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Remaking Beirut: Contesting Memory, Space, and the Urban Imaginary of Lebanese Youth

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Remaking Beirut: Contesting Memory, Space, and the Urban Imaginary of Lebanese Youth Remaking Beirut: Contesting Memory, Space, and the Urban Imaginary of Lebanese Youth Craig Larkin∗ University of Exeter Throughout the centuries Beirut has had an endless capacity for reinvention and transformation, a consequence of migration, conquest, trade, and internal conflict. The last three decades have witnessed the city center’s violent self-destruction, its commercial resurrection, and most recently its national contestation, as opposi- tional political forces have sought to mobilize mass demonstrations and occupy strategic space. While research has been directed to the transformative processes and the principal actors involved, little attention has been given to how the next generation of Lebanese are negotiating Beirut’s rehabilitation. This article seeks to address this lacuna, by exploring how postwar youth remember, imagine, and spatially encounter their city. How does Beirut’s rebuilt urban landscape, with its remnants of war, sites of displacement, and transformed environs, affect and in- form identity, social interaction, and perceptions of the past? Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s analysis of the social construction of space (perceived, conceived, and lived) and probing the inherent tensions within postwar youths’ encounters with history, memory, and heritage, the article presents a dynamic and complex urban imaginary of Beirut. An examination of key urban sites (Solidere’s` Down Town) and significant temporal moments (Independence Intifada) reveals three recur- ring tensions evident in Lebanese youth’s engagement with their city: dislocation and liberation, spectacle and participant, pluralism and fracture. This article seeks to encourage wider discussion on the nature of postwar recovery and the construc- tion of rehabilitated public space, amidst the backdrop of global consumerism and heritage campaigns. INTRODUCTION The music evoked Beirut’s Golden Age...Marwan’s voice burned with anger. “I hate the way they are demolishing the old centre and plonking down a new root- less, soulless ghost town with only a handful of old buildings preserved. Ignorant arrogant assholes! What do they think they’re doing? We need to continue the ∗ Correspondence should be addressed to Craig Larkin, Department of Politics, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter, EX4 4RJ; [email protected]. An earlier draft of this article was first presented at the June 2008 CRASH Conference, “The Culture of Re- construction: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Aftermath of Crisis,” at the University of Cambridge, and then at the Conflict in Cities International Workshop—“Jerusalem and Other Contested Cities”—Notre Dame, Jerusalem, January 10–12, 2010. I thank the participants of both conferences for their questions and comments and the anonymous referees of City & Community for their constructive criticism and guidance. I am also in- debted to the Lebanese students who generously allowed me to interview them. Finally, I thank “Conflict in Cities and the Contested State,” funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (RES-060-25-0015). City & Community 9:4 December 2010 doi: 10.1111/j.1540-6040.2010.01346.x C 2010 American Sociological Association, 1430 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20005 414 REMAKING BEIRUT: MEMORY, SPACE, AND THE URBAN IMAGERY country, not reinvent it. Every single fallen stone should come back to its place. We should rebuild the souks, restore the crumbling buildings—preserve the essence of a city that’s been there at least five thousand years.” The Last Migration, Jad el Hage, 2002. Beirut’s endless capacity for reinvention and transformation is best observed in its city center. This pivotal district has known as many labels and urban forms as it has historic lives. The medieval bourj, Ottoman provincial port, French colonial “Place des Canons,” independent “Martyrs’ Square” (Sahat al-Shuhada) have finally been succeeded by an ul- tramodern global cityscape. This most recent reimagining, a consequence of 15 years of devastating civil violence and self-destruction (1975–1990), preceded by 15 years of futur- istic urban landscaping,1 has become both a symbol of Lebanon’s national recovery and an object of postwar critique. Beirut’s commercial resurrection and deliberate rebrand- ing as a leading Arab metropolis and dreamscape of visual consumption has stirred fierce debates and contests over the nature and scope of urban reconstruction in the after- math of conflict (Kassir, 2003; Nagel, 2000, 2002; Sarkis and Rowe, 1998; Sawalha, 2010). These frictions have been further compounded by the resurgence of sporadic violence2 and popular mobilization, which has transformed