede vatandaş yaşamaktadır ve vatandaşın doğal ihtiyaçları vardır. Oğlu evlenir, ek oda yapmak gerekir. Ahırı yıkılır, onarmak gerekir. Damı akar, aktarmak gerekir. Güneşten korunmak için gölgelik, keçiden korunmak için çit, soğuktan korunmak için bilmem ne yapmak gerekir. Gel gelelim devlet 30 yıldır bu imar planını çıkarmayarak vatandaşını ve ihtiyaçlarını umursamamaktadır.

Vatandaş tabii ki gerekeni yapmıştır ve yapmaktadır. Yani tüm Şirince halkı suç işlemiştir; halen de işlemektedir. Devlet, Şirince halkını çaresiz bırakarak suç işlemeye teşvik etmiştir.

Sevan Nişanyan’ın suçu, yaptığını gizli gizli değil, alenen yapmasıdır. Yani cumhurbaşkanından en basit vatandaşa kadar hepimizin yaka silktiği bürokrasi dediğimiz kontrolden çıkmış canavara meydan okumasıdır. Sevan Nişanyan doğrusunu yapmıştır. İkiyüzlülüğe yeltenmemiştir. Rüşvete tenezzül etmemiştir. Korkmamıştır. Kötülüğün üstüne üstüne gitmiştir.

İşte budur suçu.

Kabul! Kabul ediyoruz, Sevan Nişanyan’ın bu yaptığı suçtur. Bürokrasiye meydan okunmaz!

Suçtur da cezası ne kadardır? Bir yıl? İki yıl? O da olmadı beş yıl! Ya 15 yıl? Ya 25 yıl?

Hadi adalet yok, hadi akıl mantık yok, hadi vicdan da yok. Peki ya izan da mı yok, bir parça da mı yok?

Ali Nesin

--

Biz aşağıda imzası bulunanlar, toplumun her kesiminin vicdanını kanattığına inandığımız Sevan Nişanyan sorununa mutlaka bir çözüm bulunmasını talep ediyoruz. Önerilerimiz:

1) Devletin sorumluluğunu yerine getirmediği durumlarda suçlu vatandaş değil devlet olmalıdır. En azında bu durumlarda vatandaş ceza almamalıdır.

2) Kültür Bakanlığı Sevan Nişanyan’ın Şirince’de yaptığı mimari eserleri korunması gereken kültür varlıkları olarak tescil etmelidir.

3) Özgürlüğüne kavuşana kadar Sevan Nişanyan'ın cezaevinde çalışmasına ve üretmesine izin verilmelidir.

Saygılarımızla.

İlk imzacılar:
Ali Nesin, A. Haluk Ünal, Abdullah Çelikaslan, Abdullah Demirbaş, Acar Ataseven, Adnan Aksel, Ahmet Aykaç, Ahmet İnam, Ahmet Şekercioğlu, Akın Atauz, Akın Birdal, Akif Kurtuluş, Alev Ok, Ali Bayramoğlu, Ali Fikri Işık, Ali Işıksalan, Ali Rıza Görener, Arif Dirlik, Asaf Savaş Akat, Ateş Kemal Doğan, Atilla Dirim, Atilla Zenciroğlu, Attila Tuygan, Ayça Örer, Aydın Engin, Ayla Sumer İşler, Ayşe Batumlu, Ayşe Erzan, Ayşe Hür, Ayşegül Sönmez, Azad Barış, Aziz Gökdemir, Babür Pınar, Balam Kenter, Barış Özkul, Barış Pirhasan, Barzan Demirhan, Baskın Oran, Bektaş Elçin, Bilge Selçuk, Bülent Keneş, Bülent Küçükaslan, Bület Tekin, Cengiz Aktar, Cihat Daşkıran, Cumhur Öner, Cüneyt Cebenoyan, David Barsamian, Davut Erkan, Demir Küçükaydın, Denis Ojalvo, Deniz Ilgaz, Derya Yetişgen, Dogan Özgüden, Edip Yüksel, Eflan Topaloğlu, Elçin Öz, Elif Köksal, Engin Ender Çetin, Ercan İpekçi, Erdağ Aksel, Erdal Doğan, Erdal Yıldırım, Erden Kosova, Eren Keskin, Erol Özkoray, Esra Arsan, Etyen Mahçupyan, Ezel Akay, Fatih Vural, Fatime Akalın, Fatma Dikmen, Ferhat Kentel, Fikret Başkaya, Fuat Keyman, Fusun Erdoğan, Gaye Boralıoğlu, Gençay Gürsoy, Gökçe Altunay, Gökhan Karahan, Gül Gökbulut, Gülçin Avşar, Güliz Vural, Güngör Şenkal, Habib Taşkın, Halil Savda, Hasan Cemal, Hasan Gürkan, Hasan Kaya, Hasan Zeydan, Hayati Şener, Hicri İzgören, Hilmi Maktav, Hilmi Tezgör, Hovsep Hayreni, Hrant Kasparyan, Hüseyin Alataş, Hüseyin Ergun, Işık Yenersu, Işın Önol, İbrahim Eke, İbrahim Köroğlu, İbrahim Seven, İlkay Alptekin Demir, İnci Aral, İnci Tuğsavul, İrfan Açıkgöz, İsmail Beşikçi, İzzet Yaşar, Kadir Akın, Kadir Cangızbay, Kamil Yıldırım, Kemal Çalğan, Kenan Yenice, Khatchig Mouradian, Koray Çalışkan, Lale Alatlı, Lale Mansur, Ludmilla Danisenko, Mahmut Konuk, Maya Arakon, Mehmet Bal, Mehmet Demirok, Mehmet Ördekçi, Mehmet Özer, Mehmet Öztürk, Mehmet Uluışık, Meral Saraç Seven, Metin Solmaz, Mihail Vasiliadis,  Murat Kuseyri, Murat Meriç, Murat Toklucu, Mustafa Sütlaş, Mustafa Yasacan, Mustafa Yetişgen, Muzaffer Erdoğdu, Muzaffer Karadeniz, Müjde Tönbekici, Nabi Yağcı, Nadya Uygun, Necati Abay, Necmi Demir, Necmiye Alpay, Nilüfer Göle, Nilüfer Tarikahya, Noam Chomsky, Nur Sürer, Oktay Etiman, Onur Hamzaoğlu, Orhan Bas, Orhan Pamuk, Orhan Silier, Oya Aydın, Oya Baydar, Ömer Elaçmaz, Ömer Madra, Ömür Çınar Elçi, Önder Bayram, Özcan Soysal, Özcan Soysal, Özgür Öğret, Özlem Beyarslan, Özlem Yağız, Pakrat Estukyan, Perihan Mağden, Pınar Ömeroğlu, Raffi A. Hermonn, Ramazan Gezgin, Recep Maraşlı, Rıdvan Bilek, Rıdvan Günay, Robert Cabı Akman, Sait Çetinoğlu, Samim Akgönül, Seçkin Yaşar, Selahattin Esmer, Selda Asal, Selina Doğan, Semra Somersan, Serdar Kaya, Serdar Koçman, Serra Yılmaz,  Sevilay Demirci, Sibel Asna, Sibel Özbudun, Şaban İba, Şahin Alpay, Şanar Yurdatapan, Şebnem Korur Fincancı, Tamer Çilingir, Taner Akçam, Tarık Günersel, Temel İskit, Temmuz İlhan, Tolga Yarman, Turgay Oğur, Tülay Karacaörenli, Ufuk Uras, Uğur Aker, Ümit Aktaş, Ümit Cizre, Ümit Kıvanç, Ünal Ünsal, Ünsal Dinçer, Vedia Yeşim Bayanoğlu, Vincent Bouvard, Yakup İçgören, Yalçın Ergündoğan, Yaprak Zihnioğlu, Yasin Yetişgen, Yener Orkunoğlu, Yıldıray Oğur, Yücel Demirer, Yusuf Haddadoğlu, Zeynep Tanbay, Zeynep Tozduman, Zübeyde Bilget

The Sevan Nişanyan Question

Sevan Nişanyan has been in prison for over two years now. Currently he is facing eleven and a half years in jail. This does not include other pending sentences that might increase this to twenty-five years.

Twenty-five years is no joke! It is almost one-third of one’s lifetime.

People who harm society, other individuals, the environment, or nature, are of course punished, because in order to be able to exist, the community has to protect itself from evil.

As he has been sentenced to prison for more than ten years and possibly up to twenty-five years, Sevan Nişanyan must have harmed the community very badly. Reason and logic implies this—because even murderers usually do not receive such harsh sentences in Turkey.

What evil has Sevan Nişanyan committed that he has been sentenced to what equals a life sentence? Let’s start counting:

Sevan Nişanyan has created beauty, and he has created only beauty. He has not only saved an old Greek village, which was doomed to extinction like hundreds of others before it, but revived it. He has gifted it to the world and Turkey, and has created job opportunities for the villagers of Shirince.

He has created a small village called Ilyastepe consisting of five or ten small single-floor adobe houses. It is a never-never land that must be visited.

He has not hurt nature or the environment; he has not felled a single tree, has not killed a single animal. Just the opposite: due to the vegetation he has planted, none of the houses that he has built could be seen even from one hundred yards away. Today Ilyastepe is a bird sanctuary. It is playing host to many animals, from pigs to goats, from ducks to peacocks.

The Mathematics Village and the Theater Madrasa, which are by themselves architectural masterpieces, have made immense contributions to our cultural and educational life.

He has prepared a Turkish etymological dictionary, which is of unparalleled scope and which has added great value to our world of knowledge.

He has collected and published the story of the names of Anatolian cities and villages, which for millennia have been changing.

With his book The Wrong Republic, with its shocking deliveries, he has enriched our thinking and our perception of the world.

This is his crime!

He has not gained a penny out of all this. Today Sevan Nişanyan does not own a house, or a car, nor does he have a penny in his bank account.

He has never hurt anyone. He has never separated anyone from his or her spouse, food, or home. Just the opposite: the villagers of Shirince are able to live comfortably by the income they derive from the tourism business because of what Sevan has created.

Sevan has also done many other nice things, but we ask: what evil has he committed to earn a twenty-five-year sentence?

Sevan Nişanyan has been convicted because of opposing the local zoning laws, supposedly causing environmental pollution, breaking seals placed by the authorities. In Turkey, which is full of ugly and unlicensed construction projects, we know of no other person convicted of the same crime.

Sevan Nisanyan, who has created these exceptional architectural beauties, ironically has been convicted in court buildings with no aesthetic value! If those court buildings were demolished, humanity would surely not lose a thing, but demolishing even a single house built by Sevan Nişanyan is akin to committing murder.

By throwing Sevan Nişanyan into prison, we are not only punishing him but also Turkey and the world by depriving them of his work.

Sevan Nisanyan’s real crime is revolting against the state that has ignored its people by not doing its duty: it was simply an act of civil disobedience.

The state, thirty years ago, declared Shirince a historic site and thus forbade even minor repairs in the village. In such cases, the state is obliged by law to promulgate a new construction law within a year, because citizens live in these regions and people have natural needs. For example, someone’s son might get married, so he must add a room. The barn might be damaged, so it has to be fixed. The roof leaks, so it must be fixed. He might need a place to protect himself from the sun, a fence to keep the goats away, to do something to keep warm, etc. But unfortunately the state, for the past thirty years, by not issuing this new master plan, has ignored its citizens and their needs.

Of course citizens have done whatever is needed and continue doing it. That is, all the inhabitants of Shirince have committed crimes and continue committing them. The state, by leaving no choice to the inhabitants of Shirince, has forced them to commit these crimes.

Sevan Nisanyan’s crime is that instead of doing things secretly, he has done them openly. He has been resisting the monster called “bureaucracy,” which is even hated by the president and the common folk. Sevan Nişanyan has done what is right. He has not attempted to pay bribes. He has not been scared. He has gone against evil.

We accept!

We accept that what Sevan Nişanyan has done is a crime. You must not fight the bureaucracy!

It is a crime, but what should the punishment be? One year? Two years? OK, five years? How about fifteen years? Or twenty-five?

Let us say that there is no justice, no logic, and also no conscience. How about common sense, not even a bit?

We, the undersigned, demand that a solution be found to Sevan Nisanyan’s problem.

Our suggestions are:

1) In cases when the state does not fulfill its obligations, the guilty should be the state and not the citizen. At least in such cases citizens should not be punished.

2) The Ministry of Culture should declare the architectural works of art made by Sevan Nişanyan in Shirince to be protected cultural entities.

3) Until he regains his freedom, Sevan Nişanyanshould be allowed to continue his intellectual activities and production.

Respectfully submitted,

Signatories

Ali Nesin, A. Haluk Ünal, Abdullah Çelikaslan, Abdullah Demirbaş, Acar Ataseven, Adnan Aksel, Ahmet Aykaç, Ahmet İnam, Ahmet Şekercioğlu, Akın Atauz, Akın Birdal, Akif Kurtuluş, Alev Ok, Ali Bayramoğlu, Ali Fikri Işık, Ali Işıksalan, Ali Rıza Görener, Arif Dirlik, Asaf Savaş Akat, Ateş Kemal Doğan, Atilla Dirim, Atilla Zenciroğlu, Attila Tuygan, Ayça Örer, Aydın Engin, Ayla Sumer İşler, Ayşe Batumlu, Ayşe Erzan, Ayşe Hür, Ayşegül Sönmez, Azad Barış, Aziz Gökdemir, Babür Pınar, Balam Kenter, Barış Özkul, Barış Pirhasan, Barzan Demirhan, Baskın Oran, Bektaş Elçin, Bilge Selçuk, Bülent Keneş, Bülent Küçükaslan, Bület Tekin, Cengiz Aktar, Cihat Daşkıran, Cumhur Öner, Cüneyt Cebenoyan, David Barsamian, Davut Erkan, Demir Küçükaydın, Denis Ojalvo, Deniz Ilgaz, Derya Yetişgen, Dogan Özgüden, Edip Yüksel, Eflan Topaloğlu, Elçin Öz, Elif Köksal, Engin Ender Çetin, Ercan İpekçi, Erdağ Aksel, Erdal Doğan, Erdal Yıldırım, Erden Kosova, Eren Keskin, Erol Özkoray, Esra Arsan, Etyen Mahçupyan, Ezel Akay, Fatih Vural, Fatime Akalın, Fatma Dikmen, Ferhat Kentel, Fikret Başkaya, Fuat Keyman, Fusun Erdoğan, Gaye Boralıoğlu, Gençay Gürsoy, Gökçe Altunay, Gökhan Karahan, Gül Gökbulut, Gülçin Avşar, Güliz Vural, Güngör Şenkal, Habib Taşkın, Halil Savda, Hasan Cemal, Hasan Gürkan, Hasan Kaya, Hasan Zeydan, Hayati Şener, Hicri İzgören, Hilmi Maktav, Hilmi Tezgör, Hovsep Hayreni, Hrant Kasparyan, Hüseyin Alataş, Hüseyin Ergun, Işık Yenersu, Işın Önol, İbrahim Eke, İbrahim Köroğlu, İbrahim Seven, İlkay Alptekin Demir, İnci Aral, İnci Tuğsavul, İrfan Açıkgöz, İsmail Beşikçi, İzzet Yaşar, Kadir Akın, Kadir Cangızbay, Kamil Yıldırım, Kemal Çalğan, Kenan Yenice, Khatchig Mouradian, Koray Çalışkan, Lale Alatlı, Lale Mansur, Ludmilla Danisenko, Mahmut Konuk, Maya Arakon, Mehmet Bal, Mehmet Demirok, Mehmet Ördekçi, Mehmet Özer, Mehmet Öztürk, Mehmet Uluışık, Meral Saraç Seven, Metin Solmaz, Mihail Vasiliadis,  Murat Kuseyri, Murat Meriç, Murat Toklucu, Mustafa Sütlaş, Mustafa Yasacan, Mustafa Yetişgen, Muzaffer Erdoğdu, Muzaffer Karadeniz, Müjde Tönbekici, Nabi Yağcı, Nadya Uygun, Necati Abay, Necmi Demir, Necmiye Alpay, Nilüfer Göle, Nilüfer Tarikahya, Noam Chomsky, Nur Sürer, Oktay Etiman, Onur Hamzaoğlu, Orhan Bas, Orhan Pamuk, Orhan Silier, Oya Aydın, Oya Baydar, Ömer Elaçmaz, Ömer Madra, Ömür Çınar Elçi, Önder Bayram, Özcan Soysal, Özcan Soysal, Özgür Öğret, Özlem Beyarslan, Özlem Yağız, Pakrat Estukyan, Perihan Mağden, Pınar Ömeroğlu, Raffi A. Hermonn, Ramazan Gezgin, Recep Maraşlı, Rıdvan Bilek, Rıdvan Günay, Robert Cabı Akman, Sait Çetinoğlu, Samim Akgönül, Seçkin Yaşar, Selahattin Esmer, Selda Asal, Selina Doğan, Semra Somersan, Serdar Kaya, Serdar Koçman, Serra Yılmaz,  Sevilay Demirci, Sibel Asna, Sibel Özbudun, Şaban İba, Şahin Alpay, Şanar Yurdatapan, Şebnem Korur Fincancı, Tamer Çilingir, Taner Akçam, Tarık Günersel, Temel İskit, Temmuz İlhan, Tolga Yarman, Turgay Oğur, Tülay Karacaörenli, Ufuk Uras, Uğur Aker, Ümit Aktaş, Ümit Cizre, Ümit Kıvanç, Ünal Ünsal, Ünsal Dinçer, Vedia Yeşim Bayanoğlu, Vincent Bouvard, Yakup İçgören, Yalçın Ergündoğan, Yaprak Zihnioğlu, Yasin Yetişgen, Yener Orkunoğlu, Yıldıray Oğur, Yücel Demirer, Yusuf Haddadoğlu, Zeynep Tanbay, Zeynep Tozduman, Zübeyde Bilget 

Nadine Bekdache, “Evicting Sovereignty: Lebanon's Housing Tenants from Citizens to Obstacles,” in Arab Studies Journal(Vol. XXIII No. 1), Fall 2015: 320-51.

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

Nadine Bekdache (NB):I started by researching the urban transformation of ‘Ain al Mraysseh, the seaside neighborhood in which I grew up, and mapping the demolition of old buildings, as well as buildings awaiting demolition whose residents live in a state of uncertainty and are constantly expecting eviction. Prime land-—a label that haunts almost all built and un-built land in Municipal Beirut-—is subsequently made available for real estate investment. I looked for answers on how to confront this tragic loss of the historical urban fabric, and I found in previous efforts to save heritage buildings a total disregard for old time residents. Instead of mapping historical buildings, I decided to locate these old time residents in the neighborhood. These old residents were either old tenants or old landlords living together or separately in buildings built roughly between 1930 and 1975, which was when the civil war started and building activity halted. This was an opportunity to save the urban fabric of a neighborhood by confronting spatial injustice and by stressing the right of the residents to remain in place and take part in shaping the future of their neighborhoods, though it was an everyday battle for many households. But this opportunity had never been claimed by heritage activists, either on the scale of the neighborhood or the city.

It is here that I started researching rent control laws, made effective between 1940 and 1992 for all rental contracts, as both a manifestation of a changing social contract between the state and its citizens and an urban question. I was looking for answers to what enabled dwellers to become long-term residents, despite their lack of land or home ownership, in a city like Beirut where the political economy relies heavily on investment in real estate. Before 1992, rent control can be considered the only durable housing policy that allowed low and middle-income, dwellers to secure housing in the city near their workplaces. Before the civil war, when tenancy amounted to eighty-five percent of Beirut’s dwellers, the social fabric of neighborhoods reflected diversity in sect, income, town of origin, and nationality. These were residents/citizens who defended their right to a fair rent cap, held periodic protests, and were active in unions that constantly proposed housing policies that would make more affordable housing available. Their active engagement in the future of their city was taken away from them when, in 1992, rent control as a means to access new housing was abolished—instead of revisited—while their contracts, signed before 1992, remained cautiously effective. By then, old tenants were conceptualized as “problematic” and an obstacle to private property rights and real estate investment. The state used time to exercise its power over space and intentionally subjected urban clusters to decline. 

As of 1992, old tenants represented an exception to a prohibitive housing market and an obstruction to landlords’ opportunities to profit from their skyrocketing land prices. In fact, the mere continuous presence of old tenants in inner Beirut’s neighborhoods poses what might be considered the only substantial challenge to the real estate growth machine tirelessly transforming our city into enclaves for the rich, normalizing eviction, and pushing low and middle income families to the peripheries. Nonetheless, by shifting the tenants’ legal and social position from a rights-based one to an exception in the new spatial order, their legitimacy is being actively damaged, making them vulnerable in securing their housing rights and consequently jeopardizing housing rights for all. Despite all these forces that absent the experiences of old tenants, it is their claims and stories that pose alternative notions of property and the social production of space that stem from local needs, aspirations, and visions—alternatives that could eventually become instruments to spur more justice in the city.

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

NB: The article provides a reading of the historical development of rent control in Lebanon that led to tenants’ loss of agency as a collective force. By reflecting on this process, the article understands the Lebanese state as shifting from provider of basic rights to enabler of the market. This is significant, since the Lebanese state is widely conceptualized as a weak one with a purely laissez faire ethos since its formation, masking its role as an evicting sovereignty. In contrast, the article highlights the difference between the state in the seventies with it in and the nineties by taking rent control as a case study, and it posits the post civil war manufactured vulnerability of tenants as both the cause and the effect of a strong state. The exuberant rise in land prices, coupled with a complete absence of land policy and public intervention to curb real estate profit and produce affordable housing, the private sector is providing housing that around 80%eighty percent of Lebanese households cannot access. Under these conditions, jeopardizing existing tenure security is rendered an act of violence. 

On another level, the article focuses on a neighborhood in Beirut to analyze the processes of eviction and the coordination between state and non-state actors in enabling eviction. These include measures that verge on the limits of extra-legal activities, including shifting legal parameters of negotiations with tenants, swindling, intimidation, threats, and the employment of official notices to speed up eviction. Also significant are the counter-narratives and contentiousness that challenge the seemingly normalized process of eviction and positing alternative perspectives to private property, and citizenship beyond confessionalism. The work of Nicholas Blomley in “Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of property” was particularly useful in spotting defiant claims in tenants’ personal narratives. They remain nonetheless absented from pubic debate, by a carefully orchestrated narrative of economic growth, the real estate dream, the demonizing of rent control, and the weak state.

The article also analyzes the difference between the case-by-case market led eviction of old tenants and the newly issued new rent law to evict en masse old tenants by increasing rents to market level over the span of six years. By taking the tragic fall of a building in Beirut which killed twenty-seven residents as an excuse to renounce the old rent law, the state capitalized on this tragedy to successfully issue the new law. This in turn lead to a reawakening–though contained by a consolidated propaganda and systematic impoverishing policies since early nineties–of tenants political struggle for both the right to housing and for the right to their city.

J: How does this article connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

NB: My first engagements with urban issues happened through my final year university graphic design project where I researched an informal neighborhood in the southern suburbs of Beirut through the experiences of three teenagers. The relationship between the formal and the informal city and the antagonism that arises was a main aspect of the project. Later on, I was experiencing in my “formal” neighborhood, processes producing what can be compared to informality on many levels. Old tenants, out of time and space, are subjected to threats of exclusion without possessing the tools to legitimize their existence as “informal” neighborhoods might have. For they have “legitimately” had access to their spaces and “legitimately” are being evicted from them. This led me to focusing, in my Masters thesis, on the urban history and transformation of ‘Ayn al Mraysseh, where tenants’ grey existence became my main concern. I followed up, later, the struggle of the ‘Committee to Defend the Rights of Tenants’, and the ACSS paradigm factory fellowship became my first chance to research rent control history in Lebanon in depth.

In parallel, I was employing other tools of research, such as mapping, representational imagery and filmmaking, to investigate the relationship of old tenants with the changing built environment. I co-directed the short documentary Mapping Place Narratives: Beyhum Street, where an image of a futuristic representation of a neighborhood is employed to instigate conversations with the current residents. Furthermore, the film maps the social and ownership history of a cluster in the neighborhood that have razed and replaced with a 35 floors building, referred to as the ‘building higher than Burj el Murr’.

I worked later, as part of Public Works, on researching rent controlled neighborhoods through the triangulation of the fields of activism, academic research and community engagement. We devised and conducted a workshops program, and started with Bachoura as a pilot research project. The direct outcome was a collectively produced publication. The project developed to include more neighborhoods, under the title Mapping Beirut Through its tenants’ stories, with the intention to create a city scale reading while bringing out the nuances of neighborhood specific experiences.

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

NB: The public debate that has been aroused over the recently issued rent law was able to scale down the urban and social consequences of eviction in favor of conflicting rights between landlords and tenants. Limiting the discussion, or perhaps shifting it, allowed for the law to be issued in the first place after successive failed attempt since 1992. More importantly, it had direct consequences on two things. First, it left city dwellers that do not belong to either group (old tenants and landlords) out of a discussion over processes that have great effects over their every day life in the city. Second, the public image of old tenants was slandered to the point of criminalization, and rent control as a viable state intervention in the production of affordable housing of old tenants is commonly underestimated.

Redirecting the debate towards the right to housing and the city, with the active participation of all city dwellers who are either being pushed out of their long life neighborhoods, whose security of tenure is being threatened, and/ or who have no access to stable and affordable housing is ultimately the motive behind writing this article. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

NB: Sadly the right to housing is almost absented from public debate. Nonetheless, through the efforts of the Committee to Defend Tenants’ Rights, formed since 1952, and by challenging the newly issued rent law at the Constitutional Council, the right to housing was confirmed as a constitutional right for the first time in Lebanon. Accordingly, a group of lawyers, economists and urbanists took the initiative to launch a working process towards a Right to Housing law, where the old rent law would be addressed within a larger framework of a comprehensive housing policy.

Departing from this initiative, Abir Saksouk-Sasso and I, as part of Public Works Studio, began research that focuses on rent as a viable mean to access affordable housing in Beirut, an alternative to home ownership, and a manifestation of claims to the city beyond private property, This project is specifically significant when urban policies are being drafted without surveys and studies of the socio-economical and cultural conditions they target.

I am also working on other collaborative research projects, including The Communal Making of Neighborhood Football Fields. The research develops a piece from Practicing the Public, a recently issued co-edited publication.

Excerpts from “Evicting Sovereignty: Lebanon's Housing Tenants from Citizens to Obstacles”

In January 2012, the collapse of a building in the Fasuh neighborhood in the Ashrafiyya area spurred a shift in public opinion on rent control. The dominant reaction framed rent control laws as unjust and unconstitutional; as causing the degeneration of the urban fabric and the confiscation of private property; as paralyzing the rental market; and finally as transferring the responsibility for securing housing from the state to individual landlords. The building’s collapse, which resulted in twenty-seven deaths, led to this heightened discourse of blame, which verged on criminalizing the residents by disregarding other factors that might have led to the building’s fall. This rhetoric, that landlords and state officials alike adopted, portrayed the tenant as an “illegitimate occupier,” “one who has a second house in his village of origin,” and even as one who is “richer than the landlord.” The Association of Landlords formed in 2006 after a surge in property prices with registration number 155. With discursive support from policymakers and legal representatives in recent years, the association has mobilized to declare landlords’ collective lack of responsibility for future fallen buildings. It has also pushed for an immediate liberalization of rental contracts by periodically issuing official statements, performing demonstrations, holding press conferences, participating in TV programs, and employing phone messages and social media platforms. The following quotation from the Association of Landlords’ Facebook page illustrates the association’s relentless efforts to delegitimize any claims put forth by tenants:

Expats, Investors Beware No. 1 property and investment looting country worldwide. 70 years ago, we built this country…0.00% return in 40 years. Ever since our properties are under legalized camouflaged nationalization (mafia word for looting).

These statements criminalize rent control tenants by claiming that they have taken advantage of an unconstitutional situation over the span of eighty years, depriving landlords of their fair share. Landlords in the association have labeled themselves victims of the old rent law, while alleging that old tenants stole their house with a rental contract. The landlords frame the state as interfering in their property rights, declaring that their assigned role as housing providers is unconstitutional since it is the state that should provide housing.

