As the Dust (Un)Settles: Consuming Disaster in Beirut’s Reconstruction
As someone who researches Beirut’s past, I struggle with the problem of heritage and reconstruction in the city’s present. I understand the value society places on historical structures and culture, without which a job like mine wouldn’t exist. But there is something to question about prioritizing buildings (no matter how charming or historically significant) over justice, over accountability, over bodies buried beneath architectural rubble. The commodification of heritage—of the past—is nothing new; it’s been the bread and butter of political regimes and our global economy since the rise of modernity in the late eighteenth century. For Beirut, in the wake of one of the world’s largest non-nuclear explosions, pictures and videos of devastated buildings—across Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter—have been accompanied by urgent calls to save Beirut’s historical buildings and help fund their restoration. But these calls to resurrect brick and mortar were making their rounds before we even knew the extent of our losses, when bodies (or what remained of them) waited beneath the wreckage. For Lebanon, this drive for reconstruction is ingrained in a problematic psychology of resilience, which we find ourselves incessantly embroiled in in the face of disaster. More importantly, this mythos of resilience, coopted by an economic system that not only consumes, but produces, disaster, disturbingly glosses over whose heritage people want rebuilt and why.
Figure 1. Port of Beirut’s damaged grain silo, August 2020, Beirut. Photograph by George Azar. Reproduced with permission of George Azar.
But in Lebanon, disaster struck well before Beirut’s explosion. Our terrible year began in late 2019, with the hope of the October revolution. People took to the streets fed up with three decades of a clientelist system of corruption, injustice, and pandering to the 1 percent. Costs of living and unemployment rates were skyrocketing. An environmental disaster was looming. We were sick of a power-sharing neoliberal system that thrives on continual threats of war and violence, that uses sectarianism to buttress itself, and that creates and perpetuates our electricity, water, and garbage crises. Little did we think that things could get worse. As the year unfolded, we witnessed an economic collapse, the criminalization of free speech, an unchecked COVID-19 pandemic, and the militarized suppression of dissent. Almost a year later, we find ourselves grappling with an implausible reality in the wake of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate exploding at the port of Beirut on August 4 resulting in an unfathomable level of destruction—to bodies and buildings. I cannot imagine a truer testimony to the culpability of the Lebanese political class and the socioeconomic system that enables it.
Figure 2. ARIA Damage Map: Beirut Explosion Aftermath. Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Earth Observatory of Singapore/ESA.
Over two months since the blast, we’ve committed to memory its immediate impact. The human toll: 300,000 displaced, over 200 dead, over 6,000 injured. Beirut Port’s grain silo, a huge concrete structure built in 1968 with the capacity to hold 120,000 tons of grain, shielded the western part of the city from the force of the blast (Figure 1). Weeks later, I am still unsettled by the idea that the random placement of this nondescript building, which few of us even knew existed before August 4, could be the reason my family and I are alive. But many do not have the privilege of pondering alternate scenarios. Approximately 50 percent of neighborhoods under the jurisdiction of the Beirut Municipality were damaged (Figure 2). Areas in the explosion’s epicenter—including Beirut Port, Karantina, Gemmayzeh, Mar Mikhael, Saifi, Geitawi, Badawi, and Beirut Central District—recorded the most destruction, fatalities, and injuries. Four hospitals in these neighborhoods are out of commission. Nearby quarters, like Achrafieh, Bachoura, and Bourj Hammoud (a little further off) also saw extensive structural damage and human injury (Figure 3). Countless glass surfaces shattered in buildings five miles away from the port. Equally significant has been the push for the reconstruction of heritage buildings, under the guise of defiantly rising from the ashes and protecting our society’s greater interests.
Figure 3. Map of Beirut (not drawn to scale) showing the city’s districts impacted by the explosion, with the inclusion of neighborhoods discussed in this essay. The red star indicates the location of the blast, and the red circle is an approximation of the explosion’s epicenter. Map by the author, 2020.
Looking at some initial responses to the explosion in the media, resilience is signaled early on as the city’s savior. Defying the pandemic by flooding the streets of damaged neighborhoods bearing brooms, young residents stood out for some observers as paragons of resilience (Figure 4). “Hope and resilience will always prevail,” one follower commented on social media pages of designers and artists, whose stores and studios were damaged in the blast. “New symbols of Lebanon’s famed resilience are everywhere,” noted a BBC report on the civic response to the blast, which saw hordes of volunteers assisting with repairs and clean up. For “the sake of sanity” some say we need to construct “a more inclusive and resilient ecosystem.” On the other hand, many are frustrated with the Lebanese crutch that is its supposed “resilience.” They ask, are we—have we been—fooling ourselves into thinking we could “survive anything”?
