laying claim to beirut - urban narrative and spatial i.d in the age of solidere

Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of SolidereAuthor(s): Saree MakdisiSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 23, No. 3, Front Lines/Border Posts (Spring, 1997), pp. 661-705Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344040Accessed: 22/02/2010 12:20

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Laying Clainl to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of Solidere

Saree Makdisi

As regards coastal towns, one must see to it that they are situated on a height or amidst a people sufficiently numerous to come to the support of the town when an enemy attacks it. The reason for this is that a town which is near the sea but does not have within its area tribes who share its group feeling, or is not situated in rugged moun- tain territory, is in danger of being attacked at night by surprise. Its enemies can easily attack it with a fleet. They can be sure that the city has no one to call to its support and that the urban population, accustomed to tranquility does not know how to fight.

IBN KHALDUN, The Muqaddamclh

When he came to the end of his journey, Abd al-Karim didnt realize hed traveled more than all the shoe shiners in the world. Not because he had come all the way from Mashta Hasan in Akkar to Bei- rut, but because Beirut itself travels. You stay where you are and

All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. An earlier and much shorter version of this essay was presented at the Middle East

Studies Association (MESA) conference in Phoenix, November 1994; part of section 3 was presented at the MESA conference in Washington, D.C., December 1995; part of section 4 was presented at the "Dislocating States" conference on globalization held at the University of Chicago in 1996. Portions of this essay previously appeared in Saree Makdisi, "Letter from Beirut," ANY(Architecture New York) 5 (Mar.-Apr. 1994): 56-59.

For the formation and elaboration of many of the ideas I present here, I am deeply indebted to discussions with my parents and brothers, Ronald Abdelmoutaleb Judy, Rich- ard Dienst, Cesare Casarino, Paul Silverstein, David Rinck, Nadya Engler, Roger Rouse, Maha Yahya, Michael Speaks, Homi Bhabha and the other coeditors of Crttical Inquiry, Elias

CrS2cal Inquiry 23 (Spring 1997)

X) 1997 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/97/2303-0007$01.00. All rights reserved.

661

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FIC. l(a). What used to be Martyrs' Square, facing south; the statue has been removed for renovation. The excavation in the foreground is an archaeological dig. The remaining buildings in the backround mark Solidere's southern perimeter. Photo by author.

FIG. l(b). Postcard of Martyrs' Square before the war, facing north. The street lamp in the foreground (near the buses) is visible in its postwar ruination in the photo in fig. 5.

662 Saree Makdisi Laying Claim to Beirut

it travels. Instead of you traveling, the city travels. Look at Beirut, transforming from the Switzerland of the East to Hong Kong, to Sai- gon, to Calcutta, to Sri Lanka. It's as if we circled the world in ten or twenty years. We stayed where we were and the world circled around us. Everything around us changed, and we have changed.

ELIAS KHOURY, The Journey of Little Gandhi

The very center of Beirut is today a wasteland. For thousands of square meters extending from Martyrs' Square little remains of the heart of this ancient city. Several adjoining areas are made up of a patchwork of buildings slated for recuperation and of naked sites where buildings or souks long since bulldozed or demolished once stood. Today a bold new rebuilding project is underway, one that, under the aegis of a single company (Solidere), promises to bring new life to the center of the city; indeed, the company's slogan is Beirut An Ancient City for the Future. Ironically, though, in the months since reconstruction officially began in earnest (summer 1994), more buildings have been demolished than in almost twenty years of artillery bombardment and house-to- house combat.

As of the summer of 1994, indeed, whatever one wants to say about the reconstruction plan currently being put into effect in central Beirut is almost (but not quite) beside the point. For the object of discussion the center of the city virtually does not exist any longer; there is, in its place, a dusty sprawl of gaping lots, excavations, exposed infrastructure, and archeological digs. Critics of the reconstruction plan mourn the loss of the old city center; but its supporters claim that the old city center had been left beyond salvation by the end of the war and that not only was reconstruction on this scale inevitable but, for any number of reasons, this particular reconstruction plan was and is the only possible option. The debate has centered for the most part on how or why or whether the current plan is the only option. In the meantime, we are losing sight of

Khoury, Ramiz Malouf (director of information at Solidere), Zakaria Khalil (of the Town Planning Deparment at Solidere), Najah Wakeem, and above all Kamal Hamdan. This essay forms only one part of a much larger project; in subsequent essays I more fully elaborate the historical questions raised by the Solidere project, and I also try to move beyond critique to an elaboration of alternatives to the Solidere project. What is at stake in the present essay is merely an outline of the project and an overall assessment of some of its political and cultural ramifications.

Saree Makdisi is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Universal Em- pire: Romanticism and the Culture of Modernization (forthcoming). He has also been writing a series of essays, including this one, on the politics of culture in the contemporary Arab world.

FIG. 2. The wasteland of what used to be Martyrs' Square, with one of the ubiquitous Mercedes dumptrucks in foreground and a "recuperated" building in background. Photo by author.

FIG. 3. Infrastructure installation. The scale of some of the work on the infrastructure can be quite overwhelming, evocative perhaps of a technological sublime. Photo by author.

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how it came to be the only option, how other options were foreclosed long before the reconstruction effort officially began, how the whole process has been presented to Lebanon and the world by Solidere and others as an accomplished fact. Now the city center appears as a blank slate, as an "inevitable" problem with an '4inevitable" solution, and the ''solutiorl'' itself appears as the fulfillment of its own self-fulfilling prophecy.

Blank or not, the city center is a surface that will be inscribed in the coming years in ways that will help to determine the unfolding narrative of Lebanon's national identity, which is now even more open to question. For it is in this highly contested space that various competing visions of that identity, as well as of Lebanon's relationship to the region and to the rest of the Arab world, will be fought out. The battles this time will take the form of narratives written in space and time on the presently cleared- out blankness of the center of Beirut; indeed, they will determine the extent to which this space can be regarded as a blankness or, instead, as a haunted space: a place of memories, ghosts.

I should add at once that the relationship between these spatial narratives and Lebanon's national identity can never be reduced to a simple equivalence and that whatever vision ultimately takes shape in central Beirut will not finally hold all the answers to the questions surrounding this identity. Indeed, one cannot overemphasize the extent to which this identity, and even the very existence of an entity called Lebanon to which it supposedly corresponds, has been disputed. Lebanon's narrative of self- understanding began with formative sectarian struggles in the 1860s (whose subsequent significance for Lebanon's national identity was determined largely under the aegis of the various European empires as well as the Ottoman Empire)l and culminated in the horrors of the 1975-1990 war, which left around 150,000 dead and 300,000 wounded. The war was in a sense fought over different constructions of the nation. For although all nations and all nationalisms are artificial constructions, not all nations have faced the same difficulties of trying to invent a community as has Lebanon. Nor have many nations paid the terrible price that Lebanon has paid for not having successfully come to terms with itself as such an artificial entity (not that such a project of self-understanding needs to be understood in strictly nationalist terms, nor in terms that isolate Lebanon from the rest of the Arab world).2

1. See Ussama Makdisi, "The Modernity of Sectarianism in Lebanon," Middle East Report 26 (Summer 1996): 23-26, 30.

2. Indeed, the question of Lebanese national identity is inseparable from the broader question of national and communal identity in the rest of the Arab world. In another essay, I discuss the failure of the project of nationalism in the Arab world and the relevance of the questions of Palestine and of Lebanon for contemporary Arab reevaluations of nationalism and national economic development. See Saree Makdisi, "'Post-Colonial' Literature in a

Neocolonial World: Modern Arabic Culture and the End of Modernity," Boundary 2 22 (Spring 1995): 85-1 15.

Critical Inquiry Spring 1997 665

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FIC. 4. Wartime damage to the city center. Photo by author.

During the war, territories proliferated, defined according to subna- tional community or sectarian identities. Other spaces were abandoned, most dramatically the so-called Green Line dividing east and west Beirut,

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666 Saree Makdasi Laying Claim to Beirut

and above all the very heavily damaged city center, which for more than fifteen years remained an emptied-out site marking the graveyard of national dialogue and reconciliation.3 To be sure, the questions generated by the war will continue to be contested at various levels and through different modalities (in a reversal of the terms of von Clausewitz's famous dictum). However, central Beirut must, I believe, be seen as a key site for the development and contestation of these and other questions; and it is for this reason that the process of reconstruction assumes a significance that far exceeds the directly material terms in which it has already begun to take shape. This shape takes the form of the work now being under- taken by the newly invented joint-stock Lebanese Company for the Devel- opment and Reconstruction of Beirut Central District, better known by its French acronym Solidere, which now has legal or managerial control over the land in the center of the city. But here it becomes necessary to explain what Solidere's proposed spatial narrative looks like and what are its origins and the origins of the company itself.

