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DECONSTRUCTING BEIRUT'S RECONSTRUCTION: 1990 - 2000 Coming to Terms with the Colonial Heritage An essay on a public lecture presented by Robert Saliba at Darat al-Funun, Amman on April 19, 2000. --continued-- THE "PEOPLE'S" PERSPECTIVE To Saliba there is a need to look at the memory of the city not only from a formal historical perspective, but also from the informal perspective of the city's inhabitants. He adds that the notion of the memory of the city has been misused and abused during the past decade both by the advocates and the opponents of the reconstruction of Beirut's Central District, who mainly consist of architects, entrepreneurs, sociologists, and politicians. Each group has tailored the notion of collective memory to fit with its own needs and arguments. However, nobody has bothered to ask the people themselves how they actually remembered the city. In this context, Saliba presented an exercise he carried out with his students in 1990, while teaching at the American University of Beirut (AUB). This was at the end of the civil war, just before the center of the city became fully accessible to the public. The exercise consisted of interviews with about eighty persons who were asked to draw mental maps of the city. This group of respondents was divided into different age groups so as to see how each of the groups remembered the city and how it viewed its reconstruction. Collective Memory Interestingly enough, the youngest of these age groups, who were the AUB students carrying out the exercise, viewed the city center as a tabula rasa. Since these students were all under the age of 25, they had neither a clear recollection nor a direct experience of the city from before the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. The media and the accounts of their parents mainly shaped their image of the city. Their mental maps of the city center emerged as an empty space with two markers: the Place des Martyrs and al-Masarif Street (Banks' Street) (figure 3). The first was drawn as a circle despite being rectangular in shape, while the second figured more realistically on the maps since it existed on the western edge of the Beirut Central District, and was partially preserved from destruction during the war. When asked about their opinion on how to approach the reconstruction of the central district, this group preferred that the center be reconstructed anew disregarding what it looked like before the war. The situation was different for the group between 25 and 45 years of age, who provided more elaborate mental maps of the city (figure 4). Many of the younger members of this group, who were between 25 and 35 years of age, already had established their businesses outside the city center and feared the competition that would arise from the reconstructed city center. On the other hand, the older members of this group, who were between 36 and 45 years of age, expressed a yearning to preserve the pre-war image of the city center. Saliba referred to this group, to which he belonged at that time, as the "romantics." They greatly interacted with the city center in the 1960s and 1970s, and the city center formed an integral part of their mindscape. The group above 45 years of age presented the most elaborate mental maps in relation to the other age groups (figure 5). However, they favored the reconstruction of a new city center since they believed it would create work opportunities for their children. Interestingly enough, their response was similar to that of the youngest group, but for different reasons. Obviously, one is presented with a variety of reactions to the reconstruction of the city center, and no generalizations should be made about the "memory of the city" and the suitability of its reconstruction as often asserted by planners, designers, and politicians. The final result of this exercise was to put together a synthesis map (figure 6) representing the "collective memory" of the city center. This map was complemented by an analysis of the physical and spatial structure of the city center in order to articulate an urban design assessment framework instead of a reconstruction scheme. This framework was used to assess the 1977 and 1991 reconstruction plans in terms of their respect for the historical, physical, and perceived identities of the city (5). Public Attitudes towards Reconstruction In 1997, the German researcher Heiko Schmid of Heidelberg University carried out another survey dealing with the reconstruction of the city and the Solidere project (6). Part of the survey included putting together a map that showed the amount of destruction that affected the city center during the war and after the war (figure 7). What had been preserved appears in black, what was destroyed during the war appears in yellow, and what was destroyed after the war appears in blue. The map shows that the structures that were destroyed after the war are more numerous than what was destroyed during the war. For his survey, Schmid interviewed about 200 persons, about half of whom were Christian and the other half Muslim. Almost three-quarters of those interviewed supported the process being carried out for the reconstruction of the city center under Solidere. The study noted that the level of acceptance among Muslims was slightly higher than among Christians. Schmid believed that this was connected to the fact that al-Hariri, a Muslim, was Lebanon's Prime Minister at that time. |
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