For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut's Frontiers

HIBA BOU AK AR F O R T H E WA R YE T T O C O M E PL ANNING BEIRU T'S FRONTIER S 8/10/18 10:22 AM HIBA BOU AKAR FOR T H E WAR Y E T TO C O M E PLANNING BEIRUT’S FRONTIERS S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S • S TA N F O R D , C A L I F O R N I A Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bou Akar, Hiba, author. Title: For the war yet to come : planning Beirut's frontiers / Hiba Bou Akar. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identiiers: LCCN 2017050467| ISBN 9781503601918 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503605602 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503605619 (electronic) Subjects: LCSH: City planning—Lebanon—Beirut. | City planning—Political aspects—Lebanon—Beirut. | Communalism—Lebanon—Beirut. | Beirut (Lebanon)—Politics and government. Classiication: LCC HT169.L42 B68 2018 | DDC 307.1/2160956925--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050467 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/15 Adobe Garamond Pro CONTENTS Figures Acknowledgments Transliteration, Translation, and Pseudonyms Acronyms ix xi xv xvii Prologue: War in Times of Peace 1 1. Constructing Sectarian Geographies 11 2. The Doubleness of Ruins 35 3. The Lacework of Zoning 63 4. A Ballooning Frontier 105 5. Planning without Development 145 Epilogue: Contested Futures 177 Notes References Index 187 213 229 MEDITERRANEAN SEA M U N I C I PA L BEIRUT Hayy Madi/ Mar Mikhail SOUTHERN SUBURBS (AL-DAHIYA) aid ld S Rafic Hariri International Airport a R oa d G R E AT E R BEIRUT O Sahra Choueifat Doha Aramoun N 0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3 mi 4 5 km FIGU RE 1. Beirut, the southern suburbs, and the three field sites: Hayy Madi/Mar Mikhail, Sahra Choueifat, and Doha Aramoun. Source: Adapted from Google Maps, 2017. PROLOGUE WA R IN T IME S OF P E AC E O N A PRI L 26, 2011 , I tuned in online from Berkeley, California, to a popular Lebanese radio show. It was the morning of the next day in Beirut, and the show’s famous host, Rima, was asking her listeners to engage with her on what they thought were the most urgent problems facing Lebanon. People called in to express an array of concerns—among them health beneits, housing prices, and power outages. At one point, Rima paused and said, “I think we should all start thinking about urban planning. Look around you. I would say that in this city, urban planning lacks planning and order.” his was not the irst time I had heard such a statement. While I was conducting ieldwork for this book in Beirut, people frequently asked me what I was studying. I often responded with what I thought was a simple answer: “I am studying urban planning in Beirut.” But over and over, I would get the same reaction: “You came all the way back from the United States to study planning here?! Does planning even exist in this city?” Once, three acquaintances and I were chatting on the balcony of a hillside apartment overlooking the city. “Look at how haphazard urbanization is in Beirut,” one exclaimed. “Now, you tell me, is this planning?” We had a view of Beirut and its southeastern periphery where Sahra Choueifat’s remaining agricultural ields, striped with housing complexes and industries, merged with the international airport. On Beirut’s southern fringe, buildings gradually blended into each other until they folded into a solid concrete mass with the city. he Mediterranean Sea framed the view (Figure 2). During the Lebanese civil war, our location had been a military site. Bullet holes from that long gone war still lined the balcony’s walls. Pondering that, a second acquaintance asked: “See how buildings have diferent heights, diferent materials, and no street alignments? Where is planning?” His wife then added: “Tell me where are the sidewalks, the trees, the playgrounds? Many of these streets and highways remain uninished.” My ieldwork notebooks hold dozens of such stories and encounters. And I realized that with each such encounter, I had become more curious about how 2 WA R IN T IME S OF PE ACE F I G U R E 2 . Sahra Choueifat with the airport and Beirut in the background. Source: Marwan Haidar, 2016. Reproduced with permission. popular perceptions of planning are formed in a contested city like Beirut, mired in cycles of conlict. Why did people think there was “no planning” in Beirut? And how did urban planning become a subject of everyday discourse? Beirut: A Contested City For decades now, the name Beirut has been synonymous with war, chaos, and violence. Indeed, from 1975 to 1990, the city was the epicenter of the long Lebanese civil war. hat conlict resulted in massive property destruction, while at least 120,000 people were killed and one million more were internally displaced.1 During the war, Beirut was divided between a Christian east and a Muslim west along what became known as the Green Line. However, this represented only one facet of a new geography of violence that was partitioning a city that had, just a decade earlier, been celebrated for its vibrant, cultural, and intellectual society, prosperous and open economy, Mediterranean landscapes, and “Westernized” lifestyle. Before the war, Lebanon had been internationally viewed as a young, decolonizing nation with a bright future. he country had recently gained its