1. Berytus Delenda Est; or, 'Xn Ancient City for the Future"

Following the close of the traumatic events of 1975-76 (which marked the beginning of the Lebanese war), the question of what to do about the damage to the central district of Beirut was first opened for discussion. The war seemed then to be over, and various public and private organizations began to consider proposals for the reconstruction effort. These discussions culminated in the first official plan, in 1977, commissioned by the Council for Development and Reconstruction

3. See Kamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions: The Hzstory of Lebanon Reconsidered (Berkeley, 1988). "In all but name," Salibi wrote during the war, "Lebanon today is a non- country. Yet, paradoxically, there has not been a time when the Muslims and Christians of Lebanon have exhibited, on the whole, a keener consciousness of common identity, albeit with somewhat different nuances." Thus, he goes on to say,

The people of Lebanon remain as divided as ever; the differences among them have come to be reflected geographically by the effective cantonization of their country, and by massive population movements between the Christian and Muslim areas which have hardened the lines of division. In the continuing national struggle, however, the central issue is no longer the question of the Lebanese national allegiance, but the terms of the political settlement which all sides to the conflict, certainly at the popular level, generally desire. Disgraced and abandoned by the world, it is possible that the Lebanese are finally beginning to discover themselves. [Pp. 2-3]

Now that the war has indeed ended, it has been argued that central Beirut should serve as a site in which the spatialized sectarianism of the war could be deconstructed and hence as a site in which a new sense of national identity could be given spatial expression, by, among other things, bringing together members of the different sects in a common and collectively reinvented area.


(CDR), to rebuild the city center along the lines of its traditional layout, to restore its centrality in the life of Beirut, and to improve its infrastructure. Particular emphasis was placed, however, on the need to reintegrate the center in both class and sectarian terms (that is, to restore the class and communal diversity that had characterized it before the war) and on the need to ensure the reintegration of the center into the rest of the city's urban fabric. Before the war, the downtown had served not only as a commercial and cultural center but also as a transport hub (all bus and service-taxi routes originated and terminated there, for instance, so that trips to different parts of the city or the country more often than not were routed through the city center). As Jad Tabet points out, the 1977 plan highlighted a desire "to remold the center of the Lebanese capital into a meeting place for the various communities," while at the same time bearing in mind the need to "modernize the center in an attempt to solve the serious problems of functioning and access Beirut faced before the war, while maintaining the specific image of its site, history, and Mediterra- nean and 'oriental' character."4

In any case, the war was not yet over. In late 1977, fighting resumed, punctuated by the first Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1978 and the second Israeli invasion in 1982, which culminated in the siege (and tempo- rary Israeli occupation) of west Beirut in the summer of that year. After the massacre of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, multinational "peacekeeping" forces returned to Beirut in Sep- tember 1982, and the Israelis were compelled to withdraw from Beirut and to retreat to a heavily defended occupied strip of southern Lebanon. Once again the war seemed to be over.

In 1983, OGER Liban, a private engineering firm owned by the Leb- anese billionaire Rafiq Hariri, took over the reconstruction project and commissioned a master plan from the Arab consultancy group Dar al- Handasah. In late 1983, and in the absence of a new of Scial plan, demolition began in the central area on the pretext of cleaning up some of the damage. This "cleaning up," whose perpetrators remain officially uniden- tified (though it has been repeatedly alleged that they stand behind today's reconstruction project),5 involved the destruction of some of the district's most significant surviving buildings and structures, as well as Souk Al-Nouriyeh and Souk Sursuq and large sections of Saifi without recourse to official institutions, on what critics argue were false pretenses,

4. Jad Tabet, "Towards a Master Plan for Post-War Lebanon," in Recovering Beirut: Urban Design and Post-War Reconstruction, ed. Samir Khalaf and Philip S. Khoury (Leiden, 1993), p. 91.

5. See, for example, Nabil Beyhum et al., I'amar Beirut wa'l fursa al-da'i'a [The Recon- struction of Beirut and the Lost Opportunity] (Beirut, 1992), p. 16. See also Assem Salaam, "Le Nouveau plan directeur du centre-ville de Beyrouth," in Beyrouth: Construire l'avenir, reconstruire le passe 2 ed. Beyhum, Salaam, and Tabet (Beirut, 1996).


and in total disregard for the then-existing (1977) plan for reconstruction, which had specifically called for the rehabilitation of those areas of the city center.6

In 1984, however, another round of fighting forced the cessation of planning and reconstruction activities, and intensive shelling caused further damage to the downtown area. When the war entered another lull in 1986, further unofficial demolition was carried out in the downtown area; the same parties that had been behind the 1983 demolitions alleg- edly began implementing a plan (bearing some distant resemblance to the current Solidere proposals) that called for the destruction of a large proportion up to 80 percent of the remaining structures of the city center. According to critics, this was carried out without the authorization or approval or interference of any official or governmental institution.7

Following the final paroxysm of violence that signalled at last the end of the war in 1990, attention once again focused on the reconstruction of the now very heavily damaged center of Beirut. And it was in this context that several developments took place that enabled the resumption of the

6. See Beyhum et al., I'amar Beir7lt wa'lfursa al-da'i'a, pp. 15-25, esp. pp. 15-21. 7. See ibid., p. 16.

FIG. 5.- Martyrs' Square after the war but before the Solidere demolitions, facing south; compare with fig. l(a), which was taken from the same standpoint, to see the scale of the demolitions. All the buildings in the photo have been removed. Photo by author.

FIG. 6. Aerial photograph of central Beirut following the war. Solidere's perimeter, marked by the large boulevards, is clearly visible. Note the Normandie landfill at the northern end of the photo; Place de l'Etoile and Martyrs' Square are clearly visible in the center. Source: Solidere.


kind of planning that had first begun with the unofficial demolitions of 1983-86 and that ultimately led to the formation of Solidere. First of all, Fadel el-Shalaq, the head of Hariri's OGER Liban, was appointed as the head of CDR. As Hashim Sarkis points out, "in effect what this has meant is that the main private organization in the building industry has taken over the ofiicial planning advisory body. The agency that the government used to control private development has now reversed its role."8 Indeed, this development marked only the beginning of the state's abdication of its authority and any direct role it might have played in the reconstruction of central Beirut, and the beginning of a political-economic discourse we might identify as Harirism, which would culminate in 1992 when Rafiq Hariri himself became prime minister of Lebanon. It is worth pointing out that Hariri has always regarded the reconstruction of central Beirut as the crowning project of the economic "rebirth" that he claims to represent.

Also in 1991, a new set of master plans for the reconstruction of central Beirut was released by Dar al-Handasah (the consultancy firm that had been first commissioned by OGER Liban in 1983). These plans, which had been drawn up by the Dar al-Handasah architect Henri Edde, called for what has been fairly unanimously denounced as an outrageous rebuilding project to follow the virtually total demolition of whatever structures remained in the city center. Edde's plan included such features as the creation of an artificial island to house a "world trade center" and an eighty-meter-wide boulevard rivalling the Champs-Elysees (which is a mere sixty meters wide!), as well as a street layout, including overpasses, bearing no resemblance to either what had been there before or to the urban grain of the rest of Beirut. This plan, as Tabet argues, would have made the city center an isolated "island of modernity,"9 all but cut oS from the rest of the city. In the face of a huge public outcry, the CDR and Dar al-Handasah were forced to scrap the scheme, and they set to work on a new master plan.

The last key event of 1991 had to do with the question of property rights in central Beirut. Given the destruction in the city center, but also the increased fragmentation of property rights, the diffusion of property- rights claimants and related inheritance disputes, the idea was put for- ward to have a single private real estate firm expropriate all the land in the city center and take over the rebuilding process.l° Since the main governmental body in charge of reconstruction (the CDR) had already

8. Hashim Sarkis, "Territorial Claims: Architecture and Post-War Attitudes Toward the Built Environment," in Recovering Beirut, p. 114.

9. Tabet, "Towards a Master Plan for Post-War Lebanon," p. 95. See also Beyhum, "Beyrouth au coeur des debats," Les Cahiers de l'Orient 32-33 (1994): 103.

10. Some estimates suggested that there were as many as 250,000 property-rights claimants in the central district, since Lebanese law protects claims not only by property owners and their descendants but by lessors and their descendants as well.

FIG. 7. Martyrs' Square, facing north toward the sea. All the buildings have been removed to make way for a boulevard linking Fouad Chehab Avenue to the port. Photo by author.

FIG. 8. Martyrs' Square, facing north. Note the poster in the background, presenting what this scene is supposed to look like after the reconstruction. Photo by author.


been placed under the leadership of those leaning toward the creation of such a firm, this body (in cooperation with properly private-sector interests, notably Hariri and OGER Liban, that were also in support of the single firm concept) commissioned another study from Dar al-Handasah, which, unsurprisingly, called for the creation of a single firm to take over the center of Beirut. The new plan also called for the demolition of most of the remaining structures in the center in order to facilitate an unfet- tered large-scale development project. But despite the growing support for this new plan in certain public- and private-sector circles, opposition to it also grew from both the general public and a protest group that was formed to debate the idea and to try to generate possible alternatives to it.

