Saving Beirut: heritage and the city

Abstract

Decaying or abandoned buildings and houses are a distinct part of Beirut’s urban landscape. Many local heritage initiatives call for their preservation while raising contentious issues regarding belonging, identity and ownership. Rather than focusing only on houses as such, this paper looks at the meanings and uses of heritage within the context of ongoing urban transformation. Here I am more concerned with what heritage does and how it works, rather than what it is. Analysing the relationship between heritage-making and gentrification attempts, I explore how heritage is mobilised in the face of socio-spatial restructuring in Beirut’s central and peri-central neighbourhoods.

Keywords:

• Heritage
• the city
• Beirut
• destruction and preservation
• Lebanon

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to Chiara de Cesari, Rozita Dimova and Fadi Shayya for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of the paper. I would like to thank the journal editor, Laurajane Smith, and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions. A special note of thanks to the activists and all the individuals in Beirut who shared their time and insights with me.

Notes

1. Basta el-Tahta is one of the peri-central districts of the Municipality of Beirut situated just outside the ancient city walls, which no longer exist.

2. Names of individuals and organisations have been changed to maintain anonymity.

3. Relationships are entangled in personal connections and clientelist networks as well as ethno-religious allegiances wherein ethno-religious denotes not simply ‘tenets of faith’ but also ‘a mix of religious belief and cultural practice’ (Volk 2010, 7).

4. The bulk of the research I discuss here was conducted between April 2013 and April 2014.

5. Set up in 1977, the Council for Development and Reconstruction is a government organisation in charge of planning, execution and supervision of reconstruction and development projects.

6. Although Electricité du Liban (EDL) introduced a rotating power outage schedule to stabilise insufficient capacity of electricity production, some parts of Lebanon can experience blackouts for up to 12 h a day. Beirut is ‘fortunate’ enough to face a three-hour power failure per day which may last longer between 6 am and 6 pm, depending on the district. EDL displays daily cut-off times so that inhabitants are able to manage. Now it is possible to download and instal a kahraba (electricity) application on your phone. Still, I could often see power cuts timetables in people’s homes, especially when they could not afford diesel generators, which each cost up to 100 dollars per month to run.

7. Grue means ‘crane’ and this slogan refers to the classification of the selected Beirut streets as Rue à Caractère Traditionnel.

8. The buildings belonging to rich and influential families carried their names, for example Butros, Sursock or Barakat. Religious properties also hold a high heritage value.

9. ‘The old rent’ refers to the times when the rent was in lira. The sharp devaluation of the Lebanese lira was one of the consequences of protracted warfare. In early 1975, one US dollar was equal to two Lebanese liras, but the Israeli invasion in 1982 brought a sharp devaluation of the Lebanese currency. It plummeted towards the end of the 1980s when the inflation exceeded 400% in 1988 and remained on the rise until further depreciation of the Lebanese lira. Although now the rent is still in liras, many people pay in dollars, and the rent can be as low as 100 dollars per year.