independence from France—the country that had been granted a mandate to rule it and its nearby areas in 1923 (following the partition of the Ottoman Empire). Soon after gaining independence in 1946, the country enjoyed an economic boom bolstered by local and regional investments.2 Nonetheless, this narrative of economic WA R IN T IME S OF PE ACE development took little account of the socioeconomic disparities in Lebanon that resulted in the political upheavals and labor protests that were common throughout the 1950s and 1960s.3 his same period witnessed the initiation of regional conlict attending the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the resultant mass displacement of Palestinians to Lebanon, and the subsequent onset of armed Palestinian resistance across Lebanon’s southern border. On the eve of the Lebanese civil war, tensions had escalated on a range of issues. hese included Lebanese nationalism versus Pan-Arabism, the Palestinian armed presence, and uneven development and class inequality (as poverty in rural Lebanon forced many families to migrate to Beirut and its peripheral areas looking for jobs). here were thus many origin stories for the civil war; however, the nature of the war also changed over time to relect the many regional and international interventions and shifting local alliances, eventually becoming, as it is most commonly understood today, a sectarian battle among Christian, Shiite, Sunni, and Druze militias.4 As is also well understood, the violence associated with the war at times took the form of sectarian cleansings that resulted in mass displacement, forcing people to lee their homes in “mixed” areas to seek refuge in areas under the control of militias corresponding to their sectarian ailiation. hus, west Beirut became predominantly Muslim while east Beirut became predominantly Christian. Meanwhile, those Palestinians living in east Beirut who had survived the violence of Christian militias against their camps were forced to lee to west Beirut. housands of Shiite families, leeing the violence on the Lebanese-Israeli border and the eventual Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon in 1982, also sought refuge there. In 1989, the warring factions inally reached an agreement—the National Reconciliation Accord, also known as the Taif Agreement—to end the ighting. Signed in Saudi Arabia, the accord was brokered by Syria, other Arab countries, and the international community. Among other provisions, it ratiied and institutionalized the sectarian-based power-sharing system originally set up informally in 1943 to create a system of national government.5 But after the ighting came to a halt in 1990, this same governing framework allowed the militias that had fought the war to organize themselves as religious-political organizations overnight, and so continue to rule postwar Lebanon. In the wake of the Taif Agreement, there followed a more or less peaceful period during the 1990s that allowed the reconstruction of downtown Beirut to begin, along with attempts to resolve the mass displacement caused by the civil war. However, in 2005, violence returned to the city in the form of a series of assassinations and bombings, only to be followed by a new Israeli war on Lebanon in July 2006.6 hen, in May 2008, the ghost of the civil war returned, as what had 3 4 WA R IN T IME S OF PE ACE appeared to be only sporadic episodes of sectarian violence unexpectedly erupted into full-scale battles in Beirut and its peripheries, as well as other areas of Lebanon. he violence lasted for ive days and came to be known as the May 7 events.7 Ever since then, fear of sectarian tensions has risen, and the country has experienced one episode of political gridlock after another. hus, in 2015, the Lebanese Parliament renewed itself without a vote, citing fear that elections would lead to sectarian violence. In addition, owing to gridlock, the country was without a president from May 2014 until October 2016. his tense political landscape was compounded by the ongoing war in Syria, which has seen the active participation of several Lebanese factions. By 2016, the Syrian war had also resulted in the light of more than one million Syrian refugees to Lebanon.8 Planning without Progress For many people, such as my acquaintances conversing on the balcony, who lived through the gruesome years of civil war and who continue to experience ongoing episodes of sectarian violence, a visualization of spatial order seems to hold great signiicance. Ordering the present with quality afordable housing, paved streets, playgrounds, and trees means improved living conditions. But it also signiies something more—the promise of a planned future that might inally dispel the specter of war that has loomed over the city and its peripheries for so long. Although the task of organizing cities is an old one, it was the Western project of modernity that imbued it with a teleology of order and progress. Toward this end, the regulation of urbanization, redistribution of resources, and provision of public amenities are tasks that professional planners now pursue through tools like zoning ordinances, building and property laws, and investments in public infrastructure. Despite critiques, such as that by David Harvey, that the profession is a tool of the powerful (the state, capital, and dominant social groups)9 