Even as the plan was being widely debated, however, official sanction for it was being consolidated, most importantly in the form of laws and decrees calling for the institution of a single company to take over the real-estate rights in central Beirut. The most important of these is Law 117 of 7 December 1991, which provided the legal framework for the constitution of such a company, a law that has been repeatedly denounced as unconstitutional." It should be noted, however, that this law in no way mandated the creation of Solidere specifically or as such that is, the collection of private interests and powerful individuals who gathered together as Solidere's board of founders in 1992. Thus without regard to the public or even to those whose property would be expropriated by the company did Solidere come into being: the ultimate expression of the dissolution of any real distinction between public and private interests or, more accurately, the decisive colonization of the former by the latter. As the Lebanese architect and public planner Assem Salaam argues, "entrusting Beirut's Central Business District (CBD) redevelopment to the CDR is a typical example of the dangers inherent in the state's abdication of its role in orienting and controlling one of the most sensitive reconstruction development projects in the country."'2

In the spring of 1992, further demolition was begun in the downtown area, this time on behalf of the government, even though the reconstruction plan as such had not yet been approved or even defined. Not only were buildings that could have been repaired brought down with high- explosive demolition charges, but the explosives used in each instance were far in excess of what was needed for the job, thereby causing enough damage to neighboring structures to require their demolition as well.'3 Thus, for each building "legitimately" demolished several other buildings were damaged beyond repair, declared hazards, and then demolished

11. See "Al-sharika al-iqariyya fi al-itarayn al-dustouri wa al-qanouni" [The Legal and the Constitutional Aspects of the Real Estate Company], in I'amar Beirut wa'lfursa al-da'i'a, pp. 87-88.

12. Salaam, "Lebanon's Experience with Urban Planning: Problems and Prospects," in Recovering Beirut, p. 198.

1 3. See Beyhum et al., I'amar Beirut wa'lfursa al-da'i'a, pp. 15-20.

FIG. 9. A map of the proposed 1991 reconstruction plan. Source: Beyhum et al., Reconstruction of Beirut anJl the Lost Opportunity ( 1992).

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FIG. 10. An artist's impression of the proposed 1991 plan. Source: Beyhum et al., Reconstruction of Beirut and the Lost Opportunity ( 1992).

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674 Saree Makdisi Laying Claim to Beir7lt

themselves with the same zeal for big explosions. It is estimated that, as a result of such demolition, by the time reconstruction efforts began in earnest following the formal release of the new Dar al-Handasah plan in 1993, approximately 80 percent of the structures in the downtown area had been damaged beyond repair, whereas only around a third had been reduced to such circumstances as a result of damage inflicted during the war itself.l4 In other words, more irreparable damage has been done to the center of Beirut by those who claim to he interested in salvag?ng and rebuilding it than had been done during the course of the preceding fifteen years of shelling and house-to- house combat. 15

As this demolition was being carried out, though, opposition grew. In the spring of 1992, for instance, a group of concerned architects was formed to formulate alternatives to the (still unofficial) reconstruction plan. In May of that year, this group organized a conference to debate issues of aesthetic, cultural, social, economic, and political significance in any reconstruction effort, and to call a halt to the demolition.l6 The conference also called for the necessity of public and governmental debate before any decisions could be made and urged that appropriate con- sideration be given to their proposals and to other issues of concern raised in the large-scale public discussions by the holders of property rights in the downtown area.

In spite of all these calls, however, and in spite of the increasing attention and coverage being given to the national parliamentary elections that year (electoral campaigning, begun in earnest in the summer of 1992, overshadowed the debates over downtown Beirut), the government passed a series of laws enabling the creation of Solidere, whose articles of incorporation were approved in July of that year. One of the last acts of the previous government (shortly after the elections and before it resigned and was replaced by the Hariri cabinet), in fact, was the formal approval of Dar al-Handasah's brand new master plan on 14 October 1992. Thus in an atmosphere of national anxiety and concern with the outcome of the September elections, and with no public participation in decision making the future of the heart of Beirut was decided, long before any (official) investments had been made in it. Demolition was

14.Seeibid.,p.l9. 15. Salaam, for one, points out that more buildings were destroyed by bulldozers than

by the war. According to Salaam, "I1 y a eu plus d'immeubles detruits par les bulldozers que par la guerre. En 1992, des constructions bordaient encore la place des Martyrs. Elles ont ete demolies en six mois" (Le Monde, 3 June 1995). Some cynics, in fact, assert that much of the fighting in the downtown area during the war was paid for in order to achieve as much destruction as possible; Najah Wakeem has made this allegation publicly on several occa- sions. Such views are certainly cynical, but given the many twists and turns of the war, they cannot be entirely ruled out of the question; in any case, many seemingly equally improba- ble events have been substantially documented.

16. The papers from this conference are collected in Beyrouth.


resumed in 1994 and, by the end of that year, as I've said, much of the center of the city had been razed.

Solidere itself makes little reference to its prehistory or to previous plans for reconstruction in the center of Beirut. Formally established on 5 May 1994, the company says in its information booklets that it represents the largest urban redevelopment project of the l990s. Its sole reference to the recent history of the city center is as follows:

Located at the historical and geographical core of the city, the vibrant financial, commercial and administrative hub of the country, the Bei- rut Central District came under fire from all sides throughout most of the sixteen years of fighting. At the end of the war, that area of the city was afflicted with overwhelming destruction, total devastation of the infrastructure, the presence of squatters in several areas, and extreme fragmentation and entanglement of property rights involv- ing owners, tenants and lease-holders. 17

Solidere thus presents itself as a healing agency, designed to help central Beirut recover from its "afflictions." It makes no mention of the previous history of reconstruction not only because these histories do not exist in official terms but also because of the company's peculiar and contradic- tory relationship to history (to which I shall return shortly).

Solidere's capital consists of two types of shares, together initially valued at U.S.$1.82 billion. Type A shares, initially valued at U.S.$1.17 billion, were issued to the holders of expropriated property in the downtown area, in "proportion" to the relative value of their property claims, as adjudicated by the company's board of founders. A further issue of 6.5 million type B shares was released to investors, bringing in new capital at an initial stock offer of U.S.$ 100 per share (and indeed the stock offering was denominated in U.S. dollars, not Lebanese pounds). Within a few weeks, until its closing in January 1994, the stock offering had been over- subscribed by 142 percent (that is, U.S.$926 million, offered by some twenty thousand subscribers). There is, however, an important caveat to all this. Stocks may only be purchased or held by certain individuals in the following order of priority: the original holders of property rights (of all nationalities, though presumably the majority would have been Lebanese); Lebanese citizens and companies; the Lebanese state and public institutions; and persons of Lebanese origin, as well as the citizens and companies of other Arab countries. Non-Arabs, unless they were originally property holders, are thus not permitted to buy shares (though, because of special exemptions to strict Lebanese laws regulating the ownership of land by foreigners, they will be allowed to purchase real estate from the company once land and buildings are placed on the mar-

17. Solidere, Information Booklet 1995, p. 5; hereafter abbreviated IB.


ket by Solidere). Furthermore, there is a maximum individual sharehold- ing limit of 10 percent.

Solidere shares are now being exchanged on the company's own private stock exchange (not on the official Beirut Stock Exchange, which the company has circumvented). As of December 1994, shares had already appreciated in value by some 50 percent, though they have come down considerably since then.l8 In addition to the expected returns and divi- dends (which should accelerate as buildings and land are put on the market), which the board of founders estimated at approximately 18 percent over a twenty-five year period, the company and its investors will not be taxed, either on income from the project or on capital gains, for the first ten years. In fact the first sales of land are already in process, reportedly at a price of U.S.$950 per built-up square meter (considering that the project entails a built-up area of some 4.5 million square meters, one can get from this some sense of the value of Solidere's property).l9

Solidere's massive advertising campaign not only plastered huge posters all over Beirut and the rest of Lebanon but also took out ads in foreign newspapers and magazines. "In Lebanon," reads one of Solidere's ads in the Financial Times, "everyone knows we must rebuild Beirut's city centre. We know how."20 Another ad, in the New York Times, proudly pro- claims, "We've invested in the future of an ancient city.''2l Large-scale mailings of glossy information booklets, maps, and even a miniature set of pictures taken from oversized posters have spread throughout Leba- non ("Le centre ville vous invite...."). All of this, incidentally, appeared before the company itself had actually come into being (the ads were tech- nically sponsored by Solidere's "board of founders").

In any case, what few people in Lebanon seem to realize is that Soli- dere is not going to rebuild the downtown area: it is going to oversee the rebuilding of the downtown area. Other than the infrastructure, the company will limit itself to at most about a third of the construction of actual buildings. To be more specific, Solidere will, according to its information booklets, have four principal functions: first, to supervise the exe- cution of the government-authorized reconstruction plan; second, to finance and rebuild the infrastructure; third, to rehabilitate certain buildings and structures and the development of the rest of the real estate; and, fourth, to manage and sell these properties, buildings, and other facilities. One of the striking features of the development of the infrastructure is that not only will the Lebanese state deny itself any possible tax revenues from this development for the first ten years but it will even

18. As of February 1997, shares are traded at around U.S.$110. 19. See al-Hayat, 4 July 1995. 20. Financial Times, 9July 1993, p. 14. 21. New York Times, 22 Nov. 1993, p. C11.

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go so far as to actually pay for the infrastructure repairs (estimated by the company at U.S.$565 million in 1993 dollars), largely by allocating the company extra space for development in an area of land to be reclaimed from the sea.22

Solidere's rebuilding project encompasses a surface area of about 1.8 million square meters, which will include the reclamation of over 600,000 square meters from the sea. The plan will involve the development of over 4.5 million square meters of built-up space, of which around half will be dedicated to residential units. Approximately half of the area will be owned, managed, and ultimately sold by Solidere. Much of the rest of it will be ceded to the state (infrastructure, parks, open spaces), and an additional 80,000 square meters are exempted lots (government and religious buildings, which revert to their previous owners, that is, the state and the various religious communities). Some 260 buildings in the center have been designated as recoverable and hence spared the bulldozer and dynamite crews; their former owners or other interested parties may redevelop and refurbish them. Anyone, including former owners (who are given priority), wishing to recuperate such a building, however, would have to pay to the company a 12 percent surcharge on the estimated value of the lot; they must also be prepared to repair the building within a two- year time frame and subject their plans to an architectural brief issued by Solidere and under the company's strict supervision. Solidere's recuperation briefs are intended to preserve each recuperated building's original external features and faSades so that the central district retains its previous (surface) appearance to the greatest extent possible and so that the central district can be woven (visually) into the rest of the urban fabric of Beirut.

