REVIEW AND ANALYSIS 29 identity. Solidère sought to bring back their historic commercial function and to encourage the return of the mercantile community that had fled to the fringes of the city during the civil war. The company launched an international design competition to rebuild them, retaining their Hellenistic street grid layout which characterised the old souks and the area’s historic landmarks. The contest was won by Spanish architect, José Rafael Moneo Vallés, who designed the southern souk and British architect, Kevin Dash, who designed the Gold souks. Other new souks also retained their Hellenistic street grid layout as well as their historical names: Souk al Tawila, Souk Arwam, Souk Jamil, Souk Ayyass, Souk Sayyour, Souk Bustros and Souk Arwad. An international campaign of rescue excavations was initiated in 1993 under the auspices of the Directorate-General of Antiquities - the agency responsible for Lebanon’s cultural heritage – and with some financial support from Solidère, together with some local experts. Such missions were effective for their own merits, but they were not fully supported from beginning to end and some projects remain incomplete, neglected, lacking in unity and independent from state run initiatives. Many important sites were looted due to lack of security (Al Radi 1996). The underlying assumption was that public administration in Lebanon was weak, impoverished, and riddled with inefficiencies (Adwan 2004). Rather than attempt to remedy these problems and reinforce the state, the Lebanese authorities turned to global capital and proposed a neoliberal solution that took advantage of the impotence of central authority (Fawaz and Peillen 2003: 3). The reconstruction project was therefore mostly market-oriented and had given superficial attention to the historic fabric of the city, making minor provision for the management of cultural resources during the reconstruction process. The BCD was to be reinstated as an international centre of finance and commerce housed in contemporary new buildings. These proposals promised brash new development with limited retention of the district’s former self, rather than cautious rehabilitation. The main target audience was international finance and the wealthy expatriate community was seen as a key source of funding and business development. From the outset, Solidère was devoted to showing the world that Beirut belonged among the rank of world cities, and that this could be achieved through grandiose urban planning. This approach provoked controversy and resistance across all sectarian divides. The top-down imposition of reconstruction generated uncertainty across all aspects of daily life for most residents of the city. In an effort to erase the war and start afresh, old buildings were demolished, long-standing tenants were evicted and long-established social networks were disrupted. Anger toward Solidère was aided by a surge of negative feeling towards the plan when a large number of historic buildings, condemned as unsafe, were hurriedly demolished in such a way as to damage nearby buildings, thus also requiring them to be demolished. A city centre that once drew all of Lebanon’s diverse people to its souks, cafes, cinemas and hotels was now a somewhat rootless zone of empty luxury stores and unoccupied apartments. Rebuilt as a destination for international money and tourists, it is felt that the heart of Beirut is a very costly monument built at the expense of social cohesion and local participation. People from all walks of life criticised Solidère’s reconstruction plan, arguing that the company failed to fully consider the city and its inhabitants’ diverse historical and social identities, that it ignored locals’ interests and needs, and favoured the technical and economic interests of investors over public space. Solidère itself made little reference to its prehistory or to previous plans for reconstruction in the centre of Beirut (Makdisi 1997: 675). Local people felt that any archaeological work that did occur placed historical emphasis on the most distant aspects of Beirut’s past, its Hellenistic and Phoenician history, rather than anything more contentious from recent decades, including its rich Islamic history. There was a sense in the city centre that history had been intentionally erased. The erasure of the civil war in particular is evidenced by Hariri himself. In 2000, at an event commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the start of the war, he declared that Reconstructed streets in Beirut Central Area currently lacking activities and people Reconstructed Central Area of the Place de l’Etoile
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=