Figure 4. Young masked volunteers with brooms, Beirut, August 2020. Photograph by George Azar. Reproduced with permission of George Azar.
Yet the idea of Beirut being associated with the “spirit of the Phoenix” is more than just a maddening cliché. The rhetoric of “resilience” is not just anecdotal. Nor is it unique to Lebanon. It is echoed in the notion of “survivance” as the antithesis of victimization, of defeat, of tragedy amongst generations of indigenous groups. What survivance and resilience share is the onus placed on their affected social groups to perpetually perform their own resurrection, with no hope of justice or reparations, where any struggle to survive is their individual burden to bear. For Lebanon, resilience forms the backbone of the United Nations’ and European Union’s policies in the country. It’s UNESCO’s Education 2030 program. It’s the (now ironic) 2018 Beirut urban resilience master plan developed by the World Bank and Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery. Resilience, in these narratives, is one “empowering elites.” It’s a resilience that banks on threats—of regression, of stagnation, of sanctions, of violence, of poverty, of defeatism—to bolster a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps and scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours system. As my colleague at the American University of Beirut, Sara Mourad, writes “resilience romanticizes our loss and dispossession” and serves as “a marketing stunt for a political and economic system that runs on crises, that manufactures crises in order to sustain itself.” After the explosion, this feeding off of disaster was seen in the push for reconstruction; a drive that was happening even before bodies of victims were fully recovered. A desire to consume and profit from the disaster manifested itself in the actions of the political class and entrepreneurial elites.
“After the explosion, this feeding off of disaster was seen in the push for reconstruction; a drive that was happening even before bodies of victims were fully recovered.”
Leading the charge in capitalizing on tragedy, the Lebanese government responded to the influx of international humanitarian aid, relief, and financial assistance for reconstruction efforts (for the most part) with open arms. On August 7, when missing bodies were still buried beneath crumbled buildings, President Michel Aoun noted that “the accident that occurred on August 4 in the port lifted the economic siege that [Lebanon] was under.” It comes as no surprise that the explosion presented Lebanon’s political class with access to funding and assistance from the international community that was previously withheld because of “informal sanctions.” The ruling class, with its quid-pro-quo form of governance, ceaselessly attempts to have the upper hand and “leverage the situation to its own political gain.”
Equally opportunistic are the country’s elites who are trying to profit off of the disaster. In some cases, these offenders are real estate vultures who saw the explosion as a way to rebuild parts of the city in their neoliberal image at a time when the country’s economic collapse had dried up or stifled most local ventures. Within a few days of the explosion, rumors on social media swirled like a gust of glass-shattering dust: mysterious “property sharks” were trying to swindle homeowners into selling their damaged homes for cheap. In a viral video, activist Joseph Nassar explains that his landlord, who owns a damaged building in Mar Mikhael, received a barrage of calls from unknown brokers to sell. In another clip, architect Fadlallah Dagher admonishes: “our home is not for sale, our heritage is not for sale, our urban fabric and social fabric are not for sale.” He insists Beirut will be rebuilt, but “Solidere II, will not pass.”
Solidere refers to the private company established in 1994, after the Civil War, by late Prime Minister Rafic Hariri. It was known for monopolizing the redevelopment of Beirut’s devastated post-war city center. For many leftist Lebanese, Solidere was synonymous with all that was worrisome about neoliberalism in the 1990s, with late capitalism’s “triumph” and global Americanization. Three years after the country’s Amnesty Law of 1991 that retroactively pardoned all political crimes, allowing warlords to wear the guise of members of government, Solidere—under the banner of “resilience”—laid claim to the city’s center through underhanded maneuvers, like undervaluing the shares of preexisting property owners. As the post-blast panic and paranoia of history repeating impended, the hashtag #BeirutIsNotForSale trended on social media, as did #SaveBeirutHeritage and #BeirutWillRiseAgain.