22. According to IB, "the Company shall be reimbursed by the State for all infrastructure costs incurred, in one or a combination of the following ways: in cash, in State-owned land within the BCD [Beirut Central District], in land within the reclaimed land zone, or in concessions for the exploitation of infrastructure services." Since the state is going to end up paying for the project in the end, many critics of the Solidere plan argue that, at the very least and if for no other reason than this-the state should have much more of a direct role in the company's affairs and even that the state should simply seek financing from multilateral lending agencies or from banks and manage the reconstruction by itself, reaping at least some of the benefits in the form of tax and other revenues, of which it is in considerable need, rather than passing those on to a private company and ultimately paying for the reconstruction in any case. It should be noted that critics of the Solidere plan have argued that the real cost for the infrastructure in the center of the city is in the range of U.S.$50-U.S.$70 million, a figure well within the reach of the Lebanese government; see, for example, Le Monde, 3 June 1995. Since so much of the support for the single-firm concept has been argued in terms of the government's supposed inability to pay for the infrastructure and hence the need for private investment as opposed to public expendi- ture-this is a crucial issue. Critics suggest that the government, now firmly in the hands of certain private sector interests, has abandoned its own role in the city center in favor of these same interests.


Solidere's master plan calls for the creation of a lively and attractive urban core in Beirut, featuring a balanced mixture of office space, residential areas, commercial and retail zones, parks and tree-lined prome- nades, as well as beach facilities and two yacht clubs. In contrast with the notorious 1991 Dar al-Handasah plan (which in a way looks like a deliber- ate red herring), a concerted effort has been made by Solidere's architects and urban planners led by the Harvard-educated Oussama Kabbani- not to depart visually from the traditional appearance or street plan of the city center or adjoining neighborhoods (except in the area to be reclaimed from the sea, which will be based on a grid layout with wider streets). The company's advertising booklets rely heavily on visual and photographic contrasts between the ruined central district as it stands today, the bustle of the district in the heady prewar days of the 1960s and 1970s, and the promise of a poised and elegantly manicured downtown sometime in the next ten or fifteen years.

In response to the various criticisms of the previous Dar al-Handasah plan, the current master plan highlights the intended reintegration of the central district within the greater Beirut metropolitan area. It will also include the planned preservation of certain buildings in the historic core (particularly in the relatively small area from the grand Serail to Martyrs' Square); the "reconstruction" of some of the old souks; the planned preservation of the lower-class and lower-middle-class residential areas within the central district (though it seems fairly obvious that these areas will not take on their previous class identities and will probably be priced beyond the reach of most Lebanese citizens);23 and as a nod toward the more culturally and environmentally motivated critics- the planned creation of a seaside park (on the landfill), which will include what one of the booklets refers to as "some cultural facilities," including a library and a center for the arts. In addition, there is a policy that limits high-rise buildings and calls for a seafront boulevard, hotels, restaurants, cafes, gardens, and a new highway linking the central district with Beirut International Airport, which is barely three miles away to the south.

A major feature of the Solidere plan allows for the preservation of various archaeological finds, some of which will remain in their present locations, others of which will be relocated to an archaeological park near Martyrs' Square. The archaeological richness of the central district cannot be overestimated: the earliest settlements in Beirut date to some 65,000 years ago, and the city has been inhabited and rebuilt by virtually every major culture in the eastern Mediterranean. Present archaeological

23. Property prices in Beirut are today not only astronomical but out of all proportion to the local economy; it is not unusual for a new apartment to be priced in the region of one million dollars. It should be said that Solidere claims that its residential units will be aimed at a variety of income groups, but it remains to be seen to what extent this claim will be realized.

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digs in between work on the infrastructure, which is already underway organized by various Lebanese universities and financed by Soli- dere and international agencies, have uncovered medieval and Ottoman structures, and even earlier finds (Mamluke, Crusader, Arab, Byzantine, Persian, Roman, Greek, Phoenician) and Canaanite, as well as Bronze and Stone Age), including the recently uncovered walls of the Phoenician city, which date from the second millennium B.C. One of the prizes that archaeologists still hope to locate is the Roman law school, the first in the Roman Empire and one of the most important until its destruction in an earthquake. Originally somewhat equivocal about the archaeological dimensions of the reconstruction project, Solidere now seems to be taking it very seriously. According to the archaeologists I spoke to, some of the major infrastructure work (including underground canals and part of the road network) will be diverted or redesigned in order to work around the recently uncovered ancient Phoenician city walls. The redeveloped souk area (essentially a shopping mall) will be constructed along the axes of the ancient city, which have remained largely the same since early Hel- lenistic times. At the same time, of course, the company is turning the architectural and archaeological preservation of certain sites to commercial advantage; one Solidere strategist was quoted recently in Le Moruie, saying, "we have been accused of the destruction of the architectural patrimony of Beirut; that's false, and, more to the point, it's not in our inter-

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FIC. 16. An archaeological site in the oldest part of the city. Note the ancient city walls and the ruins of a Crusader castle. Photo by author.

est. Like the archaeology, it forms part of the marketing [program] of Solidere."24

In visual terms at least (or at most), Kabbani's urban design team is trying to ensure that the new city center will not look like a foreign body in the heart of Beirut. However, the actual details of the actual construction of actual buildings remains, so far as one can tell, a mystery. We do know that the appearance and faSades of recuperated buildings cannot be altered in any way (though internally they can be entirely redesigned). But other than that we know little or nothing. There was, for instance, no outright winner in the 1994 International Ideas Competition for the "reconstruction" of the souks. In reality, this subproject could only amount to a construction from scratch, since the souks were razed, either by Solidere itself or by its various predecessors (though it is worth asking why this project relentlessly clings to the language of the re- rather than admitting that it is not about the resurrection, redemption, recuperation, reinvention, remembrance of that past but rather its invention from scratch). An international jury of architects received 357 detailed proposals from 51 countries, of which 3 were named winners. In effect, however, no one, or at least no one outside of Solidere, knows in any detailed way what the future "souk" area will look like.

In any case, Solidere's concern for (indeed we might call it an obses- sion with) appearances should not obscure the primary emphasis of the

24. Jean-Paul Lebas, quoted in Le Moruie, 3 June 1995.


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FIG. 17. Archaeological excavation of ancient Roman baths in the city center. Photo by author.

project, which lies underneath and behind the various faSades and at the level of infrastructure its greatest concern all along. In a sense, the infrastructure project is at the heart of the matter here; it will be covered up by faSades that may turn out to have a "Levantine" flavor but that could just as easily have had no flavor at all (as with the original Dar al-Handasah plan). Flavor in this context amounts to little more than a marketing advantage, a way to sell the underlying infrastructure; the company strategist quoted above goes on to say that the downtown's archaeological and architectural patrimony will form an essential element in the competition between the rebuilt center of Beirut and other regional centers, such as Dubai, that offer a similar technical infrastructure but that lack Beirut's historical richness and hence the kind of flavor that Solidere can lay claim to. "We will play this card," he promises.

The reclaimed land, for instance, will require an impressive infrastructure to protect it from the sea, consisting of submerged caissons and a lagoon formed by artificial breakwaters. The new road network will be backed up by a series of tunnels and extensive underground parking facilities (for 40,000 cars). The central district will have its own dedicated underground power supply system. It will also have the most advanced telecommunications infrastructure in the world. The telecommunications services will allow for high-speed data communications, transactional da- tabases, and of course international communications via satellite earth stations and international submarine fiber-optic cable links. Beirut's basic

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copper phone network will be backed up in the central district by digital fiber-optic lines capable of carrying video signals as well as audio. Finally, the district will be covered with GSM cellular service provided by no fewer than ten base stations (GSM represents the leading edge of digital mobile telecommunications).25 Finally, the central district, which is already close to the city's port, will be served by Beirut's newly expanded international airport (which is being upgraded to serve 6 million passen- gers annually) via the new expressway. And, for those who prefer the luxury of travelling by yacht, two marinas will be directly incorporated into the central district.

2. Beirut? Or, a City zuithout History?

Before resuming my reading of the overall Solidere scheme, I would like to dwell for a moment on the "reconstruction" of the souk area and on what it might tell us about Solidere's peculiar relationship to history. The souk project forms part of the first phase of the overall reconstruction effort. Phase one is designed to set up two major magnets to draw life back into the central district the banking area around Riad al-Solh Square and Place de l'Etoile, and the souk area.

