The Insecure City

Kristin V. Monroe

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813574646
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Fifteen years after the end of a protracted civil and regional war, Beirut broke out in violence once again, forcing residents to contend with many forms of insecurity, amid an often violent political and economic landscape. Providing a picture of what ordinary life is like for urban dwellers surviving sectarian violence, The Insecure City captures the day-to-day experiences of citizens of Beirut moving through a war-torn landscape.   While living in Beirut, Kristin Monroe conducted interviews with a diverse group of residents of the city. She found that when people spoke about getting around in Beirut, they were also expressing larger concerns about social, political, and economic life. It was not only violence that threatened Beirut’s ordinary residents, but also class dynamics that made life even more precarious. For instance, the installation of checkpoints and the rerouting of traffic—set up for the security of the elite—forced the less fortunate to alter their lives in ways that made them more at risk. Similarly, the ability to pass through security blockades often had to do with an individual’s visible markers of class, such as clothing, hairstyle, and type of car. Monroe examines how understandings and practices of spatial mobility in the city reflect social differences, and how such experiences led residents to be bitterly critical of their government.   In The Insecure City, Monroe takes urban anthropology in a new and meaningful direction, discussing traffic in the Middle East to show that when people move through Beirut they are experiencing the intersection of citizen and state, of the more and less privileged, and, in general, the city’s politically polarized geography.  

1

The Privatized City

Forming a cape that extends into the sea, Beirut is situated at the geographical center of the Lebanese coast. Initially developed around its port area, the city expanded through the twentieth century in all directions: northward along the coastal plains and their neighboring mountainous areas toward the country’s second largest city of Tripoli, eastward in the direction of the Beirut-Damascus highway, which rises into the mountains, and to the south, where, by the early 1950s, villages were being transformed into suburbs by rural migrants seeking economic opportunity in the capital and, later, several Palestinian refugee camps were established.¹ Today, about half of Lebanon’s total population—close to two million people²—lives in the Greater Beirut area, which comprises the city and its suburbs.³ It is a densely built landscape of concrete structures, “mostly indiscriminate mid-rise and high-rise buildings that cast their shadows on the remaining vestiges of villas or low-rise houses of the French Mandate period” (Verdeil 2005).⁴ Buildings sit in close proximity to one another with narrow setbacks from the street; commercial shops and services are on their ground floors.

In many neighborhoods, towers of otherwise indistinctive apartment blocks express the individuality of their occupants through a particular architectural feature: the balcony. Beirutis speak about a kind of ilfeh (familiarity or intimacy) that characterizes the city’s urban culture. The apartment balcony, situated on the border between the public space of the street and the private realm of the domestic sphere, is a site where this intimacy is cultivated. From balconies, which are used year-round, neighbors converse with one another, families’ socks and undergarments are hung out on clotheslines to dry in view of passersby, and residents shout down requests for grocery items to be carried upstairs by workers in shops below. Walking through the city or sitting at the open window of a public bus as it crawls through traffic, the streetside observer encounters these household scenes. In this way, the balconies help to produce an urban street culture that is caught up in the sights, sounds, and even smells of everyday domestic life, from the yells of children calling down to their friends in the street and the aromas of lunchtime meals wafting out from kitchens to the sounds of the television news and glimpses of residents tending to their hanging gardens, oases of green amid a dense city colored concrete gray.

FIGURE 1.1. Map of Beirut in Lebanon and the region. (Map by Richard Gilbreath. Adapted from map by Andrew Alfred-Duggan, ITMB Publishing.)

FIGURE 1.2. Neighborhood map of Beirut with main sites referred to in this book. (Map by Richard Gilbreath. Adapted from map by Andrew Alfred-Duggan, ITMB Publishing.)