This campaign has succeeded in influencing public opinion on new rent laws. On 1 April 2014, the Lebanese parliament unexpectedly voted to liberalize rental contracts, after considering the issue for only thirteen minutes. The Administration and Justice Parliamentary Committee, which has drafted multiple rent law reforms since 1992, proposed the law.

Individual moral struggles have become the primary arena for challenging prevailing narratives of property. These struggles challenge the discourses of the sanctity of private property, the dominance of the Tenants’ claims to remain in place are rooted in local histories and in social movements dating to the 1950s. These claims have taken shape as a counternarrative of property. This counternarrative is the only substantial discursive challenge to the real estate sector’s increasing domination, which is erasing communities and producing a new spatial order of political differences.

One such individual struggle is that of Larisse, who has rented both an apartment and a mini-market in the same building in Hamra, located in the religiously mixed area of Ras Beirut, since 1968. She has created a public installation outside her store to denounce a court ruling evicting her in return for absurdly low compensation. She not only felt “betrayed by the state,” but she also made claims about the neighborhood: “My husband was abducted in 1978 on the demarcation line between ‘Ayn al-Rummana and Shiyyah, and I have since managed this store alone to raise my two sons…I have stayed here during the war, and have built, over the years, good relations with the residents of Makdisi Street and Hamra, who intentionally visit my store, since they find goods not available in other stores nearby. The neighbors and passersby have shown their solidarity and supported my decision to resist eviction. That is all I have, I am no one and know no one [influential]….I have always been a legitimate citizen of the state and part of the local history of this community. I cannot accept being ruined by the Lebanese state itself.

A Historical Geography of Collective Entitlement

Between 1940 and 1992, the state regulated the private rental market through a series of “extraordinary emergency laws” that limited the maximum yearly rent increases landlords could enforce. Historical rent control strategies in Lebanon harnessed social justice ideals to clientelist strategies through which newly formed postcolonial states sought to establish their sovereign legitimacy.

Since the 1950s, Beirut faced a continuous housing crisis, as increasing numbers of working-class people migrated to the capital. Housing policies were unable to meet increasing demand because of a number of factors. These included uneven development in the country favoring particular areas and sectarian groups, the neoliberal economic model that channeled resources to the wealthy or toward global capital rather than toward working-class citizens, political conflicts that hampered decision making, administrative mismanagement, and the lack of an overall planning vision for Beirut.

Despite this context, two main forms of life, commerce, and sociality struggled to remain a part of the city. First, an informal housing market expanded, in both the city’s suburbs and its inner quarters, as communities resorted to self-help solutions and created housing developments for the poor. Second, social groups have mobilized through the state, defining state sovereignty by its ability to maintain the system of rent control and fair rents.

Farid Jubran, a parliament member and one of the founders of the Progressive Socialist Party, founded the Committee to Defend Tenants’ Rights in 1952. The Committee called for an affordable housing policy and mobilized workers’ unions, women’s associations, and artisans, as well as public and private employees including teachers, drivers, and factory workers to maintain fair rent policies in Beirut.

A factor sustaining this popular sovereignty was that Beirut had the lowest rate of house ownership of all Arab capitals. Because of this high rate of rent, Beiruti landlords considered apartment construction an investment. Rent was a viable, albeit state-regulated, income. In the 1970s, 125,000 families in Lebanon’s main cities were tenants. This translates to roughly 625,000 people, or eighty-five percent of the urban population. Only ten percent of landlords were estimated to reside at their own property.

After Beirut’s historical central district fell to Solidere, the privatized post-war reconstruction project, the clusters of settlements bordering it became the center of Beirut’s historical, urban, and social fabric. The spatialization of these old tenants does not typically follow old and new demarcation lines produced by religion, sect, class, and political affiliation. Moreover, these spaces maintain particular kinds of livelihood. Artisans, craftsmen, small shops, and a variety of economically viable spaces remain distributed across the city. They remain sustainable primarily because of rent control. These lived geographies are concealed and vulnerable to abrupt and violent changes. However, it is these local histories that subject prevailing property relations to critical scrutiny and expose their contradictions.

Naturalizing Evictions, Depoliticizing Struggles

Before the civil war the concept of rent was at least partly connected to an official recognition of the right to affordable housing, with prices kept at a competitive level in spite of landlords’ claims to higher rents. The postwar recognition of a rent gap in Beirut meant that land prices were no longer tied to what tenants could pay, but to what investors could pay. As the next section will show, developers and other actors in the land and housing markets of Beirut started buying out small landlords and driving old tenants to negotiate and compromise in an effort to evict them. Rather than arising from landlord demands, it was the postwar neoliberal Lebanese state that made the end of rent control possible. Indeed, the state capitalized on its image as “weak” to entirely restructure the housing market to the benefit of large real estate companies.

During this era, the state’s discourses of popular and civic participation hid how “neoliberalism ha[d] imposed itself as a technology of governance over and above ideology, as the most efficient, rational, and pragmatic solution to problems.” Presenting neoliberalism as a problem-solving approach based on scientific truth depoliticized the housing and rent debate. It rendered the displacement of “old tenants” and elderly communities invisible.

In practice, therefore, the Lebanese state extended the sovereignty of nonstate and private-sector interests, along with that of allied local bureaucrats. This process fragmented socio-spatial relations, redefined citizenship, and fortified notions of private property. These factors in turn widened the broader rejection of rent control. Enabled by new political imaginaries, the militantly interventionist “weak” Lebanese state now enacts a new kind of sovereignty grounded in violence. It does this by gradually transforming tenants from citizens who identify themselves as part of the political urban space, to obstacles in the negotiation around fulfilling a newly desired image of the nation and its capital city.

The Sovereignty of Privately Led Evictions

The state’s selective authority at the neighborhood level played a crucial role in setting the stage for the legal developments discussed above. What activists accomplished to maintain rent control until 1992 would be incrementally lost. Rent control was once a recognition of citizens’ entitlement to the city. However, the seventy-three-year-old law has been fragmented and depoliticized. As a result, even though old tenants bear a legal legitimacy to occupy their houses, they are “stripped of their symbolization and humanity” as new property relations, discourses, and representations of the city and its heritage increasingly marginalize them. The next section shows how these instruments of marginalization gain authority in the neighborhood of ‘Ayn al-Muraysa.

The Threat of Displacement in ‘Ayn al-Muraysa: Developers as Agents 

‘Ayn al-Muraysa has become particularly attractive to developers over the past two decades, due to its location on the coastline near downtown and AUB. The increasing value of property in this district has encouraged developers to tolerate extensive negotiations with sitting tenants and divided property owners.

The presence of large new buildings inside small alleyways places current tenants in a state of awaiting their own evacuation. Activists for Beirut’s heritage, on the other hand, have demanded the preservation of the city’s historical urban fabric. This move has paradoxically hastened the eviction of old tenants and the destruction of old houses.

Shift of Ownership and Coercive Negotiations

Negotiations for compensation for eviction are persistent and take new forms depending on the actors and the value of real estate. However, the government’s granting of land ownership as a permanent asset to the landlord as opposed to those holding rental contracts always shapes these negotiations.

The category of rent, once an efficient way to manage the productive needs of society, contradicts the current process that transforms housing into a commodity, which must constantly produce value to sustain a class of landlords and investors.

With the intensified investment in real estate, and under the rent control law, tenants have to settle for monetary compensation in return for their exclusion from the socio-urban space of which they are part.

Because land prices are on the rise, compensation that is not paid instantly is not as valuable the next year. Although landlords drag tenants to courtrooms, tenants are generally able to prolong eviction if they are legally savvy. Having given up on rent as a source of income as a result of the devaluation of the Lebanese pound, small landlords are often unable and unwilling to pay compensation fees, since according to the law, it constitutes a percentage of the value of land in the current real estate market. However, tenants’ only guarantee to housing in the city would be compensation equal to a down payment on a mortgage. The position of landlords has also changed. To be able to evict tenants and develop the land, landlords are mainly obliged to partner with or sell to real estate companies.

The process to evict usually starts with the landlord trying to prove the tenants’ ineligibility for compensation. In more than one instance over a decade, the owners of a building, which was fully rented for decades have tried to evict the tenants in ‘Ayn al-Muraysa by any means necessary. In one case a family was even accused of having squatted in their apartment, even though they had legally rented the space and consistently paid rent. The family resorted to litigation and was able to retain its home. Other stories have more tragic endings.

The Municipality as a Selective Official Authority

Developers and politically connected landlords maneuver between legal and extralegal operations to evict tenants and develop land in Beirut. These entrepreneurs create a status quo that state authorities never intervene to reverse. The municipality acts selectively: It works as legal authority to pressure tenants with notices and it does not hold landlords accountable for illegal practices. In ‘Ayn al-Muraysa, many developers and contractors seized the preoccupation of regulatory bodies and media channels during and after the Israeli aggression against Lebanon in July 2006 as an opportunity to proceed with demolitions without authorities’ supervision or permission. A similar situation arose after the civil disturbances that paralyzed Beirut in May 2008. The fall of the Fasuh building, and the lack of a serious investigation to determine responsibility, encouraged landlords to capitalize on the story, warning tenants of a similar fate. Such destructive claims were rendered credible when the municipality received more than 116 requests to inspect old buildings just after the fall of Fasuh. Landlords are envisioning the fall of their buildings. On one hand they hold the state responsible for killed or injured tenants, or blame the tenants themselves for not heeding warnings to evict. On the other hand, they capitalize on this vision of their buildings’ destruction. However, these public performances of forewarning also suggest deliberate, yet unprosecuted, acts of destruction of old vacant buildings, and bespeak the coercive strategies used by landlords to evict tenants.

Some landlords even resort to inscriptions on the surface of the city’s built landscape, marking their own buildings with signs of decay in order to build their case for evicting residents and creating a new status quo.

[Excerpted from “Evicting Sovereignty: Lebanon's Housing Tenants from Citizens to Obstacles,” by Nadine Bekdache, in Arab Studies Journal (Vol. XXIII No. 1), Fall 2015, by permission of the author. © 2015 The Arab Studies Journal. For more information, to view the full issue, or to subscribe to the journal, click here.]

AbirSaksouk-Sasso, “Making Spaces for Communal Sovereignty: The Story of Beirut's Dalieh,” in Arab Studies Journal(Vol. XXIII No. 1), Fall 2015: 296-319.

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

AbirSaksouk-Sasso(AS): When I started working on this article back in 2012, I had just finished a collaborative project entitled “This Sea Is Mine” about the coast of Beirut. The project had triggered a series of questions in relation to the coast and public space in Beirut. In fact, in a debate that took place at Beirut Art Center where the Dalieh case was presented, some argued that “public space” in Lebanon is “an ideal”. They considered public space as a product of a sovereign modern state which Lebanon is not. Others added that the lack of public space in Beirut is the symptom of a failed citizenship project where city dwellers are incapable of associating with any sense of common good, largely due to sectarian divisions.

As these arguments revealed, the dominant discourse on public space presupposes citizenship and central authority, generally assuming that it is dependent on a sense of entitlement and predictability, where the state is the provider of such spaces. What I was rather trying to argue was that shared spaces in Beirut are constantly produced and sustained through individual as well as communal efforts of diverse publics. These shared spaces are defined by their users’ social practices of gathering and recreation, beyond the areas allocated by the state as “public”. Restricting the discussion on public space within notions of state and citizenship in Lebanon not only freezes activism in the struggle for “state building", but also traps policies and future visions for urban planning within a strictly propertied understanding of the city, turning dwellers and everyday users of space into passive agents with no claims over the city.

Yet based on observations and a constant interest in public practices in outdoors urban space, it was obvious that Beirut dwellers lay claim to a number of open (yet privately-owned) areas in the city whose uses are “public” in the sense that they are accessed freely and allow for a range of social activities to occur. Access to these spaces is secured through social and communal agreements through which their uses are organized, rather than the laws and institutions of a central state. As such, I developed this article by investigating and documenting social practices in several shared spaces in contemporary Beirut - such as Dalieh, left over seaside plots, or communal football fields - and putting them in historical context.

Through this investigation, I wanted to tell the story (history and present) of public space in Beirut from below; public space as used – hence spaces for the public. It is a story of people and places that were never made visible in official representations of the city, nor in most academic historicizing of Beirut.

I wanted to situate the claims and practices of these users within a political framework of the right to the city. These sites—namely Dalieh—have been in fact the platform for representing low-income city dwellers, refugees, suburb dwellers, ethnic communities, and others, as a legitimate part of the public, and of the city.

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

AS:The article discussed dominant ideals of what should take place in public space and who should use it. This was very important for me, particularly after Beirut’s mayor declared that the reasons behind the decades of closure of Beirut’s only large park—the Horsh—included the “undesirable” activities that he believed would dominate the uses of the park if it were open. His talk demonstrated an undeniably classed, sexed, and racialized understanding of what an acceptable public might be. As such, I explore public space literature, and how it was defined. I am mostly interested in how Don Mitchell describes public space, as a space where politics is possible and a space where different social groups make themselves visible and represented in the city. I also referred very much to the work of Simon Springer who describes public space as unpredictable by definition, with a need to keep it unscripted, versus how state officials regulate public space.

In the end, I truly believed that it is how users, state officials, professionals, academics and activists conceive of the public sphere that shapes the policies that are put in place to govern such spaces. I was therefore using this literature and the issues they opened to advocate for understanding public space as unpredictable, and hence the need to be open to the unknown, and this means trusting our public, all of our public; Or at least allowing for space to be a tool for building up this trust. Departing from this idea, I was also very keen on approaching public space, as well as the theme of sovereignty, in spatial terms (largely inspired by the work of Lefebvre). By spatializing the notion of public sovereignty on the level of social practice, it was possible for me to document its material existence. This spatialization of everyday practices enabled me to reveal a form of historical as well as emerging communal sovereignty in Beirut.

J: How does this article connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

AS:As mentioned earlier, this article was a continuation of the “This Sea Is Mine” projectabout public spacesalong Beirut’s coast. However, it also connects tightly with my university studies, as well as my current work. In fact, my final year thesis project in architecture was about a seaside site in Beirut (‘Ajram Beach). Rather than approaching it merely in physical terms, I was very interested in communal and social practices that were taking place in that women-only resort. In urban terms, I had proposed to re-insert the public into this site by creating a series of public programs that would bring back the site to the city. Recently, I have finished two relevant collaborative projects: a publication entitled “Practicing the Public” about the multiple visions of public space in Beirut, and a site-specific performance entitled “I Will Guide You Through Saida” about the city’sshared and communal spaces, specifically coastal areas and the changes they are undergoing.

I am also a passionate advocate for understanding the city and planning its future departing from the different spatial practices of dwellers and their rights. This takes shape in several forms, such as activism in the Civil Campaign to Protect Dalieh, or in professional collaborative projects that recognize and support collective claims and communal interests, such as a recent research about the informal making of neighborhood football fields in Beirut.

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

AS:Ideally, I would like anyone to read this article, no matter what her/his background is. The article attempts to tell the story of public space in Beirut. Yet it has gaps surely. I am specifically keen if readers were to seize upon the missing ideasin this article and develop them, such as the status of public spaces during the civil war in Lebanon, or the historical (mandate and pre-mandate) conditions that have produced a privatelyowned coast in Beirut.

J: Has your article changed with the development of the activism to save Dalieh?

AS:Definitely. Evicting the fishermen, demolishing their houses, and fencing Dalieh by real-estate developers happened one year after starting writing this article. Ever since then, the article was being updated with developments on the ground. Large sections of it were also developed by constant inspiration from the campaign that was launched in March 2014. One important fact that is not mentioned in the article, is that the fence was recently removed by activists during the harak (You Stink movement) in Lebanon.

I ended the article with the following: “The fact that Dalieh has so far been open, unrestricted, and uncontrolled is in itself inspiring. The right that city dwellers have acquired to Dalieh has been the premise for the Civil Campaign to Protect the Dalieh. It is a prescriptive right to become legally established or accepted by long usage or the passage of time. By recognizing this prescriptive right, the campaign is essentially battling to transform the notion of “property to exclude” into “property not to be excluded.” (...) As such, Dalieh has been an ideal space to imagine possibilities for reclaiming our city by focusing on our rights to it as both a working slogan and a political ideal. As we chant in our rallies, “To whom does Dalieh belong?” “TO US!”

J: What other projects are you working on now?

AS:I am currently working on several collaborative projects, whether through Public Works Studio or Dictaphone Group, of which I am a member and co-founder. Besides the theme of public space, I am working on projects that tackle housing rights in Beirut and the fight against evictions in the city, as well as participatory planning and community building in Palestinian refugee camps. In partnership with the Legal Agenda and Public Works, we are developing a research project about urbanism and law.

Excerpts from “Making Spaces for Communal Sovereignty: The Story of Beirut's Dalieh”

Raouche: Contesting the Official Narrative

Beirut’s Rock of Raouche (Pigeon’s Rock) was one of the main stops for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalists who came to explore the Middle East under Ottoman rule. The prominence of the rock is evident in these early explorers’ drawings. During the Egyptian occupation of Beirut (1831-40), the many French experts who accompanied Ibrahim Basha gave the name La Rocher to the rocky site, after previously being known as magharital-hamam, or grotte aux pigeons.Numerous nineteenth-century manuscripts portray Beirut through its rock. At the time, what we know today as the Raouche area of Beirut was almost completely agricultural, with many different farms, including mulberry plantations separated by cactus hedges. By the early 1900s, maps of Raouche show the presence of coastal agriculture, with orchards, orange groves, largebeds of lettuce, vineyards, and plots of other crops. It was not until the 1950s that building activity started in the Raouche area. By the early 1960s, Beirut was becoming a major tourist attraction in the region. It was at its most attractive on the coast, an area that observers and tourist agencies compared to Nice’s “Promenade des Anglais,” with its broad corniche, palm trees, and cafés overlooking the sea. A 1960s map shows several luxury hotels on the Raouche, including the Federal andthe Carlton, as well as luxury residential buildings designed by famous architects. These include PhillipeKaram’sChams’ Building, and WaseqAdib and Karl Chayer’s Shell and Ghandour Buildings. These architects belonged to Lebanon’s modern movement, the pioneers of which came from socially and politically dominant families, specifically feudal lords and the urban bourgeoisie. These modern edifices and the way of life they promoted dominated representations of 1960s Beirut. Lavish restaurants and hotels, private beach resorts, and new cars, with the background of the rock, were featured exclusively in all official postcards. The monumental rock was also Lebanon’s symbol inthe 1967 Year of International Tourism.

During the Lebanese civil war (1975-90), Raouche was also a relocation site for merchants of the old souks (marketplaces) of downtown Beirut. A few of these merchants relocated to Raouche in 1976, and were gradually followed by friends, familymembers, and other merchants who squatted along the cornice sidewalk. However, in 1982, a time of political instability during the Israeli invasion,Beirut’s mayor ChaficSardoukordered the systematic twelve-day destruction of the merchant kiosks. According to Sardouk, destroying the kiosks was in the interest of the capital’s touristic image. He expressed that he was “fedup with them blocking the cornice view for so many years and wanted to ‘open the heart of Beirut’ by evicting them.”Today, Raouche is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the real estate market in Beirut. Luxury residential towers and hotels, including Bahri Gardens, the Carlton Residences, and the infamous MövenpickBeach Resort,as well as the signs of fast food chains and high-end caféspunctuate its skyline. Official postcards, airline magazines, andministry advertisements all portraytheRaouche standing monumentally in a depoliticized landscapedevoid of people.

The nearby Dalieh peninsula does not appear in pictorial representations of the city. Photos of the “Dalieh of Beirut” only appear in family albums. Nevertheless, although Dalieh is neither a park nor public property, it is one of the main spaces for the public in the city. The area boasts a number of informal seashore kiosks and a steady stream of visitors enjoying the sea, picnicking, swimming, bathing, and strolling. Dalieh is also a prime destination for divers, who come from different parts of Beirut to exercise their passion for jumping off high cliffs into the Mediterranean waters. Two local fishing ports, one of which is famous for offering touristic boat rides along the coast of Beirut, are also in the area.

While cars use an untreated road next to the nearby Mövenpick hotel entrance, pedestrians access Dalieh through a makeshift gap created in the corniche balustrade. Every day, the seashore is filled with strolling couples. As Abu ‘Abid, a long-time fisherman in Dalieh, says, “Everywhere you look you will see lovers; they sit on the rocks staring out to the sea and at each other. They have no place to go, so they come here.”Today Dalieh includes a variety of social groups, such as Beiruti fishermen, corniche visitors, suburb dwellers, Iraqi refugees, Syrian migrant workers and refugees, and others. It is also site of the grand Nowruz festivities of the Kurdish community. On 21March of every year, the Dalieh transforms into a space in which the Kurdish community gathers by the thousands, setting up food kiosks and a music stage, and dancing all day carrying national flags.

None of these vibrant and diverse activities on Beirut’s seashore appear in publicity images of an empty and sanitized Raouche Rock.Indeed, these promotional representations erase everyday life, and the possibility of a public. As a lived space, Dalieh, with its local practices and alternative forms of tourism,is an asset to the city at large. Yet it is invisible in official narratives of Beirut’s history and present. The following section contests this official Raouche narrative by centering the Dalieh as a social and communal space that various publics have reclaimed. Despite its invisibility, the Dalieh has grown as an unofficial, informal space. Its various users—the fishermen, the strollers, the swimmers, the lovers, the Kurdish community, and others—retain their own narratives and collective memories.

A Social and Communal Space: The Dalieh of Beirut

According to cadastral registry documents, the Daliehis an unbuiltland property that several familieshave owned since the 1940s. During the Ottoman period, Dalieh was outside the city walls. Most lands outside the walls of old Beirut were miri (amiri) lands, under state domain or the jurisdiction of the sultan. The Ottoman Land Registration (tapu), begunas part of the Tanzimatreforms of in 1861, enabled the sultan to bestowsome mirilands to notables or persons of influence, such as the Arslan family. Thecadastral archive indicates thatAmir Sa‘idArslanowned plot number 1113, the largest plot in Dalieh. In 1876, Amir Arslan sold the plot to ‘Ali Shatila. According to a tapu dated 1916, the land later became the property of ‘Abdal-Majid and ‘UthmanShatila, who inherited it from their father ‘Ali. During the French Land Registration, plot 1113 was the registered property of ‘Abdal-Majid and ‘UthmanShatila. By the 1950s, the plot had more than ten owners, who had split the land through inheritance. Over the years, other families bought shares in the plot, including the‘Itani, ‘Arab, Haddad, Matar, ‘Afif, and Mu‘awwad families. This sale of plots, along with inheritances, led to multiple owners sharing the land.

Yet despite this long history of various private owners, people have understood and used Dalieh seafront lands as a crucial open-access shared space in the city. The use of Dalieh as a shared space challenges the modern conventional notion of public space as tied to state ownership, through the state’s designation of city spaces as “parks” or “gardens.” Abandoning this limited model opens new possibilities for understanding how negotiations and interactions categorize space in Beirut. Thus, despite familial land claims, different people maintain Dalieh as public domain.

Since the 1940s, countless stories attest to Dalieh as a picnic and outing destination for families on holidays and Fridays. People bring food, beverages,and water pipes, as well as the inevitable family musician who plays the ‘oud,bozoq, ortabla. People called this activity thesiran,to referto picnicking in manatiq al-tanazzuh, or places of promenade or strolling.These tanazzuh sites included Ramlatal-Bayda’ beach, Hurshal-Awza‘i, HurshSaqiyatal-Janzir, Karmal-Ashrafiyya, Mazra‘atal-‘Arab, HurshBayrut, KarmShatila in Rawsha, and MinatZurayqa in Shawran.Historical and contemporary narratives reveal that public use of urban space in Beirut was not restricted to designated parks. To the contrary,tanazzuh and sirantook place in sites characterized by openness and lack of ascription. Their names refer to natural spaces: forest, vineyard, and plantation. Until the 1960s, Dalieh, along with Ramlatal-Bayda’ beach, hostedthe yearly Arba‘aAyyub celebration, during which residents hailing from different neighborhoods in Beirut would come together to march to the seafront. The women would serve their traditional Beiruti dish, the most delicious mufataqa, while the kids would fly their kites.

In recounting people’s recreational activities and celebrations in Beirut from the 1940s on, it is important to return to Lefebvre’s argument about the “right to the city.”Lefebvre draws a distinction between public space that the government controls and regulatesand public space that social groups use. This distinction draws attention to the power to deem particular spaces official. This power runs “concomitant to the power to exclude certain groups from such sites on the basis of this very ascription.”The controversy around an “unscripted” view of public space versus the “ordered” viewopens new questions as to the sovereign’s relationship to public space. 

Images of Martyrs’ Square at the end of the civil war further illustrate the meanings and uses of unscripted public space. In 1990, on the day the civil war ended,my mother, sister and I set foot in downtown Beirut for the first time after the fighting. The photographs I took document a moment when people gathered in Martyrs’ Square around the central statue.They celebrated thechance to once again visit the city’s historic core. Children played and jumped around the statue, people put out plastic chairs, and sweets vendors and the famous Pink Panther ice cream van gathered at the site. The informality of these interactionscontrastssharply with its contemporary reality. Today, Martyrs’Square is a central vehicular roundabout and a site of commemoration. It is, in other words, a space that both governmental and private forces have predetermined, fixed, and controlled. It is now a space free of passion. As Springer puts it: “To remove passion from public space, the state attempts to create spaces based on a desire for security more than interaction and for entertainment, more than democratic politics—the end of public space.”

Elsewhere along the coast, people swim and dive every single morning on the corniche. During the winter the swimmersuse the American University in Beirut (AUB) beach when it is open.Recently, many people frequently cross the fence of a privately owned green piece of land overlooking the sea to have picnics. Adjacent to this green space is another large privatelyowned plot, once the Summerland beach resort’s parking lot. Abandoned for many years, the parking lot is now a public space. Children ride their bicycles on the asphalt road, and families picnic on green patches where cars once parked.

Thus the public’s different spatial practices defy the language of private property and its attempts to make actions predictable in clear spatial boundaries. Shared spaces have been emerging in Beirut outside of the sovereign state’s provision. Everyday practices create these spaces for the public through what AsefBayat calls “the quiet encroachment of the ordinary.”Bayat defines this notion of “quiet encroachment” as “the silent, protracted but pervasive advancement of the ordinary people on the propertied and powerful in order to survive and improve their lives,” without clear leadership, ideology, or structured organization. In contrast to state sovereignty over public space, the acts of these ordinary people to claim spaces in Beirut form the informal or communal sovereign.

[Excerpted from “Making Spaces for Communal Sovereignty: The Story of Beirut's Dalieh,” by AbirSaksouk-Sasso, in Arab Studies Journal(Vol. XXIII No. 1), Fall 2015, by permission of the author. © 2015 The Arab Studies Journal. For more information, to view the full issue, or to subscribe to the journal, click here.]

English

Crackdown on Journalism

After Seizing Zaman Newspaper, What's Next for Turkey? Mustafa Akyol argues that all of Turkish media, not just a few newspapers like Zaman, is under threat by the current regime in Turkey.

Tightening The Grip: Turkey's Media Takeover Al Jazeera’s “The Listening Post” examines the fallout from the government seizure of Zaman newspaper and interviews journalist Can Dündar on the state of media freedom in Turkey.

A Risky Acceleration in Turkish Politics Murat Yetkin suggests that the takeover of Zaman is the latest in Erdoğan’s plan to consolidate power and quash opposition.

Kurdish Reporter Faces Jail Time in Turkey for Twitter and Facebook Posts An editor for Jiyan describes how Hayri Tunç and other Kurdish journalists are facing prosecution by the Turkish government for their reporting.

Zaman Group Used Charity Money for Gainsİlnur Çevik, current presidential advisor and former owner of Turkish Daily News, recalls how his “extremely objective and authoritative newspaper” was “pushed into financial disaster by the military in the 1990s” and sold off to the Doğan Group.

Kurdish Politics & Violence in Southeast Turkey

Turkey’s Kurdish Leader: We Will Struggle On in Parliament ‘Till the End’  Şükrü Küçükşahin from Al-Monitor interviews Selahattin Demirtaş, the co-chair of Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), on Kurdish politics, ongoing violence in the southeast Turkey, and the future of the peace process under the government's current policies.