I have already mentioned that, even following the release of a sketch of a master plan, it remains unclear what the new souk will look like. The company's most recent (1995) information booklet says that the attempt behind the "souk" project is to "recapture a lifestyle formerly identified with the city center and re-create a marketplace where merchants pros- per and all enjoy spending long hours" (IB, p. 25). Elsewhere in the booklet, we are told that "the clearing of the old souks, which accompanied the clearing and demolition of buildings and sites in the BCD mandated by the Master Plan, paved the way for reconstruction of that district over an area of 60,000 square meters." This district deliberately heavily damaged, we will recall, in the demolitions of 1983 and 1986 and finally pul- verized in the summer of 1994 will, as the booklet goes on to say, "incorporate department stores, retail outlets, supermarkets, theaters, offices, exhibition areas, residences and parking facilities. The total built- up surface area will near 130,000 square meters" (IB, p. 17). Clearly, the most pressing question here is not the one about how a collection of Pizza

25. With an expected 1 million electronic phone lines and 750,000 cellular lines, for a population of 3.5 million, Lebanon should soon have the greatest number of phone lines per capita of any country in the world; it is here, though, that this statistic, used internation- ally as a benchmark of "development," reveals its shortcomings, since these extremely ex- pensive services will be available only to a relatively small proportion of the Lebanese population.

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Huts, Safeways, Walgreens, McDonald's, Body Shops, Burger Kings, Be- nettons, Gaps, Blockbuster Videos, and Tower Records gathered together and given the benediction of the term souk will recapture any lifestyle other than that of the postmodern shopping mall, which is clearly what it would inevitably look like, largely because that's what it would be. In fact, all we know is that, while calling itself a souk, this area can amount to nothing more than a postmodern pastiche of the concept of the souk. For how, in any case, could one re-create something like a souk, which is not only the product of a long historical process but is also characterized and even defined by spontaneity and above all heterogeneity? Indeed, to speak of planning a souk is something of a contradiction in terms. Thus, the souk subproject may be taken not merely as symptomatic of the larger Solidere project but as a synecdoche for it.

Solidere's publications make use of the language of memory and af- fect to characterize what they promise will be the flavor of the new central district. But it seems clear that the simulacral effect of the reconstruction project is to be achieved specifically and solely in visual terms or, to be precise, in terms of appearance and faSade. Hence the souk area will be called a souk because it will (supposedly) somehow look like what a souk looks like. But what does a souk look like? In particular, what did Beirut's old souk look like?

Suddenly a particularly striking aspect of all this planning becomes quite clear. Assuming all goes well and the souk gets "rebuilt," it will only be a matter of years before the generation of Lebanese that remembered the old souk, the old Beirut, will be gone. The souks and the old downtown have been gone since 1975, after all; people of my own generation can barely remember what they were like, and anyone born after 1970 or so can have no idea at all what the souks were like. (I myself have only a few sketchy memories.) Of course one could go offto Tripoli or Damascus or Aleppo to see what other Arab souks are like, or to Istanbul or other cities in the region to see what other Levantine souks look like; but it is in the "nature" (if I may use that language) of souks that each one has its distinctive identity and even that different souks in the same city have

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thelr own c .lstlnctlve ldentltles. Then why call this area a souk? Why not just call it a shopping dis-

trict, like Baltimore's Inner Harbor or other such projects in the U.S. and Europe (of which Disney's U.S. history theme park near Washington, D.C., would have been another variant), in which time and history as much as more "material" objects get commodified and effectively put up for sale and consumption? After all, just as MTV and CNN jockey for position on Lebanese airwaves, the streets of Beirut are already witness to an astonishing proliferation of American global consumer-culture outlets. Here the logic of the simulacrum becomes almost inescapable. Guy Debord's famous slogan from The Society of the Spectacle, "the image has

C"tical Inquiry Spring 1997 687

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FIG. 20.-From one of the Solidere booklets. Note how the photo has been inserted into the margin and seems to protrude from underneath the text, an bunderneath" that does not exist. Source: Solidere.

become the final form of commodity reification,"26 is, as Fredric Jameson has argued, now

even more apt for the "prehistory" of a society bereft of all historicity, one whose own putative past is little more than a set of dusty specta- cles. In faithful conformity to poststructuralist linguistic theory, the past as "referent" finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts.27

What will presumably appear in a few years as the new Beirut "souk" will present itself as recapturing and re-creating the old souk, the lifestyle of happy customers and ask-no-questions merchants (that is, harking back to the myth of the Levantine entrepot, to the happy Lebanon of the good old days, to a never-never land that has only ever existed in Solidere's booklets), and hence it will claim to re-present the past and the historical collective memory of the old Beirut souks in its own spatiality. It will ap-

26. Quoted in Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C., 1992), p. 18.

27. Ibid.


pear or, to be precise, it will be marketed as a re-creation of what was there before, rather than as something that is entirely novel, something that, properly speaking, has no historical depth because it has no past at all, because it is part of a much broader process that has from the beginning tried to strip away the past and lay bare the surface of the city as sheer surface spectacle and as nothing more than that.

Indeed, the representation of the past in visual or iconic terms is a recurring theme in Solidere's various information booklets. One of these booklets, appropriately entitled Wasat al-tasaoulat (The Center of Contro- versy), published in 1993 in response to various criticisms of the reconstruction project, incorporates visual references to the past by including thin slices of old photographs inserted at the inside margins of its pages. The visual effect is to make it seem as though there is an old photograph "underneath" each facing page, which is only partly protruding (so that you can barely determine the content of the photograph; because it is grainy and black and white, all that's clear is that it is of something old). But if you try to turn the page to see the rest of the photo, you realize that it's not there after all; it just seems to be there, as though it were serving as the figuration of some kind of iconic or visual unconsciousness of the book: there, but not there, an absent presence. As soon as you try

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to get access to the full "image" of the past (for as I say the past is presented only in visual terms), you realize that it's only a fragmentary image, a fragment of a larger whole that has disappeared "underneath" the weight of the "present" text, and that there is no "underneath" from which the print appears to protrude because the text itself is literally as well as metaphorically depthless.

But undoubtedly the most interesting of Solidere's booklets is the one called Beirut: Do We KnozlJ It? This colorful little booklet seems to be aimed at a juvenile audience, given not only its cartoon format but above all its storyline. Its premise is that a little boy called Farid wants to know "what this city is." He asks his mother to explain. Here it is worth quoting at some length the initial dialogue that sets up the storyline.

What is this city? I was involved in organizing my things and had not been paying

attention to what Farid was doing. I looked up at him. What city, Farid? This one!

And he pointed to a photograph album that he had taken from my table. I craned my neck to see where his finger was pointing.

That's Beirut, Farid! Beirut>!

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FIG. 22. Opening pages of BeiruZ: Do We Know It? Note the postcard of Martyrs' Square in the top left; see fig. l(b). Source: Solidere.


At this point in the text we see a reproduction of a classic postcard of Martyrs' Square from before the war. The storyline resumes:

He looked up at me in surprise. And he said: We live in Beirut. And I've never seen these buildings in my

life! I smiled. His life, which had begun during the war! How could

he believe that this was indeed Beirut? So I explained. -These are pictures of Beirut from before the war. Of course

you've never seen it. And I turned over a few of the pages. -Especially these, Farid; these are pictures of the heart of Bei-

rut. And all you and your friends know and experience are its extremities, like the extremities of the body.

He asked: -And is the city like a body? -Exactly like a body. A city is born, it grows, it changes, exactly

like a body. And it's the same with Beirut, our beloved city.28

It becomes clear that the booklet's storyline involves Farid taking a tour of the old Beirut. This is in other words not merely a narrative of the history of Beirut as Solidere would like that history to appear but a full- blown guidebook, complete with a map, a legend, and a route that should be followed through the center of the city, with descriptions of the various significant structures or ruins given along the way.

There is just one problem with this guidebook: the area which it proposes to guide young Farid through no longer exists. Published in 1994-even as the center of Beirut was being wiped clean by Solidere itself-this booklet amounts not merely to a children's history of the center of Beirut but to a guidebook whose referent has disappeared and has been replaced by the textual images that the book itself contains. It is a guidebook to a space that can no longer be found anywhere except in the sort of textual (and specifically visual) forms that so dazzle little Farid. One can only imagine a real-life Farid taking the map and guidebook downtown and trying to follow the meandering route that it charts through a wasteland that has taken the place of the actual material buildings that once stood there. Or did they?

As this little guidebook gets closer to the present and starts dealing with the war, we are presented with various dazzling examples of computer-generated graphics. Above a photo of Allenby Street as it was left after the street fighting, for example, there is a computer-generated photo of the same street as it is supposed to appear after it has been refurbished and cleaned up. The computer image is clearly based on the same wartime photo (for example, the perspective and the borders in

28. Solidere, Beirut: Hal na'arafha? [Beirut? Do We Know It?] (Beirut, 1994), pp. 2-3.

Critwal Inquiry Spring 1997 691

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FIG. 23. Guidebook and map in Beirllt: Do We Know Itt Note that the area that it proposes to guide people through no longer exists except in such textual form. Near the top right of the map, for example, note one of Solidere's own artist's impressions of what that area will look like a view reproduced in fig. 11. Source: Solidere.

each of the images are identical). However, this photograph of a simu- lated future just as easily could be of the old prewar Allenby Street (that is, there's nothing particularly futuristic about it; it looks like the same street as in the wartime photo only without the damage and with the addition of a few cars, a few trees, and some tastefully interspersed pedes- trians). Hence, once again, Solidere's slogan: Beirut An Ancient City for the Future, in which future and past become all but indistinguishable, the one a replication of the other, only it is not clear which is the replication and which the original or whether there was an original to begin with.