Moving through Beirut, one also observes its “half-commercial, half-industrial” character (Adnan 1982, 9). The sight of tower cranes putting up high-end residences in and adjacent to the city’s historic and geographic core, the downtown area,⁵ gives evidence of the fact that the commercial traffic in land is one of the most important sources of private wealth in Lebanon.⁶ In the east, just past the picturesque neighborhood of Ashrafieh and its late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French-style architecture is Bourj Hammoud, an area that was founded by survivors of the Armenian Genocide and that expanded mostly during the 1930s,⁷ where scenes of manufacturing and light industry—from furniture and shoes to mechanical parts and mattresses—emerge. From there, one approaches the junction for the coastal highway heading north at Karantina, where the air is thick with the putrid smells emanating from both the city’s waste-treatment plant and one of the country’s largest slaughterhouses. The coastal highway, one of the most congested traffic corridors in the country, is used daily by commuters living in the northern suburbs. These suburbs rise upward from the coastal plain to the storied Lebanese mountainside.⁸ Moving north and east from the beaches of Beirut, through congestion and industry, to the foot of the Mount Lebanon range is thus a route across the city’s diverse physical landscape, one that brings to mind a favorite aphorism often repeated to foreign visitors: “Only in Lebanon can you go to the beach and ski in the same day.” To travel along this route in Beirut is also to move across different territories, areas of the city that are identified with particular sectarian and political groups that have been and continue to be adversaries.

In this chapter, I approach Beirut’s physical landscape as a code whose deciphering may be undertaken through the study of its “ordinary but diagnostic features” (Meinig 1979, 6). Two processes, modes of privatization nourished by a laissez-faire market-led model of urban development and political sectarian conflict, have been the key power geometries (Massey 1994) shaping the city’s space in the modern era. I consider these power geometries—by which I refer to the ways in which spatial arrangements, access, and mobility reflect hierarchies of power and control—in this and the following chapter. Here, I provide a historically informed overview of Beirut’s built, physical, and transport environment that reveals the city’s unplanned, informal, and privatized character.

THE RISE OF MODERN BEIRUT

Lebanon became a province of the Ottoman Empire in 1516, but Beirut was an insignificant port town for much of the Empire’s rule. It was not until the late Ottoman period (1860–1914), when the city was made an imperial administrative center and trading activity shifted from the interior to the coastal region along the eastern Mediterranean, that Beirut came to prominence. Along with the emergence of the French-supported silk industry in the Mount Lebanon region, which expanded the export sector and stimulated ancillary enterprises in finance, shipping, banking, and insurance,⁹ the city also developed as an outcome of administrative reforms instituted by the Ottomans to “modernize” the Empire; these reforms encouraged British and French investment in infrastructural projects in and around the city.¹⁰

These investments increased the economy and attracted rural-to-urban migrants seeking not only a better livelihood but also refuge from religious violence in their villages.¹¹ In the course of the nineteenth century, rural migrants transformed Beirut from a small town of six thousand people spanning a quarter of a square mile into a major seaport city with a population of one hundred twenty thousand by the century’s end (Fawaz 1983, 1). While many of the these new residents in the city retained ties to the villages they left—and the building of roads that extended across the mountains and faster carriage service facilitated these connections—rural migrants to the city were, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, becoming Beirutis. They became Beirutis in a civic sense, as residents of an urban polity governed by a municipal council rather than through the charitable institutions, sectarian communities, and private property owners that collaboratively supervised villages (Abdou-Hodeib 2011, 478). But, in another sense, these rural-to-urban migrants, many of whom entered the trading milieu and constituted part of the city’s burgeoning middle class of merchants and salaried professionals, were also becoming Beiruti through their participation in new kinds of public and social practices.

During this time, the city became both “the project and object of the cosmopolitan desires of an Ottoman-Arab bourgeoisie to belong to a distinctly modern epoch” (Hanssen 2005, 14). The interest of this urban middle class in taking leisure in the public realm gave rise to cafes, theaters, balls, evening dances, clubs, public gardens, horse racing viewed from within a European-style hippodrome, and roads designed specifically for owners of automobiles.¹² In the park squares, coffeehouses, art galleries, and theaters of turn-of-the century Beirut, new forms of public sociality took shape that brought the people of Beirut together both by chance as well as along class-based lines. With the appearance of these kinds of places, the removal of its medieval city walls, and its newfound status as an imperial capital, Beirut changed profoundly during the late Ottoman period; a modern city was inaugurated, one characterized by a vibrant, middle-class public sphere.

