Laying Claim To Beirut - Urban Naratives and Spatial Identity in The Age of Solidere

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Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of Solidere
Author(s): Saree Makdisi
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 23, No. 3, Front Lines/Border Posts (Spring, 1997), pp. 660-705
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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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 be-
cause 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 re-
moved for renovation. The excavation in the foreground is an archaeological dig. The re-
maining 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 build-
ings 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 cul-
ture 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 infrastruc-
ture 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 pro-
cess 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 nar-
ratives 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 deter-
mined 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
iN;i -sBt
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 na-
tional 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 pri-
vate organizations began to consider proposals for the reconstruction ef-
fort. 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, how-
ever, 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.
Critical Inquiry
Spring 1997 667
(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 bear-
ing 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 sec-
ond 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, demoli-
tion 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 to-
day'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 reconstruc-
tion, 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 fur-
ther 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 insti-
tution.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 north-
ern 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 reconstruc-
tion 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 inter-
ests, 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 de-
nounced 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 expro-
priated by the company did Solidere come into being: the ultimate ex-
pression of the dissolution of any real distinction between public and
private interests or, more accurately, the decisive colonization of the for-
mer by the latter. As the Lebanese architect and public planner Assem
Salaam argues, "entrusting Beirut's Central Business District (CBD) rede-
velopment 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 down-
town area, this time on behalf of the government, even though the recon-
struction 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 de-
bate 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 at-
tention 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 re-
signed 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.
Critical Inquiry Spring 1997 675
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 repre-
sents the largest urban redevelopment project of the l990s. Its sole refer-
ence 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 val-
ued at U.S.$1.82 billion. Type A shares, initially valued at U.S.$1.17
billion, were issued to the holders of expropriated property in the down-
town area, in "proportion" to the relative value of their property claims,
as adjudicated by the company's board of founders. A further issue of 6.5
million type B shares was released to investors, bringing in new capital at
an initial stock offer of U.S.$ 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 pri-
vate 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 mar-
ket), 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 infor-
mation 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 build-
ings 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 infra-
structure 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 re-
claimed 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 reli-
gious 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 re-
develop 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 recu-
peration briefs are intended to preserve each recuperated building's orig-
inal 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 infrastruc-
ture 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.
Critical Inquiry
Spring 1997 679
Solidere's master plan calls for the creation of a lively and attractive
urban core in Beirut, featuring a balanced mixture of office space, resi-
dential 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 re-
claimed 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 residen-
tial areas within the central district (though it seems fairly obvious that
these areas will not take on their previous class identities and will proba-
bly 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 can-
not 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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Critical Inquiry Sprang 1997 681
.
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FIG. 15. An artist's impression of the new Solidere plan. Source: Solidere.
digs in between work on the infrastructure, which is already under-
way 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 commer-
cial advantage; one Solidere strategist was quoted recently in Le Moruie,
saying, "we have been accused of the destruction of the architectural pat-
rimony of Beirut; that's false, and, more to the point, it's not in our inter-
$V E't::
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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 construc-
tion 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 propos-
als 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.
e
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 ar-
chaeological and architectural patrimony will form an essential element
in the competition between the rebuilt center of Beirut and other re-
gional 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 infra-
structure 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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Laying Claim to Beirut 684 Saree Makdisi
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 al-
ready 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 reconstruc-
tion 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 book-
let, 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 dam-
aged, 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, of-
fices, 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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'rX . / S J; l :, - ,, creat room fbr an underground garage. Note the scale of the excavation; the fence in the back-
.,' 0 0 --- tt 5, j--Aw s - H - -. ground is eight to ten feet high. The domed structure that has been spared is an early-sixteenth-
_ -- 1 '; } t; ! century Mamiuk sanctuary. Photo by author. , t ; ;; b - . -; , . | . W - X si->i ^ 1 7 8 t !}- - i- -- --. -;- Lt >''} rs
Fle;. 18.-A map of the proposed souk redevelop-
ment plan. Source: Solidere.
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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 down-
town 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
. . . * * s * -
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 out-
lets. 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 begin-
ning 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 recon-
struction 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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FIG. 21. The cover of Beirut: Do We Know itt Note how the characters are pointing
towards one of Solideres own sketches of Beirut as though it were real (see fig. 12). The
word Beirut as it appears on the cover is the company's logo. Source: Solidere.
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to get access to the full "image" of the past (for as I say the past is pre-
sented only in visual terms), you realize that it's only a fragmentary im-
age, 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>!