With Spread of IS-Like Tactics, Urban Warfare in Turkey Grows Bloodier Mahmut Bozarslan writes that heavy clashes between Turkish security forces and groups affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) resulted in the destruction of cities and mass migration of residents.

Armenian Animosity Rekindled Through PKK Terror Pınar Tremblay points out that the AKP government's repeated insults that Kurds are considered Armenians are aimed at labeling the pro-Kurdish HDP as non-Muslim, and to justify the heavy attacks on border towns in the southeast of Turkey.

March 8th, International Women's Day

Why Is Erdogan Wary of Women? Pınar Tremblay reports that despite the bans on the celebration of March 8th, International Women's Day, women in Turkey found creative and cheerful methods to circumvent bans, promising to celebrate the day to the fullest in the streets.

Why Turkish Women Are Opting Out of the Workforce  According to Riada Asimovic Akyol, a deeply patriarchal culture, work environments unfavorable to a healthy balance with family life, and internalized gender roles keep many women in Turkey uninterested in taking advantage of opportunities to work.

How One Sultan's Harem Is Another's School Pınar Tremblay writes that Turkey's First Lady Emine Erdoğan's praise of the Ottoman harem as a school has disturbed and baffled Turks.

Domestic Politics

If Turkey Sinks, We All Go with It Semih İdiz wonders how the AKP thinks it can inspire confidence in its authority with the utter chaos reigning throughout Turkey’s political and civil society.

HDP: Lift the Immunities, Build a Safer Future Daily Sabah columnist Yahya Bostan argues that the activities “certain” HDP members are supporting, such as allowing “an armed group to block roads, tax citizens or assault civilians and officials,” are grounds for lifting their parliamentary immunity.

The Rage against The Constitutional Court In the wake of Erdoğan’s denunciations of the Constitutional Court for freeing journalists Can Dündar and Erdem Gül, Mustafa Akyol speculates about potential efforts to curb the autonomy of the court and the consequences that would have for democracy in Turkey.

Is Another Regime Crisis Awaiting Turkey? Daily Sabah writer Fahrettin Altun explains that, since the president is now elected by the public, there is a “crisis” between the executive and the bureaucracy. Yet the debate to solve this problem as the president has proposed has been “criminalized” by the opposition parties.

Davutoğlu on The Eve of Critical Decisions under Erdoğan Pressure Serkan Demirtaş writes about meetings among senior AKP officials, in which they discuss the security situation in the southeast, the prospect of lifting parliamentary immunity for HDP MPs, and the Constitutional Court controversy.

The Sound of Footsteps: Erdoğan’s New Enemies Within Gareth Jenkins discusses the growing tensions within the AKP but doubts that there is “any indication that [Gül] has yet formulated a detailed strategy for taking the offensive against Erdoğan.”

Foreign Policy

Davutoglu Attempts to Get Back to Zero Problems With Iran Semih İdiz notes that Prime Minister Davutoğlu's efforts to restore Turkey's relations with Iran, mostly due to economic reasons, could easily be undermined by an unpredictable harsh statement by President Erdoğan.

EU Fears Kurdish Flow Rather Than Turkish Flow Barçın Yinanç claims that EU countries are wary of coming to an agreement for visa-free travel with the Turkish government because they are afraid that Kurds will flee Turkey en masse due to the situation in the southeast.

Syria’s Dark Shadow Over US-Turkey Relations Henri Barkey argues that the distance between Turkish and American objectives in Syria had widened tremendously since the rise of ISIL.

Turkey's Plan on the Refugee Deal Leaves EU under stress The government is not “dehumanizing the refugee issue and using it as a bargaining chip,” as critics suggest, but rather “maintaining a principled but defensive position” given the EU’s minuscule contribution to solving the issue, argues Daily Sabah’s Sadık Ünay.

The Dark Side of The EU-Turkey Refugee Deal Kenan Malik contends that the European Union has criminalized migrants and increased border security since the 1990s, and that the current deal struck with Turkey will only serve to amplify those measures.

EU-Turkey: Is Refugee Issue a New Membership Criterion? According to Cengiz Aktar, the current refugee deal shows that “Turkey is no more than a third party for the EU to deal with on project by project basis”

Turkey's Move Likely to Shift Balances within EU (1) - (2) Murat Yetkin describes the disagreement among various EU governments about the refugee plan struck between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Erdoğan.

Other Pertinent Pieces

Turkish Military Struggles to Find New Recruits Metin Gürcan points to serious structural problems, including inadequate recruitment, in the Turkish Armed Forces.

The 3rd Bridge Writing for Daily Sabah, Beril Dedeoğlu laments that “many people are looking at [the third bridge] only from the angle of it being a successful construction project” and are failing to see the symbolic role it can play in bringing East and West together where the first two bridges have failed.

Mystery 'Dude' Rattles Turkish Stock Traders With Massive Bets Bloomberg financial writers discuss the “Dude,” an investor (or group of investors) who has made giant investments in the Turkish stock market, single-handedly raising trading volume by 8% this year.

Turkish

Ankara Bombing

Ankara saldırısında hayatını kaybedenlerin hikayeleri The BBC provides some brief biographies for some of the victims from Sunday’s bombing in Ankara.

O Meydan Ertuğrul Özkök recalls meaningful moments that he has spent in Kızılay Square and calls on people to join together “end terror.”

Domestic Politics

Türkiye’nin önündeki son kavşak Expressing nostalgia for the op-eds written several years ago about Turkey’s potential descent into authoritarianism, Levent Gültekin describes the disjunction between Turkey’s constitution and the government’s political practices.

AYM'nin Dündar ve Gül kararı evrensel standartlara uygundur Tolga Şirin, professor of constitutional law at Marmara University, examines the Constitutional Court’s decision to release Can Dündar and Erdem Gül, finding it to be in keeping with universal human rights standards.

AK Parti demokratikleşmede geri adım atar mı? Karar columnist Mehmet Ocaktan points out that the AKP’s 2010 legal reforms were beneficial, but also created tools that pre-AKP elite-allies (i.e. Can Dündar) could misuse.

MHP bu kaos ortamından ancak Devlet Bey'le çıkar Ahmet Hakan interviews Deniz Bölükbaşı about the current leadership challenge within the MHP. He argues for the MHP to adopt a “new strategy and discourse.”

Devleti kim yönetiyor? Nami Temeltaş recalls the removal of parliamentary immunity for several Kurdish MPs in the 1990s and criticizes parliament for its utter refusal to investigate human rights violations and to apply the law.

Kürt siyasetçilere "dokunulmazlık" şantajıİbrahim Genç speculates on the possibility of HDP’s removal from parliament, arguing that it would not “give a positive message to the Kurds.”

‘Biz terörist miyiz?’ Yusuf Karataş draws attention to how the government's use of "terrorist" label forecloses the possibility of an alliance between working classes and the Kurdish movement.

MHP bu süreçten nasıl çıkacak? Prof. Recai Coşkun points out that Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) does not know how to organize itself as more participatory, inclusive and transparent party that can attract different segments of society.

Boydaklar… (1) (2) Soner Yalçın gives a history the Boydak Group, which is currently under investigation by the government for its links to Fethullah Gülen.

Kurdish Politics & Violence in Southeast Turkey

İmralı Notları kitabından: Başbakan'ın yakasına yapış, "Savaş olacak, Apo daha fazla tutamaz" de!Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu continues his examination of the recently released book about the meetings between Abdullah Öcalan and the HDP, concluding that the book shows to what degree the opportunities for negotiation and reconciliation have been squandered.

Arife Doğan, kardeşi Mazlum Doğan'ı anlatıyor (1) - (2) In conjunction with the opening of an exhibition about women in Diyarbakır prison, Bircan Değirmenci speaks to Arife Doğan, sister to Mazlum Doğan, a Kurdish activist who hanged himself in Diyarbakır prison, and Delal Doğan, who died fighting against the Turkish military.

Çatışmaların otopsisi: Silopi örneği Metin Gürcan diagnoses the degree to which military operations in Silopi attained their goal, concluding that it is likely the government did not get rid of the PKK but simply made their presence “more foggy.”

HDP’lilerin dokunulmazlığı niçin kaldırılıyor? Levent Gültekin contends that the prospect that the AKP government might revoke parliamentary immunity for HDP MPs is proof that they are less interested in resolving the Kurdish question than in consolidating and strengthening its hold over power.

Cizre'den izlenimler: Cizîr mala me ye (1) - (2) Yüksel Genç writes about the destruction of the city of Cizre, the lack of food and water, and the efforts by individuals and families to patch their lives back together.

Yüz günün yalnızlığı!Şeyhmus Diken writes about the end of the twenty-four hour martial lockdown in Sur district of Diyarbakır just hours shy of one hundred days and on the forty-fifth anniversary of the 1971 military coup.

Evlerin dışından, evlerin içine bir algı (1) - (2) Bedri Adanır argues that the current mindset governing in Turkey is one in which Kurdish mothers can be accused of giving birth to terrorists and Kurdish children can be accused of eventual terrorism.

Cizre izlenimleri - Üç kısa belgeselÜmit Kıvanç provides links to three short documentaries about Cizre, two by Fatih Pınar and one by Kazım Kızıl.

March 8th, International Women's Day

Kadınlar Günü ve Cumhurbaşkanı'nın gözyaşları Yılmaz Murat Bilican draws attention to President Erdoğan's appeal to emotions, tears, and compassion whenever he talks about women issues, although his war policies continue to create suffering and pain in many women's lives.

Türk tipi başkanlıktan Türk tipi kadın haklarına Oya Baydar criticizes President Erdoğan's promotion of "Turkish-style women's rights."

Kadınların eşitlik talebi Erdoğan’ı neden geriyor?"Why does women's demand for equality bother President Erdoğan?" asks Mehveş Evin.  

Zulme karşı öfkesi isyana dönüşen kadınlarla gelecek bahar… Summarizing the alarming situation of women's rights, freedom, and equality in contemporary Turkey, Hürrem Sönmez argues it is still women who will resist against and eventually break down this oppression.

Erkek devlet, bıyıklı anayasa ve bayanlar (!)… Murat Sevinç points to the gender disparity in government offices, and criticizes the lack of women's participation in decision-making and recent constitution-writing processes and debates.

8 Mart Dünya Emekçi Kadınlar Günü kutlu olsun!İhsan Çaralan reminds readers that the AKP government has attacked women’s movements and struggles through various means.

Kadınlara selam olsun Nilay Etiler argues that the government is attacking the increasing visibility and power of women, because it is women who are resisting the government's anti-environmentalist development projects, authoritarian measures, and war policies.

İki parça bez arasında şiddet coğrafyası Nuray Sancar emphasizes that while the AKP government presents itself as the savior of 'veiled women' oppressed by Kemalist-secularist obsessions, it doesn't shy away from attacking veiled women who don't comply with AKP's policies.

Tarihten Kara Fatma portreleri Ayşe Hür highlights the role a number of women have played in the military history of Turkey.

Foreign Policy

Türkiye-Rusya savaşı boş bir iddia değil, ciddi bir ihtimal Hakan Aksay argues that Turkey-Russia war is not unsubstantiated claim, but indeed a highly likely possibility.

Obama, Erdoğan’la görüşecek mi? Amberin Zaman writes about the US' shifting and not-so-clear stance on the possibility of Turkey's military intervention in Syria.

Suriye ateşkesinde Türkiye ve Kürtler Fehim Işık analyzes Turkey's Syrian policy in relation to the increasing power of Kurdish groups in Syria.  

Türkiye-İran ilişkilerinde yeni bir ivme Bayram Sinkaya points out that Prime Minister Davutoğlu's visit to Iran has given a new twist to Turkey-Iran relationship.

Other Pertinent Pieces

Varsın bizi balıklar yesin Nurcan Baysal discusses the kinds of discrimination experienced by Yazidis who fled to Turkey as refugees, as well as the fear they feel living in Turkey, which they see as an ally to the terror of ISIS that they fled.

Bir direniş estetiği olarak hevallerin uçuşu Writing from Diyarbakır D-Type Prison, Özgür Amed praises six other prisoners who escaped on 5 March, asserting that their “fluid energies” were essential to keeping their drive for freedom alive.

Erdoğan kendisine niye Kanuni'yi değil, Fatih'i örnek alıyor? Reflecting on the president’s preference for Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror over Süleyman the Magnificent, Fuat Keyman observes that the latter was interested in “just administration” while the former began a new era—Erdoğan’s ambition of the moment.

Borç tuzağındaki ‘Yeni Türkiye’ Erinç Yeldan worries about Turkey’s economic prospects. Though debt has risen in the years since the economic crisis, incomes has not risen at nearly the same rate.

Published on Jadaliyya

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Can the Kurdish Question Be Settled by Killing People in Sur?

In Turkey, the Regime Slides from Soft to Hard Totalitarianism

Over the last couple of weeks, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and the ruling AKP government have started to lay out the details of the government’s master plan for urban renewal in Turkey’s conflict-ridden Kurdish region in Southeast Anatolia. Though the government announced on 9 March that military operations in Sur had been completed, many of the aspects of the plans remain ambiguous. Nonetheless, it is evident that the government’s aim is to achieve a dramatic spatial and socio-economic reconfiguration of the region. For example, Davutoğlu announced a ten-point “master plan” for Kurdish cities in Turkey that ties notions of terrorism to economic underdevelopment and the languishing nature of urban life in the region. In the announcement, he rebuked HDP municipal leaders in the region for “supporting terrorism instead of making investments,” promising to “fortify” the region’s economy by deferring debts for tradesmen, artists, and farmers, and by offering new loans. And he promised to rebuild Diyarbakır’s historical Sur district “so well that humanity will come back to life” (“Sur'u öyle bir inşa edeceğiz ki insanlık ihya olacak”). In early March, similarly, Davutoğlu announced a “great reconstruction...through which the state will demonstrate its constructive capacity” (“Devlet inşa kudretini de gösterecektir”) to begin in Silopi—a district in the Southeastern city of Şırnak that was set under curfew for over a month until mid-January.

In this article, we discuss how these ideas of revitalization and urban transformation fit into the larger war that the Turkish government has been waging in Kurdistan for the past several months. We examine how the discourses of public housing and ghettoization intersect in order to understand the connections between the capitalization and governmentalization of urban space in Kurdistan. In Turkey, public housing has long been a tool for reorganizing urban spaces and the people who inhabit them. The urban transformation and gentrification of Istanbul, for example, has been the subject of countless academic articles as well as of the acclaimed documentary Ekümenopolis. Conversely, the notion of Kurdish city centers as “ghettos” constitutes a unique discursive turn worth exploring. By forcibly displacing whatever “innocent” civilians may have inhabited these urban spaces and consequently pathologizing these spaces as blighted by terrorism, the Turkish government has legitimized the wholesale liquidation of anyone who did not (or could not) flee from the military occupation. And it has set the stage for long-term forms of structural and economic violence aimed at stamping out oppositional Kurdish lifeworlds.

At bare minimum, what we have witnessed over the past weeks and months in Kurdish cities is the total unmaking of everyday life at the hands of the Turkish government. As a consequence, it is important to be skeptical of the Turkish government’s promises to revitalize and rebuild. Through our examination of public housing and ghettoization within the context of the military occupation, we argue that the Turkish government’s efforts to “sanitize” the space of city centers like Sur, Yüksekova, Silopi and Cizre are ultimately efforts at making them governable and forcing their populations into long-term compliance.

A Brief History of Public Housing in Turkey

The first debate around the AKP’s plans to spatially and socioeconomically reorganize the Kurdish region erupted when the pro-government newspaper Star reported in late December last year that the Public Mass Housing Administration (Toplu Konut İdaresi Başkanlığı, or TOKİ for short) will rebuild the historical Sur district in Diyarbakır one of the centers of conflict. According to the report, TOKİ plans to replace damaged and destroyed buildings with modern, “luxurious” ones.

Before demonstrating how TOKİ figures into the current transformation of urban space in Turkish Kurdistan, we will first explicate its institutional politics to examine how it became the primary—if not sole—regulator of the urban land market.[1] In some ways, the emergence of TOKİ is not an unfamiliar story, following similar trends in global real estate. TOKİ was established in 1984 as the Mass Housing and Public Partnership Administration, four years after the 1980 military coup that is often understood as setting the stage for Turkey’s neoliberal transformation. Initially, TOKİ was primarily responsible for disbursing credit and government monies for housing cooperatives. In 1989, TOKİ’s mission was rearticulated as a program for providing housing to the poor with an emphasis on redressing the ills of informal housing—in particular, the exponential rise in squats and shanties (known in Turkish as gecekondu). With budget cuts and poor management over the course of the 1990s, TOKİ slowly gave up administering public funds for its housing projects, and its public housing capabilities dwindled (the fund it had been drawing from was dissolved in 2001). Though it still held significant swathes of well-located, public, urban land, the Administration lacked the capacity to develop or build upon them. [2]

In 2002, the AKP was elected on a platform that promised economic stability in the wake of the economic crash of 2001. Less than a year later, in 2003, TOKİ was revitalized when the legislature passed a law that opened up significantly more opportunities for partnerships with the private sector. Additionally, government restructuring in 2002 and 2008 outsourced and privatized certain industries (such as tobacco, most notably) and simultaneously granted TOKİ control over much of this land. Simultaneously, the legislation passed a bill that granted sole authority for zoning regulation to TOKİ and sold virtually all state-owned urban land—the sole exception being land owned by the military—to TOKİ. A law passed in 2011 expanded TOKİ’s authority to dispossess inhabitants of gecekondus—an authority most famously deployed in the Ayazma region of Istanbul, in which gecekondus were destroyed for a luxury housing development, leaving poor families entirely homeless. [3] TOKİ, in short, has gained an unprecedented amount of control over rights to very significant portions of urban land.

At the same time, TOKİ’s partnerships with private contractors and construction companies transformed its institutional mandate from emphasizing state-subsidized housing for needy populations to generating sites for financial speculation and capital accumulation. Work by the Networks of Dispossession project shows the degree to which these partnerships are padding the pockets of private contractors as well as state officials. TOKİ’s ascent to the top of the real-estate market in Turkey, therefore, was accomplished through significant changes to existing laws about state property, through the structural reorganization inherent in the AKP-led transformation of the government’s roles and responsibilities, and through the government’s consequent efforts to induct capital into every realm of social life in Turkey.

TOKİ today is a public authority directly under the supervision of the Office of the Prime Minister, but it is also a self-proclaimed advocate for the poor, and it is also a financial institution in dogged pursuit of domestic and international capital investment. It is, in Jean-Françoise Pérouse’s terms, “public as well as private, employer as well as contractor… investor-oriented project developer as well as housing manager, a Robin Hood as well as an unrivaled, unaccountable monarch.”[4] Under the AKP government, TOKİ’s leaders have prided themselves on touting urban revitalization as a technique of enfranchising poor and marginalized communities and populations. In this regard, they offer mortgages of up to twenty-five years that allow low-income populations to become homeowners. Homeownership, they claim, offers financial stability and upward class mobility that is supposed to alleviate divisions among different social groups and contribute to more harmonious urban communities. However, due to the AKP’s private-public partnerships, the process of urban transformation has generated further inequality, rather than mitigating it, disproportionately affecting the very poor and marginalized communities it claims to empower. Under the banner of resolving the housing crisis of Turkey’s city centers, the government has destroyed gecekondus and other informal housing, rendering many occupants homeless, while turning any potential real estate into a site for speculation and rent extraction. As Duygu Parmaksızoğlu explains in an interview with İmre Azem, director of the documentary Ekümenopolis, the process of urban transformation “tears the city apart, splitting it into pieces and turning each of these pieces into potential vehicles for profit, turning them into commodities. In every street, every building, every neighborhood [urban transformation] comes upon, it creates ‘investments’ instead of living spaces.” The emphasis on investments in the case of Istanbul’s urban transformation resonates with Prime Minister Davutoğlu’s promises for the city centers of Kurdistan.

Mortgage Debt as Governmental Technology

In the past, the government has shown on many occasions how effectively it can use TOKİ as an instrument to displace poor residents from potentially valuable areas—not only in the east but also in Istanbul and elsewhere in the country. This displacement has not only a class but also an important ethnic and racial component since many of those neighborhoods and districts targeted are home to large shares of ethnic, racial, religious, and sexual minorities, including Kurds, Alevis, Romani people, and LGBTIQ people. Popular examples from Istanbul are neighborhoods such as Küçükarmutlu in Sarıyer or Okmeydanı in Beyoğlu - both neighborhoods are strongholds of left political activism and mostly inhabited by Alevis. Transforming these areas in favor of middle- and upper-class use while relocating their populations to TOKİ buildings at Istanbul’s periphery will hence not only bring economic benefits but also smash AKP opposition. TOKİ, accordingly, serves not only as a profit-making state agency but also as a governing instrument to ensure political compliance.

A particular story of how this mechanism of compliance works in practice has been recently published in the pro-labor newspaper Evrenselin the form of a letter from an anonymous factory worker in the western industrial city of Gebze who also lives in a TOKİ home under mortgage. The worker lives in a low-income TOKİ home on a fifteen-year mortgage, for which he still has thirteen years of repayment left, at a rate of 530 lira per month. In the lead-up to the most recent elections on November 1, he explains that residents were threatened by TOKİ management: if the ruling AKP government did not win the election, residents’ interest rates would skyrocket and they would lose their homes. He concludes, “In the 1 November election, I was forced to vote for the AKP not as a worker, but as a person paying off a fifteen-year loan on a TOKİ home.”

As the case of this worker shows, long-term mortgage debt operates as a governmental technology, exercising power over the social and political decisions of mortgagors. Threatened by TOKİ officials with a rise in his interest rate, this worker was posed with the choice of voting for the AKP—at the expense of his social, economic, and moral objections—or voting against them, putting his whole family’s economic and housing security in jeopardy. Indebted homeownership, in other words, governed his political participation in a manner that benefits the AKP’s ongoing efforts to consolidate power. Given the scale of TOKİ’s contemporary megaprojects—a housing complex in Gaziantep, for example, intended to house 350,000 people over the next seven years, and more on the way throughout the southeast region—it is easy to see how the proliferation of citizens indebted to long-term mortgages under the control of a state institution would render those citizens dependent upon the state’s continued benevolence, thereby exerting pressures on their everyday lives and political decisions. Indentured to TOKİ by virtue of their mortgages, indebted citizens living in public housing give up the power of political resistance when it risks losing everything.

A similar strategy will most likely be applied in Sur and the other conflict-ridden areas of Kurdistan. In the wake of the controversies surrounding the report in Star mentioned above, the government clarified that it will not erect TOKİ apartments in Sur but instead rebuilt the district after its historical image in the 1930 and 1940s and turn it into a touristic center. Prime Minister Davutoğlu has now also added that they envision Sur to look like Toledo in Spain. The comparison is deeply ironic, given that Toledo is the capital of the Castilla-La Mancha region, which declared limited autonomy from the Spanish government, while the AKP government has ardently rejected discussions of any form of autonomy. Nonetheless, because Sur is on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, a major intervention in the built environment is not possible—though the demographics of the area can be altered considerably. This is where TOKİ comes in: TOKİ apartments have already been built outside the historical center of Sur on the peripheries of Diyarbakır. Some of the families living in Sur were resettled as early as 2011. With the ongoing war in the region and the 24-hour curfews, and with hundreds of buildings either entirely destroyed or damaged, Sur’s urban “renewal” may now be easier to realize, given that almost all of Sur’s population has already left the district. While the government has claimed that all original residents will be able to return to Sur, it is likely that at least some who have fled will not come back. If this is the case, this will open the way for a dramatic change of Sur’s social and economic composition without encountering further resistance.

Diyarbakır, Şırnak, and Hakkarı, where the military occupation has been most protracted and intense, are also the regions that gave the most votes to the HDP in the 1 November election. If the case of the aforementioned worker is any indication, then it is likely that the AKP hopes to put significant portions of the HDP-supporting urban Kurdish populations into long-term mortgage debt in TOKİ housing—and in so doing, achieve long-term political submission through enduring forms of structural violence.

In another statement from the beginning of the year, Davutoğlu added that there are plans to move the administrative apparatus from the centers of the cities of Şırnak and Hakkarı to their outer districts. The “ghetto, slum-like” (“getto, varoş şekline dönüşmüş”) settings in the outer districts—namely Yüksekova in Hakkari and Cizre in Şırnak—according to Davutoğlu, will in this course be restructured. It was again the pro-government Star newspaper that headlined Davutoğlu’s statement with the words “the ghettos will be cleaned out.” It seems that the usage of the term “ghetto’ is another important component in the AKP’s current urban political discourse regarding the Southeast.

Constructing—and Destroying—the Kurdish Ghetto

While in academic discourse the question of whether Kurdish ghettos have emerged in some of the urban centers in the west of Turkey has been discussed at length,[5]  and their existence is every now and then suggested in the media, the usage of the term ‘ghetto’ (getto in Turkish) to describe poor neighborhoods in Kurdistan is rather rare. In Turkey, poverty-ridden neighborhoods can be found all over the country and are typically referred to either as gecekondu (shanties) or varoş, which actually means suburb or banlieue, but is used to describe marginalized areas in general.

Historically speaking, the ghetto has been first and foremost characterized by racial or ethnic segregation—rather than explicitly economic segregation. The notion of the ghetto dates back to 16th century Venice, when Jews were forced to live within certain quarters. These Jewish-Venetian ghettos were not necessarily poor but rather characterized by quite lively niche economies. During World War II, the Nazis built ghettos throughout Europe that were intended to round up and sequester Jews, forcing them to work in hard labor and killing them—as in the Warsaw ghetto. The logic of Nazi ghettoization culminated, of course, in the form of concentration and extermination camps. From the 1960s onwards the term “ghetto” gained currency in describing residential segregation of black Americans, particularly in big cities such as New York and Chicago. Today, “ghetto” is typically used to describe relatively marginalized areas inhabited by large shares of ethnic and racial minorities and/or immigrants in the United States and sometimes in Western Europe, though its usage in the European context has been subject to a highly critical debate. [6]

Given the historical context, Davutoğlu’s usage of the term “ghetto” is not a coincidental conflation or a simple replacement of the in Turkey more common terms gecekondu or varoş, but a significant discursive turn that warrants our attention. Particularly because just last year, in April 2015, at the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, Prime Minister Davutoğlu argued, “we do not have ghettos. Ghettos are a European artifact. Where there are ghettos, ethnic discrimination will occur and then genocide.”

The government, therefore, seems to be changing its mind over whether ghettos exist in Turkey or not and also on who is to blame for their existence: according to AKP spokespersonÖmer Çelik, the fact that ghettos have emerged in the largely Kurdish-inhabited southeast of the country is not a sign of ethnic exclusion or a result of racist state politics, but rather is the result of the PKK’s influence in the region and—more recently—the digging of trenches and building of barricades.

This relatively new “ghetto discourse” must of course be understood in relation to the planned urban transformation of the Kurdish region. As the late urban geographer Neil Smith maintained, the perception of crisis and threat is an important part of the gentrification process. Discourses of urban decline, what Smith has famously called the “frontier myth,” construct certain parts of the city (often inhabited by ethnic/racial minorities) as frontier to be (re)conquered by the (white or de-racialized) middle class in the form of an “urban revanchism.”[7] Neoliberal urban policies are hence, according to Smith, supported by non-dialectical—often binary—epistemologies of space such as marking certain neighborhoods as “ghettos.”

This revanchist strategy has been used in other forms in Istanbul as well: in 2007, former TOKİ President Erdoğan Bayraktar stated that the Beyoğlu neighborhood of Tarlabaşı—home to an ethnically diverse group of working-class rural and international immigrants and refugees as well as Roma and LGBTIQ individuals—is the “hearth of terrorism, drugs and a crooked view of the state” ("terörün, uyuşturucunun, devlete çarpık bakmanın yuvası"). The area is currently undergoing one of the most comprehensive urban transformation projects in the city aiming at a more or less complete exchange of the population.[8] The fact that Davutoğlu and other AKP officials now have used the term “ghetto” for the Southeast, of course adds a more clear ethnic/racial dimension to this discourse of urban decline. The discursive construction of the ghetto, then—verging on discrimination and ethnic cleansing, by Davutoğlu’s own logic—is a precondition for the Turkish military’s wholesale destruction of these spaces.