FIGURE 1.3. Cafe at a Beirut public garden during the late Ottoman period, ca. 1900–1920. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-DIG-matpc-01186.)

Allied victory in World War I brought the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.¹³ Following the declaration of independence in 1920 by an Arab Congress and its provisional recognition by the Allied Powers, France invaded Syria and, working together with the British, divided the Arab Near East of the Ottoman Empire into a number of separate states subject to colonial control. While the British Mandate administered Palestine (modern Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip), French mandatory control was established over six states that divided Lebanon and Syria.

The decision to create a State of Greater Lebanon—whose borders are those of the country today—which was separated from the states of Syria, had several important consequences. First, it further strengthened France’s historic alliance with Lebanon’s Christian communities, especially Maronite Catholics,¹⁴ and expanded the political influence of these groups.¹⁵ Second, the choice to create a Greater Lebanon in particular and French mandatory policy more generally confirmed the financial and commercial hegemony of Beirut over the mountain regions and the development of a pattern of economic activity in which agriculture and industry became ever more subordinate to banking and trade.¹⁶ The legacy of this center-periphery mode of development is evident today in the considerable infrastructural, health, educational, and income disparities between the Beirut and Mount Lebanon regions and the south, Bekaa Valley, and the north.¹⁷ Some have even gone so far as to argue that Beirut not only is the capital of Lebanon but, given its role as the country’s economic and demographic center, has come to constitute a city-state.¹⁸ Finally, the establishment of a French-controlled Greater Lebanon entrenched political sectarianism, an important development that I discuss further in the following chapter. French officials ruled through paternalistic power that distributed—and rescinded—benefits to the “ruled” through a mediating elite.¹⁹ Although this elite brought Sunni, Shi‘a, Druze, and Greek Orthodox leaders into its fold, it reinforced the notion of a sectarian-based political order.²⁰ As historian Philip Mansel (2010, 300) observes, even municipal appointments in the government of Beirut were apportioned according to sect, a practice that entrenched a sense of difference among residents of the city rather than integration.

As in France’s other colonial territories, the French administration in Lebanon was a technocratic one that emphasized vast infrastructural projects such as the laying out of a cross-country road network, the modernization of the ports and postal service, and the creation of a telephone network, hospitals, and sanitary services (Picard 1996, 38). In Beirut, public space was made French through commemorative practices that named streets and squares for French military figures and that erected monuments and statues in the honor of French government figures and military men and also through the design of the built environment. The city’s downtown center was a particular focal point for the mandate authorities, as it was intended to be the showpiece of French urban planning in the Levant. There, Haussmannian Paris was re-created.²¹ A symmetrical pattern of long, straight, and wide avenues took the place of the Ottoman-era labyrinthine network of narrow alleys, open-air souks (markets), and crowded quarters. Streets radiated out, in a star-shaped design, from Place de l’Etoile (Square of the Star).²² The construction of public buildings and residential structures also gave other parts of Beirut—like the Ashrafieh neighborhood on the east side of the city, for example—a distinctly French character.

Through its colonial cultural policy, the mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission), the French made Beirut the center of French culture and language in Lebanon. Secular and religious schools in Beirut—including Muslim ones—many of which had been opened along with American and British missionary schools during the nineteenth century, served as an ideal staging ground for this enterprise.²³ Efforts to cultivate French language and culture in Beirut, those that began well before the mandate era but intensified during the colonial period, have endured until the present. In today’s Beirut, not only are aspects of French culture, foods, and fashion, for example, commonplace, but also French is widely spoken and the Lebanese Arabic used by Beirutis is peppered with French words and phrases.

In the late Ottoman and French colonial periods, Beirut developed from a backwater imperial holding into a flourishing trading center with a lively middle-class public sphere. In the following sections I explore how modern Beirut has taken on an unplanned physical form characterized by state-supported processes of private investment, shrinking public space, and vehicular congesti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Language
• Introduction
• 1. The Privatized City
• 2. The Space of War
• 3. Politics and Public Space
• 4. Securing Beirut
• 5. The Chaos of Driving
• 6. “There Is No State”
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author