What the Solidere project represents, in a sense, is an attempt to spectacularize history. Thus what might have been called the flow of Bei- rut's past or the collective memories of the city are worked into the Soli- dere proposals and booklets solely in visual form, in a pastiche version of the history of central Beirut and of Lebanon, one that in representing


the imposition of spatial layers in corporeal terms as the "growth" of a single "body" translates the passage of time into appearance, into spectacle.29

And yet it is worth asking what alternatives there might have been to all this or what alternatives there might still be and whether alternative conceptions of history are still possible.30 In retrospect, it becomes quite clear that from at least 1983 there has been a concerted effort to wipe the surface of central Beirut clean, to purify it of all historical associations in the form of its buildings, to render it pure space, pure commodity, pure real estate. The most obvious and striking potential war memorial (in a country that has all but forgotten its war), the shrapnel-scarred statue in Martyrs' Square, will be completely repaired its bullet holes erased and covered over just as the historical referents in the city center (and history itself) are being erased in the reconstruction. And in one sense the demolition crews and the powerful financial interests standing behind them have produced an irreversible fait accompli. Thus, what becomes important at this stage isn't the material construction, as such, but rather what the construction project represents and how it ties into other processes and other discourses in Beirut, in Lebanon, and in the world. What I want to address now is the political-discursive modes through which this activity inscribes and makes interventions in the surface of the city.

3. "Enrichissez-vous!" Or, Let Them Eat Cellular Phones

"'Enrichissez-vous!' Tel semble bien etre le coeur de l'ideologie de la reconstruction."3' Thus writes the economist and historian Georges Corm in a recent issue of Les Cahiers de l'Orient. In the same issue of the journal, the urban sociologist Nabil Beyhum argues that the Solidere project represents an embodiment of the "confusion" of public and private interests symbolized by the arrival in power of Hariri and his cabinet.32 Indeed,

29. Here it becomes important to bear in mind the distinction that Jameson makes between parody and postmodern pastiche. See Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural LogXc of Late Capitalism, p. 17.

30. The latter question, the question of history, I plan to take up in a different essay, "Remembering Beirut: The Space of Memory and the Time of War."

31. Georges Corm, "La Reconstruction: Ideologies et paradoxes," Les Cahiers de l'Orient 32-33 (1994): 85.

32. Beyhum writes:

Le role de l'Etat comme arbitre etait decrie par les promoteurs soit par ideologie soit pour realiser leur objectif a court terme. La confusion entre interets prives et interets publics qui etait symbolisee par l'arivee de Hariri au pouvoir avec son equipe, sans qu'ils demissionnent de leurs postes dans leurs firmes privees, risquait d'aggraver encore les problemes meme si elle pouvait faciliter les choses. [Beyhum, "Beyrouth au coeur des debats," p. 103]


FIGS. 24-26. The future as referent: the giant poster put up at the northern end of Martyrs Square to project what the view is supposed to be like when the reconstruction is complete. Photos by author.

one of the most persistent criticisms of the Solidere project which needs to be understood as the centerpiece of a discourse I'm identifying as Har- irism has been that it not only confuses public and private interests but that it represents the colonization of the former by the latter. "How," asks Sarkis, "do we define public space, now that the state is no longer the agency keen on promoting public life, but a group of private entrepreneurs wanting urban life to promote their businesses?"33

What Solidere and Harirism seem to represent is precisely the withering away of the state, whatever one might have called a public sphere or civil society, and their final and decisive colonization by capital. And perhaps it is for this reason that the company avoids any discussion of Lebanese national identity except in terms of visual pastiche. What Soli- dere offers instead of a redemption of the competing narratives of collective memory or national identity is an emptying-out of those collective claims and memories and the substitution of a "collectivity" defined by a stock-offering, in which a strictly individualized form of participation is regulated and defined by the purchase of stocks rather than in terms of historic or communaVnational identities and uncommodified rights. For certain forms of public planning, the state and above all the nation have been key determining discourses (no matter how problematic), yet Soli- dere seeks to bypass these discourses in search of a much purer form of

33. Sarkis, "Territorial Claims, p. 1 18.

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intensification that finally has only as much to do with the putative nation as is required by the dictates of marketing techniques and the production of a pastiche nostalgia for something that was never there in the first place, namely, an "authentic" and, more importantly, supposedly uncon- tested narrative of Lebanese national identity that somehow harks all the way back to the Phoenicians and that can be summoned now in commodity form to add an unproblematic tinge of local color to an otherwise global project.

Emerging from the fiery crucible of the war in 1990, Lebanon found itself a country virtually without a state. The state began to reconstitute itself shortly after the war, however, and following the parliamentary elections in the summer of 1992 the last transitional government resigned and was replaced by a new parliament and a new cabinet under the newly appointed prime minister, the multibillionaire engineering tycoon Hariri. The ascendency of the Hariri administration signalled a major turning point in the history of Lebanon. While the country has always had a free- market economy, the arrival of Hariri who as an individual was already a major player in the Lebanese economy (his net wealth is the equivalent of a substantial proportion of the country's GNP) represented a dra- matic intensification of the presence of market forces in national economic and political organization. In fact, in the terms established by Harirism, the process of postwar reconstruction has been one of astonishing self-enrichment for the members of the government and their wide circle of business associates. For the new government has not only opened the floodgates of privatization; its members, as individuals, take

Crit?cal Inquiry Spring 1997 695

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advantage of the very same market liberalizations that they mandate. At least until the elections of 1996, the parliament included several opposition members, who were critical of the government and its reconstruction plan and were able to block certain projects. During the 1996 elections, however, almost all of those oppositional figures lost their seats and (thanks largely to overwhelming vote rigging) were replaced by a compla- cent parliament made up largely of businessmen in pursuit of wealth (including Hariri). Today's parliament is one of the richest in the world; it includes thirty-five millionaires and three billionaires.

Because of the situation that Lebanon found itself in after the war (the near-total deterioration of public order, of state apparatuses, of civic organizations, of the national infrastructure), the process of privatization is already at a more advanced stage in Lebanon than it is elsewhere in the world, where the forces of privatization (such as Berlusconi in Italy) have had to face the opposition put up precisely by those forms of public and civic and national organization which in Lebanon had already been eroded or destroyed by the war. In this sense, Lebanon may be seen as a kind of laboratory for the most extreme form of laissez-faire economics that the world has ever known. And, moreover, Beirut itself, especially in view of the reconstruction project, can be seen as a laboratory for the current and future elaborations of global capitalism, as well as for its own future, though whether it is possible to speak of the imminent "Lebanoni- zation" of the world remains to be seen (this would of course be a different "Lebanonization" than the one popularized by the media in the early


1980s, which was used to refer to an uncontained spread of communal violence).

Indeed, if one can speak of a discourse called Harirism, it would center on but not be limited to Lebanon's multibillionaire prime minister, who in the name of economic stability has brought a previously un- dreamt-of intensification of profit seeking to the Lebanese economy, in which the apparatuses of the state have not so much been dismantled or circumvented as they have been put to use for private interests, including those of Hariri himself. Witness for example the recent passage of a law enabling the greater commercial exploitation of the previously highly regulated national coastline. Shortly afterwards (coincidentally) came the announcement of a private development project called Port Hariri, which would center on the construction, on Beirut's only remaining public beach, of a private hotel and yacht club complex, adjoining, it might be added, a road that was only recently renamed Boulevard Rafiq Hariri.34 One could just as easily point to the impending plans for the reorganiza- tion and possible privatization of the national airline, which are contin- gent on negotiations between leading politicians; or to the plans to reduce the number of television stations from sixty to five, which will basically be split up among various influential personalities.

"Let them eat cellular phones" might suggest itself as Harirism's call to arms. For, in the face of dire poverty and squalor at a national level, in the face of an immense socioeconomic crisis and an increasingly desper- ate standard of living for most of Lebanese society (the minimum wage is the equivalent of U.S.$ 150 a month, while prices for rent and many goods and services are often comparable to those in New York or London), Har- irism offers the public a vastly improved infrastructure the new cellular phone lines, the new roadways, the new cable television (also owned by Hariri), the new airport and newly expanded air services whether or not they need or can afford to use them. Even as the country prepares for a supposed economic boom that is supposed to follow the regional "peace" agreement with Israel, improvements in basic social services, especially those provided by the state (education, health care, sanitation, housing), have for the most part gone unaddressed (with the notable ex- ception of municipal garbage collection in Beirut, which was recently improved, following its privatization and purchase by none other than a Hariri company). Indeed, to the broad mass of the Lebanese population Harirism has little or nothing to offer except the same hollow promises as those of the long-awaited trickle-down effects of American Reagano- mics or English Thatcherism. In fact, Harirism employs the same neoliberal rhetoric of Reaganism and Thatcherism.

