Elie ANTOUN, EVCAU, France
What happens if a city loses its memory after a crisis? And if memory is lost, daily life disrupted, and social habits and practices altered, what are the implications for the future of urban space? What scars or traces are left after these post-crisis phenomena?
Lebanese heritage has suffered waves of looting, vandalism, neglect and destruction over the past decades, and through these crises, the social fabric, heritage and memory of the city have suffered. Beirut has been more destroyed and disfigured in times of peace than in times of war. It was not Lebanon's civil war (1975-1990) that caused the most destruction, but rather its “reconstruction”. Indeed, "SOLIDERE", the urban reconstruction project of the city center initiated after the civil war, played an essential role in the tabula rasa of the city center, to then entrust to the private sector, without specifications guaranteeing any general interest, the reconfiguration of a space of nearly 150 hectares as symbolic as strategic, on purely financial bases. The loss of the heritage and the spirit of the place is thus experienced as an act of symbolic violence towards the past and future inhabitants of Beirut. "SOLIDERE" expropriated land from the inhabitants and depopulated the city center to build a new, unrecognizable Beirut, in which the traces of the conflict were removed and replaced by new buildings that corresponded to a global and cosmopolitan image, in order to hide the history of the war and to make Beirut "beautiful" again. She came to build a new city for a new population, replacing one memory with another in what Naccache called a “memorycide” (1998: 40).
On the 4th of August 2020, a colossal explosion rocked Beirut and ruined a large area of the city. The massive event triggered civil war memories, reopened the debate about the reconstruction of ruined Beirut amidst an ongoing economic crisis while the future of the city remains uncertain.
Keywords: Destruction|Reconstruction|Heritage|Collective Memory|Social Resilience
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