But which homes and communities are these earnest calls trying to save? The public outrage is mostly about Beirut’s heritage as represented in the historical, predominantly Christian, neighborhoods of Gemmayzeh, Mar Mikhael, and other nearby quarters. Gemmayzeh, a small neighborhood in Beirut’s Rmeil district, has two main streets, Gouraud and Pasteur, running through it. They merge into Armenia Street in Mar Mikhael. These modest neighborhoods are some of the few areas in the city where historical buildings remain standing. Dating to the mid-nineteenth century, these industrial quarters—with their diversity of non-Muslim minorities—emerged at a time in the Ottoman period when mass migrations were occurring from villages to cities. As a result, Beirut, which started as a small merchant town around a port, witnessed rapid urbanization (it boasted 75,000 residents in the 1870s, up from about 8,000 in the early 1800s).[1]
Figure 5. Example of a damaged heritage structure in Gemmayzeh, Beirut, August 2020. Photograph by George Azar. Reproduced with permission of George Azar.
Historical neighborhoods like Gemmayzeh, Mar Mikhael, and nearby areas in the Achrafieh district like Sursock and Rue Monot, known (since the 2000s) for their vibrant restaurant culture, art galleries, and nightlife, are equally popular for the charm of their architecture dating from the period of late Ottoman rule (which ended in 1917) to the French Mandate (1923-1943). Often described as hybrid eclecticism, the architecture combines Mediterranean coastal features, like terracotta-tiled pitched roofs and facades adorned with limestone, with more European neo-gothic and neo-classical elements, like intricate plaster wall ornaments or thin Greek-style columns, once considered the height of modernity during the late nineteenth century (Figure 5).[2] Streets are lined with two- to three-storied central hall mansions called “Triple Arch Houses” because of their characteristic three arched lancet windows, which adorn the buildings’ street-facing façades, and are usually framed by patterned wrought iron balconies or cement balustrades. Apartment complexes dating to the time of the French presence show a combination of triple-arch bay windows along with Art Deco-style verandas, which sometimes round out the corners of these buildings (Figure 6). Some windows in the more elaborate mansions are made of colorful stained glass, like the ones restored in 2014 for the Sursock Museum (originally late art collector Nicholas Sursock’s mansion), which were shattered during the recent explosion.
“Beneath an aura of a post-explosion resilience and commitment to heritage preservation, lies the momentarily buried reality of an already-ravaged urban fabric.”
Figure 6. Examples of architecture from different periods and styles (with a traditional triple-arch house on the right), damaged after the explosion, Gemmayzeh, Beirut, August 2020. Photograph by George Azar. Reproduced with permission of George Azar.
Images of these, and other, destroyed historical buildings have flooded social media via accounts like Rebuild Beirut, Live Love Architecture, and Beirut Heritage. Copious photographs of gutted neighborhoods speak to our voyeuristic enthrallment with consuming images of devastation. The aged façades of the past have transformed into clumps of ground up cement and asbestos; like life-sized doll houses, the rooms in people’s homes expose the inner workings of antiquated spaces. The high ornate plaster ceilings are twisted, torn, and punctured like fragile sheets of tissue paper revealing the roofs’ century-old construction materials (Figure 7). Out of 8,000 buildings destroyed in the city, 640 are considered historical, and 60 of these are at risk of collapse. It is this heritage that local and international initiatives want to rebuild and preserve.
Figure 7. Example of a damaged triple-arch house in Gemmayzeh, Beirut, August 2020. Photograph by George Azar. Reproduced with permission of George Azar.
Within a week of the blast, several groups sprang into action to protect and restore these heritage structures. The sense of urgency is apparent in how quickly things got done in a country where things never get done. The government issued a decree forbidding the sale of historical buildings without permission from the Ministry of Culture. International groups like UNESCO, under the supervision of the Ministry of Culture, partnered with numerous local NGOs, like the Arab Center for Architecture and Save Beirut Heritage, and the Beirut Heritage Initiative to rehabilitate historical structures. Experts, fundraisers, and social awareness campaigns advocating the value of cultural heritage continue to stream into and throughout the city.
Beneath an aura of a post-explosion resilience and commitment to heritage preservation, lies the momentarily buried reality of an already-ravaged urban fabric. Historical structures in the city have been incessantly demolished since the 1990s, long before pressure waves reduced some of them to rubble. The coastal areas of Ain El-Mreisseh and Ras Beirut, to the west of the city’s center, have long seen the destruction of historical mansions and buildings. The APSAD Foundation, whose 98-year old founder, Lady Cochrane Sursock, recently passed away from her blast-related injuries, was one of the few NGOs active in preserving heritage decades before it was de rigueur. But instead of a slew of followers and “likes,” heritage “crusaders” garnered insults; they were branded as naïve youth, fanatic leftists, or plain old-fashioned delusionists for piteously trying to hold back the “necessary” progress of a post-war economy. Under the guise of heritage protection, the government’s laws were changed. With each legal amendment, in 1996, 1997, and 2010, more buildings were demoted from “legacy” status to “disposable” in order to make way for urban “reconstruction” in the form of luxury skyscrapers (beyond Solidere’s central district). Stretched across the city’s coastline, these still-empty high-rises, which purloined their multi-million-dollar views from the ghosts of demolished turn-of-the-century homes, now seem to desolately stand sentinel, safeguarding the vestiges of a crumbled economy.