to shape urban spaces in their image, hopes remain high among planners that their expertise can create better cities for the great majority of residents.10 Among governments and the population at large, planning has likewise been celebrated as a way to mediate diference and provide a positive, coherent narrative of a shared urban future. However, if the normative discourse within the planning profession is one of “progress,” the reality in Beirut is quite diferent. In Beirut, planning has become a central domain of contest between religious-political organizations, governments, and proit-seeking developers. Several scholars, including Oren Yiftachel, Bent Flyvbjerg, and Ananya Roy, have described how planning outcomes are not always aimed at general improvement and betterment. My hope here is to contribute to understanding this darker reality of planning practice.11 In Beirut, the ordinary WA R IN T IME S OF PE ACE tools of planners are commonly used by complex urban actors such as Lebanon’s religious-political organizations in an overtly partisan manner. Such spatial practices challenge the common conception of planning as a tool through which to order the present in the interest of an improved future. hey debunk modern narratives of peace, order, and progress; and they collapse distinctions between peace and war, order and chaos, construction and destruction, progress and stagnation. A practice of continuously planning for war in times of peace thus explains the underlying logic of Rima’s assertion that “planning lacks planning” in Beirut. With these conditions as a background, this book can be conceived as addressing a series of general questions. In cities in conlict, like Beirut—ones where the specter of war is always present; where state structures are not clear and public processes are frequently outsourced; and where fear, threats, rumors, and otherness provide as vital a ground for policy formation as statistics, censuses, and scientiic indings—how are urban presents and futures conigured and contested? What roles do spatial practitioners, including planners, engineers, and real estate brokers, occupy in such settings? And how are territories arranged, by whom, and for what purposes? he speciic territory in which I have chosen to investigate these issues is Beirut’s southern and southeastern suburbs, particularly those peripheral areas known as Hayy Madi/Mar Mikhail, Sahra Choueifat, and Doha Aramoun (see Figure 1, preceding the Prologue). Beirut is a coastal city, bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to its west. Its downtown occupies a settlement site that is more than ive thousand years old. But its contemporary development only began in the nineteenth century, when its port became a major transshipment point for regional produce. During the twentieth century, development began to sprawl both up and down the coastal plain from this downtown area and the rocky peninsula to its south that originally sheltered the port. Today this development has also spread part way up the hills that overlook the city, and that gradually morph into the Lebanese mountains.12 Originally, much of Beirut’s population was concentrated near the city’s historic core and its main roads.13 However, the onset of civil war in 1975 caused a mass displacement from these central areas, resulting in the urbanization of outlying suburbs that grew exponentially after the end of the war.14 While there are no authoritative numbers, a 2000 estimate put Lebanon’s population at 3.2 million.15 At the end of the 1990s, it was estimated that about 32 percent of these people lived in the greater Beirut area, and that Beirut’s suburbs were home to 22 percent of Lebanon’s entire population.16 To further illustrate this urbanization pattern, another source estimated that in 1996 at least 80 percent of all buildings in Beirut’s south and southeastern suburbs had been built since 1975.17 5 6 WA R IN T IME S OF PE ACE Since the end of the civil war, formal urban planning and development discussions in the city have been dominated by two topics: the progress of large-scale postwar reconstruction and redevelopment projects (such as Solidere, Elyssar, Linord, and more recently, Waad)18 and the condition of Beirut’s informal peripheries (such as Ouzaii and Hayy el-Selloum).19 By contrast, the three neighborhoods I discuss here are peripheral yet formal, planned yet contested.20 Located at the edge of the city, in 2008 these densely populated, understudied, overlooked areas suddenly found themselves at the frontier of renewed sectarian conlict. Implicit in this analysis is a speciic understanding of the notions of periphery and frontier. Peripheries are areas excluded by design, neglect, or circumstance from the formal ordering of a metropolitan center. For this reason, they are typically theorized as being governed by informal social, economic, and political arrangements. However, rather than understanding Beirut’s peripheries as a geography of the unplanned, this book will attempt to show how they are in fact becoming ever more intricately planned within a logic of sectarian order. As such, they are increasingly taking on the spatial character of frontiers—areas often theorized as dystopic, where regimes of power and capital are actively involved in reconiguring space in their own image. he principal agents in conlict in