Disaster Capitalism

With the destruction of Southeast Anatolia’s built environment, the “twenty-four hour martial lockdowns” and the constitution of the region as a “frontier” to be conquered, along with the celebratory announcement of urban renewal plans by the AKP government, it seems that the war on the Kurds aims to generate political compliance as well as to inject capital into the region. After the AKP came to power in 2002 the country has undergone a series of drastic neoliberal reforms that were followed by uneven but significant economic growth. Since 2007 this growth has languished. Particularly in the last few years, the AKP has deployed its all-encompassing capacities as the state to build partnerships with the private sector, and has thus sought new ways of encouraging international and national investment. Urban renewal and the construction sector constitute the centerpiece of these attempts.

While the Kurdish region has historically been governed through underdevelopmentleaving the population relatively poor and isolated from state services,[9] it seems that we are currently witnessing the dawn of a new form of neoliberal governance. Just as the AKP has been unwilling and unable to continue peace negotiation talks with Kurdish representatives, it has also been unable to push for urban renewal and reinvestment in the Southeast, as the example of Sur and the resistance on part of its residents to relocate is proof of. The destruction of the region’s urban areas—including infrastructure that provides basic needs like electricity and water—and the prolonged curfews that are forcing residents out of their homes have shown to be an effective technique for pushing the AKP’s agenda. Destruction and reconstruction here are two sides of the same neoliberal coin.

This form of “disaster capitalism” has obviously not been invented by the AKP. Canadian journalist Naomi Klein has famously described the relation between natural and man-made catastrophes and capitalist development  in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Klein shows how the continued growth of the free market necessarily depends on the production of crises and disasters as well as on the perpetual mobilization of shock and awe campaigns against terrorists and other sources of moral panic. There is a tautological relationship, she argues, between the increasing securitization of the state and its actors, and the privatization of whatever is left behind in the wake of its destruction. She describes, for example, recently observed big investments by construction companies after the war in Iraq, quoting a contractor who says, “the best time to invest is when there is still blood on the ground.” [10]

What is striking about the Turkish case is how urban renewal plans are gleefully unveiled one by one by the government and pro-government media while the war itself continues, with news of more and more civil casualties on a daily basis. In this sense, the connection between warfare and economic opportunism has probably never been so clearly articulated.

Inhabitants of Kurdish cities have mounted resistance and opposition to the government’s shock and awe campaign for urban transformation. Hakan Sandal and Serhat Arslan argue that the trenches that have been dug in the streets of these Kurdish cities articulate borders for Kurdish autonomy against the Turkish nation-state even as they simultaneously offer protection against state violence and disrupt the military’s mobility. And as one woman in the Sur district of Diyarbakır told journalist Ceyda Karan, “May the ban be lifted; we will come back. They can’t dupe us with TOKİ. We’ll die but we’ll never give up our Sur.”

Not surprisingly, then, as soon as Minister of Interior Efkan Ala announced on 9 March that military operations had come to an end after 103 days (the curfew, however, has not been lifted), many current and former residents began to gather at the barricades. While the government is already waiting in the wings to realize its urban renewal plans, it thus seems that the residents of Sur will not be easily pushed into compliance: against the public-private partnerships that plan to inject capital as a form of governance into Kurdistan’s cities, and in the wake of extraordinary violence, the people are resolved.

[1] Jean-François Pérouse, “Kentsel dönüşüm uygulamalarında belirleyici bir rol üstlenen Toplu Konut İdaresi’nin (TOKİ) belirsiz kimliği üzerinde birkaç saptama,” In İstanbul: Müstesna Şehrin İstisna Hali (Istanbul: Sel Yayınları, 2013), 81-96. See also Tuna Kuyucu and Özlem Ünsal, “‘Urban’ Transformation’ as State-Led Property Transfer: An Analysis of Two Cases of Urban Renewal in Istanbul,” Urban Studies, 47/7 (2010): 1479-1499.

[2] Pérouse, “Kentsel dönüşüm…” See also Ayşe Buğra, “The Immoral Economy of Housing in Turkey,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 22/2 (1998): 303-317.

[3] İmre Azem, Ecumenopolis: City without Limits (Istanbul: Kibrit Films, 2012).

[4] Pérouse, “Kentsel dönüşüm…” 90.

[5] Osman Alacahan and Betül Duman, “Getto tartışmasına bi metropolden bakmak,” International Journal of Social Science, 5/2 (2012): 55-74. See also Ayşe Alican Şen and Bülent Şen “İstanbul'un öteki yüzü ve araftakiler: Suriçi İstanbul’da göç, yoksulluk ve göçmen mekanları,” Süleyman Demirel Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi 1/21 (2015), 31-58.

[6] Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (London: Polity Books, 2008).

[7] Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996).

[8] Tuna Kuyucu and Özlem Ünsal. “Neoliberal Kent Rejimiyle Mücadele: Başıbüyük ve Tarlabaşı’nda Kentsel Dönüşüm ve Direniş,” In İstanbul Nereye?: Küresel Kent, Kültür, Avrupa (Istanbul: Metis, 2011) 85-106.

[9] İsmail Beşikçi, Devletlerarası Sömürge Kürdistan (Paris: Institut Kurd de Paris, 1990), 130-133. For a detailed explanation of the history and political economy that led up to Kurdistan’s uneven development and practices of underdevelopment as governance, see chapter three in İsmail Beşikçi, Doğu Anadolu’nun Düzeni: Sosyo-Ekonomik ve Etnik Temeller (Ankara: E Yayınları, 1970).

[10] Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2008), 326.

Call for Papers for the Conference Conflict and living heritage in the Middle East: Researching the Politics of Cultural Heritage and Identities in Times of War and Displacement

10-11 May 2016, Sulaimani, Kurdistan, Iraq

Summary

Cultural heritage and identities, on the one hand, and armed conflicts and forced displacement, on the other, are central to events unfolding in several countries of the Middle East. Scholars are invited to consider how these issues inter-relate during an academic conference to be held on 10 and 11 May 2016 in Sulaimani (Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq). The event is organised jointly by the French Institute in the Near East (Ifpo) – a public institution of scholarly research in the field of humanities and social sciences with a presence in several countries of the Middle East –, and the Social Sciences Department of the American University of Iraq – a not-for-profit liberal arts institution of higher education located in Sulaimani. As a follow-up to the conference, Ifpo together with local academic partners will organise two research workshops in autumn 2016 in Iraq. Woking languages for these events are French, English, Arabic and Kurdish. The conference and workshops aim to start a conversation between local and international scholars in view of refining theoretical, conceptual and methodological tools and approaches for analysing conflict and living heritage in the region, and to foster collaboration between scholars and academic institutions. The project is supported by the French Embassy in Baghdad and the Institut français in Paris.

Overview

Cultural heritage is central to the wars currently being waged in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen. The international media and organisations, together with governments and heritage professionals – including academics – have focused their attention mostly on damages to archaeological property or sites and artefacts with a highly emblematic global value, at times framed as 'universal.' The local meaning of such heritage is generally disregarded, and so are other aspects of affected populations' living heritage understood here as that which gives them a sense of collective identities. Yet local knowledge and know-hows, popular arts, crafts and traditions, religious beliefs and rituals, language and oral expressions, together with religious and vernacular architecture are all forms of heritage that suffer in the on-going wars. In many instances, this living heritage is deliberately targeted by parties striving to perform cultural cleansing. What then happens to living heritage and collective identities in areas affected by war and under new political authorities? What about the heritage and identities of the millions who have been displaced as a result of the recent conflicts in the region? More generally, what can an examination and conceptualisation of the practices and discourses of local actors reveal about the nexus between cultural heritage, identities, armed conflicts and population displacement in the Middle East yesterday and today? The proposed topic calls for considering on-going and recent situations together with more ancient ones such as – but not limited to – the Armenian, Kurdish, Palestinian, or Lebanese cases. It also begs for a comparative perspective between these case and others beyond the region.

The French Institute in the Near East (Ifpo) and the American University of Iraq propose to address these questions during a multidisciplinary academic conference to be held on 10 and 11 May 2016 in Sulaimani, Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq.

The following themes will form the core of the discussions:

Theme 1: Heritage and Conflict

In conflict situations, cultural heritage tends to become a contested area where relations of domination and violence are expressed, and where competing groups strive to assert legitimacy. This is manifested, inter alia, through unequal control over space (within urban areas, or on emblematic sites and monuments), and the often brutal removal of cultural attributes or markers attached to collective identities (regional, ethnic, religious, gendered, etc.). One central issue is how civilian populations, on the one hand, and political and military actors, on the other, engage with various forms of living heritage during and immediately after conflict. Discourses, representations, and practices have to be considered to understand the role of heritage as a vehicle for violence between groups, or conversely as a medium to de-escalate conflict and reach comprise.

Theme 2: Heritage and Displacement

More often than not, people displaced by conflict experience (usually in gendered ways) violence, a break up of social ties, and a radical separation from their places of origin. Such situations can also brutally severe people's bonds with their tangible and intangible heritage, particularly when such heritage is targeted by warring parties. The interrelation between heritage and displacement opens up questions as regards the loss of identity reference points, the transformation and redefinition of heritage in exile, and the role heritage plays in the (re)construction of collective memory and cultural identity among refugees. Such issues have to be examined in different contexts and time-frames: in transient or liminal places (such as refugee camps, border or transit areas), or states (such as that of refugeeness), and when exile endures near or far from the homeland. An important question to be addressed is how experiences of exile become incorporated into new heritage discourses that serve as bases for collective memories and identities.

Conference Follow-up

A selection of papers presented at the conference will be submitted for publication to peer-reviewed social science journals.

The conference will be followed by two research workshops organised in autumn 2016 in Iraq as partnerships between Ifpo and local academic institutions. The three-day closed workshops will each bring together about fifteen participants, a least twelve of them Iraqi. Participants will present and discuss their on-going or planned research or writing projects (these can include research papers, articles, or conference presentations). Group discussions will aim at refining theoretical and methodological approaches (including methods of data gathering), identifying possible synergies between scholars and institutions, and developing research and teaching partnerships around relevant themes. Each workshop will end with a public event open in priority to other scholars, the media and civil society organisations.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions for papers to be presented at the conference have to be sent exclusively to the following address: patrimoinesvivants@gmail.com.

Deadline for receiving submissions is 31 March 2016.

Submissions can be received in French, English, Arabic or Kurdish.

They must be submitted as one single PDF file (other formats will not be considered). 

They must include:

An abstract of the proposed paper not exceeding 500 words (one page, single spaced) and comprising of: a title, a clear research question, the disciplinary approach used, the main elements of the proposed demonstration, details of the documentary corpus and/or methodology used, and indications of the main theoretical and empirical references.

The prospective presenter’s short bio (maximum 500 words over one single page) including: his/her main research projects and publications relevant to the conference, details of institutional affiliation, and contacts (email, phone, Skype name, postal address).  

The organising committee will select about thirty submissions on the basis of their academic qualities. Special attention will be given to submissions focusing on Iraqi case-studies past and present.

Organising Committee

Dr Elizabeth Campbell, Assistant Professor, American Univerity of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS).
Dr Géraldine Chatelard, Associate Researcher, Ifpo, Amman.
Dr Boris James, Research Fellow and Site Manager, Ifpo, Erbil.
Dr Hassan Nadhem, Co-Chairholder of the UNESCO Chair for the Development of Interreligious Dialogue Studies in the Islamic World, University of Kufa, Najaf.

Practical Information

The organising committee will get back to prospective presenters with an answer no later than 10 April 2016.

The organisers will cover selected presenters’ transportation to Sulaimani together with meals, accommodation and local transportation in Sulaimani for the duration of the conference. No other expense will be covered, and no per diem or other financial compensation will be provided in cash or otherwise.

Attachements in various languages

Unfolding Middle Eastern Landscapes
Changing Forms, Evolving Tools, Transforming Meanings
Beirut, 31 May-2 June 2016

This conference aims to bring together landscape academics and professionals to reflect on the discourse of landscape in the Middle East. The organizers hope that speakers, contributors and participants will contribute to the environmental and cultural specificities shaping the emerging profession of landscape architecture in the Middle East. The conference is jointly organized by the newly established Lebanese Landscape Association (LELA) and the American University of Beirut and sponsored by the International Federation of Landscape Architecture (IFLA), with the support of the Ministry of Agriculture, Lebanon.

Landscape is a word with multiple meanings, an idea that is complex, in part nature and in part culture. The layered meanings and complexity was addressed by definition of landscape by the European Landscape Convention as “an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors.” Nevertheless, the visual meaning, landscape as scenery, dominates the common understanding of the word universally and in the Middle East. Introduced during colonial restructuring of traditional cities in the early twentieth century, the word landscape continues to be perceived in terms of city parks, green boulevards and spacious roundabouts. This narrow interpretation is problematic not only because it precludes the layered meaning of the English word and the overlap with nature, region and country, but also because it limits the professional scope. Nor is there a sufficient body of critical research into the regional landscape history, traditional landscape practices and indigenous management to complement the prevailing understanding of landscape in the Middle East.

The conference organizers are calling for abstracts that demonstrate a range of professional and academic approaches to landscape design and planning in the Middle East at the local and the regional scales. Contributions can follow one of six broad themes (download Conference document for details)

Deadline for abstract submission: 30 March 2016
Early Registration (reduced fees): 15 April 2016
Registration (full fees): 28 April 2016
Notification of Acceptance: 30 April 2016

Ouarzazate is a beautiful town in south-central Morocco, well worth visiting. It is an important holiday destination and has been nicknamed the "door of the desert." It is also known as a famed location for international filmmaking, where films such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Mummy (1999), Gladiator (2000), and Kingdom of Heaven (2005) were shot, as was part of the television series Game of Thrones. That is not all what Ouarzazate has to offer as its name has recently been associated with a solar mega-project that is supposedly going to end Morocco's dependency on energy imports, provide electricity to more than a million Moroccans, and put the country on a “green path.”

If we were to believe the makhzen's (a term that refers to the king and the ruling elite around him) narrative, recycled without nuance or critical reflection by most media outlets in the region and in the West, the project is very good news and a big step toward reducing carbon emissions and tackling climate change. However, there is space for scepticism. One recent example of such deceptive talking points was the official celebratory announcements of a "historic" agreement at the COP21 in Paris.

My recent visit to Ouarzazate has prompted me to deconstruct the dominant narrative around this project. In particular, to scratch beneath the surface of the language of "cleanliness," "shininess," and "carbon emission cuts" in order to observe and scrutinize the materiality of solar energy. This analysis examines the project through the lens of the creation of a new commodity chain, revealing its effects as no different from the destructive mining activities taking place in southern Morocco. As Timothy Mitchell argues, analyzing this materiality of such a project can help us trace the kinds of economic and political arrangements that particular forms of energy engender or hinder (Timothy Mitchell 2011).

Last year, I wrote a critique and an assessment of the Desertec solar project, advancing arguments for why it failed and why it was misguided from the start. A similar approach is necessary to understand the political and socio-environmental implications of what is currently being dubbed the largest solar plant in the world. Actually, most of the arguments made in the Desertec piece still stand. The purpose here is not to be gratuitously harsh or cynical, but to raise a few important questions and points in order to contribute an alternative perspective to the hype surrounding existing media coverage.

What seems to unite all the reports and articles written about the solar plant is a deeply erroneous assumption that any move toward renewable energy is to be welcomed. And that any shift from fossil fuels, regardless of how it is carried out, will help us to avert climate chaos. One needs to say it clearly from the start: the climate crisis we are currently facing is not attributable to fossil fuels per se, but rather to their unsustainable and destructive use in order to fuel the capitalist machine. In other words, capitalism is the culprit, and if we are serious in our endeavors to tackle the climate crisis (only one facet of the multi-dimensional crisis of capitalism), we cannot elude questions of radically changing our ways of producing and distributing things, our consumption patterns and fundamental issues of equity and justice. It follows from this that a mere shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, while remaining in the capitalist framework of commodifying and privatizing nature for the profits of the few, will not solve the problem. In fact, if we continue down this path we will only end up exacerbating, or creating another set of problems, around issues of ownership of land and natural resources.

Green Grabbing and the Economy of Repair

The fact that the concentrated solar power (CSP) project in Ouarzazate involves the acquisition of 3000 hectares of communally owned land to produce energy, some of which will be exported to Europe, lends itself to the notion of "green grabbing" as a frame of analysis (Rignall 2012). Green grabbing is defined as the appropriation of land and resources for purportedly environmental ends. It implies the transfer of ownership, use rights and control over resources that were once publicly or privately owned –or not even the subject of ownership– from the poor (or everyone including the poor) into the hands of the powerful. This appropriation is central to the dual, related processes of accumulation and dispossession (Fairhead 2012).

Things green have grown to become part of big business and an integral part of the mainstream growth economy. Part of this transformation is associated with the "neoliberal turn" and the neoliberalization of environmental arenas of governance, as well as the privatization and commoditization of nature (Castree 2008). Green grabs primarily reflect what Fairhead et al. called "the economy of repair." Morocco's solar plan is part of this economy that "has been smuggled in within the rubric of sustainability, but its logic is clear: that unsustainable use 'here' can be repaired by sustainable practices 'there,' with one nature subordinated to the other." (Fairhead 2012) This is clear in the government's discourse of promoting  a global green agenda by harnessing national resources. However, this comes with the support of another environmental narrative that labels the lands of the rural south as marginal and underutilized, and therefore available for investing in green energy (Nalepa and Bauer 2012). This productivist creation of marginality and degradation has a long history that goes back to French colonial times. It was then that degradation narratives were constructed to justify both outright expropriation of land and the establishment of institutional arrangements based on the premise that extensive pastoralism was unproductive at best, and destructive at worst. (See Rignall 2012 and Diana Davis' book "Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa").

These narratives continue to shape the political economy of Morocco's rangelands. They also contribute toward driving small herd owners out of the sector and concentrating wealth in a few hands, along with the commoditization of the livestock market and chronic droughts. That is exactly what happened with the plateau selected for the plant in Ouarzazate, as the discursive framework rendered it "marginal" and open to new "green" market uses: the production of solar power in this case at the expense of an alternative land use - pastoralism - that is deemed unproductive by the decision-makers. This is evident in the land sale that was carried out at a very low price.

The Modalities of Land Appropriation

It is important to first begin with a chronological review of the land acquisition and community dialogue (see in detail in Rignall 2012). The Office National de l'Electricité (ONE) first visited the site outside of Ouarzazate in 2007. This resulted in the announcement of the solar plan in the fall of 2009. The collective land representatives, three from the ethnic community Aït Oukrour, gave their formal approval for the sale in January 2010. The sale was completed in early October 2010, just prior to the king's visit later that month to officially kick-off the Ouarzazate project (MASEN 2011: 18, 20).

Residents of the surrounding communities were never informed of the process of site selection and the terms of the sale has no mandated procedure for consulting with them. This is due to the existence of various deceptive laws with colonial origins that have functioned to concentrate collective land ownership within the hands of an individual land representative, who tends to be under the influence of powerful regional nobles. As such, ordinary people were unaware of what was taking place when the topographer arrived. As a result, they began to ask questions, which largely went unanswered.

The first public meeting on the solar installation took place in November 2010, a month after the king's announcement of the project in Ouarzazate. The meeting consisted of a formal presentation of the environmental impact study in Ouarzazate's most luxurious five-star hotel. Attendees included government officials, NGO representatives, village development associations, and representatives of the local population. Residents themselves, however, were excluded from voicing their opinions. Such meetings masquerading as a "consultation with the people" were only designed to inform the local communities about a fait accompli rather than seeking their approval (Rignall 2012).

The sale price of the collective land to the state was at one Moroccan dirham per square meter (about 10 cents, based on the "marginality" and "non-productivity" of the land). This is in comparison to the price of ten to twelve Moroccan dirhams per square meter, the price at which collective land in Ouarzazate was being rent or sold. People were not happy with this sale and thought the price was very low. One noted that "the project people talk about this as a desert that is not used, but to the people here it is not desert, it is a pasture. It is their territory and their future is in the land. When you take my land. You take my oxygen." (quote adopted from Rignall 2012).

Land was increasing in value throughout the region, a result of speculation and the growing demand for land by agri-business and commercial livestock markets. The land, sold at a cheap one Moroccan dirham per square meter was clearly worth a lot more. As if things were not bad enough, the duped local population were surprised to find out that the money from the sale was not going to be handed to them, but that it would be deposited into the tribe's account at the Ministry of Interior. Additionally, the money would be used to finance development projects for the whole area. They discovered that their land sale was not a sale at all: it was simply a transfer of funds from one government agency to another.

The makhzen was not content in simply acquiring the land to the benefit of the Moroccan state (dividing lines are often blurred between the state and the royal family's holdings). But in addition, it sold it to the Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy (MASEN), a private company with public funds created specifically in October 2010 in order to carry out Morocco's solar plans. These privatizations in the renewable energy sector are not new as of 2005, when a royal holding company called Nareva was created specifically to monopolize markets in the energy and environment sectors and ended up taking the lion's share in wind energy production in the country (Jawad. M 2012).

In essence, the law was bent in order to sell the land to a private entity by way of state agencies. Through this process, the government had effectively privatized and confiscated historical popular sovereignty over land and transformed the people into mere recipients of development; development they are literally paying for, provided it would one day materialize, of course.

This wholesale alienation of land for green credentials from existing claimants reflects the neoliberal restructuring of human-ecological interactions and agrarian socio-economic relations, rights, and authority. It also constitutes one aspect of "accumulation by dispossession," which is the enclosure of public assets by private interests for profit, resulting in greater social inequity (Fairhead et al. 2012).

However, the state of affairs did not go unchallenged. Encouraged by the dynamic of the 20 February Movement for radical change that emerged at the same time as the Arab Uprisings during 2011, people resisted in various ways (complaints, sit-ins, letters...). They mobilized around long-standing grievances about land, water, and the rights to benefit from economically profitable projects, such as the solar one and the mines that dotted the south of the country.

Privatizing Solar Energy: The Role of International Financial Institutions (IFIs)

About nine billion US dollars has been invested in the Noor solar power complex in Ouarzazate, much of it being private capital from international institutions such as the European Investment Bank, World Bank, African Bank of Development, l'Agence Française de Développement, KfWBankengruppe, and backed by Moroccan government guarantees (in case MASEN cannot repay).

There is no surprise regarding the international financial institutions' (IFIs) strong support for this high-cost and capital-intensive project, as Morocco boasts one of the most neoliberal(ized) economies in the region. It is extremely open to foreign capital at the expense of labor rights, and very advanced in its ambition to be fully integrated into the global marketplace (in a subordinate position, that is). In fact, Morocco was the first country in the North African region to sign a structural adjustment package (SAP) with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1983. As is well documented, SAPs are responsible for wreaking economic and social havoc across the global south.

The aforementioned loans are part and parcel of the strategy of the World Bank and other IFIs for the country where they continue to reinforce and justify the core neoliberal orientation and the deepening of pro-market policies. The World Bank has a major funding program in Morocco that covers three specific areas connected to the development of Morocco’s “green” capitalism. The first of these areas is support for the government’s 2008 Plan Maroc Vert (Green Morocco Plan, PMV), which sets out the country’s agricultural plan for the period between 2008–2020. The PMV aims to quintuple the value of export-oriented crops by shifting land away from staple cereal crops, promoting private investment in agriculture, and removing restrictions that stand in the way of private property rights. The second major area of World Bank funding to Morocco is in support of the country's National Initiative for Human Development (INDH), which has, according to some Moroccan activists and scholars, created an artificial and non-independent civil society that helps to deepen the marketization and privatisation of the society (Hanieh 2014). The solar energy project figures in the World Bank's third focus, encompassing a range of policy developments and project-specific loans. The World Bank’s disbursement levels to Morocco reached record levels in 2011 and 2012, with a major emphasis of these loans placed on promoting the use of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) within key sectors.

As has been well documented, PPPs are only a euphemism to outright privatizations, while providing public funds and guarantees. It is essentially about privatizing profits and nationalizing the losses. The Noor-Ouarzazate complex is being built, and will be operated, as a PPP with private partner, ACWA Power International, a Saudi Arabian company. It is strange that such an arrangement has the "public" name on it when the public has no control or shares in the project. This is an entirely private venture when it comes to ownership and management and it seems that the makhzen is transferring public funds to a private company and giving guarantees to pay MASEN loans in case the latter cannot pay, at the risk of further indebting the country and leading it to bankruptcy.

The private partner is responsible for building the infrastructure, the production of energy, and its sale to the Office National de l’Électricité (ONE), with an engagement from the latter to purchase the electricity for a period of twenty to thirty years. PPPs have been extremely costly for the Moroccans, including in the energy sector, where private companies (producing more than fifty percent of electricity in the country) have benefited from generous contracts with ONE since the 1990s. Popular discontent with such companies and arrangements has surfaced recently, October 2015, for example, in huge mobilizations against the company Amendis in northern Morocco against high electricity bills. It seems that production of energy from the sun will not be different and will be controlled by multinationals only interested in making huge profits at the expense of sovereignty and a decent life for Moroccans.

Debts and the Financialization of Nature

The cost of producing energy with CSP is very high. It is at 1.62 Moroccan dirhams for the kWh (kilowatt-hour), compared to around 0.8 Moroccan dirham for photovoltaic (PV) energy. MASEN will be buying the energy from the ACWA consortium at a fixed-price of 1.62 Moroccan dirhams, and selling it at an inferior grid price to ONE, operating therefore at a loss. According to MASEN's president Mustapha Bakkoury (also former general secretary of one of the most royalist political parties, Parti authenticité et modernité, PAM), they will be operating at a loss for at least the next decade until the gap between the purchasing and sale price disappears due to inflation (note this is only speculation). To cover this loss for the next five years, they obtained a World Bank loan of 200 million dollars, deepening the dependence upon multilateral lending and foreign assistance. Several articles reported the existence of some undisclosed energy subsidies from King Mohammed VI in order to prevent the cost from being transferred to energy consumers. One article by the World Bank estimated these subsidies at 31 million dollars per year. But there is a certain ambiguity as to why these funds are needed if ONE is buying at the grid price from MASEN.

The Moroccan monarchy has framed its renewable energy plan as not only an economic development initiative, but also as a potentially export-oriented policy that would further liberalize its economy. There are also expectations that this will draw the country closer to the European Union (EU) by helping increase the percentage of renewables in the EU's energy mix. It is no coincidence that “the Moroccan government designed a new energy strategy in 2009 mostly aligned with the EU’s energy trinity of energy security, competitiveness and environmental sustainability" (Beard 2013). Morocco has joined a number of global and regional renewable energy institutions and programs, including the International Renewable Energy Agency and the Solar Plan for the Mediterranean. It has also stated its interest in joining the MENA region Desertec project, and registered its renewable energy project under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. CDM is part of what is called carbon trading and is one of the false solutions proposed to tackle climate change. CDMs were created to allow wealthier countries classified as "industrialized" to engage in emissions reductions initiatives in poor and middle-income countries, as a way of eliding direct emissions reductions. This mechanism, along with others such as REDD (Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) and different offsets participate in putting a price on nature, commodifying it under the rubric of "green capitalism". McAfee (1999) described this process as an attempt to sell nature in order to save it.

At this moment, it is not clear how much the project will earn from CDM, but one must pay attention to how this "green" trading relies on and reproduces the conventional economic notion of differential opportunity costs. In other words, that contributions to the improvement of the global environment should be sought where this is cheapest. Yet, as McAfee (2011) points out, this crucially depends upon and reinforces inequalities between poorer and wealthier landholders, between urban and rural areas, and between the global South and North.

The idea that Morocco is taking out billions of dollars in loans to produce energy, some of which will be exported to Europe when the economic viability of the initiative is hardly assured, raises questions about externalizing the risk of Europe's renewable energy strategy to Morocco and other struggling economies around the region. It ignores entirely what has come to be called "climate debt" or "ecological debt" that is owed by the industrialised North to countries of the Global South, given the historical responsibility of the West in causing climate change. Instead, debt is only legitimate in the other way and plays a role of imperialist control and subordination. As David Harvey observes, decades of easy loans and increasing indebtedness are often quickly followed by a political economy of dispossession.