“But what we do see ahead of us is a system that produces, that uses, disaster in order to reinvent itself.”
The swift post-explosion political interest in heritage is suspect; the impetus behind the robust elite response to reconstruction is equally questionable. As the dust settles, as losses are tallied, as we learn to live with the burden of surviving, there remains a growing list of pressing questions. What ways, and for which purposes, are members of the Lebanese National Bloc political party, who posted Dagher’s video on their Instagram account, leveraging their commitment to heritage preservation? Is gentrification, which saw the displacement of elderly renters in Mar Mikhael years before the explosion decimated their apartments, immune from concerns about the sale of “our urban fabric and social fabric”? As Nassar explained, in a conversation three weeks after the blast, heritage structures, like his rental in Mar Mikhael, have long interested real estate brokers, the explosion just made it easier to convince owners to cut their losses by having their properties listed. How do we justify the audacious crowdfunding goals of (overpriced) Beirut-based establishments, some of which are to blame for hiked rental prices, who catered to the privileged few? There’s something to be said of “resilience” when it translates into “opportunity” in the face of disaster.
What initiatives are calling attention to “other” historical quarters damaged by the explosion, yet lacking the cultural currency so valued by tourists, expatriates, and elite communities? Karantina, a neighborhood located to the east of the port, which gets its name from the quarantine station established there in 1831, housed many low-income residents. These are the migrant workers, Syrian refugees, and underprivileged families who, in every revolution of resilience, find themselves thrust into the cavernous abyss of perpetual poverty. In recent years, Karantina also found itself on the losing end of gentrification. But, in this case, parts of the gentrified “SoHo of Beirut” with pop-up bars, galleries, and nightclubs, led to the purported betterment of a neighborhood with no marketable “charm” of its own to lose. The blast’s impact on Bourj Hammoud (near Karantina), known as the city’s Armenian neighborhood, is mostly reported on in Armenian-centered outlets. It’s hard not to think how, as usual, issues of race and class determine which destroyed bodies and homes are deemed newsworthy or worth saving.
More than two months later, many of us in Beirut still feel like we are teetering on the cusp of a great unknown yawning wide before us like the crater where the city’s port used to be. But what we do see ahead of us is a system that produces, that uses, disaster in order to reinvent itself. As reconstruction picks up, the market for glass and aluminum is soaring. As puppet governments resign, new(ish) minion prime ministers are instated. As the French presence is resurrected it paves the way for the privatization of Lebanon’s public sectors by western investors. As calls for justice continue to go unanswered, the desperate and unconnected—the perennial losers in this game—continue to serve as fodder for the bedrock of the system. They are driven to turn, once again, to their respective “sponsors,” reinforcing the sectarian clientelist system in place. As the dust settles (and the fire re-ignites), we are unsettled by the thought that bodies remain beneath the rubble. As we cast aside the shackles of our “resilience,” international initiatives, like UNESCO’s ResiliArt, wax poetic about art “mak[ing] us resilient” in order to resist the desperation of crises. But is resilience the antithesis of despair? Or are the two different sides of the same coin within a system that gaslights us into thinking that everything is changing, when everything remains the same?
Postscript
In the weeks since writing this essay, fires have continued to ignite and PMs continue to resign, revealing the farce that is the current political scene. While the nation's president paves our path to “hell,” we are placed at the mercy of France's closing window of assistance, with the alternative being, as always, the looming threat of civil war.
Author’s note: Thanks to Lamees Miknas, Nadine Zeni, and Joseph Nassar for their help with research, George Azar for generously allowing me to use his photographs, and Alya Karame for reading, and re-reading, drafts of this essay.
NOTES
[1] Jens Hanssen, Fin de Siècle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press; Clarendon Press, 2005), 2n6, 28.
[2] Robert Saliba, Beyrouth: architectures aux sources de la modernité, 1920-1940 (Beirut: Éditions Dar An-Nahar, 2009), 43-49.