Beirut are religious-political organizations involved in post–civil war battles over land and access to housing. Among these, the four most prominent are Hezbollah (the main Shiite party in the region),21 the Future Movement (the main Sunni party), the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP, the main Druze party), and the Maronite Christian Church22 (as outlined in Figure 3). Given these conditions, urban planning in Beirut must be viewed as embed- Sectarian Affiliation Religious-Political Organization Druze Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) Shiite Hezbollah Haraket Amal Sunni Future Movement Maronite Christian (Catholic) Maronite Church Free Patriotic Movement Phalange Party (Kata’ib) Lebanese Forces FIGURE 3. The main religious-political organizations in Beirut’s south and southeastern peripheries, and their sectarian affiliations. The Lebanese Constitution recognizes a total of 18 religious sects. Political offices are distributed among the largest of them. The National Pact of 1943 stipulates that the president, prime minister, and speaker of parliament must be Maronite Christian, Sunni, and Shiite, respectively. Distribution of political power among sects occurs at both national and local levels of government. WA R IN T IME S OF PE ACE ded within a continuum of other social and spatial practices. his means it must frequently rely on innovative techniques to balance a spatiality of political diferences to keep war at bay when possible, while simultaneously allowing for urban growth and development proit. Given such conditions, planning discourse and practice must continuously straddle tensions between the political, the technical, and the violent. However, by being simultaneously a tool of paciication, conlict, and development, it has actively transformed Beirut’s peripheries into contested frontiers characterized by environmental degradation and ongoing cycles of violence. On the one hand, it has encouraged a patchwork of planned spaces that provide low-cost housing. On the other, it has created overlapping industrial and residential zones, towns where highways are never inished, and playgrounds and other amenities are planned but never built. The Logic of Future War he transformation of Beirut’s peripheries into sectarian frontiers has been made possible through an overarching logic that I call the war yet to come. At its most basic, this logic does not treat war and peace as distinct categories. Aside from philosophical theorizations of war, the act of war is not considered the usual state of afairs; rather the war’s absence, peace, is. However, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, “the Second World War was not followed by peace but by a cold war.”23 Similarly, in Lebanon, the end of civil war has not brought peace, only mutations in the logic of war. he war yet to come thus approaches war not as a temporal aberration in the low of events, with a beginning and an end, but as a state of afairs expected to reoccur. he anticipation of future war has thus become a governing modality within Beirut’s peripheries, with its imagined impetus drawn from a variety of possible sources, including local sectarian disputes, the Arab-Israeli conlict, the transnational geography of Islamic militarization, and the global “War on Terror.”24 he politics of the war yet to come has both a temporal and a spatial dimension. Temporally, it involves a present moment from which the future can be imagined only as a time of further violent conlict. Spatially, it invokes a regulating logic according to which Beirut’s peripheries are envisioned not only as spaces of urban growth and real estate proit but also as frontiers of future wars. hese spaces are thus today continuously reconigured through recursive cycles of violence, producing patchworks of destruction and construction, lavishness and poverty, otherness and marginality. he arrangement of urban territories based on military logic is not new, nor is it unique to cities in conlict or geographies of the Global South.25 It was equally constitutive of the project of modernization in the Global North. For example, 7 8 WA R IN T IME S OF PE ACE David Harvey, among others, has argued that Haussmann’s nineteenth-century Parisian boulevards represented not only a modernization project but also a military strategy to counter frequent popular uprisings in the city.26 However, the temporal logic of the spatial interventions of the war yet to come in Beirut sets the logic of planning in this city apart from Eurocentric approaches to urban development that characterized Haussmann’s interventions and the post–World War II reconstruction of European cities. While these planning projects folded defense mechanisms into ideas of progress and modernization, planning for the war yet to come is shaped by expectations of future violence, terror, and economic ruin—devoid of the promise of a better future. Two moments in recent Lebanese history are critical for understanding this framework: the end of the civil war in 1990 and the return of sectarian violence, peaking in the events of May 2008. During the Lebanese civil war, the three southeast peripheries that I discuss here were located in what was commonly known as Muslim west Beirut. However, this area was far from homogeneous, and changing global and regional geopolitics created powerful