Is the Project Really Green? The Question of Water Usage

The technology chosen for the Ouarzazate solar plant is the concentrated thermal solar power (CSP) with parabolic troughs. This technology concentrates radiation within mirrors and onto a focal spot where an oily liquid is heated. The collected heat produces steam, which is then converted into electricity through a turbine generator.

The Environmental and Social Impact Assessment conducted by MASEN in 2011 concluded that the most impactful solution for the environmental and societal areas studied is the CSP technology with parabolic troughs. It seems that the thermal storage capability of this option took precedence over other considerations regarding this technology. This capability allows for the adaptation of power generation closer to demand peaks, i.e. in late afternoon. The concept is simple: use energy to heat a product (e.g. molten salts) during the day, and then recover the heat energy to continue to operate the generators after sunset.

The biggest issue with this technology is the extensive use of water that comes with the wet cooling stage. Unlike photovoltaic (PV) technology, CSP needs cooling. This is done either by air cooled condensers (dry cooling) or high water-consumption (wet cooling). Phase I of the project will be using the wet cooling option and is estimated to consume from two to three million cubed meters of water annually (Kouz 2011). Water consumption will be much less in the case of a dry cooling (planned for phase II): between 0.73 and 0.88 million cubed meters. PV technologies require water only for cleaning solar panels. They consume about 200 times less water than CSP technology with wet cooling and forty times less water than CSP with dry cooling.

One questions the rationality of such a choice in a semi-arid region like Morocco that suffers from an acute water stress and is slated to lose its water resources by 2040. Given this situation, which has been exacerbated by an ongoing severe drought (being tackled by a massive and expensive  government drought recovery plan), the question that begs to be asked: where are they going to get the water from and is this use of water sustainable in the mid to long-run? The answer is that the plant is already using the water from a nearby dam called Al Mansour Addahabi. According to authorities, they will be using less than one percent of the average dam capacity.

The water inputs to the dam vary between fifty-four and 1300 million cubed meters, with an average of 384 million cubed meters (based on the last twenty-five years). This water is usually used for irrigation at a level of 180 million cubed meters per year, drinking water at four million cubed meters per year, while evaporation consumes around sixty million cubed meters per year.

Even if the solar plant is only using one percent of the average dam capacity, the water consumption is still significant and can become a thorny problem at times of extreme drought when the dam contains only fifty-four million cubed meter. At such times, the dam waters will not be sufficient to cover the needs of irrigation and drinking water,  making the water usage for the solar plant deeply problematic and contentious. This issue is even more important when the water needs in Ouarzazate are taken into consideration, which will reach 840 million cubed meters by 2020, of which 808 will be allocated to agriculture and thirty-two for the provision of drinking water.

During the investigation of this water issue, no document mentioning water sale to or purchase by MASEN was uncovered. Regardless, in an arid region like Ouarzazate, this appropriation of water for a supposedly green agenda constitutes another green grab, which will play into and intensify ongoing agrarian dynamics and livelihood struggles in the region.

Contradictions in Morocco's "Sustainable" Development Model

Morocco will host the climate talks (COP22) this year in November and its international reputation rests on its renewable energy plan. For this purpose, the Ouarzazate solar complex will be used as a flagship project to embellish the "green" facade of the makhzen and enhance its international standing by attracting more political and strategic rents at the expense of democratic and radical change.

However, scratching slightly under the surface will allow us to see through this deceptive narrative. If the Moroccan state was really serious about its green credentials, why is it then building a coal-fired power plant at the same time, which represents an ecocide in-waiting for the already-polluted town of Safi? Why is it also ignoring the devastating environmental and social effects of the mining industry in the country? One notable example is the long-standing community struggle in Imider (140 kilometres east of Ouarzazate) against the royal holding silver mine (Africa's most productive silver mine), which is polluting their environment, grabbing their water, and pillaging their wealth.

Conclusion

Despite the allure of the solar mega-project, it is incumbent upon the radical left and the environmental/climate justice movement to critically approach the makhzen's propaganda and the emergent dominant global discourse around environmental governance to which it is linked.  Activists must ask the relevant-as-ever questions that will shift our focus to the materiality of solar energy: who owns what? Who does what?  Who gets what? Who wins and who loses? And whose collective, public good is being served? Answering these questions through a distributive justice lens, while taking account the colonial and neo-colonial legacies, and issues of race, class, and gender will reveal the numerous parallels between the CSP plant and the extractive industries that are more obviously destructive. Like these industries, the CSP problematically occupies space, denying people sovereignty over the land, and robbing them of resources in order to concentrate the value created in the hands of the predatory makhzen circles and private companies, both Moroccan and non-Moroccan.

In order to design and implement just and truly green projects, we need to recapture nature from the clutches of market mechanisms and recast the debate around issues of justice, accountability, and the collective good away from market logics that compartmentalize, commoditize and privatize our livelihoods and nature. At the center of this are meaningful forms of local engagement and proper consultations where communities and populations are free to give or deny their prior and informed consent.

Bibliography

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Beard. Jennifer. 2013 Green Rentier State: A Case Study of the Renewable Energy Sector in Morocco.

Castree. N. 2008 Neoliberalising nature I and II: the logics of de- and re-regulation. Environment and Planning A, 40(1), 131–73.

Davis, Diana K. 2005 Indigenous Knowledge and the Desertification Debate: Problematising Expert Knowledge in North Africa. Geoforum 36:509-524.
-2007 Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press.

Fairhead, James, Melissa Leach, and Ian Scoones. 2012 Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature? Journal of Peasant Studies 39(2):237-261.

Hanieh. Adam. 2014 Shifting Priorities or Business as Usual? Continuity and Change in the post-2011: IMF and World Bank Engagement with Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt. Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 42:1, 119-134.

Harvey, David. 2005 A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jawad. M. 2012 Projets de développement durable au Maroc : Protéger l’environnement ou protéger les profits ?  

Kouz, Khadija, Hine Cherkaoui Dekkaki, Sarah Cherel, Bertrand Maljournal, and Christine Leger. 2011 Etude d’Impact Environnementale et Sociale Cadre du Projet de Complexe Solaire d'Ouarzazate. Rabat: MASEN.

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-2011 Selling nature to finance development? The contradictory logic of "global" environmental-services markets. Paper presented at the conference on "Nature^TM Inc? Questioning the Market Panacea in Environmental Policy and Conservation", Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, 30 June–2 July 2011.

Mitchell, Timothy. 2012 Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso.

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Kishwar Rizvi, The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

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

Kishwar Rizvi (KR): The idea for this book emerged through my research travels in Europe and the Middle East, where I would encounter monumental mosques that looked historical in design but were built in the past thirty years. I wondered why a community of immigrant Turks in Germany, for example, chose to worship in a neo-Ottoman style mosque that appeared anachronistic and out of place (see Figure One); similarly, why were mosques in Dubai copying the Mamluk architecture of Cairo (see Figure Two)? I wanted to better understand the motivations behind these stylistic choices in which reference was being made to particular moments in Islamic history. I wanted to know what the political and ideological agendas of the states sponsoring these buildings, namely, the government of Turkey in the case of the German mosques and that of the UAE in the case of Dubai, might be.

[Figure One: Türk Şehitlik Mosque, Berlin, Hassa Mimarlik, architects. Image via the author.]

I am an architectural historian and an architect. My focus has been on religious architecture in the early modern Islamic empires, as well as on issues of nationalism and politics in the modern Middle East. I have been interested in the manner in which the past is evoked as a source of inspiration and legitimacy, whether in Safavid Iran of the sixteenth century or in the Turkish Republic of the twentieth. Thus, when I was awarded a Carnegie Foundation Scholars Award in 2009, I wanted to understand the role played by history in the service of contemporary politics, and how it was manifested through the construction of monumental state mosques.

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

KR: The book focuses on the intersection between architecture and historical memory in the contemporary Middle East. I study state-sponsored mosques to understand the political and ideological vision of four countries in particular, namely, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. These countries represent, in many ways, divergent and complementary visions of state and society in the contemporary Middle East. I suggest that transnational mosques (defined as buildings built through government sponsorship both in the home country and abroad) provide insights into the diverse practices and beliefs of modern Islam and the nature of devotion in the twenty-first century. Their patronage, design, and production serve as important resources for understanding the role of architecture in creating public space as well as disseminating religious ideology.

The Transnational Mosque is based on extensive fieldwork, photo-documentation, and interviews with architects. Together they provide insights on several issues, foremost among them the centrality of history in the discourse on politics and Islam today; the transnational allegiances that divide and unite the Middle East and the world; and the place of architecture and the built environment in the performance of nationhood. This book builds on previous surveys of modern mosque architecture through theoretically focused and historically grounded analyses that aim to shed light on the intersection of religion and politics, and the transnational connections that it brings about.

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

KR: I have written previously on nationalism and politics in the modern Middle East, with a focus on the Islamic Republic of Iran. I am interested in populist forms of religious authority and their co-option by nationalist agendas. In an earlier essay on the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini, for example, I discuss the conflation of historicist shrine architecture with the symbolism of a state monument. I have also researched early modern (sixteenth-seventeenth century) architecture of Safavid Iran, in which I consider the social, historical, and urban dimensions of architecture. Then, as now, history and religion were motivating factors in imperial representation. Thus the new book builds upon my earlier work, while paying attention to subjects and sites that are new to me—namely, contemporary mosques and their transnational connections.

Religion has often been omitted from the discourse on art and architecture of the Middle East, as elsewhere, even though it is a central factor in contemporary politics and serves to both distinguish and unite communities of belief across the world. Thus The Transnational Mosque uses religious identity as a starting point to understand how countries in the Middle East construct, and export, their national image through the patronage of state mosques. I also situate these buildings within the context of architectural history and theory, positing that the roots of historicism lie in the postmodern movement, which sought to legitimize classicism as an antidote to modernism, looking at historical form for design inspiration and, often, direct imitation.

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

KR: The book was written with a broad audience in mind, from architectural historians to students and scholars of the Middle East, from architects and practitioners to those interested in urbanism and cultural studies. I hope that the book is visually rich and accessible, challenging readers’ preconceptions about political allegiances in the Islamic world, and the mutability of identity in the contemporary Middle East.

[Figure Two: Jumeirah Mosque, Dubai, Hegazy Engineering Consultants, architects. Image via the author.]

I have had the opportunity to share my work with diverse academic and design communities in the US and the Middle East, and it has been rewarding to see how people engage with the material based on their own geographical and political locations. I hope the book initiates conversations on these state monuments and their role in creating (or negating) public discourse; their centrality in national and diplomatic agendas; and their place in contemporary design practice.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

KR: A new project that extends the findings of The Transnational Mosque is on the relationship between state mosques and international museums, focusing on Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Both countries have invested a great deal of financial capital in the construction of monumental religious and cultural institutions; however, they are often viewed as distinct and unrelated. In my study, I consider the “soft power” of the museums and mosques in the construction of national identities in the Gulf as two sides of the same coin, catering to citizens as well as a global community.

Excerpt from The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East

Transnational mosques provide insights into the diverse practices and beliefs of modern Islam and the nature of devotion in the twenty-first century. Their patronage, design, and production serve as important resources for understanding the role of architecture in creating public space as well as disseminating religious ideology. The networks within which contemporary mosques exist are more complex than ever before and need to be studied within their political and historical contexts. Their symbolic meanings and formal relationships, however unique and specific to the Muslim context, also connect them to modern architecture from other religious traditions. Contemporary mosques thus mark the underlying connections, sometimes harmonious and sometimes in conflict, within the modern Middle East in particular, but also the world at large.

In the twentieth century, architectural production in the Middle East, as elsewhere in the developing world, was predicated on emulation and engagement with Western forms of modernism, in which emphasis was laid on projects that furthered the image of statehood, such as educational and governmental buildings. Seen as derivative of movements in Europe and the United States, this architecture was often considered by scholars to be neither indigenous nor international, belonging neither to Islamic cultural history nor to the history of global modernism. Even less attention has been paid to modern religious architecture, such as mosques, shrines, and community centers, which are dismissed as catering to popular taste and undeserving of intellectual engagement. It is necessary to question these presumptions by studying the nationalist roots of early twentieth-century architecture, as well as the impact of international modernism on the built environment of the Middle East.[1] It is also important to investigate the manner in which such institutions may be viewed as forms of political and social agency.

I assert the heterogeneity of Muslim identity by focusing on distinct mosques and by revealing the complex negotiations that take place within and between nations and communities of belief. Recent scholarship has laid important groundwork for understanding the networks through which these negotiations are implemented.[2] Architectural practice at the turn of the twenty-first century, too, is one of interconnections, predicated on the itinerancy of architects and the global networks of corporate construction firms. Identities and nationalities can provide access, as is the case of the young Lebanese-American-French architect Michel Abboud, whose practice is located in New York, Beirut, and Mexico City and who was commissioned in 2010 to design the Park 51 Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque in lower Manhattan.[3] Similarly, the London-based Halcrow Group oversaw the construction of the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi. The ability for individuals as well as corporations to move beyond geographic borders and even religious ones speaks to the transnational nature of contemporary architectural culture and the mobility provided by modern technology.

The regional interconnectedness of modern architecture in the Middle East is a subject that has not received the attention it deserves. Most studies focus either on a specific nation or generalize the motivations for all Muslim communities. The study of modern mosques often falls into the latter category and, despite attempts at exhibiting diversity, results in essentialist readings of a pan-Islamic identity. The first comprehensive examination of modern mosques was published in 1997 and divides the subject into categories such as governmental and individual patronage, community and commercial institutions, and sites in Europe and the United States. One of the categories relevant to this study is that of the state mosque, which the authors, Renata Holod and Hassan Uddin Khan, define as “a building initiated by the central government and paid for by public funds. It is inevitably conceptualized by a committee with an insistence upon a clearly recognizable image, that is to say explicit in terms of regional, modernist and Islamic references.”[4] This book builds on the foundations laid by that earlier scholarship by focusing on transnational mosques built within and beyond state borders.

In the past forty years, religious identity has come to play an increasingly central role in public discourse. This is evident in the Islamic Republics of Iran and Pakistan, but also throughout the Middle East and South Asia, where Islam is a galvanizing form of sociopolitical expression. New patrons promoting religious ideology as a source of political agency have sponsored wholesale reinterpretations of traditional building types. Similarly, greater emphasis has been laid on institutions that represent and augment Islam, such as mosques, madrasas, and community centers. Contemporary mosques employ tradition as a starting point for their design, but their styles move beyond the simple repetition of form. Not only are older motifs reinterpreted, but the very functions of a mosque are altered in order to respond to social change. A cogent example is the Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara (Figure Three), a massive structure with a parking garage and shopping mall in its lower levels, which looks strikingly like Ottoman mosques built in previous centuries. However, here the patron was not a sultan but the populist Welfare Party (Refah Partisi), with its appeal to a broad segment of Turkish society.

[Figure Three: Kocatepe Mosque, Ankara, Tayla and Uluengin, architects. Image via the author.]

Architecture emerges as the repository of historical consciousness, serving as it does to both monumentalize belief and situate it within particular geographic and ideological sites. Although a building like the Kocatepe Mosque may have a singular physical location, it will arguably reference places far removed from Ankara and moments remarkably distant from its date of construction. This mobility marks contemporary architectural practice and subverts ideas of regionalism and nationalist styles that have pervaded the discourse on architecture in the twentieth century. Mosque architecture, in particular, also calls into question the common representation of Islam as a monolithic identity, shared across centuries and continents. Instead, examples of contemporary mosques require contextualization, even as they highlight the transregional and transhistorical trends that define architecture and religion today.

As current events in the Middle East and North Africa demonstrate, allegiances in the Islamic world are often based on the perception of shared histories of language, ethnicity, and religion. However, the term “Middle East,” while suggesting a category of affiliations, may better be understood as an umbrella under which diverse histories, politics, and religious identities are gathered. It is useful to think of this seeming territorial designation instead as a “geopolitical concept” or a “virtual space” that serves to unite shifting social and political realities. As Michael Ezekiel Gasper writes, “The Middle East belongs to a geographic imaginary that is in part built on the general alignment of contemporary geo-strategic power. Accordingly, it will inextricably accumulate new meaning until some major strategic realignment occurs and the geographical paradigms that have been in place for more than a century give way to something new.”[5] Despite the too-simple discourse of globalization as a boundaryless web of correlations, the reality of the early twenty-first century is that identities—such as “the Middle East” or “the Islamic world”—continue to dictate how people and their governments define themselves.

Architecture, particularly that of mosques, manifests territorial as well as ideological connections by referencing historical periods and building styles and by enabling the rituals of inhabitation that augment the practice of religion. It may be argued that among the most important issues connecting—and, unfortunately, sometimes dividing—the Middle East is religious identity. While this identity is constructed and disseminated through several national and subnational means, four nations represent important, and distinct visions, for the future of the larger Muslim community, and are taking steps to advancing that agenda. Thus Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates serve as the starting points of this study. Through close analyses of their nationalist projects and their patronage of transnational mosques, valuable insights may be gleaned into not only the region’s political geography, but also its architectural landscape. Through their patronage, the dynamic mobility of form and meaning is made manifest. Rather than suggesting any predetermined flow from one to another, the mosques studied here reveal the unexpected and complex interactions between these nations and global communities of belief.

NOTES

[1] Rizvi and Isenstadt, Modernism and the Middle East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008); Rizvi, “Religious Icon and National Symbol,” Muqarnas: Journal of Islamic Art and Architecture 20 (2003): 209-224.

[2] Cooke and Lawrence, Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip Hop (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

[3] The program has since been changed. The current proposal calls for condominiums and a museum of Islamic art, the latter to be designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel.

[4] Holod and Khan, Mosque and the Modern World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997); 63.

[5] Gasper, “There Is a Middle East,” in Is There a Middle East? The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept, edited by Michael E. Bonine, Abbas Amanat, and Michael Ezekiel Gasper (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); 240.

[Excerpted from Kishwar Rizvi, The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East, by permission of the author. © 2015 University of North Carolina Press. For more information, or to purchase this book, click here.] 

Caecilia Pieri, Bagdad. La construction d'une capitale moderne, 1914-1960. Beyrouth : Presses de l’Ifpo, 2015.

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

Caecilia Pieri (CP): Having seized an opportunity to go to Baghdad in June 2003,[1] I unexpectedly discovered an interesting modern vernacular landscape, which remains important to this day—in terms of quality and, still today, in terms of quantity. Instead of the black hole of information and of desolation with which the city’s name was associated due to the war(s) and sanctions, I saw a modern city which possessed a human shape, whose brickwork and concrete architecture revealed a civilian life, a subtle, rich and sophisticated sociability, and a thriving creativity. It was the contrary of the distorted military imagery overshadowing them over the last decades.

 
[Top: Villa Chadirji, built 1935-1936 by Badri Qadah, a Syrian architect who got his diplomas from the Ecole de
Génie Civil in 1928, then from the Institut d’urbanisme in 1930, both in Paris. Photo by Caecilia Pieri, 2012.
Bottom: Mamouniya School, Waziriya, Baghdad, built 1952. Architect: Hazim al-Tik (1927-2015). Photo
from student file by Haidar Lutfi, Sara Salih, Marwa Falih, Shimiran Taidi, Baghdad College of Engineering. ]

Upon returning from my first trip in 2003, I started seeking to document my first photographs. I immediately was confronted with the following fact: contemporary Baghdad was, as Pierre-Jean Luizard had already written at the time of the embargo, “almost absent from the field of publishing.” Concerning the built work, critical literature is especially devolved to the archaeological periods, and Islamic eras and cultures (Abbassids, Persian) as well as, to a lesser extent, the Ottoman era. There are few studies on the contemporary era, as the term is understood by historians. This book is the fruit of an intellectual curiosity born from the shock of my senses. I decided to dig deeper into the question in order to help make understandable the urban form and city life of a city too often perceived through either un-informed or deforming lenses—that is to say, of a too-little-known city. It is also the starting point of a militant way to construct this built ensemble as a modern valuable heritage and to raise public awareness about it, in Iraq and outside Iraq. I have traveled nineteen times to Baghdad between 2003 and 2013, each stay being rather demanding in terms of organization: precautions, discretion, security, for me and for people hosting me. It did not make the task easy to realize surveys, interviews, and researches.

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

CP: Baghdad’s evolution cannot be dissociated from Iraq’s specific political context. The capital’s evolution between 1914 and 1960, between urban development and national construction, echoes the dynamics of state-building and nation-building. The paradigms I studied are framed within the crossing of several perspectives. First, there is what belongs to the history of cities: morphological evolution, typology, topographical and functional singularity—among others, I have identified a paradigmatic Baghdadi “urban cottage” (in the Thirties) which is to Baghdad what the “three arches house” was to Beirut.

 
[Aerial view of Baghdad showing the regular “garden” city as planned after 1935, with detached or semi-detached
“urban cottages.” Karradat Maryam neighborhood (today: the Green Zone) Source: Land of the Two Rivers, 1957.]

My approach also includes urban anthropology. It is a history of individual and collective practices at various scales: house, neighborhood, and city. The backdrop to my analysis is a third perspective: the history of policies regarding the physical organization of the city as well as how they were perceived. Finally, there is an overlaying approach which is sensitive to cultural and artistic history, through the attention given to styles and decors, and the aesthetic and technical processes.

This book also largely tries to decode Iraqi historiography; this work is essential given how few primary sources there are, and extremely delicate due to the ideology that has prevailed for several decades. I found very few sources, often unreliable ones, such as official and academic publications rigged by a national discourse and representations: this constituted both an exciting and a perilous interpretative obstacle course. This book also exhumes precious primary archives gathered in Iraq and in Europe that have never been published before.

 
[Ahmad Mukhtar Ibrahim, the first Iraqi who graduated as an architect in Europe, showing his diploma,
a sanatorium for the Kurdistan region, where he was born (detail). Source: The News Chronicle,
1 July  1936. Archives, Sydney Jones Library, Liverpool.]

Finally, I am trying to roughly identify the technical modernization processes at play in Baghdad, while trying to understand the extent to which a real modernity (as a cultural condition) was setting in or not. My understanding of “real modernity” is the ultra-relative and thereby universal definition given by Gwendolyn Wright: what is modernity, if not dealing with the Other’s difference?

J. How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

CP: Most of the book proceeds from a PhD defended in 2010 at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; but I took the time to add historical documentation (most of it is unpublished or consists in reprints of old magazines, books, and maps) that was not in the dissertation. Previously, I had graduated long ago in History and Literature, and then I was a senior editor in the field of architecture and heritage for over twenty years. When I resumed my studies with my research on Baghdad, I put into practice the methodology and critical investigation I had been editing in the texts of my authors. But the book and the research are part of a wider scope. One of my main concerns is to be an activist in the field of urban heritage. Working on Baghdad gave me a solid knowledge, and added to my experience as an editor, then as the Head of the Urban Observatory (four years, French Institute of the Near-East, based in Beirut, dealing with Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, the Palestinian Territories, and Jordan). Finally, I am part of the steering committee of UNESCO-MUAMA-World Heritage group (for the safeguarding of modern urban and architectural Arab heritage).

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

CP: Iraqis, first, of course, as most of them are aware of general ideas or specific details. However, because of the political and security situation for decades, few of them were able to create a link between on-site work and archival research after the 1970s. Having had the privilege to be able to do both, I hope to give some coherence to what was the “missing link” between pieces of information dispersed between Arabic and European sources, because these sources are geographically disseminated.

 
[Map of Baghdad in 1952, before any further masterplan. Source: Ahmad Susa, Atlas Baghdad, 1957.]

Far beyond the Iraqi audience, I think that this history of modern Baghdad can bring a useful complementary piece to the history of the modern Middle East in general, far away from the usual orientalist clichés of nostalgia and the loss of the 1001 Nights.

 
[“The role of women” in modern Baghdad under the Monarchy. Source: Land of the Two Rivers, 1957.]

J: What other projects are you working on now?

CP: At the crossing between political geography and urban anthropology, I would be interested in working on Baghdad in the framework of divided cities or post-conflict cities (Bollens). The post-2003 urban configuration bears witness to an unprecedented level of spatial segregation based on politicized religious identities. Mutatis mutandis, it recalls the tribal fragmentation of the pre-modern city by reactivating the ‘assabiyat (primary belongings) to compensate the failure of the central state. But this would require a collaboration with local correspondents and is currently complicated by security matters, and by the growing numbers of emigrants. I don’t know if I will be able to continue.

Also, I am part of two research programs: one as a member, in Beirut, dealing with the role of universities and the process of urban production (associating ALBA and Université Rennes II); and the second as the research coordinator, on “Heritage at War in the Mediterranean Region,” involving partners in Lebanon, Turkey, Italy, Bosnia, Algeria, and Egypt (AUF/ Ifpo, 2015-2017).

Excerpt from Bagdad. La construction d’une capitale moderne, 1914-1960

La révolution a ouvert une page radicalement nouvelle dans l’histoire des rapports entre l’artiste et le pouvoir en Irak. Peintre ou architecte, celui-ci y acquiert un nouveau statut, une stature officielle. Soutien, mais aussi devoir. […]. Dès la révolution, la politique se mêle étroitement d’image : Chadirji raconte dans ses mémoires comment, une fois obtenue la commande de ce monument qui devait célébrer la rupture avec les chaînes du passé, le groupe d’artistes a eu affaire à des pressions constantes et précises pour influer sur le détail. Le ministère de la Défense ainsi qu’un comité central pour la communication officielle essayèrent notamment de les convaincre de représenter Abdelkarim Kassem lui-même…Un compromis a été finalement trouvé en plaçant, au centre de la composition (dont la forme s’inspire des banderoles déployées par les manifestants en 1958),[2] un soldat symbolisant le rôle libérateur de l’armée (Chadirji 1991 : 106-108).

Vingt ans plus tard, Saddam Hussein convoquera sculpteurs et architectes pour refaçonner Bagdad, en grand maître d’une cérémonie urbaine dont lui-même aura fixé tous les rituels et tous les détails. L’ordre du pouvoir sera sans discussion et l’architecte ne servira plus directement la nation, n’ayant guère le choix qu’entre l’exil et le service d’un pouvoir absolu prétendant incarner, à lui seul, la nation.[3]

Par la révolution de juillet 1958 l’Irak avait pu « acter » son indépendance—en architecture comme en politique. Or, au plan des populations et des mentalités qui habitent et façonnent la ville au quotidien, la Bagdad qui émerge de cette révolution n’est déjà plus la « cité des pluralités » dont rêve encore Jabra Ibrahîm Jabra en 1988. Dans un article, au titre révélateur de « Baghdad in a perspective of time », Jabra exprime notamment, à travers l’évocation idéalisée de Babylone, sa nostalgie d’une ville de l’Orient arabe traditionnel. On comprend entre les lignes qu’il s’agit de Bagdad—et que cette Bagdad-là n’est plus:[4]

« Babylone, de fait, fut la première métropole de l’histoire ; la ville des pluralités, ouverte sur l’extérieur, capable de maintenir ensemble sous une forme dynamique et viable un grand nombre d’éléments disparates, tant culturels qu’humains—différentes races, religions, langages, vivant tous rassemblés sous la protection d’une organisation centrale et d’une culture dominante. »[5]

On peut réévaluer l’histoire, mais on ne peut pas la réécrire. La question que l’on peut dès lors poser pour l’Irak d’après 1958 est la suivante : peut-on bâtir, au sens propre comme au sens figuré, une nation moderne, et donc une capitale (ou une métropole) moderne, avec seulement des éléments homogènes ? Au lendemain de la révolution, cet équilibre instable a inspiré à un observateur cette réflexion lapidaire : « Mêlés, mais non amalgamés ; Hindous, Juifs, Kurdes, Turcomans, Arabes… Ceux qui divisent pour régner ont ici le travail facile. » (Loverdo 1961 : 136). Jusqu’alors, la diversité n’était pas problématique en soi dans la construction nationale irakienne. À partir de 1958, la question désormais sera celle de la gestion politique de l’hétérogénéité.