While at one level one could easily misunderstand Harirism as repre-

34. For more on this event, see the Beirut newspaper as-Safir, 20 Dec. 1994, p. 1.

Critical Inquiry St7zng 1997 697

senting the withering away of the state, or its reduction to simply the maintenance of order, and while it is undoubtedly true that the state apparatuses have been circumvented and to a certain extent either dismantled or privatized, we need to extend our analysis a bit more. For at another level, what we are witnessing is not so much the dissolution of the state but rather its reinforcement, its strengthening. In their book Labor of Dionysus, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that "the neoliberal project involved a substantial increase of the State in terms both of size and powers of intervention. The development of the neoliberal State did not lead toward a 'thin' form of rule in the sense of the progres- sive dissipation or disappearance of the State as a social actor." Thus, they argue, in spite of the neoliberal rhetoric of privatization and the thin state, "neoliberal practice moves in the opposite direction to reinforce and ex- pand the State as a strong and autonomous subject that dominates the social field, in the realm of public spending as in that of judicial and police activity."35

While Hardt and Negri's arguments are directed in the first instance at the postmodern economies of the first world, there is a startling degree of accuracy if we stretch their analysis to include a state such as Lebanon. For the moment let me just register the accuracy of their theoretical assessment: not only has government deficit spending increased dramatically (with total public debt running at around 60 percent of the 1995 gross GDP), but the repressive apparatuses of the state have also been enormously strengthened. For example, old censorship laws, previously ignored, are now being enforced; a new education policy brings school curricula under much tighter government regulation; new media laws will, as I already mentioned, eliminate all but a handful of radio and TV stations and bring those under tight control thereby silencing opposition voices in the public sphere; the death penalty has been brought back for civil and political crimes; there are widespread (and substantiated) allegations of the torture and abuse of prisoners in Lebanese jails; and since 1993 there has been a ban on street protests of any kind. This last law has been used with particular effectiveness in the government's re- peated clashes with trade unions seeking to organize strikes and demonstrations: first in July 1995, when the army and internal security forces were ordered to suppress the trade union demonstrations against the recent increase in the tax burden borne by the working class and the paral- lel decrease in the tax burden of the wealthy minority who constitute the government and its circle of business associates; and more recently in February 1996, when a military curfew was imposed on Beirut and other cities to prevent a strike and demonstrations planned by the General La-

35. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (Minneapolis, 1994), pp. 242, 245.

698 Saree Makdssi Laying Claim to Beirut

bor Confederation to call for an increase in the monthly minimum wage demands that had been rejected by the government. In ordering the army to impose the curfew, Prime Minister Hariri declared, "we will not allow the government to be toppled from the street."

So in fact Lebanon has witnessed both an astonishing increase in the activities of repressive state apparatuses as well as an increase in the state's role in those forms of public planning that as opposed to health care, education, and low-income housing are calculated either to yield immediate private profits or to improve the infrastructural conditions for the generation of private profits. This does not entail merely the confusion of public and private interest, as has often been suggested. It is, rather, the colonization of the former by the latter. For, to be sure, where state projects end and private projects begin can no longer be determined- not because this is a strong state that is organizing a command economy but because capital has become the state. State and capital have become incorporated as one and the same force or process defined by the same discourse (Harirism).36

The transition has not been smooth and seamless; there has been widespread and ongoing popular resistance to it, most notably the workers' movements. Furthermore, this is a process with many exteriorities; there are many groups that it does not assimilate or even regulate. The economy still has a burgeoning informal sector (for example, the tens of thousands of Syrian laborers working in Lebanon, but also unregulated agricultural and industrial production and economic activlties of all other kinds, including various forms of banking and finance). One could say that the informal, unregulated economy that sprang up and persisted- during the war has not yet been fully colonized and incorporated into the intensified form of capitalism that the Haririst state has come to represent. Once again this sector of the economy carries on with or without regard to the presence of the state; people are left to their own devices, to make do as best they can, for better and for worse.

One might imagine two Lebanons living simultaneously and perhaps even coextensively, rhizomically and unevenly intersecting or overlapping with one another. On the one hand, there is the modern Lebanon that was born during the war, in which an informal, uneven, unorganized, unregulated combination of modern and traditional patterns of owner-

36. This is what Negri, following Marx, identifies as the total subsumption of society and the state into capital. See Negri, "Twenty Theses on Marx: Interpretation of the Class Situation Today," trans. Hardt, and Kenneth Surin, "'The Continued Relevance of Marx- ism' as a Question: Some Propositions," in Marxism Beyond Marxism, ed. Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca Karl (London, 1995), pp. 149-80 and 181-213. See also Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, trans. Joris De Bres (London, 1987); Martin Carnoy et al., The New Global Economy in the Information Age: Ref ections on Our Changing WorZd (University Park, Pa., 1993); and Paul Knox andJohn Agnew, The Geography of the World-Economy (London, 1989).

Spring 1997 699 Critical Inquiry

ship and production persists; and, on the other hand, there is the postmodern intensification of capital represented by the new Lebanon, which, while it may make use of the state and even absorb the state, is to a much greater extent aimed at the transnational flows of the global econ omy. Harirism seeks to set up Lebanon as a service center, a regional node or staging point for the circulation of capital, a base through which capital can be channeled into the still highly undeveloped and unex- ploited markets of the post-peace settlement Middle East. In this sense, the state becomes one organizing rubric, among others, for a discourse and process that goes far beyond any particular state and that finally has little interest in states, borders, territorialities. To this extent, it is no coincidence at all that more and more transnational companies-particularly in the informational and financial service sector are either opening or reopening their offices in Beirut: Saatchi & Saatchi and Citicorp, to name only two, just reopened their Beirut offices; and major investment firms such as Flemings and ING/Barings (two of the world's leading firms in opening so-called developing markets) located regional offices in Beirut (not Amman, not the Gulf, and not Tel Aviv). Nor is it a coincidence that more and more international airlines are flying to Beirut.

Thus we might theorize the presence of a postmodern Lebanon alongside a modern Lebanon, with the highly charged and fluid borders between them going as often as not unmarked and undefined. The borders do become manifest, however, after episodes such as the indiscrimi- nate Israeli bombardment of civilian targets in April 1996, when we see how quickly certain areas or sectors of the economy are repaired while others are left to shift for themselves as best they can. The postmodern Lebanon that I have been identifying with Harirism and the global informational economy and Solidere may indeed be seen as marking the phase of the real subsumption of society and state into capital.37 But this analysis cannot account for the other Lebanon, which persists alongside the postmodern-the Lebanon that Israel and Syria have been trying (and fail- ing) to understand and control primarily by brute force. We can thus also imagine two Lebanons at the level of the regional state system. The Arab- Israeli conflict, the various Syrian and Israeli projects of domination in Lebanon, the struggle between the Israeli army of occupation and the resistance movement, even the much-vaunted Middle East peace process itself: these all take place at the level of what I am trying to suggest is an outmoded, worn-out level of international state politics, the residual politics of aprevious era or mode of sovereignty, territoriality, nationalism, statism,

37. Hardt and Negri argue that "capital no longer has an outside in the sense that . . . all productive processes arise within capital itself and thus the production and the reproduction of the entire social world take place within capital" (Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus, p. 15).


namely, the era of the modern (as opposed to postmodern) state, the modern (as opposed to postmodern) world system or world economy as embodied in Harirism.38

Harirism represents a will to privatize virtually everything, from television stations to garbage collecting to educational institutions to construction projects to state property and institutions to real estate to the national airline to, finally and ultimately, the center of Beirut. At the perimeter of Solidere's territory, there are today a number of posters de- picting happy scenes from a future "reconstructed" Beirut; the slogan reads, Beirut Is Yours: Ask about It. But to most people, excluded from the so-called benefits of a reconstruction that is aimed at foreign and Lebanese capital rather than at people and the social formation in general, this can appear only as a meaningless phrase, if not an actual insult. Corm puts it succinctly: "Clearly, it is the Lebanese population, resident or emigrant, that is the missing element from the actual process of reconstruction."39 For in Solidere the discourse of Harirism has reached its pin- nacle and climax, its ultimate expression.

When, on 16 February 1996, a family of squatters was killed when the building they had been living in was brought down by a Solidere demolition crew (with the squatters still inside), many people's worst fears were confirmed: there would literally be no space in the revitalized and gentrified cosmopolitan city center for such destitute and "undesirable" migrants. As Beyhum argues, this project represents nothing less than a system of class segregation, whereby the future central district of Beirut will be cut off and isolated from the rest of the city and the country precisely in class terms.40 While the Solidere booklets emphasize the former class diversity of the city center and promise to restore that diversity by incorporating mixed-income residential developments into the overall project, Beyhum suggests that what is far more likely to happen is the appearance of a dual city in Beirut, with the boundary lines of the Soli- dere project marking the limit. "The duality between the city center and the rest of the capital," Beyhum writes,

will be reinforced irl the minds of ordinary people because images of luxury will contirlue to bombard the popular imaginatiorl in surrounding quarters. The inauguration of the first buildings will in-

38* The other states, especially Syria and Israel, continue to exist and to operate at this level, not realizing that, like emperors with no clothes, they are operating within a paradigm that is outmoded and outmaneuvered, if not exactly already extinct: the residual paradigm of state power politics, of negotiations between states, of state control, of borders, occupation, sabotage, domination, in short, of raw, naked, brutal state power, a paradigm founded upon a distinction between state and civil society, or for that matter between the state and capital.

39. Corm, "La Reconstruction," p. 96. 40. See Beyhum, "Beyrouth au coeur des debats," p. 108.


0::>: :

FIG. 27. Artist's impression of pedestrian street in new city center. Source: Solidere.

crease the signs of uncontrolled wealth that are insulting to the rest of the population. The logic of this real estate promotion will dominate one area of the city, while deterioration will probably become more strongly felt in other areas.4'

Indeed, what is central to the discussion of the reconstruction of central Beirut is a discourse of limits, of boundaries, and of frontiers.