-le$e *
tfet, k 12 [ii - _t_j
. . z .fP >4gJ t, E r _I * _E t E X R @ S *S fts4X - " i I " E | i 9jJ rJd ;j4*@s;2 ; w F ! ' : ! ^. r, _ - j _|: - * ... St Si Cl_tl si z ,Wi waLr ......................... .. , ._
* .s =w .1 ._e - w
., . . V; i_ 4 .,,_ .
= ! L . s
", LL . _ ai _ L E 9.. i _
^ . .
z-se. . s s ; 4 >ix ii i: e - :-t J . ,.+.'.. -S z ... . . - - r 1 S
o9, ,:.:: ., ^ in < aw
;^S_ .. 2SS
si Lia fh - gE e N X * d r -i _iS t . ; W
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 ex-
tremities, 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 cen-
ter 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 build-
ings 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
, *i S; r ^ . ii ,, ';,4. *8.-,9 ' : ,r: Xr.r ;- iOJ J ti e < : r :'
' 0 i 4+ X ......................... , . ! j ., > < _ _ C I ^ ae g S 1 ) 1 t ' @ ' ; * i - z S . . . . , .................... _ ,,., ,4 . _ f T ;/s ,.! i-'4, .... :
; 0 -t -d j b St R tt - j -,; t V
_ .
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 replica-
tion 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 spec-
tacle.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 demo-
lition crews and the powerful financial interests standing behind them
have produced an irreversible fait accompli. Thus, what becomes im-
portant at this stage isn't the material construction, as such, but rather
what the construction project represents and how it ties into other pro-
cesses 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 rep-
resents 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]
Critical Inquiry
Spring 1997 693
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 entrepre-
neurs wanting urban life to promote their businesses?"33
What Solidere and Harirism seem to represent is precisely the with-
ering 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 collec-
tive 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.
- .
S..He o
z P . s-., | X 8 |
.... _ |
11|[i - "" F
a _ C I |
i .D@. B w o o i
+[!j-$,,llltt; - Xt* s; : *: ^ .;+
'<,l>-*'g9i<' > 5i >_^ , t __ L
FIG. 25.
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 commod-
ity 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 elec-
tions 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 eco-
nomic and political organization. In fact, in the terms established by
Harirism, the process of postwar reconstruction has been one of aston-
ishing 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
s rRs ;a .. 1 | _ 1..--21.r ! _ e _ - _
1E _1 B 2' i ..i,,^>t'-Y,4 'r.S_ B s
| s C e ^ ^ _
_S tA/5|S | 9 { jt s Ww-t -_
- Se '%>Mo; \ {}<>>.<>2 2.5
FIG. 26.
advantage of the very same market liberalizations that they mandate. At
least until the elections of 1996, the parliament included several opposi-
tion 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 (in-
cluding 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 differ-
ent "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, es-
pecially 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 im-
proved, 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 neolib-
eral 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 ap-
paratuses have been circumvented and to a certain extent either disman-
tled 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 neo-
liberal 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 as-
sessment: not only has government deficit spending increased dramati-
cally (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 demon-
strations: first in July 1995, when the army and internal security forces
were ordered to suppress the trade union demonstrations against the re-
cent 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 imme-
diate 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 work-
ers' 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 repre-
sent. 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 post-
modern 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 coin-
cidence 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 bor-
ders 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 infor-
mational 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 post-
modern-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 poli-
tics 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 repro-
duction 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 tele-
vision stations to garbage collecting to educational institutions to con-
struction projects to state property and institutions to real estate to the
national airline to, finally and ultimately, the center of Beirut. At the pe-
rimeter 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 gen-
eral, 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 recon-
struction."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 pre-
cisely 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 sur-
rounding 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 domi-
nate 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 com-
pany'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 simulta-
neously local and global scale and indeed to see that these forces are al-
ways 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 espe-
cially 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, leav-
ing 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 charac-
terized 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 out-
side 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 in-
creasingly characterized by the labor processes of the informal economy
of peripheral zones in the world economy, cut oS from whatever "bene-
fits" might be associated with the "space of flows."44 (This, once again, is
assuming that Solidere is right in believing that Beirut can resume some-
thing 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 mas-
sive white elephant, like the Canary Wharf urban development scheme
in LondoWs Docklands.)45 Thus the duality of such a city, as Castells ar-
gues, 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 informa-
tional 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-orga-
nizational 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 coun-
tries; 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 telecommuni-
cations systems link together various nodes of intensity in the global eco-
nomic 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 out-
side 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 tradi-
tional forms and values, a pastiche that would be integrated into the proj-
ect 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]
Critical Inquiry
Spring 1997 705
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 econ-
omy, 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).

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