Mais on touche ici à la nature même du politique, et ceci est un autre débat. 

English Translation (Translated by Esther Spitz)

The revolution opened a radical new era in the history of the relationship between artists and power in Iraq. Painters and architects acquired a new status, an official stature, implying support and duty. […] Politics were intricately laced with image ever since the revolution: Chadirji recounts in his memoires how the group of artists who was contracted to build the monument celebrating the severing of ties with the past (on Tahrir Square) immediately became the target of constant and precise pressures looking to influence the detail. The Ministry of Defense, as well as an official communication central committee tried, among other things, to convince them to depict Abdelkarim Kassem himself…A compromise was eventually found, by placing at the center of the composition (whose shape is inspired by the banners deployed by the 1958 demonstrators),[6] a soldier symbolizing the army’s freeing role (Chadirji, 1991: 106-108).

Twenty years later, Saddam Hussein called on sculptors and architects to remodel Baghdad, setting himself as the master of an urban ceremony where he set all the rituals and all the details. The power was not questioned and so, the architect did not serve directly the nation anymore: he only had a choice between exile and the service of an absolute power claiming to solely embody the nation.[7]

Through the July 1958 revolution, Iraq was able to realize its independence—in architecture and in politics alike. However, regarding the populations and the mentalities inhabiting and shaping the city on a daily basis, the Baghdad which emerges from that revolution is already far from the “city of pluralities” Jabra Ibrahîm Jabra still dreamed of in 1988. In an article with the very telling title of “Baghdad in a Perspective of Time,” Jabra expresses, through the idealized evocation of Babylon, his nostalgia for a traditional city from the Arab Orient. We understand between the lines that he is writing about Baghdad—and that this Baghdad does not exist anymore:

“Babylon, in fact, was the first metropolis in history: the outward-oriented city of pluralities, capable of holding together in a viable and dynamic form a vast number of disparate elements, both human and cultural. Different races, religions, languages, all living together under the protection of one central organization and one dominant culture.”[8]

We can reevaluate history, but we cannot rewrite it. When talking about post-1958 Iraq, the question is: can we build, literally as well as figuratively, a modern nation and therefore a modern capital (or a metropolis), only with homogenous elements? In the wake of the revolution, this unstable equilibrium inspired the following lapidary comment: “Mixed up, but not blended together; Hindus, Jews, Kurds, Turkmen, Arabs…Those who practice the ‘divide and rule’ principle have an easy job here” (Loverdo, 1961: 136).

Until then, diversity was not a problem in itself in the Iraqi construction. From 1958, the question will now be about the political management of heterogeneity.

But here we are touching on the very nature of politics, and that is another debate.

[Excerpted from Caecilia Pieri, Bagdad. La construction d’une capitale moderne, 1914-1960, by permission of the author. © 2015 Institut français du Proche-Orient. For more information, or to purchase this book, click here.]

NOTES

[1] In order to meet contemporary Iraqi painters. This trip was to lead, the following October in Paris (Galerie M), to an exhibition and the publication of a catalogue, Bagdad Renaissance, Art contemporain en Irak, Jean-Michel Place Publication, Paris, 2003, 96 p.

[2] Entretien avec R. Chadirji à Londres, 15 juillet 2009.

[3] Le détail de ces grands projets est publié dans Process Architecture 1985, cf. bibliographie Fethi 1985 ; une partie d’entre eux est commentée dans Luizard 1994, Makiya 2004 et Pieri 2008.

[4] Sur l’ambiguïté du rapport entre critique et pouvoir sous Saddam Hussein, lire Pieri 2015.

[5] “Babylon, in fact, was the first metropolis in history: the outward-oriented city of pluralities, capable of holding together in a viable and dynamic form a vast number of disparate elements, both human and cultural. Different races, religions, languages, all living together under the protection of one central organization and one dominant culture.”

[6] Interview with R. Chadirji in London, July 15th 2009.

[7] The detail of those projects is published in Process Architecture 1985, cf. bibliography in Fethi 1985 ; part of them is commented upon in Luizard 1994, Makiya 2004 et Pieri 2008.

[8] On the ambiguity of the relationship between critics and power under Saddam Hussein, see Pieri 2015.

[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]

War, Conflict, and Urban Protest

De-Urbanising the Syrian Revolt Isal al-Khafaji writes for the Arab Reform Initiative that the population movements in Syria and specifically the arrival of migrants in major cities has contributed to de-urbanize the revolt.

Sur, Génocide Culturel et Social D’après Massacre [In French] This unsigned reports for the online journal KEDISTAN documents the politics of expropriation in the mostly Kurdish city of Suf in Turkey.

Jordan to Allow 200,000 Syrians to Work Legally The Emirati journal The National reports about the recent decision to allow Syrian refugees to work in Jordanian export-oriented free zones, with relaxed labour regulations, where they will probably replace Egyptians and other foreign workers.

A l’Est de Damas, Au Bout Du Monde. Témoignage D’un Révolutionnaire Syrien (préface) Political scientitst Thomas Pierret prefaces Dick el-Mehdi’s testimony on his life as a revolutionary in the Eastern Ghouta of Damascus for five years.

Le Tollé Contre Le Parking de La Place Tell Se PoursuitL’Orient-Le Jour reports about public protests in Tripoli against the building of a parking in the Lebanese second city's central square that would threaten the popular buzzing activity in the area.

L’hiver de La Contestation Sociale Se Prolonge [In French] Nawaat reports about the continuing protests and sit-ins in Tunisia's interior cities.

Migration Interne, Marché de L’emploi et Disparités Régionales [In French]Nawaat reports about an interesting study highlighting the intense migrations inside Tunisia.

Housing and Planning Issues

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Comment Les Wahhabites Ont Transformé La Mecque En Disneyland [in French] Jamal Boushaba relates the historical transformations of Mecca over the centuries and critisizes the most recent changes under the rule of the Wahabis as Disneyfication.

Creating New Public Space in Lebanon’s Tripoli (PHOTOS) Victor Argo presents the proposal of design student Christine Attiyeh in order to improve the public spaces in Tripoli around the river.

في رام الله «رمانة»... لا هي مطعم ولا مقهى ولا مركز ثقافي! [in Arabic] Al Hayat reports on the conversion of an old house in the city of Ramallah into a “third space” which is used for multiple purposes such as cooking, playing music, reading, and much more.

Returning to past glory Al Ahram covers the reactions of residents and shop owners to the Cairo Governorate's plans to renovate one of downtown Cairo’s oldest streets.

Vulnerability and Displacement in Beirut Mona Khechen, writing for Legal Agenda, argues that Beirut's neoliberal housing policies are a key factor in the displacement and emigration of Lebanese from their country.

ممرات وسط البلد.. فرص مهدرة [in Arabic] Al Masry Al Youm discusses the downtown alleys of Cairo and what policies can be put in place to preserve and protect them.

Loi Sur Les Loyers : En Maintenant Le Flou, Les Autorités Veulent Pousser Propriétaires et Locataires à S’entendre à L’amiable [in French] Anne-Marie El Hage reports for L’Orient-Le Jour about the delays in publishing the bylaws of the new Rent Law, which pushes owners and renters to reach a compromise.

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One Thousand and One Dalieh, Imagined Beirut (Tales of Citizens’ Resistance) Doctoral student Alex Mahoudeau summarizes a seminar held at IFPO (French Institute of the Near East) about the mobilization against the privatization of the Dalieh area in Beirut.

An urbanist's guide to Cairo: a city weighed down by stereotypes Mohamed Elshahed writes for The Guardian, arguing that the usual urban depiction of Cairo as a city out of control is only partially true. "[Cairo] is a hard city that can take its toll on its residents but the potential to turn things around is omnipresent."

A Look Back: 8 Years of Social and Urban Projects ArchDaily presents a list of 24 exemplary architectural projects designed to ameliorate the effects of various global crises. The projects are divided into three categories: social housing, community, public space.

Ecological Issues

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Waste Management Key to Regaining Public Trust in the Arab World The World Bank argues that garbage crises across various Middle Eastern states are symptomatic of the lack of legitimacy of political elites. The article is also available in French and in Arabic.

Climate Change Contributes to Worst Middle East Drought in 900 Years A Recent NASA study provided evidence that the Middle East is experiencing the worst drought in years and suggests it has accentuated the current political crisis in the region, the Middle East Eye reports.

Water wars intensify between Egypt, Ethiopia Al Monitor discusses the rising hydropolitical tensions surrouding the use of the Nile waters and the potention constructon of further dams.

Tunisia faces tough strategic choices as demand for energy begins to outstrip supply Moëz Charif, writing for the the World Bank, discusses the challenges Tunisia faces in meeting its energy needs.

Featured Resources

The Journal of Urban Design has published a series of articles on the topic of sustainability and urban design. The full list of articles, along with links to download them, is available from the journal's website.

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The story of cities A new series of articles in The Guardian explores the origins and history of cities from a global perspective, including articles on Benin City and Potosí. For a specifically Middle Eastern interest, see #1 Alexandria and #3 Baghdad.

The "Deep Administration" in Tunisia: Is Change Impossible? Sharaf al-Din al-Yacoubi on Legal Agenda considers the future of political change in Tunisia in the face of stubbornness from the pre-revolutionary bureaucracy.

Nelson Garrido captures the modern architecture of Kuwait's Golden Era A collection of photographs published by Dezeen magazine online.

Revue de Presse - Ville, Mars 2016 - CEDEJ - Égypte [In French] The monthly press review of cities in Egypt by the team of the French Social Sciences Center in Egypt.

Recently on Jadaliyya

New Texts Out Now: Caecilia Pieri, Bagdad. La construction d'une capitale moderne, 1914-1960. Jadaliyya interviews the author of this book about how the process of urban modernisation contributed to the development of Baghdad.

New Texts Out Now: Kishwar Rizvi, The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East. In conversation with Jadaliyya, Rizvi discusses his study of the architecture of various state-sponsored mosques and how official ideologies can be seen through them.

The Ouarzazate Solar Plant in Morocco: Triumphal 'Green' Capitalism and the Privatization of Nature. Hamza Hamouchene discusses eco-projects in Morocco as a method of land appropriation.

CFP: Unfolding Middle Eastern Landscapes (Beirut, 31 May-2 June) All call for papers for a conference on the meaning of landscape, jointly organised by the Lebanese Landscape Association (LELA) and the American University of Beirut.

"Cleaning out the Ghettos" - Urban Governance and the Remaking of Kurdistan Nicholas Glastonbury and Defne Kadıoğlu discuss the history of housing policies in the Kurdistan region of Turkey, and their role as a technique of political control.

New Texts Out Now: Abir Saksouk-Sasso, Making Spaces for Communal Sovereignty: The Story of Beirut's Dalieh Saksouk-Sasso discusses her article on the history of Dalieh through the prism of public space.

New Texts Out Now: Nadine Bekdache, Evicting Sovereignty: Lebanon's Housing Tenants from Citizens to ObstaclesJadaliyya interviews Bekdache about the transformations which have taken place in Lebanese housing policy over since independence, and the effects this has had on how tenants are conceived.

Call for Papers: Conflict and Living Heritage in the Middle East: Researching the Politics of Cultural Heritage and Identities in Times of War and Displacement A call for papers for a conference organised by IFPO (the French Institute of Near East Studies) and the Social Studies Department of the American University of Iraq to take place on 10 and 11 May 2016 in Sulaymaniya, in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Sevan Nisanyan icin izan talep ediyoruz! / The Sevan Nisanyan Question [in Turkish and English] A petition protesting the unjust imprisonment and sentencing of the Turkish artist and author Sevan Nisanyan.

New Texts Out Now: Mona Harb and Sami Atallah, Local Governments and Public Goods: Assessing Decentralization in the Arab World Cities Page editor Mona Harb and her co-author Sami Atallah discuss their recent book with Jadaliyya, covering the history and development of decentralization as a technique of governance in the Arab world and its effects on the provision of services.

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Turkey and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Turkey Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to turkey@jadaliyya.com by Sunday night of every week.]

English

Erdogan's US Visit

Erdoğan's Uncomfortable US Visit Semih İdiz writes of the US' displeasure over anti-democratic developments in Turkey, mainly the oppression of freedom of expression and freedom of the press.

Erdogan Uses Closed-Door Meeting to Blast Obama Administration John Hudson reports on President Erdogan’s off-the-record dinner with the Washington think-tank-crowd and his efforts to emphasize the importance of Turkey to the US government. No White House representatives attended the event.

Coverage of President Erdoğan’s visit (and his body-guards’ aggressive behavior) in The Guardian and the Washington Post.

Turkish Bodyguards Take Washington by Force Fehim Taştekin reports that after assaulting a deputy in Ecuador, Turkish President Erdoğan’s bodyguards this time terrorized the media and protesters in Washington.

Representative accounts of Erdoğan’s trip from Daily Sabah include Erdoğan's US Visit Rejuvenates Turkey's Middle-Power Politics (by Sadık Ünay) and Erdoğan's Washington Visit Enlightens US on Fables (by Hilal Kaplan).

Thank you Mr. President! Aydin Ünal argues that Erdoğan was received in much love and enthusiasm in the US.  

Erdogan's March to Dictatorship in Turkey Dexter Filkins hopes that "President Obama skips the diplomatic language and goes straight to the point: that any leader who jails journalists—and arms Al Qaeda and bombs the Kurds and jails his opponents—is no friend of the United States."

Ensar Vakfı Rape Scandal

Abusing Turkey’s Children Sexually and MentallyÖzgür Korkmaz blames the education system that has been changed to the core by the AKP for producing predators disguised as teachers and imams who sexually abuse children.

‘If You Lost Your Virginity, Then You Cannot Marry’ Melis Alphan touches upon the obstacles and neglect in the struggle against violence and sexual abuse against women and children.

Kurdish Politics

New Turkey-PKK Peace Talks: An Inevitability Postponed Nigar Göksel and Berkay Mandıracı call on both the Turkish state and the PKK to return to the negotiation table in order to put an end to violence and offer suggestions for a successful negotiation process.

Turkey: No to Terrorism, No to Double Standards AKP Member of Parliament Kani Torun calls the US and European countries that support PYD to act in principle against all kinds of terrorism, and warns them that if they collaborate with a terror group for whatever reason, it will eventually harm them.

Turkey’s Crackdown Swells the Ranks of Kurdish Militants Piotr Zalewski reports from Cizre as civilians try to return to their daily lives in the aftermath of government operations. Neighborhoods like Cudi have “been reduced to a wasteland of buildings torn apart by artillery fire and overturned cars.”

Is Turkey's Lax Oversight Keeping PKK Flush with Funds? According to Pınar Tremblay, while the Turkish public is asked to mobilize against PKK terror, the government’s efforts to curtail PKK financing and money laundering remain mediocre.

Why PKK Shifted to Urban Warfare Mahmut Bozarslan points out that many people couldn’t understand why the PKK resorted to trench-barricade warfare in cities, and that some say the PKK was misled by reports of its militias who claimed people were ready to join an uprising.

Domestic Politics

Turkey to See More Ballot Boxes This Year Ali Sökmen argues that the government has a great deal to gain from even more elections this year; not only are “opposition parties are at their weakest state in a decade and are beset by internal leadership struggles,” but the government has also significantly raised the minimum wage.

What is the news like on Turkish TV? The blog James in Turkey look at the largely undifferentiated message coming from Turkey’s nightly news programs, concluding only Fox’s Fatih Portakal interjects a bit of useful commentary. The fact that “more viewers watch his bulletin than any other” suggests “there is an audience for his style.”

Mechanisms of Control: How Turkey is Criminalizing Dissent and Muzzling the Press A detailed report from the Bipartisan Policy Center argues that the Turkish government’s “attacks on the media are part of a larger strategy of dismantling any institutions . . .capable of acting as a check on the AKP’s power.” Full report HERE.

Military Wipes Its Hands of Turkish Politics Metin Gürcan notes that rumors and denials of a possible coup by the Turkish military are a symptom of the malignant political atmosphere in the country.

Turkey’s Deteriorating Security-Freedom Balance Serkan Demirtaş notes that Turkey has lost its security-freedom balance in the wake of terrorist attacks.

Ambiguity in Women’s Policies Gila Benmayor writes that the government's way of dealing with the women’s issues, such as women’s employment, violence against women, and gender justice, is highly ambiguous.

Turkey's Erdoğan Openly Embraces His Naked Ambition Metin Gürcan reports that President Erdogan tells potential military leaders about his goal of becoming a functioning — not symbolic — commander-in-chief.

The Last Hope of Turkey’s Lazy Democrats Nuray Mert calls on everyone to take action against the government's authoritarian measures before all aspects of social and political life will deteriorate. 

Foreign Policy

Why the West Must Embrace Turkey, Not Push It Away Luke Coffey argues that in the face of Russian aggression and ISIS terrorism, NATO needs Turkey.

Reza Zarrab Paying Price of Challenging US Financial Hegemony Daily Sabah columnist Mahmut Övür argues that the US indictment of Reza Zarrab has “little to do with Turkey—except the fact that Turkey had actively contributed to a global rebellion against U.S. financial hegemony in 2010.”

Illegal Mass Returns of Syrian Refugees Expose Fatal Flaws in Europe-Turkey Deal Amnesty reports the Turkish government is sending hundreds of refugees back to Syria—generally (but not always) unregistered Syrians. Simultaneously, the government is scaling back registrations.

Other Pertinent Pieces

Today’s Zaman: “Newspaper Not Found” Zeynep Karataş reports on her experience as an editor at Today’s Zaman at the time of its seizure by the government.

In Istanbul, A Major Gentrification Project is Hyped Via Its Own Museum Exhibition Paul Osterland reports on the gentrification of Hacıhüsrev, a historically-Roman neighborhood in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district, which is being demolished by Polat Holding to make room for new apartments and offices.

The $31 Luxury-Hotel Rooms That Are Spooking Turkish Banks Isobel Finkel reports on the decline in Turkey’s tourism industry over the past year. With the number of Russian tourists in sharp decline, the industry is expected to shrink by $10 billion compared with last year.

Should They Stay or Should They Go? Turkey Leaves Foreign Investors at Odds  Mehmet Çetingüleç writes that short-term foreign investors staged their biggest flight from Turkey last year, while foreign direct investments shot up to a seven-year high.

Turkish

Crackdown on Academics

Figen Yüksekdağ'dan Esra Mungan'a mektup A letter written by HDP co-chair Figen Yüksekdağ to imprisoned academic Esra Mungan, reminding her that “we are all strengthened by your commitment, and the commitment of all those dignified academics calling for peace.”

Bir akademisyenin tutukluluk izlenimleri Imprisoned signatory of the peace petition and professor of history Muzaffer Kaya writes a letter from prison in which he discusses his living conditions and time behind bars so far.

Başbakan’a alkış Cumhuriyet columnist Ali Sirmen compliments Prime Minister Davutoğlu’s willingness to disagree with the prosecution of Esra Mungan.

Ensar Vakfı Rape Scandal

Çocuğa cinsel istismar suçuna ortak olmayalım Seda Akço and Bürge Akbulut present a comprehensive analysis of children's sexual abuse in Turkey, including institutional and personal responsibilities as well as legal loopholes in the juridical system.

Karaman vakası: bir vakfın sorumluluğu nasıl örtbas edilmek istendi? Burcu Karakaş criticizes the government's attempts to whitewash Ensar Foudantion’s responsibility in the rape scandal.  

Kurdish Politics

Her yer orta sınıf, her yer izleyiş Filiz Gazi discusses the tensions between the desire to romanticize resistance in Kurdistan from afar and the difficulties of continuing everyday life that are rampant across Kurdish cities in Turkey.

Kalbinin her yerinden kanar AmedÖzlem Durmaz Mungan writes, “For some people, Diyarbakır is an Armenian city; for others, it’s Kurdish. For some people it’s Diyarbakır; for others it’s Diyâru Bekr/Diyarbekir; and for still others it’s Amed. For some, it’s a cultural mosaic; for others, it’s an assemblage of pain. The Diyarbakır I know? I don’t really know anymore.”

Sur, Metropoldür…Şeyhmus Diken laments the government’s decision for an “emergency expropriation” of two thirds of the land in Diyarbakır for the sake of producing “new life” in the city, highlighting the fact that it is a well-established “dissident metropolitan political city.”

Suriçi'nde yarı-ablukada yaşam Elif İnce presents a photo-essay of “life under half-blockade in Suriçi,” showing that people are trying to get back to living their lives.

Nusaybin’de vali-asker uyumsuzluğu Sözcü columnist Saygı Öztürk looks at the high number of soldiers who have died during operations in Nusaybin and concludes that it stems from a lack of coordination between the governor’s office and the military.

Domestic Politics

Yeni anayasada egemenliğin çerçevesi ne olmalı? Kürşad Zorlu analyzes the question of national sovereignty in new constitution writing debates.

Üst akıl savunması ve yeni kırılma noktası Murat Somer writes that the government has been responding to all criticisms against its anti-democratic and unlawful practices by invoking a "superior mind" that allegedly tries to organize a coup and overthrow the AKP government.

AKP iktidarı değerlendirmelerinde es geçilen nokta Hüseyin Şengül argues that “a government’s network of economic relations are the most important grounds of defining its political attitudes.”

Çocuklara cinsel istismarın arkasında da AKP’nin Meclis diktatörlüğü var Nasuh Mahruki lists off the staggering number of investigation requests that the government has rejected. These range from the recent child abuse at the Ensar Foundation to the deaths of miners in Soma, chemicals used against Gezi protesters, various bombings, female labor force participation, the hostage crisis at the Iraq embassy, and so on.

Darbe lafı AKP’ye yarar! Emre Kongar argues against talk of military intervention—even if elected officials are effectively carrying out a coup—pointing out how the 1960 coup “poisoned” Turkish politics. Rather than the military, universal law and the Constitutional Court are the nation’s protection.

Foreign Policy

ABD Tek Taraflılığı ve Türk-Amerikan İlişkileri Kılıç Buğra Kanat argues that Turkey-US relations entered a serious crisis as a result of conflicts around Turkey's Syrian policy and the US' support for YPG.

Muhaliflere ve iktidarcılara hafif sert bir sesleniş Following a fifty-minute meeting between Erdoğan and Obama, Ahmet Hakan mocks government critics who hoped that Obama would not meet with Erdoğan and government supporters who accused Obama of being a terrorist “mastermind.”

Other Pertinent Pieces

Silahlar sussa da savaşın kiri kalıcı According to Bülent Şık, the destruction of the natural and built environments in Turkey, Kurdistan, and Syria will have drastic environmental and public health consequences that will far outlast the current wars and political regimes.

Published on Jadaliyya

“Cleaning out the Ghettos” - Urban Governance and the Remaking of Kurdistan

Urgent Call for Solidarity with Academics in Turkey (Letter to the US Department of State)

New Texts Out Now: Kishwar Rizvi, The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East

Entertainment and Consumption: The Impending Destruction of the Armenian Memorial Trchnotz Puyn

On a Day of a March…

Humanism and Its Others

Ward Vloeberghs, Architecture, Power, and Religion in Lebanon: Rafiq Hariri and the Politics of Sacred Space in Beirut. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015.

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

Ward Vloeberghs (WV): While studying in Beirut in the early 2000s, I witnessed a construction site on the corner of Martyrs’ Square. Back then, contrasting rumors circulated as to what exactly was emerging on this central location, and who was in charge of the project. I became intrigued by this saga, and decided to trace the origins of the construction process once I received funding for my PhD project. By then, the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque had been almost completed, and it had become clear that Rafiq al-Hariri had commissioned the edifice. As a result, this book reads as a monograph with a clear protagonist—Hariri—and one main case-study—the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque.

Aside from this personal note, I felt that many Lebanese were interested in the history of this particular mosque. Some of the mosque’s initial criticasters dropped their opposition after Hariri’s assassination and his burial just next to the mosque. Moreover, it seemed to me that, at least among peers, there was a genuine interest in the ways religious architecture is made subservient to political statements in contemporary Lebanon. Thus, analyzing how politics, religion, and architecture interact offered me an interesting approach to visualize societal struggles, and to observe urban politics in action.

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

WV: The book intends to show how religious architecture serves as an important tool for political actors in Lebanon. To illustrate this, I investigate how Hariri took hold of the pre-existing project of the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque to realize his long-coveted desire to lodge a major mosque in Beirut and then had it built in the way he did. This leads me to examine how politics are accomplished in fluid relationship to a specific context (all politics is local!) and how built fabric or physical space can express forms of belonging and ambition.

To do so, I have structured the book in three main parts. The first part provides a comprehensive introduction to Rafiq Hariri, and his emergence as a political actor in Lebanon. Though such portrayals have appeared before (most notably Emmanuel Bonne’s Vie publique, patronage et clientèle. Rafic Hariri à Saïda), I believe this political personality profiling exercise sheds new light on some key periods of his life (for example, the sparsely-documented period in Saudi Arabia), and serves as a necessary preliminary to understand Hariri’s dedication to the construction of this specific prayer hall at this particular location. Perhaps most importantly, this first part of the book also critically discusses Hariri’s posthumous legacy as a victim, as a martyr, and as a dynast who continues to inspire a political coalition ten years after his assassination.

Secondly, the book provides an in-depth overview of the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque’s construction history—both from an architectural, and from a political perspective. This second part is more than a description, though, as it offers a view into the project’s genealogy. As such, it features insights into the tribulations of the Sunni community in Lebanon over the past 150 years, and shows how the actual origins of the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque date back to the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Mejid. By relying on process tracing, content analysis, and first-hand material (mostly interviews and observation), I go on by situating the mosque and its various designers within the context of Beirut’s heritage of Islamic architecture.

In the third part of the book, I examine how the politician Rafiq Hariri used this prestigious piece of religious architecture to boost his legitimacy. This dynamic started during his lifetime, but was considerably expanded after his death. Thus, I investigate the conversion of sacred space into political territory. I discuss the mosque’s outspoken design to address issues of class, confessional identity, and citizenship. To take the analysis one step further, I then move away from my case study to encompass other instances of religious architecture, both within and beyond Lebanon—mostly by drawing on literature from art history, anthropology, and international politics.

In the final chapter, substantial attention is given to Hariri’s posthumous influence. At this point, I illustrate how commemoration practices devoted to Hariri redefined the mosque, and its surroundings, including his gravesite. That process was accomplished both by visual and by discursive means, through slogans (‘allam, ‘ammar, harrar or dammak ghali, sawtak ‘ali) and by various artefacts, many of them offered at special occasions (such as the annual anniversaries of Hariri’s assassination or the establishment of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon).

 
[In 2006, Liban Post issued this series of stamps to commemorate the first anniversary of Hariri’s
assassination. The Muhammad al-Amin Mosque is featured bottom left. Image via the author.]

Throughout, the book seeks to adopt a balanced stance towards Hariri’s policies and activities. This chapter, therefore, also examines how other actors lost out to (for example, archaeologists), contested (for example, occupy activists during an eighteen months sit-in), or retaliated against (for example, a neighboring cathedral) his initiatives. Thus, I argue that, in urban terms as much as in public finance, Hariri’s accomplishments have certainly come at a price. For example, by installing a monumental mosque, Hariri de facto opted to pour a layer of concrete on top of his city’s ancient remnants.

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

WV: While studying Arab and Islamic studies, I was attracted to the Middle East’s numerous minorities and decided to explore the situation of the Copts in Egypt (who reject the notion of minority being applied to them). In doing so, I became fascinated by the difficulty of obtaining reliable statistical data about Arab populations.

Thus, during an MA program in political science, I conducted some research on Lebanese demographers because I wondered how, in the absence of a national census, population scientists manage to do their job. Besides, I wanted to know how public policy makers set out about planning for schools, hospitals, or housing facilities given this census sensitivity. In the end, I discovered that Lebanese demographers have devised tools and surveys to analyze population growth indirectly. These instruments are perhaps more efficient than the techniques used in many neighboring states that do conduct a regular headcount, resulting in most Lebanese having a sharp awareness of the country’s demographic balances.

