The dust of the Beirut Port August 4 2020 explosion had not settled when voices rose to speak of the loss of the city’s architectural heritage. Since then, homeowners, preservation advocates, and others have rushed to survey damages, estimate the costs of repair, buttress crumbling walls and roofs, prevent demolitions, and when possible assemble the rubble to rebuild what is gone. Estimates count 60-80 historical buildings in need of considerable repair[1]. Their admirable efforts coalesced under the banner of an organization of volunteers, which includes many of the individuals who have been actively invested in Beirut’s architecture preservation for decades. If we are to save the city’s urban heritage, however, it is imperative that we read the effects of the Beirut explosion within the context of the transformations that preceded the blast. Rather than a rupture, the blast precipitated a destruction well underway with several hundred buildings lost in the past two decades. To change this course, there is a need to contextualize the ongoing mobilization and widen its scope to address the trends that undermined heritage protection prior to the blast.
Those familiar with Beirut’s history recognize the neighborhoods in the vicinity of the port as emblematic of the city’s built heritage. Indeed, Beirut only expanded beyond its small population of 10,000 once its port began to play the role of a regional economic anchor in the 1830s. It was then that the city’s Quarantine was established, the site where sailors were forced to isolate for two weeks to prevent the spread of diseases, before they were allowed to mingle with other city dwellers. The site continued to play the role of hosting those functions and peoples deemed undesirable for many decades. Today, Karantina is home to a vulnerable population of migrant workers, refugees, and low-income Lebanese population who were severely affected by the blast. It was also in the 1830s that the city began to expand beyond its walls, eventually generating the districts that would bridge between the Armenian Camps of Bourj Hammoud and Beirut’s historic core, along the length of Armenia Street, over a century later. Unlike the nearby neighborhoods of the city’s historic core that fell under the savage bulldozers of the post-civil-war reconstruction in the 1990s, the districts surrounding the port maintained a generous number of old stone buildings, many of which embody the unique character of Beirut’s first decades of the 1900s. Their charm and unique character has attracted over the past two decades a population of young creatives, including studios and workshops, restaurant and bar owners, as well as their clients and visitors. They cohabitated often uncomfortably with the aging residents of the district who suffered from the noise and late night activities… Still, more buildings were lost than preserved. Indeed, powerful real-estate interests and their business partners in the political and bankers’ classes found numerous opportunities to replace the small, often modest architecture of the districts with imposing high-rises –many of which failed to bring a new life to the neighborhoods. They were able to do so because the absence of incentives and support for property owners had rendered their ownership a burden. Trapped between expensive repairs, on the one hand, and an outdated rent control that had exponentially increased the rent gap in the districts, on the other, landlords –many of whom shared property in uncomfortable family inheritance conditions- had often been forced to let go of their property to more powerful individuals, sometimes for peanuts, as the latter could secure a lifting of the heritage classification and a lucrative investment now authorized with a revised and excessively permissive building law.
As we move forward in developing a narrative for the recovery of the city’s urban heritage, a critical task by all accounts, it is imperative that the support flowing towards the protection of the city’s heritage embodies a larger understanding of what falls under this category. Heritage is a lived entity. Unlike relics in museums that people visit to study what no longer is, urban cultures exist with the people they embody. In combination with streets, pathways, staircases, stores, and their connections, buildings anchor the multiple forms of inhabitance, the practices, imaginations, and interactions, individual and collective. They form the frames in which people dwell and engage each other. As such, these spaces embody the accumulation of people’s practices, historical and contemporary, and it is this accumulation that makes for their importance as heritage, gives it its lived value, makes it personify objective histories and individual memories, which eventually reflects shared communal histories and identities, capable of bringing people together. When the practices of these communities are eviscerated for the sake of real estate speculation, the marks of their histories are erased. Consequently, if we are to stop the destruction of our heritage and recover what remains of these urban districts, we must create a new reality for their residents and users. We need to bring them on board as champions for the restoration. Side by side with the palette of restrictions typically deployed in heritage preservation (e.g., no lot pooling, respecting the architecture typology), we need to address the larger urban and economic frameworks that reduced the urban economy to speculative investments. As such, it is imperative that a holistic vision for urban regeneration is introduced, one that invests in the productive economies of the districts and proposes public projects and integrated urban interventions. There should also be incentives and compensations directly targeting neighborhood residents, prioritizing their return and the recovery of their businesses. Only by bringing life back to the districts can we secure a path of heritage recovery, one that recognizes our culture as lived and in constant need of positive reinvention.
[1] Survey conducted by the Order of Engineers and Architects in Beirut and Directorate General of Archeology, August 24, 2020