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PRIVATE DEVELOPMENT VERSUS the PUBLIC REALM 0750640987-Ch001.Qxd 01/05/2005 6:17 AM Page 13 0750640987-Ch001.Qxd 01/05/2005 6:17 AM Page 14 0750640987-ch001.qxd 01/05/2005 6:17 AM Page 12 Part One PRIVATE DEVELOPMENT VERSUS THE PUBLIC REALM 0750640987-ch001.qxd 01/05/2005 6:17 AM Page 13 0750640987-ch001.qxd 01/05/2005 6:17 AM Page 14 #01 REMAKING BEIRUT Angus Gavin one INTRODUCTION Behind the discussion of ‘private development versus the public realm’ lies the growing concerns of many urban designers, sociologists and city authorities over the continuing decline of the public realm, the loss of civic value and the lack of maintenance and increasing privatization of public space. Private corporate interests that have ghettoized the city into gated communities and incorporated the green space and former public arena of the city into private ownership and development are seen as the principal scapegoat. As part of their route of recovering from a sixteen-year civil war, the Lebanese govern- ment privatized in 1994 the entire city centre of Beirut, transferring the ownership of virtually all land, including the former public realm, to a private development corpora- tion, Solidere. On the face of it, Beirut seemed to confirm the worst fears observers might have about the private annexation of public space, presaging the ultimate demise of the public realm. As an example of inner city renewal, Beirut might be seen to repre- sent this extreme. This chapter seeks, however, to demonstrate that the reverse is in fact the case. Solidere is required, under its formation decree, to build up the entire infrastructure and public domain of the city centre, defined in the master plan as constituting almost half the land area of the city, and to deliver it to the public authority on completion. The company finalized most of the infrastructure in 1996 and continues to work through a rolling pro- gramme of design, construction and handover of some 60 public parks, gardens, squares and promenade areas. Since these green spaces are perceived by the company to exert a significant impact on land sales, as well as creating a strong focus of attraction in the city as a whole, Solidere has been motivated to build a public realm of the highest quality, which is much admired by Beirutis and visitors alike. Key factors are the Mediterranean climate and lifestyle that permit and encourage the social use of public space for promenading in ways that are inconceivable elsewhere in the Middle East. What is gradually emerging in the downtown area is very distant from the impoverished or privatized public realm decried by critical observers of the modern city. Fine public spaces that are owned by the city and create the main meeting points, social arenas and attraction to visitors are rapidly emerging as one of central Beirut’s unique assets, differentiating it from all other cities. 14 0750640987-ch001.qxd 01/05/2005 6:17 AM Page 15 GAVIN: REMAKING BEIRUT two ENERGY OF THE MULTI-LAYERED CITY For 5000 years Beirut has provided a link between Europe and the trade routes of the east. Lying at a watershed of cultures and religions, the city has absorbed the legacy of twelve civilizations. Destroyed several times in its long history by war, invasion, earthquake and tidal wave, it has nevertheless each time succeeded in regaining its role as a regional focus and gateway between Europe and the Arab world. Now recovering from the 1975–1990 Lebanese war, Beirut lies again at just such a crossroads. In spite of the destruction it experienced during the war and its resulting loss of regional influence, Beirut remains a fascinating place of contrasts, complexity and cultural depth, figure 1.1 CITY CENTRE CONTEXT - SATELLITE IMAGE OF BEIRUT PENINSULA 15 0750640987-ch001.qxd 01/05/2005 6:17 AM Page 16 CITYEDGE figure 1.2 CITY CENTRE MASTER PLAN compared with many of its neighbours. The booming cities of the Gulf, which thrived on Beirut’s wartime decline, seem by comparison like global city implants on the Dallas model, or superficial place-marketing constructs. In Beirut, the energy for renewal seems to radiate from the ground – the very soil that, through postwar clearances and excavations in the downtown area, has revealed the archaeological riches of past city layers from the Canaanite Phoenicians through the Classical, Arab, Crusader and Ottoman periods to the recent past. All these layers exist within the area dedicated for postwar renewal as the ‘Beirut Central District’, a zone which contains the entire extent of the city from ancient times until the 1830s but now defines the city centre of the Lebanese capital. These past city layers which represent simultaneously both constraint and opportunity, carry the risks of conflict between archaeology and development. At the same time, however, the preservation and display of the key features of the city’s past is also helping create a unique destination for visitors in the downtown area. three AFTERMATH OF WAR Much of the outside world’s perception of modern Beirut derives from