All of this highlights the fact that I possessed no prior knowledge of architecture when I started the work that led to this book. Rather, I wanted to find out the story behind this building, and was motivated by applying a particular approach to this case. The fact that I broadened my knowledge about architecture at the same time was a cherished side effect, a bit like I had previously coincidentally gained familiarity with Arab demography.

In fact, at the onset of this research, I had been asked to elaborate a project about politics and Islam in the Arab world. I had taken this quite literally, and had not been able to think of anything better than to connect a prime minister with a mosque. Eventually, however, I learned a precious lot about urban design, and how architecture, like art, is indexical of politics in any given society.

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

WV: In addition to urban scientists, this book is intended for all those interested in Lebanese politics, and anyone (students, scholars, journalists, professionals) concerned with the contemporary Middle East. I am convinced that regardless of disciplinary background, be it in (art) history, anthropology, architectural engineering, or economics, this book can help to understand how built fabric serves as a depository of aesthetic preferences, political ambitions, and commemoration practices.

Therefore, social scientists who pay attention to material expressions of power may want to purchase a copy, as will institutional libraries. I am confident old-fashioned bibliophiles, like I am, will acknowledge the efforts made by the series editors and the publisher (in editing, illustrating, printing, and binding quality) to offer value for money.

In terms of impact, my hope is that this book can foster scholarly interest in material culture from a social science perspective. In particular, I am convinced there are promising opportunities for students in adopting such an approach towards Beirut’s impressive heritage of religious architecture. As a matter of fact, religious buildings have been given more prominence in the cityscape of Beirut than was the case say fifty years ago. This interplay between aesthetics and politics attracts me, and has not, in my view, been adequately addressed in the literature on Beirut’s reconstruction. Last but not least, it seems likely that such a research program can also be transferred to other cities, and to other socio-religious contexts.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

WV: First of all, I remain, of course, committed to researching political dimensions of sacred space in the Arab world. As indicated, there is plenty of opportunity to develop this theme further. Besides, on the long term, I continue to be fascinated by political elites in the Arab world. I am particularly zooming in on cases where public office is handed down within the family, from one generation onto the next. Such “political dynasties” (not limited to the realm of politics, though) offer concrete glimpses into the specific structures of individual families and societies. The renewal of political elites—not only at the top tier levels of government and business but also those at less visible, sub-top echelons—is a crucial aspect that I want to underline, as it helps to understand the interconnectedness of interests and decisions, thus affecting overall political stability.

Apart from these research topics, I am currently setting up a curriculum in political science within an exciting new institution: the Erasmus University College in Rotterdam. Here, emphasis is on a resolutely multidisciplinary approach (students can combine molecular cell biology with courses on conflict resolution) that also comprises an urban studies track. Liberal arts colleges are quite new in Europe, although The Netherlands has played a pioneering role. Since I was involved in the start-up of a similar project in Rabat between 2010 and 2014, I am eager to continue on this track in a city with a remarkable, raw pulse and spectacular diversity.

J: How do you see this book contributing to the field of Urban Studies? Why do you think it is special?

WV: I believe this book offers a prism to witness the longstanding, ongoing struggle for the city of Beirut. This political struggle is being waged by a variety of actors with eminently urban means, like the physical rearrangement of certain neighborhoods, the installation of statues, or the crafting of sacred space. As such, the book can inform anyone interested in urban studies on how processes of urban design, reconstruction, and framing practices concur to project an image of the city that is passionately formulated and reformulated, time and again. My hope is that the book contributes to urban studies by encouraging social and political scientists to explore religious architecture, a theme often confined to the realms of art history, archaeology, or anthropology.

Spatial expressions of politics, as well as material manifestations of power and identity, are key components for understanding social reality, and not only in the Middle East. It is my conviction that focusing on such (often apparently ordinary) acts and artifacts helps us to better understand how people accomplish power, religion, and architecture on a daily basis, often through simple gestures inspired by positive intentions. The overall result of these accumulated activities, however, is not always harmonious and can, occasionally, lead to fierce antagonism. In this sense, the nearly solipsistic attitude of certain political actors in Lebanon finds itself reflected in its capital’s architecture, in spite of the lip service sometimes paid to diversity, tolerance, and coexistence.

I hope the excerpts below can convey the book’s argument, namely that one can analyze politics of a society through a careful reading of that society’s architecture. In the case of Beirut, sacred space has become an important component of the city’s urban development.

Excerpts from Architecture, Power and Religion in Lebanon: Rafiq Hariri and the Politics of Sacred Space in Beirut

From the Introduction

When Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and Mufti Qabbani laid the first stone for the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque on the first of Ramadan 1423 (6 November 2002), Hariri declared that the construction of this mosque “cherished by the Muslims of Lebanon in general and Beirut in particular” had been awaited “during the past five decades”. He praised Allah for having “shaped the suitable circumstances for the start, today, of the setting up of this sublime religious edifice (as-sarh ad-dīnī al-jalīl).” Everyone knew that Hariri himself had contributed a good deal in bringing about the suitable circumstances and none of the attendees failed to notice the subtle choice of vocabulary. Next to thanking Allah for his favors, Hariri went on to say how fortunate it was to be able to erect the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque “on this particular site in the heart of the capital, where religions embrace each other in order to form a national corner welcoming faith as a shared area for national harmony that confirms the message of Lebanon.”

Taken at face value, these words are no more than the humble reflections of the solemn scenes that come with such circumstances, replete with authentic inclusiveness towards all fellow citizens. In this light, one assumes, Hariri's speech was a paragon of religious tolerance and epitomized his spirit of national, trans-confessional cohesiveness. Rafiq Hariri’s statement can, indeed, most profitably be understood as an anticipated self-fulfilling prophecy; i.e. as the message that Hariri wished for “his” favored mosque to transmit. In such a reading, one assumes that Hariri intended the mosque to stand next to several cathedrals in a show of national unity, deliberately inclusive of other religions, especially Christianity. Certain arrangements on the premises of the mosque—such as the trees “of national understanding” planted between the mosque and the gravesite—hint at such an image. Without taking aim at Hariri’s sincerity, I want to suggest here that, in addition to this first layer of meaning, there is another way to read Hariri's statement. Namely to take these utterances as expressions of Hariri's power. Such an alternative view would conceive of Hariri’s speech in itself, just as much as his construction of a monumental mosque, as a skillful manifestation of his authority.

Years ago, Gilsenan has documented a number of practices of power, i.e. dynamics and processes used in Lebanese contexts to express authority and command respect. Among them he counts the display of boasting (fashr), mockery (bahdala) or news (akhbār) but also joking (mazah), nobility (karāma) and social standing (markaz). One could argue that Hariri's speech about the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque illustrated more than one of these techniques, to various degrees. In this view, Hariri's inaugural statement becomes part of what Gilsenan calls the “operations of power.” We can then understand his speech as being part of those practices of public power which require “many processes less immediate to sight.” In other words, Hariri’s speech is marked by such suggestive formulas, that it can be understood as a moderate and genuinely inclusive discourse but at the same time can come across as a forceful expression of communal leadership. This is not only true for his speech, it applies to the building itself as well. Exactly that communal identity and the leadership shown by Hariri through the construction of this major mosque is the object of my investigation in this book. More precisely, I want to examine how such communal leadership can be expressed architecturally.

In monographic format, I analyze how the Lebanese political actor Rafiq Hariri conducted one of his most significant political projects, namely his patronage of the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque in central Beirut. Tellingly, Hariri did so on top of the ruins of the civil war—literally and symbolically. He installed a congregational mosque in the middle of a sector reconstructed at his impetus—and often perceived as an exponent of capitalist power. By the 2010’s, however, several guidebooks on Beirut bore the mosque’s silhouette on their cover as the edifice had become the new image of the Lebanese capital. Nevertheless, the trajectory of this long-awaited prayer hall and its relationship to one of Lebanon’s best-known politicians often remains either ignored or distorted.

[…]

From Chapter Five, Section Two: Communal Monuments, Monumental Communities

[T]he recent drive to mark urban space in central Beirut sustainably with identity claims features two main characteristics: to display confessional belonging and class status in an assertive way. This quest for visibility, preferably as close as possible to the core of the city, is shared by many communities as virtually all of Lebanon’s confessional communities have developed monumental policies, at one time or another, over the past few centuries. In several ways, then, we can say that the community edifies a monument while at the same time, the monument also serves to establish the community, be it a social or a confessional one.

Making buildings matter politically and investing them with specific, easily-recognizable identity claims has been a phenomenon that accompanied the campaigns of urban reconstruction that emerged in the 1990’s and characterized Lebanon during the 2000’s. As has been amply documented, these urban reconstruction policies were largely inspired by a neoliberal discourse and a way of life that caters primarily to the needs of the wealthy. BCD has indeed become a shop sign for globalized luxury from which the pre-war urban tissue composed of small-scale traders and craftsmen has been entirely detached. The consequence of this dynamic has been the obliteration of informal structures that characterized the city center previously and the advent of a platform for powerful brands—commercial ones but also socio-political and religious ones—to nestle themselves in the resulting vacuum. Not only have the social and commercial roots been erased, the cultural roots of the city have had to give way too: archaeological remains, cinemas and theatres have disappeared and education facilities have been banned to secondary zones.

By contrast, religious architecture has been brought to the fore, perhaps in a gesture to galvanize the cooperation of religious authorities to the reconstruction project. Indeed it would appear as if the role of religious actors in the urban reality of Beirut has increased during the post-war period. Whereas religious buildings were more or less hidden and integrated into the urban fabric of pre-war Beirut they have been made more apparent and monumental after the reconstruction. It is the choice in favor of this type of urban development that allows the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque to erect and impose itself in the heart of BCD.

Bringing such religious architecture into the prominence of the urban landscape reveals a lot about the underlying modes of governance and the balance of power that has structured urban space in Beirut over the past decades. In particular does this race towards supreme visibility risk over-emphasizing certain facets of an identity while at the same time minimizing other factors of belonging. For example, does not the wish of monumental edification bear with it the risk of occulting other criteria of citizenship? Perhaps we must see in this manifestation of confessional monumentalism not so much an act of might and faith but rather an expression of the powerlessness of forces in society to promote alternative aspects of participation. What is certain is that this deliberate choice has major consequences for what is being shown and what remains hidden in Beirut.

For one thing, it seems that the very notion of a tolerant citizenship for all is being threatened by the ardent will to impose a socio-economic or a confessional format against any other odds. The self-affirmation of one single community, i.e. the Sunni and/one or the affluent one, risks pushing other communities (non-Sunni and/or less well-off) aside into the margins. By putting excessive importance on purchasing power and confessional identity the city center risks to ignore the shared experience of a human condition and joint membership in Lebanese society as a valid basis for structuring daily life. In this sense, the opulence and the towering dominance of the mosque come across as features of an edifice that, in spite of its ostentation, occults the impotence of a nation to promote civil rights and mutual aspirations as a common denominator to which a vast majority can subscribe by trying, instead, to impose its own, flawed ideal onto fellow citizens.

[…]

From Chapter Five, Section Three: Religious Architecture as Sites of Political Struggle

Political power in Lebanon can be analyzed through the prism of urban space. When examining the dialectic relationship of power through built fabric it is important to look into how power can be accomplished. Thus, exploring political dimensions of religious architecture requires more than a mere glance at the sum of the commissioner and the building. It entails a discussion about power and influence, about claims of identity and about balance and dominance, in short: about political power and how to express it. Conceiving of the mosque as a locus for power and politics supposes a setting where these practices of exchange and engagement take place. Urban space provides such a, often intensely negotiated field where all actors converge in confrontation within arenas as diverse as the particular parameters of a specific context.

Means of communication are multiple and go far beyond the uttering of words and phrases. They include several forms of non-verbal communication and often rely heavily upon visual recognition in order to convey a message. Architecture can be seen as one such way of expression. It has the potentiality to formulate values and tastes in a most tangible way. Unsurprisingly, all over the world and since time immemorial, religious buildings have been used and produced by rulers to express their devotion, to protect themselves as well as their followers from evil and/or to position themselves in relation to potential rivals.

Visual culture has become an essential part of political dynamics as image management and visual expression have gained unprecedented importance in politics. Therefore, we must familiarize ourselves with the idea of looking at power in novel and perhaps unexpected ways even though this may entail that we have to relocate power, i.e. we may have to reconsider the ways we think of and about power, in particular how and where it can be observed. Haugaard and Malesevic urge us to look at political power as being omnipresent and part of everyday life.

Power is all around us, part of the everyday, and hence invisible to the taken-for-granted natural attitude of social practice....Understanding power is about seeing in ways that are counter-intuitive.          

[Excerpted from Ward Vloeberghs, Architecture, Power, and Religion in Lebanon. Rafiq Hariri and the Politics of Sacred Space in Beirut, by permission of the author and publisher. © 2016 by Koninklijke Brill NV. For more information, or to purchase this book, click here.] 

Caecilia Pieri, Bagdad. La construction d’une capitale moderne (1914-1960) (Beyrouth: Presses de l’Ifpo, 2015) (sur le site de l’éditeur).

A travers cet ouvrage Caecilia Pieri apporte un éclairage inédit sur l’histoire urbaine de la ville de Bagdad dans la première moitié du XXe siècle. Ce travail inscrit Bagdad dans la lignée des travaux qui ont abordé les processus de modernisation des villes orientales telles que le Caire, Beyrouth ou encore Damas, à l’aube du XXe siècle (Arnaud 2005, Volait 2005, Ghorayeb 2014, Verdeil 2011, Tabet et al. 2001, Yérasimos 1994). Il éclaire la période très peu renseignée qui s’étend de l'époque ottomane jusqu’à la révolution de 1958, et qui constitue un moment-clé pour comprendre la modernisation de Bagdad. L’auteure met en miroir les différentes étapes de transformation du paysage urbain et architectural, les modes d’habiter, les pratiques urbaines et l’histoire politique de l’Irak mandataire et post mandataire. Cette approche de l’histoire urbaine de Bagdad que nous propose C. Pieri peut donc se qualifier de multidisciplinaire. Les  transformations de la ville, à différentes étapes significatives, sont saisies au regard des évolutions sociétales, de la construction nationale et d’un contexte international. Les mutations urbaines sont donc expliquées à travers une démarche qui convoque plusieurs registres. Cet ouvrage met en évidence une modernité plurielle en analysant les processus d’hybridation de modèles importés à l’épreuve d’une société urbaine en transformation. L’auteure montre comment circulent les idées et les modèles en empruntant différents voies et analyse la rencontre avec un territoire, des modes de vie et un savoir-faire local. Bagdad se transforme sans connaitre des programmes ambitieux de politique urbaine. Les architectures savante et ordinaire sont appréhendées à travers une analyse très fine et contextualisée qui met en dialogue la morphologie urbaine et la typologie des plans et des façades.  Ces transformations typo-morphologiques sont expliquées au regard des pratiques sociales, de l’appartenance sociale ou confessionnelle et aussi d’un passé citadin.  Le livre nous emmène bien au delà de l’histoire urbaine de la ville de Bagdad par l’approche comparative avec d’autres villes et contextes coloniaux. Bagdad connaît les mêmes processus de modernisation et d’hybridation que des villes levantines, comme Beyrouth et Damas, ou celles d’Afrique du Nord quelques décennies plus tôt. Par contre, la modernité de  la capitale irakienne se ne construit pas à l’image de la modernité étatique en Turquie.

L’ouvrage fait suite à une thèse soutenue en 2010. Caecilia Pieri a entrepris un travail de terrain défiant une montagne de difficultés. Un premier voyage effectué en 2003 suivi de treize séjours au total lui ont permis de constituer un matériau de travail original et d’explorer des sources inédites. Elle réussit à exploiter des archives désorganisées et lacunaires, à recueillir des témoignages et à réaliser un fonds photographique.

Sept grandes parties composent ce livre, les cinq premières soulèvent chacune une problématique de transformation de la ville de Bagdad caractéristique d’une période, avec une sixième partie conclusive et enfin une annexe riche en documents. Ce découpage chronologique  débute avec la fin de l’empire ottoman en 1914 et se termine après la révolution de 1958. Les réformes ottomanes administratives et réglementaires introduisent une première modernisation à l’instar d’autres villes ottomanes. L’arrivée du réseau ferroviaire ou encore la démolition partielle des murailles et un début d’implantation sur les franges de la ville engagent les premières transformations. L’habitat, qualifié d’introverti, analogue dans sa typologie à un habitat courant dans les ville du Moyen-Orient, est centré autour d’une cour, avec « une variation bagdadienne » sur l’espace central comme le  démontre l’auteure.  Bagdad capitale d’un nouvel Etat sous l’emprise britannique se transforme en une quinzaine d’années. C. Pieri met en évidence les liens et les décalages entre la construction urbaine et celle de l’Etat, « (…) Car l’architecture et l’urbanisme se révèlent à la fois vecteurs et miroirs entre différents pouvoirs, leviers de l’économie, instruments de contrôle social, voire sociétal, supports symboliques » (p. 67). La période coloniale  ne donne pas lieu à de grands projets d’aménagement, par contre une nouvelle forme d’urbanisation suburbaine voit le jour, corrélée à un processus de paupérisation du centre ville. Une mixité socio-professionelle caractérise de nouvelles banlieues « occidentalisées ». Un premier métissage s’exprime par l’émergence de nouvelles typo-morphologies. C. Pieri identifie quatre catégories qualifiées « d’habitat de transition » dans lesquelles on trouve : l’habitat néo-traditionnel, des maisons de lotissement de plain-pied ou encore les premières maisons bourgeoises et villas. Ces changements amorcent l’introduction d’un espace individuel sans remettre pour autant en question l’ordre patriarcal.

Les années 1930 se caractérisent par une expansion urbaine et la mise en place d’un premier règlement urbain en 1935 qui marque dans la durée le paysage  de la ville de Bagdad à la faveur d’un tracé régulier. Caecilia Pieri nous explique comment « le "cottage urbain" bagdadien » (p.154), fait son apparition à la périphérie du centre ancien. Cette modernisation voire occidentalisation, y compris dans l’architecture vernaculaire, exprime les évolutions du mode d’habiter par l’apparition des premières circulations latérales, la spécialisation des pièces comme la salle à manger. Cette analyse de l’espace centré s’appuie sur plusieurs exemples de plans reconstitués de maisons des années 1930. Ce renouveau, à mi-chemin entre une époque artisanale et le moment industriel,  utilise un savoir-faire local  et invente un métissage  qui  contribue aussi par le décor des façades à modifier l’image de la ville, bien que la brique monochrome reste prédominante. Comme le souligne l’auteure,  la modernité de cette période se manifeste par les nouveaux critères de regroupements socio-économiques.

La décennie qui suit, les années 1940, est celle de l’instabilité en Irak et de l’arrivée d’un grand nombre de migrants ruraux à Bagdad. Une croissance discontinue du territoire de la ville caractérise cette période. La ville se construit sans vision d’ensemble. Caecilia Pieri met en lumière les ruptures urbaines de Bagdad qui se confirment voire se radicalisent. Désormais, les critères de regroupement sont socio-économiques et non confessionnels, la situation géographique du quartier, le type d’habitat et l’appartenance à une classe sociale prévalent sur l’appartenance religieuse. De nouveaux programmes voient le jour comme les lotissements ouvriers dans les franges urbaines. Des formes simples et épurées font leur apparition dans le langage architectural marquant la fin de l’éclectisme stylistique de la décennie précédente. L’architecture ordinaire, non savante, s’imprègne aussi de ce courant rapporté d’Europe parfois indirectement. Les années 1940 voient se généraliser les maisons de type villa. L’espace central devient le hall d’un habitat désormais extraverti. Ceacilia Pieri décrit une ville où coexistent désormais le « plus traditionnel et le plus moderne » (p.233).

À partir de 1950, la « modernité » est véhiculée par une première génération  d’architectes ayant fait leurs études à l’étranger notamment à Liverpool et l’arrivée à Bagdad de grandes agences internationales d’architecture. Cette cinquième partie est particulièrement passionnante, car elle met en miroir la modernité en architecture et la construction d’une identité moderne irakienne. La ville est rattrapée par l’urbanisme de plan, fondé sur le zoning. Constantinos Doxiadis propose dans le cadre de son plan directeur une ville nouvelle de 100 000 habitants située sur la rive ouest de la ville. La construction de programmes de logement pour les fonctionnaires aboutissent à une ville ségrégée par profession et par sa typologie architecturale et sociale, « l’espace devient "un outil de division" » (p. 289). L’arrivée de  la verticale urbaine inaugure un nouveau vocabulaire urbain. Cette décennie dominée désormais par l’architecture internationale voit se mettre en place un langage moderne propre à Bagdad. Caecilia Pieri analyse magistralement les dispositifs d’adaptation, de contournement, de rencontre entre les paradigmes de l’architecture internationale et les références locales. Elle met en perspective une approche régionaliste et expressionniste de l’architecture moderne. L’architecture internationale trouve son terrain d’expression à travers les commandes publiques et les grands concours internationaux symbolisant cette nouvelle étape de l’histoire politique de l’Irak.

La période analysée, à savoir ces quatre décennies précédant la révolution nationale irakienne du 14 juillet 1958, « apparaissent comme une longue et irrégulière propédeutique vers une identité architecturale irakienne qui se définira avec netteté dans le années 1960. Cette gestation a affecté de manière très étroite le statut de l’architecture dans un rapport très contrasté aux pouvoirs qui se sont succédé, à ses formes au sein  de la ville qui en a émergé, aux modèles mêmes de la ville, au statut, au statut de la modernité, enfin à la question de l’identité urbaine. » (p.333) En questionnant  l’architecture à travers différents registres, cet ouvrage éclaire les processus de transformation de la ville de Bagdad et de construction d’une identité architecturale irakienne. L’auteure propose une lecture de la modernité qui dépasse la dichotomie entre traditionnel/moderne à la faveur des modernités propres à l’histoire urbaine, culturelle et politique de Bagdad.

Ce travail pionnier sur les projets et les réalisations (par exemple Le Gymnase de Le Corbusier à Bagdad) de l’architecture moderne inscrit la capitale irakienne dans l’histoire de l’architecture moderne du XXe siècle, celle des horizons divers et déclinaisons variées. Il contribue ainsi à enrichir la réflexion sur une modernité régionaliste. Il participe aussi à l’émergence et à la reconnaissance d’un patrimoine irakien encore plus menacé qu’ailleurs par une situation de guerre. Saluons enfin la très grande qualité des illustrations: photos, plans et façades reconstituées, plans d’urbanisme qui forment un répertoire (voire une mémoire) précieux du patrimoine moderne de la ville de Bagdad.

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Jean-Luc Arnaud, Damas. Urbanisme et architecture, 1860-1925 (Paris, Actes Sud-Sindbad, 2005).
Marlène Ghorayeb, Beyrouth sous mandat français. Construction d’une ville moderne (Paris, Karthala, 2014).
Joe Nasr, Mercedes Volait (eds.), Urbanism imported or exported ? (Chichester,  Wiley, 2003)
Robert Saliba, Beyrouth architectures, aux sources de la modernité 1920-1940 (Marseille, Parenthèse 2009).
Jad Tabet, Marlène Ghorayeb, Eric Huybrechts, Eric Verdeil, Beyrouth (Paris, Institut français d’architecture, Coll. « Portrait de villes », 2001)
Eric Verdeil, Beyrouth et ses urbanistes : une ville en plan (Beyrouth Presses de l’Ifpo, 2001)
Mercedes Volait, Architectes et architecture de l’Egypte moderne, 1830-1950. Genèse et essor d’une expertise locale (Paris : Maisonneuve & Larose, 2005).
Yérasimos Stéphane (dir.), L’occidentalisation d’Istanbul et des grandes villes de l’Empire ottoman au XIXe et XXe siècle (Paris, Bureau de la recherche architecturale, 1994)

Latif al-Ani, born in 1932 in Baghdad, was a member of the photography unit at the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) between 1954 and 1960. His photographs were frequently published in the IPC publication Ahl el-Naft (People of Oil). In 1960 he went on to found the photography department at the Iraqi Ministry of Culture and to head the official Iraqi News Agency. He photographed throughout Iraq until the mid-1970s when political considerations curtailed his work. 

This selection of Latif al-Ani's photographs of Baghdad in the 1950s and 60s was chosen from the collection held at the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut. A much larger collection of his work was lost during looting in Baghdad after the US invasion in 2003.

We asked Jala Makhzoumi and Mona Damluji to comment on these photographs. Below are their insightful ressponses.

Jala Makhzoumi:

Rasheed Street (شارع الرشيد) is the invisible link that ties together several of this selection of Latif al-Ani’s photographs of Baghdad. This was the first “straight” street in the medieval city, part of a campaign to modernize Baghdad during the reign of Madhat Pasha. In the decades that followed, the street was widened, its façade colonnaded with shops on the ground floor and offices and hotels occupying the upper two. Rasheed Street became the commercial, business and financial hub of Baghdad throughout the first half of the twentieth century. What remained of the medieval city, narrow alleyways, courtyard houses, schools and bathhouses lay hidden behind the fashionable street façade, a historic fabric that was allowed to decay because it was deemed “unmodern.”

Latif al-Ani’s photographs capture the historical layers of Rasheed Street, the juxtaposition of contrasting architectural expressions that came to embody changing aesthetic preferences. The oldest structure, the Mirjan Mosque (جامع مرجان) (1356) with its three brick domes and single minaret appears in the foreground of one image facing two modern buildings, Philip Hurst’s Rafidain Bank (بنك الرافدين) (1953) to the right and Dunkel William’s Central Bank (البنك المركزي) to the left. Bank Street, off Rasheed, is captured in another image, a veritable celebration of the International Style that came to influence pioneers of Iraqi modern architecture. In another photo, the historic mosque stands alongside another iconic building, the cylindrical white Burj Abboud (برج عبّود) by architects Abdullah Ihsan Kamil and Rifat Chadirji (1955). The juxtaposition of the historic and the modern captured in al-Ani’s photos reflects the dynamic mood of a city negotiating its past and planning for a prosperous future.

The earliest memory I have of Rasheed Street are of my grandfather’s office, close to the Tigris Palace, a fashionable hotel at the time. I have faint recollections of visits to the Fatto Pharmacy and the McKenzie English Bookshop, the largest in the city, looking through teahouse windows at shining samovars and fine porcelain teapots. I recall the excitement of visits to the suqs, rays of light filtering from the ceiling, the noise and sheen of the copper bazar and outings to the Rasheed Street cinemas. By the late 1960s the street had lost much of its commercial vibrancy, replaced by Sa’doun Street (شارع السعدون). One by one, offices, clinics, shops and cinemas moved out to Sadoun; the straight street was no longer fashionable.

At either end of Rasheed Street, the location where the north and south gates of the medieval city once stood, two important urban nodes developed, respectively the Maidan Bab al Mu’adham (ميدان باب المعظّم), and the Bab al Sharji (باب الشرجي). The northern Maidan evolved into a transportation terminal for municipal buses and an inclusive public space. The southern one came to be planned as a traffic junction/square of unprecedented scale, Sahat al Tahrir (ساحة التحرير), Liberation Square (circa 1960). Two images in this selection are dedicated to Tahrir, one of which shows the Hurriya Monument (نصب الحرّيه) that defines the eastern edge of the square. Architect Rifaat Chadirji designed the monument and Iraq’s foremost artist, Jawad Salim, the bronze sculptures. East of the Hurriya Monument was the Hadiqat al Umma (حديقة الأمّه), previously Hadiqat Malik Ghazi (حديقة الملك غازي), the largest municipal park in the city and equally a facet of a modernizing city. The beautiful sculpture by Khaled al Rahhal, entitled Umuma (الأمومه), Motherhood, adorns the entrance to the park, also photographed by al-Ani.

