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Beirut River: Portrait & Injection

Studio Madane engages its youth in a project called ‘The Beirut River: Portrait and Injections’, with the aspiration to engage the members in socio political reform and decision-making through research and practice. In its mission to channel ideals and slogans into practical and result-oriented action plans, Madane develops the workflow model that it will employ internally and collaboratively with FNF. 

‘Does reform, the promise of Lebanon's leaders, affect people’s political decision-making when it arrives from a political alternative?’ This research question was responded to transversely via the efforts of four working groups: The Urbanists & Environmentalists, Citizen Volunteers, Artists & Laborers, and the Documenters and Visual Creators working groups. The findings were made through mappings, surveys, documented conversations, short films, and experiments with architecture. 

The Portrait

Photographic surveys conveyed the socio-political realities via the physicalities of the urban environment. How’re residents using barriers to define their living? What do these observations say about them? The authorities, unions of residents, business owners, and other stakeholders are potential collaborators in the lack of order in the cities. In a first assessment, it was shown that almost 100% of the photos convey barriers that invade public space, and nearly 50% occupy sidewalks. More than half are informal immovable installations. A resident revealed a thought shared by many locals in one of the audio albums: “...by attempting to fix anything, we pose a threat to the dominant [political] parties…” [“I Can't Imagine Change” (0:50 - 1:33)]. The recordings by the Documenters group testify the inability of locals to create change-making initiatives without threatening their position in society.

Karantina evolved from a hub of economic prosperity in the country to an isolated and highly militarized island that has no infrastructure to recover from any inconvenience, let alone the August 4th explosion. Bourj Hammoud is in the dark and witnessing unprecedented clashes between locals and immigrants, and between locals themselves of different ethnicities. Nahr Beirut continues to act as a wound in the middle, and the residents are ‘trapped’ because of their passion for their neighborhood of birth, but also suffocated. 'Organized Entropies' aims to convey the intersections of these realities.

The injection

The geolocated photographic reports can be monitored by municipalities and addressed on the spot. The platform developed by Studio Madane to do so is a scalable pilot that encourages participatory governance in society. This technique of connecting an urban situation to a geolocation is familiar to some municipalities in Catalunya, Spain. Municipal Civil Protection encourages participatory governance to advance the action towards reform while including the residents and stakeholders [La protecció civil municipal a SITMUN]. 

Before proposing a digital reform project that dwells on accountability and active citizenship, a physical reform proposal was developed. More than 50% of the urban informalities showed positive contributions such as achieving extra space, planting, walkability, and communal spaces. These were used as targets to the civic reform proposal. These drawings are some of the drawings that are to be submitted to a separate construction grant.

Reflection

These proposals were shared with the locals to convey the level of seriousness of the project. Do these reform injections, whether digital or physical, when offered by a political alternative, affect the recipients political choices and decision making? There was a lot of reluctance when it came to rhetoric and imagination of change. Some claimed that reform would still not positively affect political decision-making because the affiliations are deeply rooted into belief systems. Can change only happen via cultural reset, a long term project?

There is a second face to the whole situation. It was filmed in 'Lebanese Clientelism'. As much as people are suffocating from their reality, they have also managed to take advantage of the condition to benefit themselves in whichever way they can. While some are bartering expensive tires for military protection, others are profiting financially. This reality cements the crises because of lifelines tied to it, and is worthy of further investigation.

Nader Akoum, 

Director of Studio Madane