the Down Town into a strategic battle- ground between rival political coalitions over competing national visions—demonstrated by mass demonstrations, rallies, and tent protests (March 14 “Freedom Tent” and the Hizbullah led “Tent City”). While Beirut may once again be a city in transition, its future is invariably tied to an ongoing negotiation of its past. This article seeks to explore this process by examining the contradictory impulses of remembering and forgetting, erasure and recovery in the context of a postwar city. In a sense the focus is less concerned with global memory debates over justice, reconcilia- tion, and truth (Nora, 2001; Ricoeur, 2004) but rather local encounters and resistance to the restructuring of urban space (de Certeau, 1988; Soja, 1989). I hope to contribute to the growing debate concerning Beirut’s rehabilitation, both on the level of its physi- cal restoration and its national collective reimagining. Beyond discourses that problema- tize the city’s social amnesia (Hanssen and Genberg, 2002), historical myopia (SMakdisi, 1997), nostalgic longing (Khalaf, 2006), and management of cultural heritage (Fricke, 2005), there is a need to understand how the next generation of Lebanese is negotiat- ing Beirut. How do postwar youth remember, imagine, and spatially encounter their city? How does Beirut’s rebuilt urban landscape, with its remnants of war, sites of displacement, and transformed environs affect and inform identity, social interaction, and perceptions of the past? The choice of Beirut as a case study stems from the fact that it has become perhaps “the world’s largest laboratory for post-war reconstruction” (Charlesworth, 2006:54), sub- ject to the globalizing forces of consumerism, privatization, and regulation (Davis, 1990), the regional impulses toward “Dubiazation” led by Arab Gulf real estate conglomerates (el Sheshtawy, 2008), and architectural attempts to promote “the reunification of the Lebanese people” (Traoui, 2002:9). The focus on Lebanese youth is both in response to the lack of previous academic research and an attempt to observe and evaluate how post- war spaces and sites are inhabited and inscribed with meaning, across generations (Fried- land and Hect, 2006; Makdisi and Silverstein, 2006). Previous analytical approaches to young people and urban spaces have observed both the marginalization of youth (Davis, 415 CITY & COMMUNITY 1990; Sibley, 1995; White, 1990) and young people’s role in subverting and constructing spatial/social order (Hil and Bessant, 1999; Robinson, 2000). This dialectic is certainly evident in Beirut’s city center although it is questionable how much power Lebanese youth have to resist and contest the elitist cityscape and construct alternative spaces. The alienation of Lebanese youth from the city center, while reflecting global urban trends (Tienda and Wilson, 2002), presents a more worrying reality in a city still struggling to recover public spaces and still fractured by sectarian symbols, political divides, and ge- ographies of exclusion/inclusion. This article seeks to probe how urban marginalization is linked to broader processes of postwar dislocation and liminality. In addressing the overlapping themes of space/memory/identity I will draw on French sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s (1974/1991) concept of three interconnecting modes of so- cially produced space: the perceived, the conceived, and the lived. The first space is a product of human design, urban planning, and spatial organization. The conceived by contrast contains the abstract, the imagined space, as well as the visual order, signs, and codes of the city, dominated by political rulers, planners, and economic interests. Finally, lived space describes how people inhabit everyday life, the way they create their city as “users” through practices, images, and symbols (Hanssen, 2005). While Lefebvre’s frame- work is a useful starting point to desegregate the multiple layers of discourse, ideology, and practice that have shaped Down Town Beirut’s construction and imagining, it is cru- cial also to explore the city’s urban “spaces of uncertainty” (Cupers and Meissen, 2002: 152), which defy functional reduction but rather are hybrid, fragmented, and unstable, emerging from “encounters and confrontations between people.” Finally, any analysis of Beirut’s posttraumatic landscape must take account of the city’s immaterial sites, spaces, and absences, which shape the territory of the imagination and mediate daily urban encounters. As Friedland and Hecht (2006:35) suggest, “material and immaterial sites are bound together by the invisible bonds of memory, memory which is not regression to the past, but a progression from past into present into fu- ture. ...Central places, holy places and sacred places and memory places are those place- ment where everyone remembers, if only remembers that something has been forgotten and cannot be
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