Following the 1958 revolution, Tahrir Square came to be seen as a symbol of the Iraqi people’s struggle for liberty and self-rule; the theme of Jawad Salim’s bronze statues of the Hurriya Monument. The post-revolution euphoria infected all, intellectuals and artists, teachers and lawyers. Tahrir Square came to personify the dream come true, a place of celebrations, but also for mob killings and, two decades later, public hangings. Traffic junction/squares like Tahrir became a favored planning tool in Baghdad and in other Arab cities because of their impressive scale, monumentality and their potential as signifiers of post-colonial nation building. This is evident in the names given to these urban landscapes, for example, Damascus’ Sahat al Umawiyeen (ساحة الأمويين), Beirut’s Sahat al Shohada (ساحة الشهداء), Amman’s Sahat Faisal (ساحة فيصل) and Cairo’s Tahrir Square, which precedes Baghdad’s Tahrir. As nationalist government gave way to dictatorship, Baghdad’s Tahrir Square lost much of its earlier socio-political significance. Recently, Tahrir Square is once more in the news from Baghdad. Mass demonstrations protesting rampant state corruption, demanding the most basic rights of living in the city have taken to this iconic square. Whether these latest demonstrations herald a revival of the optimism and spirit of solidarity captured by al-Ani’s photographs is yet to be seen.

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Mona Damluji:

 “I prefer the daily life…the beautiful life without violence.”

-- Latif al-Ani

Through Latif al-Ani’s camera lens, we witness a modern city on the rise. It is difficult not to read these serene black and white photographs of the mid-twentieth century Iraqi capital against the surfeit of present-day images of Baghdad. Unlike the works of contemporary photojournalists, which narrow in on a city besieged by barriers and bombings, al-Ani’s photos feature modernist buildings and broad avenues that characterized urban change during Iraq’s oil driven development boom of the 1950s and 60s.

The selection featured here transports us to Baghdad in the immediate aftermath of the 1958 July Revolution, which ousted the British-installed royal family and ushered in a new era of development under the socialist and later Ba’athist-led Republic of Iraq. During the subsequent two years (1959-60), al-Ani documented the country using the Roleiflex camera supplied to him by the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC). The protégé of the British photographer Jack Percival, al-Ani defined his early career through his work as a public relations photographer for the British-controlled oil company. His photographs were featured regularly on the monthly covers and pages of IPC’s twin English and Arabic magazines, Iraq Petroleum and Ahl Al-Naft (“People of Oil”), which circulated in tens of thousands of households throughout Iraq, the MENA region, and Europe.

While on assignment for the IPC Photographic Unit between 1954-60, al-Ani was trained to shoot photographs from the air. Initially, the company used small airplanes and helicopters primarily for transporting its executives and personnel between Baghdad and the oil fields. Then with the establishment of its public relations office in the 1950s, a second key purpose was identified and the oil company’s signature aerial photograph – exemplified here by al-Ani’s 1959 photo of the Rafidain Bank building foregrounding the Tigris and sprawling neighborhoods beyond – was born.

The British-controlled oil company in Iraq endured increasing public scrutiny and criticism in the aftermath of Iran’s nationalization of their oil industry; and so, the IPC considered its public relations arm a critical piece of company operations in Iraq. Once the Iraq Development Board was established in 1952 to channel seventy percent of state oil revenues into modernization projects, IPC embraced every opportunity to publicize images of Baghdad as a spectacular modern city built by those same revenues.

Thus the IPC played a powerful role in shaping what would be a dominant aesthetic approach to documenting modern Iraq. The company provided its staff photographers and filmmakers unmitigated access to a bird’s (or more precisely an oil company’s) eye view. IPC’s British and Arab photographers used the aerial vantage point to capture the impressive scale and vast extent of new infrastructural, urban, and architectural projects underway in Baghdad and beyond. As a result, whether shot from the air or an elevated vantage point, al-Ani’s photos reproduce a top-down perspective, echoing the hegemonic oversight that the company and government exercised over Iraq’s land, labor and built environments; or, in other words, this photographic practice made it feasible for the average reader to see like a state or corporation.

Looking at the images from his years with the IPC Photographic Unit (here, 1959-60), we can see how al-Ani’s frame replicates the approach of a planner’s gaze. The effect is striking, particularly in his image of the Mamoun District housing project designed by the modernist planner Constantinos Doxiadis. Here, our perspective hovers above the ground. We are removed from the street level and survey the geometric rows of white cube construction from a distance. As a result, we observe the built environment through the visitor’s gaze yet remain detached from the human geographies entangled with this modernist architecture. The exception here is a peek at hanging laundry included the corner of the frame, which acts as a sly hint at the photographer’s interest in capturing social dimensions of modernization.

Indeed, as is evident in his photographs from the 1960s, al-Ani made a significant shift in his approach and composition. His photos from this period come back to earth, and his camera plays inventively with different angles: low-to-the-ground (“Feast Day” and “Accordion Player”) over-the-shoulder (“Shopping in Baghdad”) and eye-to-eye (“Prayer at the Mosque”). Our gaze moves dramatically, no longer suspended above but rather walking through the city. Al-Ani’s career move in the summer of 1960, when he left the Petroleum Company to found the Photography Department in the Ministry of Culture, explains this change. He continued his work as a magazine photographer for the government until he retired from the ministry in 1977. This collection of al-Ani’s photographs memorializes an important era of oil modernization and urban transformation in Iraq. Yet these images only bring us into the city as far as the oil company and state would want us to see; and so, the darker side of development remains hidden from view.

Place de la République, on se crie «  plus fort ! » « micro !». Ici a lieu la parole, la parole diverse, dissonante, hésitante, lyrique, café du commerce, réfléchie. Depuis le 31 mars la place est jour après jour investie par une parole citoyenne. Des voix qui s’élèvent des quatre coins de la place, des chants, des cris, des slogans, des bêtises, des vers, des jeux de mots, des voix assurées, des voix qui s’éteignent, qui bafouillent, qui se brisent, qui vrillent, partent dans les aigus. C’est de cette réappropriation collective du langage que naît un réel espace public. L’occupation de la place permet à la foule amassée d’imposer sa présence dans l’espace urbain, et de fonder son existence en ville, de la manifester aux yeux de tout le corps social. Mais l’espace public n’a pas besoin de la place de la République pour exister, puisque c’est la réunion, le dialogue ouvert entre des inconnus, qui l’instaure en fondant le collectif. C’est le rassemblement d’individus dans l’effort conjugué de l’élaboration d’un sens commun (ce qui ne veut surtout pas dire univoque), qui fait de la place un espace public.

On peut questionner le caractère spontané et mixte de ce rassemblement, mais ce qui se joue, au-delà du mouvement Nuit Debout et des individus qui l’ont lancé, c’est la fondation d’un lieu de langage dans un espace ouvert. Certes la mixité est loin d’y être totale, mais où existe-t-elle ? Certes les familles kurdes, celles des bourgeois du Canal, celles venues de banlieue, les fêtards, les entrepreneurs, les thésards, ne sont pas sur la place en même proportion. La sociologie de cette foule assemblée n’est pas représentative, comme celle de toutes les mobilisations qui font à un moment donné irruption : cette critique est consubstantielle à tout mouvement politique. Ce qui est en revanche plus singulier c’est l’énergie qui y est déployée pour accroître la diversité, enjoignant sans cesse les « plus faibles », les subalternes, à venir parler, et fomentant l’essaimage du mouvement dans les périphéries et les marges du territoire républicain. C’est la conscience de l’urgence qu’il y a à inclure qui est nouvelle.

Face à la production d’un espace urbain aux usages contrôlés, en vue de l’imposition d’un sens, viennent s’opposer l’émergence et la persistance d’un attroupement spontané, qui pourrait proposer un autre récit. Nombre d’observateurs s’étonnent que de ces assemblées successives n’émerge aucune revendication claire et précise. Ils n’ont pas entendu et pas compris, peut-être, que ce qui se joue de crucial, c’est d’abord que la parole circule. Elle vagabonde parfois, mais elle circule, elle irrigue la place jusqu’alors marquée par un silence morbide.

La Nuit Debout, c’est faire sauter la chape de plomb narrative de l’état d’urgence et de la stupéfaction ayant suivi les attentats de janvier et de novembre. Au pied de la statue, dans la préservation maniaque des mots et des bouquets, se fabriquait insidieusement un discours politique. Un discours polarisé autour de l’émotion collective et de son corrélat – encouragé par les pouvoirs publics : le récit d’une cohésion face au « terroriste », cette altérité à laquelle est dénié le droit de cité. L’enquête commanditée par la mairie de Paris à des sociologues pour interroger les « victimes des attentats », c’est-à-dire un échantillonnage de volontaires présents à Paris le 13 novembre, sur une période de 10 ans à dater d’aujourd’hui, révèle que la mémoire officielle des attentats est bien celle d’une communauté unilatéralement meurtrie, dont il faudrait consigner l’immense douleur conçue comme unique lien politique. Cette mise en récit détourne le discours de rassemblement et de mixité produit par le réaménagement ouvert de la place, achevé en 2011.

Aujourd’hui, le mouvement d’occupation de République ne se donne pas de modèle, mais se trouve à la croisée des chemins entre le mouvement Occupy Wall Street, conçu comme mouvement d’expression, celui, révolutionnaire, de la place Tahrir au Caire en 2011, et celui du parc Gezi à Istanbul en 2013, tentative commune d’habiter un lieu symbolique, née du refus de sa réécriture par la destruction du parc au profit de la reconstruction d’une caserne ottomane. La gestion de l’espace entre les corps a valu, là aussi, comme récit de la communauté par elle-même, en résistance au sens – familial, musulman et conservateur – qu’aurait imposé le réaménagement autoritaire voulu par l’AKP. Même si les motifs de ces mobilisations étaient différents, leurs modes d’occupation de l’espace urbain se font écho. Ces mouvements ont fonctionné comme référents les uns pour les autres, de même que pour les personnes rassemblées sur la place de la République, même si aucun de ces référents ne s’impose comme modèle. Les images de ces luttes convergent dans les esprits et viennent fonder la légitimité du mouvement naissant, qui peut s’en réclamer par le rassemblement spontané des corps.

Aux assemblées générales de la Nuit Debout, les corps se succèdent rapidement à la tribune les uns après les autres : on ne peut qu’être frappés par l’hétérogénéité des élans, des postures, des gabarits, des énergies, des timbres, des rythmes – sans parler de la couleur des peaux, de l’âge et du genre. Chacun incarne ici à sa mesure un fragment fondamentalement signifiant de cette « publicité » du débat. Leur répond une gestuelle codifiée désormais connue de tous : les mains en l’air qui virevoltent, les bras qui se croisent au-dessus de la tête, le doigt levé qui demande la parole. C’est qu’ici, les corps sont politiques, ce sont eux qui font territoire politique. Parce que les corps parlent d’où ils viennent, depuis leur identité genrée ou racialisée, depuis leurs oppressions et leurs mobilisations. Ils rendent visibles le débat public en marche dans toute sa bigarrure. À l’Assemblée générale du mardi 5 avril (36 mars dans le calendrier Nuit Debout), un malentendant s’est exprimé à la tribune, en langage des signes et simultanément par la voix d’un interprète. La foule lui a répondu en langage d’AG. Les corps sont politiques parce que l’occupation est résistance aux corps dépêchés par l’État bénéficiant du monopole de la violence légitime, ceux des CRS. Dans la nuit du samedi 2 avril, devant les corps assemblés, les CRS ont tourné les talons.

Le changement du rapport de force politique réside dans une occupation des lieux dont Nuit Debout n’a ni la primeur ni l’apanage. À Sivens, Calais, place de la République, une même force d’agglomération des corps est attaquée comme nuisible, quel qu’en soit l’enjeu par ailleurs. Même si leur logique propre (protestation locale, nécessité vitale, lutte politique) tend à les séparer, il est visible que les différents aspects de l’occupation spontanée du territoire par les corps – zone à défendre, camp de migrants ou de nomades, place urbaine – ont en commun une seule et même grammaire : celle d’un espace dévolu au passage ou au vide qui devient espace d’occupation, et en tant que tel est perçu comme menaçant l’ordre public. Cette grammaire commune ne doit plus passer inaperçue : elle tend à prouver que la dispersion géographique est le pendant logique et inévitable, du point de vue du pouvoir, d’une division politique. Deux hypothèses sont alors possibles : la première est que le fameux « diviser pour mieux régner » peut se traduire en « disperser pour mieux gérer », les termes étant dès lors interchangeables d’une façon pour le moins révélatrice. La seconde, qui n’exclut pas la précédente, est que la réunion des corps n’est acceptable que lorsqu’elle est prévue par une logique venue d’en haut, telle qu’elle se manifeste dans la localisation et la superficie des espaces assignés aux « gens du voyage ». Ces deux hypothèses ont en commun l’idée que la convergence spontanée de corps en un lieu menace l’ordre politique en place. Le « Traité de nomadologie »¹ de Mille Plateaux montrait comment la spontanéité du mouvement de l’espace nomade était canalisée en ordre dans l’espace de la polis : dans le cas qui nous occupe, la spontanéité du mouvement devient spontanéité du stationnement, sans pour autant perdre de sa force désorganisatrice, ou du moins perçue comme telle.

Or la caractéristique la plus évidente de l’occupation spontanée est l’appropriation du territoire, appropriation qui n’a rien d’une privatisation : approprier, c’est à la fois prendre possession et rendre propre à un usage. Cela implique que le groupe qui occupe est vécu, au moins de l’extérieur et du point de vue du pouvoir, comme homogène, puisqu’on ne peut prendre possession tous à la fois, il faut être un groupe uni, une personne morale. De fait, cette homogénéité n’existe ni à Gezi, à Calais où les nationalités sont multiples, ni à Sivens où les statuts socio-politiques sont variés, ni place de la République où est revendiquée la pluralité des appartenances autres que purement citoyenne, nulle part. Cela, on ne peut douter que le pouvoir le sache. C’est donc que la menace est ailleurs, dans la deuxième acception : rendre l’espace propre à un usage. Car ce qui se joue dans l’occupation, c’est forcément un nouvel agencement des décisions internes, où se crée un nouveau rapport à l’autre comme semblable, puisque riverain. Calais est une zone internationale de fait ; le moindre camp de migrants, la ZAD, la Nuit Debout, rompent une illusion générale : celle du monopole légal de la règle, de la partition identitaire, des régimes de coopération. C’est peut-être cela que le pouvoir, par la dispersion, voudrait faire taire. C’est peut-être cela que ces occupations ont en commun dans leur grammaire et dans leurs aspirations : avoir lieu, c’est-à-dire exister à nouveau, ou autrement. Cette grammaire commune, perçue comme menace commune, est peut-être le signe sûr de l’avènement d’une communauté.

Ce texte a été initialement publié sur Urbanités et sur Vacarme. Nous remercions ces revues d'avoir aimablement autorisé cette reproduction.   

[1] Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1980, chapitre 12.

Le Sud-est tunisien est de plus en plus sous les regards croisés des observateurs, des décideurs et des médias. Marginalisée et oubliée pendant des décennies, cette vaste région « frontalière » est ainsi devenue l’espace surveillé et l’objet d’un contrôle rapproché faisant appel à tous les moyens humains, techniques et technologiques dont disposent les autorités sécuritaires nationales et régionales (armée, forces de sécurité…) mais aussi les puissances et les organisation militaires régionales et internationales. Ce contrôle a été resserré d’un cran après l’attaque « terroriste » d’envergure (probablement plus de 50 ou 60 attaquants) sur la ville de Ben-Guerdane qui a eu lieu au mois de mars 2016 et qui s’est soldée par plusieurs morts civiles sans compter les pertes des forces de sécurités et des groupe armés à l’initiative de l’opération[1]. 

A l’origine de cette convergence des regards, on trouve la situation instable en Libye voisine et la présence dans ce pays de nombreuses organisation et milices armées, dont l’organisation Daech – ou Etat Islamique- et d’autres mouvements a tendances islamistes radicales, qu’on soupçonne de vouloir déstabiliser la Tunisie pour y imposer un pouvoir islamiste radical. Toutefois, l’attention accordée à la région se limite à la dimension sécuritaire et ignore sciemment les dimensions sociales, économiques et politiques locales qui expliquent incontestablement la « fragilité » sécuritaire de la frontière. Ainsi, toute la région qui s’étend de Gabes aux confins du sud, est réduite par les experts de la sécurité à la seule ligne de frontière qui sépare les deux pays voisins. 

De la même manière, on assiste à une extériorisation des risques potentiels ou réels, de leurs causes et de leurs conséquences possibles, considérés comme externes (territoires) et étrangers (acteurs). Désormais, le risque est externe et étranger et les frontières doivent être renforcées et consolidées de manière à se prémunir contre… On construit des murs, on creuse des canaux, on militarise le territoire frontalier, on surveille la population, on contrôle le petit commerce informel, on renforce le contrôle des passages et des passagers qui traversent les frontières, on installe les caméras, on survole (hélicoptères, avions militaires, drones, satellites…), on stigmatise les populations locales… 

Pour les populations locales, les frontières ne sont que la matérialisation de leurs marginalisations sociales et spatiales

Il y a dans ces lectures hyper-sécuritaires un refus total de toute tentative de comprendre les divers processus en cours dans la région qui, plus que le « terrorisme » potentiel en provenance de l’extérieur, menace sur le moyen et le long terme ce qu’on pourrait appeler la « cohésion » nationale et territoriale du pays. Il existe aussi un rejet total de toute tentative d’explorer, d’un côté, les liens entre les différents processus de marginalisations économiques, sociales et spatiales, et, de l’autre côté, les mécanismes de production de différentes formes de réponses locales qui, certes, ne s’inscrivent pas toujours dans la légalité formelle mais sont en réalité l’expression visible des diverses stratégies de survie que développent les populations locales. Ces stratégies vont des différentes formes de solidarités au commerce informel transfrontalier, en passant par l’émigration et les activités ponctuelles mais rémunérées en plus des activités agricoles ponctuelles (labours, récoltes, récoltes d’olives, petits élevages…). 

Ainsi pour étudier la question de la sécurité dans le sud-est, y compris la « sécurité » alimentaire, il me semble absolument indispensable de déplacer le regard de la ligne frontière vers l’ensemble du sud est qui constitue en réalité la véritable « frontière » orientale du pays.

Si, dans le monde entier, les régions-frontières entretiennent, surtout en temps de paix, des relations d’échanges, y compris économiques, formelles et informelles plus ou moins intensives, certaines révèlent de véritables complémentarités inscrites dans le temps et dans l’espace. C’est notamment le cas entre le sud-est tunisien et l’ouest libyen. Ici on est face à des relations tribales et familiales anciennes et maintenues de générations en générations malgré les nombreux conflits qui ont jalonné depuis des décennies les relations entre les deux Etats. Ce grand ensemble frontalier est l’espace « tribal » commun de la grande tribu des Ouerghemma qui s’étend de la région de Matmata jusqu’à celle de Tripoli de l’autre côté de la frontière. Les familles se connaissent et les échanges sont à la fois courants et étendus jusqu’à des relations de mariages toujours fréquents. Incontestablement, ces relations, notamment de mariages, dépassent souvent celles qu’entretiennent les familles du sud est avec celles originaires d’autres régions tunisiennes. Il y a probablement plus de mariages entre tunisien(ne)s du sud-est et libyen(ne)s de l’ouest qu’entre les populations du sud-est et celles du nord-ouest de la Tunisie. 

Mais ces relations familiales et tribales anciennes n’expliquent que partiellement les dynamiques des échanges transfrontaliers. Les véritables explications sont à rechercher dans les politiques internes et notamment dans leurs dimensions sociales et économiques. Elles sont aussi dans la lecture des conditions sociales des populations locales et leur sentiment profond et largement répandu qu’elles sont victimes d’une politique d’exclusion sociale et spatiale programmée et suivie par le pouvoir concentré dans les mains d’une « élite » originaire du nord-est du pays et particulièrement des grandes villes du Sahel. Derrière ce sentiment, il existe un certain nombre d’indicateurs « matériels » qui montrent clairement le faible niveau de développement de la région, à l’exception notable de l’ile de Djerba qui a connu un meilleur sort grâce aux investissements et aux infrastructures touristiques et qu’il faut « isoler » comme une poche ou une plateforme d’investissements « off shore ». Pour le reste de la région, le bilan est particulièrement négatif : 1) faibles infrastructures de transports, de santé, de services, … et même scolaires 2) un chômage se situant à plus de 14 % de la population 3) un taux de pauvreté entre 20 % et 40 % (davantage si on n’intègre pas l’ile de Djerba dans le calcul des moyennes) et, enfin, 4) un taux d’émigration parmi les plus élevés du pays, même si une partie de ce phénomène n’est pas recensé puisqu’il s’agit justement d’une émigration informelle… 

Par ailleurs, parmi les nombreuses explications du développement du commerce informel, dont l’importance dominante des relations tribales et familiales, la question alimentaire occupe une très place déterminante. 

Insécurité alimentaire dans le sud-est tunisien et commerce informel transfrontalier : opportunités, dépendance et risques sociaux 

Le sud est tunisien est une région aride, assez peu irriguée par la pluie dont la moyenne ne dépasse que rarement les 120 mm par an avec une succession de périodes de sécheresses prolongées et qui peuvent durer plusieurs années successives. Toutefois, les populations locales ont développé, générations après générations, un extraordinaire « patrimoine » de techniques et de savoir-faire-s qui lui permettait de s’assurer un niveau minimum de sécurité alimentaire, y compris pendant les longues périodes de sécheresses. Ainsi, l’agriculture extensive basée sur l’olivier en terrasses, les céréales – particulièrement l’orge, les légumes secs tels que fèves, pois-chiches et lentilles (cultivés après la saison de pluie du printemps), l’élevage fixe et semi-nomade (surtout caprins et ovins) et enfin quelques cultures irriguées dans les oasis de plaine ou de montagne mais aussi à Djerba, connue par son extraordinaire « aménagement » en damiers (un carré irrigué de type oasien, dominé par le palmier, côtoyant un autre carré en sec planté d’oliviers et de cultures saisonnières pluviales…). 

Mais depuis les années 1980, voire depuis l’indépendance, on assiste à une déstructuration rapide de ce qui fait l’équilibre de la région et la capacité de ses populations à s’adapter aux difficiles conditions « climatiques » locales. Il y a d’abord eu le prolongement des politiques coloniales de sédentarisation forcée de la population, souvent loin de leurs villages d’origines et de leurs terres. Cette sédentarisation forcée a été à l’origine d’une dégradation de la sécurité alimentaire des familles semi-nomades et d’une aggravation de leur dépendance vis-à-vis du marché. Désormais le couscous traditionnel basé sur l’orge que les populations cultivaient localement est progressivement devenu un couscous de blé qu’on se procure dans les boutiques, le blé n’étant pas produit sur place à cause de la pluviométrie insuffisante. Avec ce passage de l’orge au blé, c’est un mode de consommation qui a été aussi brutalement bouleversé avec l’arrivée massive de la semoule de blé, des pâtes et des farines industrielles et du pain blanc… 

L’autre élément a été la décollectivisation (individualisation) progressive des terres « collectives » des tribus et des familles élargies ainsi que l’introduction du cadastre, un extraordinaire outil de dépossession, et de l’obligation d’enregistrement des terres. Cette réforme du foncier, inaugurée pendant la colonisation et prolongée par l’Etat indépendant, a fortement participé à « déconnecter » la population de la terre et aboutit à une forme d’abandon de l’agriculture au profit d’autres activités rémunératrices et/ou de l’émigration. Ces processus ont dramatiquement renforcé la dépendance et l’insécurité alimentaires locales. 

La dernière étape de ces processus a été inaugurée vers la fin des années 1980 et le début des années 1990 et a consisté en la « privatisation » des nappes profondes, peu ou non renouvelables, en vue de développer des projets agricoles d’investissements privés, irrigués grâce à l’eau souterraine et dont la production est essentiellement destinées à « l’exportation » vers les grands centres urbains du pays, les zones touristiques et/ou l’étranger. L’essentiel des capitaux investis dans ces nouveaux projets provenant de l’extérieur de la région et même du secteur agricole, les populations locales ont assisté au développement d’une activité agricole privée « extractiviste » dont les bénéfices ne leur profitent pas, même si quelques personnes ont pu se faire employer par les nouveaux investisseurs « étrangers ». On est là en face des mêmes processus qui se sont très fortement développés dans la région de Sidi Bouzid et particulièrement dans la délégation de Rgueb et qui ont été, d’une manière ou une autre, à l’origine du suicide de Mohamed Bouazizi. 

Ainsi, dépossédées d’un modèle social local ancestral, d’un savoir faire local exceptionnel, d’une large partie des terres collectives qui permettaient à toute la population locale d’avoir un accès convenable à des ressources, particulièrement le foncier et les ressources hydrauliques souterraines…, les populations locales sont progressivement devenus des consommateurs, en grande partie « passifs ». Désormais, elles sont dépendantes des secteurs économiques autres que l’agriculture, pour s’assurer des revenus généralement aléatoires qui leurs permettent –ou pas- de se fournir en produits alimentaires de base. Ce sont ces processus de dépossession-dépendances-insécurité, qu’il faudrait explorer en profondeur. 

Par ailleurs, cette situation d’insécurité alimentaire appelle à étudier en profondeur les mécanismes souvent complexes du marché informel des produits alimentaires. Pour avoir une idée des circuits transfrontaliers, il serait très instructif de suivre plusieurs produits de bases de la source (lieu de production ou de fabrication) à la cuisine des consommateurs locaux. Prenons, à titre d’exemple, le cas d’un paquet de semoule de blé. Produit dans le nord tunisien ou importé de l’étranger, le blé est transformé (parfois importé sous forme déjà transformée) en « farine » qui sert à fabriquer la semoule dans des usines alimentaires situées à Tunis ou à Sfax. De là, commence un long voyage avant d’aboutir chez le consommateur local du sud-est. Exporté « officiellement » en Libye (surtout jusqu’au milieu de l’année 2011), le petit paquet est vendu sur le marché libyen à un prix largement subventionné. De là, il est acheté, à un prix « de gros » subventionné, par un commerçant de l’informel (tunisien ou libyen) qui le réexporte « illégalement » à Ben Guerdane ou dans les autres villes du sud-est. Une fois arrivé sur place, le paquet est vendu sur le marché informel local (dit aussi marché libyen ou marché de Kadhafi) à un prix jusqu’à 30 ou 40 % moins cher qu’un autre paquet sorti exactement de la même usine et vendu dans le circuit formel (magasins et boutiques…). Il en est de même pour les boites de concentré de tomates et/ou d’harissa et les boites de thon et de sardines… 

Mais après la chute de Kadhafi, la déstabilisation de la Libye notamment par l’irresponsable et meurtrière intervention française (appuyée par ses alliés), le renforcement des contrôles frontaliers et la réduction consécutive du marché informel des produits alimentaire (au profit de produits pétroliers, de stupéfiants et même d’armes à feu) ont provoqué une forte hausse des prix alimentaires, aggravant ainsi l’insécurité alimentaire locale. A ceci s’ajoute le fait que les nouveaux « pouvoirs » libyens, ont supprimé les subventions des produits et les ont remplacées par des allocations financières accordées directement aux consommateurs (cash in hand). Par conséquent, les prix réels ont fortement augmenté sur le marché intérieur libyen ce qui a participé ainsi à tarir le marché informel transfrontalier, à augmenter les prix des produits alimentaires « réels » dans la région frontalière, à aggraver les conditions sociales et économiques locales et à nourrir le rejet que les populations locales développent envers « l’élite » économique et politique du pays. 

En guise de conclusion trop rapide 

En guise de conclusion, il faut souligner que, d’un côté, le développement de l’informel transfrontalier est d’abord induit par les processus de marginalisation et de dépossession des populations locales et, de l’autre, la fermeture de la frontière aggrave encore davantage l’insécurité alimentaire des mêmes populations. Alors que, pendant des années, l’économie informelle avait permis maintenu les taux de pauvreté à des niveaux inférieurs à ceux d’autres régions comme Sidi Bouzid, Seliana, le Kef et Kasserine (les 4 premières régions), son rétrécissement induit vraisemblablement une hausse rapide de ces taux, d’autant que le renforcement des frontières n’a pas été compensée par de réelles politiques de développement local. Mais il s’agit ici davantage d’une problématique de recherche que de la conclusion d’une réflexion approfondie.

[Ce texte a été initialement publié sur le blog Demmer.]

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[1] Ce qui vient ci-dessous est en grande partie vraie pour les autres régions frontalières (populations, tribus, familles, échanges, commerce transfrontalier,…). Mais je connais beaucoup moins la situation et les spécificités locales.