televised reportage of the sixteen-year civil war that was incomprehensible in its complexity, destroying the 16 0750640987-ch001.qxd 01/05/2005 6:17 AM Page 17 GAVIN: REMAKING BEIRUT central area and costing the city its hitherto undisputed role as the Middle East’s first city and regional centre for banking and trade, culture and tourism, higher education and health care. The war left Beirut polarized into many different enclaves – a pattern more complex than the east–west divide between Christian and Moslem communities that the Green Line implied. The city centre bore the brunt of destruction, and in postwar surveys the entire infrastructure and two-thirds of the fabric was assessed as being beyond salvage. At the same time the population was almost totally dispersed from the core to the relative safety of outlying areas, accompanying other major population shifts in Lebanon caused by the war and by Israeli occupation of the south. In the latter years of the conflict and immedi- ate postwar period this flow was reversed, with some 20 000 refugee families squatting in derelict properties in the abandoned city centre. Meanwhile, throughout the war years, the downtown foreshore had become the city’s fly-tip and dumping ground for domestic waste from West Beirut, which had been deprived of the city’s waste services, since they were located on the east side. By the close of the war this uncontrolled landfill extended some 25 ha into the sea, causing an environmental hazard in the eastern Mediterranean. In reviewing the options for the recovery of the city centre these were perhaps the starkest of the dilemmas facing Lebanon’s immediate postwar government, but there were others. Fifteen years of war had left an institutional vacuum so that no public sector agency was capable of taking on such complex, large-scale urban restructuring. The government’s resources were already stretched to the limit on an ambitious nationwide postwar pro- gramme of recovering the nation’s physical and social infrastructure and institutional investment, dubbed ‘Horizon 2000’. Furthermore, such was the destruction that it seemed impossible that anything other than very small-scale incremental redevelopment could take place using the existing private stakeholders in city-centre land and buildings. Lebanese property law has generated multiple ownership over the generations that has frequently resulted in paralysis. The ownership of one parcel of land in the souks, for example, was claimed by more than 4700 people. It was hard to imagine establishing a consensus for action among so many vested interests. The metropolitan plan for Greater Beirut, completed in 1986 during the war years, recognized the vital importance of restoring and redeveloping the city centre, both to symbolize postwar national renewal and to help recover Beirut’s lost regional pre-eminence. It was clear that this could not be achieved through small-scale, piecemeal redevelopment. What was needed was a grand vision. Mindful of these factors and rising to the challenge, the country’s first postwar govern- ment under Prime Minister Hariri, was determined to turn Beirut’s downtown disaster into a rising phoenix through a unique form of public–private partnership. Lebanon’s modern economy has always been heavily service-oriented and private-sector driven. Beirut’s postwar urban recovery was therefore best directed, neither through conventional public sector investment and management, nor through reliance on aid-agency funding, 17 0750640987-ch001.qxd 01/05/2005 6:17 AM Page 18 CITYEDGE as in the Balkan cities, but through concerted and rapid private sector investment into a carefully constructed institutional framework and regulated by government decree. four PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP While incremental development remains the city’s normal process of renewal, large-scale urban restructuring and regeneration call for more drastic measures. With some excep- tions, traditional public sector urban renewal has generally not fared well. Today there is widespread acceptance that the most successful model is some form of public–private partnership that combines the regulating powers of the state with the investment capabil- ity and market awareness of the private sector. Beirut offers one such model and, to that extent, lies in the mainstream of contemporary urban regeneration. One of the largest inner city and waterfront regeneration projects in the world, the renewal of Beirut’s war-torn city centre was initiated in 1994. In the first decade of a reconstruction that is likely to take some thirty years in all, central Beirut has attracted considerable international interest, for the quality of its urban development, its unique form of public–private partnership and the remarkable speed of its regeneration. This has enabled Lebanon’s flagship postwar reconstruction project to attract significant inward investment and bring life back to a destroyed city centre in less than a decade, without recourse to scarce public funds.
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