new schisms within it.27 When these came to a head in May 2008, armed militias took to the streets, producing the worst sectarian ighting the city had witnessed since the end of the civil war. his time around, however, the ighting was primarily between Muslim factions, and it represented a division of the country into two political coalitions, known as the March 14 and March 8 camps. he camps were named for the dates of two famous marches in 2005, which brought together hundreds of thousands of their respective supporters in response to the assassination of Prime Minister Raic Hariri, the head of the Sunni Future Movement and at the time the nation’s leading Sunni politician. Originally, the March 14 camp included the Druze PSP and the Sunni Future Movement (along with the majority Christian political parties), while the March 8 camp was led by the Shiite Hezbollah and Haraket Amal.28 However, as is typical of Lebanese politics, certain aspects of these alliances have changed over time, as the country’s various religious-political organizations have continued to reposition themselves.29 he actual spark that ignited the May 2008 ighting was a decision by a March 14–only government to condemn an independent telecommunications network constructed by Hezbollah as illegal.30 Hezbollah responded by announcing that this was a “declaration of war” against it and its campaign of resistance against Israel’s geopolitical project in the region. hus, at dawn on May 7, 2008, one hundred or more armed Hezbollah ighters and their allies took over west Beirut. During the days that followed, Beirut’s southern peripheries emerged as key battlegrounds—dozens were eventually killed and ighting spread to other parts of the country. At the time, Old Saida Road, which connects Hayy Madi/ WA R IN T IME S OF PE ACE Mar Mikhail, Sahra Choueifat, and Doha Aramoun—reemerged as a principal sectarian divide. his demarcation reinvoked the geography of the civil war, when Old Saida Road was part of the Green Line. But the city and its south and southeast peripheries had since been dissected even further, efectively transforming many neighborhoods into sectarian frontiers. Roadblocks, lags, posters, fortiied positions, and informal neighborhood watches also came to line the city’s streets, delineating zones, marking borders, and conining accessibility.31 Armed conlict, however, is not the only framework by which to understand how these peripheries were transformed into frontiers in post–civil war Beirut. When I began my research in earnest in 2004, fourteen years from the end of the civil war, (re)construction work was everywhere present in the city. But there was nonetheless a feeling of uneasiness. Residents and oicials alike spoke to me of ongoing fear of the sectarian other, and these fears had already caused friction and led to episodes of youth violence. In my research at these peripheral sites, I not only sensed the ghosts of past wars but also the shadows of anticipated new ones. Nevertheless, in 2004, there was no indication of the political upheaval the country would witness with the assassination of Prime Minister Hariri in 2005, or the extensive destruction that Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon would cause. But by 2008, that had all changed, as sectarian conlict, too, had come back. With a research perspective that spans times of “peace” and of “war,” this book attempts to show how in the years since the civil war, religious-political organizations have sought to arrange Beirut’s mundane peripheries into frontier geographies to relect their imagined role in local and regional wars to come. he resulting war in times of peace is not fought with tanks, artillery, and riles, but through a geopolitical territorial contest, where the fear of domination of one group by another is played out over such issues as land and apartment sales, the occupation of ruins, access to housing, zoning and planning regulations, and infrastructure projects. he transnational circulations of real estate inance, militarization, and religious ideologies also play a role. Moreover, even though the pursuit of war during peacetime has not sought to deine any particular future of war in Beirut, it has fundamentally redeined how the future is perceived and consequently how the present is arranged. Its logic lies in an evolving reconiguration of “yet to.” 32 Even during the darkest days of the civil war in Lebanon, oicials and spatial experts were still drawing and imagining a future of peace, order, and prosperity. However, gradually, in the years following the civil war, this expected future became less about peace and more about the inevitability of future conlict. his shift in perception has been informed by past experience, and by a sense that there can be no end to the many conlicts that now deine the larger Middle East. Most 9 10 WA R IN T IME S OF PE ACE critically, however, the war yet to come in Beirut forecloses the possibility of urban politics outside a sectarian order. And my analysis of these conditions aims to trace the twists and turns of engagement and estrangement through which such political diference is constructed, produced, managed, and contested. It illustrates the ways time and space may be curved into new complex conigurations that construct safe and unsafe spaces—an accepted other versus an other to fear.