With this in mind we can return to the overall Solidere plan. The talk of"proper integration" aside, the company's booklets, maps, plans, and discussions suggest that this project may turn the center of Beirut into a different zone of space-time than that of the rest of the city. The entire project has been focused and discussed in the narrowest possible terms so that the rest of Beirut and Lebanon fade away and become vague externalities to the plan, much like the blank spaces on the company's maps. This does not suggest merely a preoccupation with the city center (which is after all the focus of the project). Rather, it constitutes an effort to cover over the rest of the city with this, its postmodern alter ego; in fact, one of Solidere's logos is simply the word Beirut, in Arabic, as though the company's fiefdom somehow stands in for the rest of the city, representing it to the point of exclusion. Bearing in mind what Samir

41. Ibid., pp. 108-9.


Amin and others have suggested about the polarizing structure of the world economy, it is important to recognize the extent to which such po- larizations are played out on a local and on a global scale.42 Or, rather, it becomes important to see the development of polarization on a simultaneously local and global scale and indeed to see that these forces are always at play within the local and the global in such a way that they help to define the boundaries or limits between them (so that the globaVlocal opposition must be seen as misleading to begin with).43

In Beirut, as Beyhum, Sarkis, and others point out, there are very serious fears that a new city center will spring up in a few years that can have little to do with surrounding areas of the city or even the rest of the country. Furthermore, it should be obvious to anyone even glancing at the proposed map that the old Martyrs' Square, which once served to bring the rest of the city together, is to be effectively supplanted by a wide "boulevard" running a mere 1,200 meters or so from Fouad Chehab Avenue to the port. In fact, there will, according to critics of the Solidere plan, be many more dividing lines and not just between east and west Beirut, but between the new central district and the surrounding areas of the city.

Naturally, the advertising materials that have constituted the heavy artillery of Solidere's plan make extensive reference to the importance of ensuring "proper integration" between the central district and the rest of the city. And yet the layout will place the center within a five-minute drive from the airport and hence create for its informational workers and especially visiting businesspeople a sense that they are closer to the rest of the world than to any part of Beirut or Lebanon. These and other considera- tions suggest that this area will be developed not as a site for the spatial reconciliation of Lebanon and of Beirut itself but rather as a meeting place for foreign businesses (American, East Asian, European, Saudi, and Israeli) and Lebanese entrepreneurs, managers, financial experts, bank- ers, and technocrats. This, clearly, can only amount to little more than speculation for the time being. On the other hand, it hardly seems likely

42. See Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World, trans. Michael Wolfers (Lon- don, 1990).

43. Thus, while in the current configuration of the global economy, which Manuel Castells has argued needs to be seen as preeminently "informational," a few cities have emerged as world cities, or as what Knox and Agnew identify as "basing points for global capital," and within even those cities themselves planning strategies of segregation have become the norm (Knox and Agnew, The Geography of the World-Economy, p. 47). See Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban- Regional Process (London, 1989); hereafter abbreviated IC. Thus, Richard Sennett argues that "the thrust of modern urban development has been precisely to create cities consisting of isolated zones, to destroy or abandon the urban center as a public meeting ground, leaving only a core of national or international businesses based on the service economy" (Rich- ard Sennett, "Introduction," in Reclaiming Beirut, p. 4).


that the Solidere project has nothing to do with the current discussions of the normalization of economic and political relations between Israel and the Arab world; it hardly seems likely as well that this massive project is aimed only at the domestic Lebanese economy, which is already characterized by an enormous glut of apartment and office space.

The "dual city" of which Beyhum and others speak must, in any case, be understood in a simultaneously local and global context. For (assuming things go well for the Solidere plan) the frontier between inside and outside the central district of Beirut would amount to a frontier between a regional node in the global informational economy, to which Manuel Castells refers as the "space of flows," and a peripheral backwater identi- fiable with the rest of the city and the country, which would then be increasingly characterized by the labor processes of the informal economy of peripheral zones in the world economy, cut oS from whatever "benefits" might be associated with the "space of flows."44 (This, once again, is assuming that Solidere is right in believing that Beirut can resume something akin to the role that it once had in regional economic development; this is far from a certainty, and if the company's optimistic predictions turn out to be unfounded, the entire project threatens to become a massive white elephant, like the Canary Wharf urban development scheme in LondoWs Docklands.)45 Thus the duality of such a city, as Castells argues, can "be seen as the urban expression of the process of increasing differentiation of labor in two equally dynamic sectors within the growing economy: the information-based formal economy, and the downgraded labor-based informal economy," so that, as he says, "the dual city opposes, in traditional sociological terms, the cosmopolitanism of the new informational producers to the localism of the segmented sectors of restructured labor" (IC, pp. 225, 227). This means, Castells suggests, that it is becom- ing increasingly clear that there is an ever-proliferating distinction be-

44. "The space of organizations in the informational economy is a space of fows," writes Castells:

Centralized decision-making can only operate on the basis of customized provision of services and retrieval of information. Back offices are the material basis for decision- making, and large-scale information-processing organizations can only work on the basis of instructions received from the center. The constellation of services linked to each stage of the process of each industry also depends on access to the correspond- ing level of the communication network. Thus, the linkages of the intra-organizational network are the defining linkages of the new spatial logic. The space of flows among units of the organization and among different organizational units is the most significant space for the functioning, the performance, and ultimately, the very existence of any given organization. [ C, p. 169]

45. Of course, as Castells puts it elsewhere, the world economy can bypass entire countries; hence the threat of a fall from exploitation to irrelevance in the global system, which to Amin pushes us to think of modes of "delinking," by which he does not mean a version of autarky. See Amin, Delinking, and Surin, "'The Continued Relevance of Marxism' as a Question."


tween the global "space of flows" and more locally understood senses of place.46 What all this suggests, then, is that the homogenizing pressures of capital (which stand at one pole of a global antagonism) generate the proliferation of a "space of flows" characterized primarily by a technical kind of homogeneity; for example, the most advanced telecommunications systems link together various nodes of intensity in the global economic system in such a way that these nodes are in fact closer to each other than each is to its own immediate "hinterland." At the other pole stand various local spaces and economies not directly linked to the "space of flows," though it should be clear that this distinction, this polarization, no longer signifies an opposition between the global system and its outside and others, but rather an opposition built into the system itself.

In a sense, then, the distinction between the future center of Beirut and the rest of the city could be founded on precisely such a distinction, namely, a kind of frontier between (but really within) the global economy and one of its localized backwaters. If fulfilled, the Solidere project would redefine the city center's historical associations, as indeed it has already done by flattening most of its remaining structures. More precisely, it would redefine those associations in the form of a visual pastiche of traditional forms and values, a pastiche that would be integrated into the project at the level of marketing and aesthetics and above all at the level of building faSades, on which the company places such a heavy emphasis. The city center would then be presented as pure appearance, as pure surface, ostensibly hardwired to the global circuits of transnational capital or to "the space of flows."

But what the fluid and multidimensional "frontier" between the Bei- rut of Solidere and the rest of the city would represent is nothing other than the frontier between the space-time of a global postmodernity and an antithetical modern space-time. The latter, however, cannot simply be understood in narrowly oppositional terms as a local space to the extent

46. This is because the ultimate logic of restructuring is based on the avoidance of histor- ically established mechanisms of social, economic, and political control by the power- holding organizations. Since most of these mechanisms of control depend upon territorially-based institutions of society, escaping from the social logic embedded in any particular locale becomes the means of achieving freedom in a space of flows connected only to other power-holders, who share the social logic, the values, and the criteria for performance institutionalized in the programs of the information systems that constitute the architecture of the space of flows. The emergence of the space of flows actually expresses the disarticulation of place-based societies and cul- tures from the organizations of power and production that continue to dominate society without submitting to its control. In the end, even democracies become pow- erless confronted with the ability of capital to circulate globally, of information to be transferred secretly, of markets to be penetrated or neglected, of planetary strategies of political-military power to be decided without the knowledge of nations, and of cultural messages to be marketed, packaged, recorded, and beamed in and out of people's minds. [IC, p. 349]


that it overlaps with, or rather is embedded within, the global space of the postmodern, as its simultaneous and necessary counterpart. What we are dealing with here, in other words, is not so much the spurious and misleading distinction between global and local, but rather a cleavage, a frontier, one of the structural limits and contradictions of the global economy, a contradiction marking the tension between first world and third world: a contradiction that must be understood also, perhaps above all, in class terms. Only now the limit between these two "worlds" must be seen to inhabit and even to define the spatiality of what might otherwise seem to be the "same" city, which is at one and the same time third world and first world. For the full force of what I am trying to suggest here becomes clear only if we consider Beirut no longer to be identical to itself (if it ever was) but rather to have taken on in its own space the disarticula- tions of the global economy, to have literalized the problematics of uneven development.47 No longer defined against some outside world, the city will have become its own frontier, its own limit.

47. As Neil Smith points out, "uneven development [is] the geographical expression of the contradictions of capital" (Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Pro- duction of Space [Oxford, 1991], p. 252).

laying claim to beirut - urban narrative and spatial i.d in the age of solidere

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