 Hello everyone. I'm Amal Amdrouds. I'm the Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation welcoming you to this really heartwarming and important event on the recovery of Beirut after the explosion of August 4th. Before I say a few words about Beirut and its special place in my heart and in our imagination as architects and planners from around the world. I want to thank Hibabu Akkar, professor here at the school, as well as all our incredible alumni, colleagues, friends that I saw on the screen before the event went on. And that you will have a great pleasure, I think, of hearing today. Beirut is a very small but very large in terms of what it suggests historically about the development of cities, culture, of geographies, of policies and politics. But it's very large in terms of the way it carries as to what has been done in terms of imagining what cities can do and can be and how people can live and I think what it can do in the future. So, as I think Hiba and the panelists will share today, there's been so many iterations of rebuilding, reconstructing, recovering now, and yet we are back again but I hope, we all hope this time that some of the foundations will be stronger for structural housing, questions of preservation, the virtual and the physical coming together so much to learn from Beirut and to project outwards and also so much for all of us to give back in terms of our knowledge and our care for the city. So welcome everyone and I turn it over to Hiba and to the first panel. Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning to all the 500 plus people who are joining us from across the globe to talk about emergency architecture and planning, recovering Beirut post explosion. I'm Hiba Barker, assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation will use GSAP for short. Before I introduce the panelists, I want to thank Dean Amal Andraoos for making GSAP a place where it is possible to convene and have such critical and imminent conversations about architecture, planning and the built environment. I would like to also thank Big Time, Lila Kattlier for her amazing support during the preparation for this event and for the ADT. The event today brings people from GSAP and Columbia University along with colleagues from across the globe. Thank you to all the team panelists for joining us today. From Columbia, I will start with an alphabetical order. From Columbia we welcome Zia Jamaluddin, assistant professor of architecture. Andreas Haake, associate professor of professional practice and director of the master's program in advanced architectural design. Laura Kurgan, professor of architecture and the director of the Center for Spatial Research, Jorge Otero Peleos, professor and director of historic preservation. Zaina Bahraine, Edith Porada, professor of ancient Near Eastern art and archaeology, department of art history and archaeology. And Manan Ahmad, associate professor, director of graduate studies, department of history. From Beirut and across the globe we welcome Munafa Waz, professor of urban planning, department of architecture and design at the American University of Beirut. Marwan Gandoor, professor and director of the School of Architecture at the Louisiana State University. Rania Gusson, associate professor of architecture and urbanism, MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Habib Haddad, managing partner of the E14 fund and the founder of Yemli. John Kassir, co-founder and manager, editor of Megaphone. Adrien Lahoud, dean of the School of Architecture Royal College of Arts. Abir Satsou, founding partner, Public Works Studio. Misrin Salty, associate professor of economics, department of economics at the American University of Beirut. Rana Samara, vice president of NGO, Nussaned. Hashim Serkis, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. And Wahil Sinno, UN Habitat Area Coordinator in Lebanon. The driving force for this event is an amazing group of GSAP students alumni and alumni who I have had the utmost pleasure to work with over the past couple of months since the August 4th explosion that ripped Beirut. Their enthusiasm, creativity, compassion, organizing powers and perseverance while questioning and pushing the boundaries of what it seems to be an architect, designer and a planner at times of crisis have been inspiring to me. In fact, they've given the cynicism in me hope that we will be alright. In fact, they embody the real hope for Lebanon's future. So, here for I introduce to you and present to you the GSAP Collective for Beirut, representing the alumni we have Iyad Abu Ghayda, Marylain Antaki, Oda Azzi, Charles Hajj, Mesa Jallad, Ibrahim Kumbarji, Dina Mahmoud, Maya Rafia, Rula Salamoun, and current students Aya Abdullah and Mikaela Faraon. Just a word about the format, the two hours will be divided into five modules around five topics. We have 20 minutes per module. We hope that this event will be just the beginning of a series that aims to tackle each conversation in more detail in the spring semester and onward. For each module we have prepared one overarching question. Three or four panels will take the lead answering each questions for about two minutes per participant, and then we will open it up for discussion with the rest of the panelists. At the end of the two hours, a number of the panelists as well as the Collective will stay online for Q&A with the audience for about 30 minutes, till about 2.30 p.m. New York City time, 9.30 p.m. Beirut time. Audience, please feel free to use you to ask questions as we go through the discussion, and we will be collecting these questions and addressing them after we go through the five modules. Thank you for everyone. Thank you for participating and hope you enjoy that. Thank you everyone. I'm Oda Aziz, G-SAP alumna. Thank you Dean Amalama and Hiba Boakar for this introduction, and thank you everyone for being here today. We would like to extend our utmost gratitude to Hiba. You've shown tremendous support throughout this process, so thank you for making this happen. We are extremely happy to have such an distinguished panel joining us today to openly discuss the urgency of recovering Beirut. I'd like to begin by saying a few words about G-SAP. G-SAP cultivates a sense of openness among students, alumni and faculty, fostering a space to share ideas, thoughts during our time in school. Yet this does not stop after graduation. G-SAP ideology continues as the school does not permit us to remain silent in time of crisis. We are taught to think that architecture is not a mere singular tool, but can be used in various forms and extensions. In this situation, it's an instrument for us in times of emergency. We hope that this event will be one of many by the collective to keep the conversation going about Beirut. Hello everyone. My name is Mikhaela Farron, and I'm a current MRX student at G-SAP. I'm thrilled to introduce the G-SAP Collective for Beirut. On August 13th, following the tragedy that happened 100 days ago today, a group of G-SAP alumni and students came together with the question, how can we bring our expertise and connection to contribute to the great efforts made for Beirut. So we are based in Beirut and New York, but also in London, Amsterdam, Toronto, Cairo, Dubai and The Hague. Brought together by Zoom, we formed the G-SAP Collective for Beirut. The G-SAP Collective is dedicated to the promotion, discussion and reflection of contemporary issues in the Middle East and Lebanon specifically. We're interested in weaving a cross-functional network that facilitates collaborative thinking by connecting existing areas of expertise within and outside of the school, encouraging cooperative involvement. We're meeting with Assistant Professor Hibab Waqar. We're so happy to be discussing here with all of you to date. Beirut and the aftermath of the explosion that has forever changed the face of the city through this event, recovering Beirut post-explosion. We would like to start with a short work-in-progress video that draws parallels between the blast and multiple crises in Lebanon that happened throughout the years to situate this conversation in the past, present and future. We hope you enjoy it. Thank you. An age 4 and a 3 spilling Never would we have thought that rather than an Israeli missile dripping an organic compound improperly stored at the port of Beirut warehouse 12 would cause the death and destruction of our city exploding the apocalypse exploding longer reverberating fogging bombing before the two explosions spreading people heard the all too familiar sound of jet planes but it was only the sound of combustion impact warning signs simulating that our port and everything within a 10 kilometer radius planning would explode shake and shatter witnessing worrying trembling a wave of aluminum profiles bent like string cheese deserting the dust of crumbling stones cleaning glass shards cutting through everything sinking and everyone in sight appropriating hospitalizing burning and us who survived witnessing it all marrying hoping nothing will bring us back to how it was before August 4 lamenting helping offering sharing rescuing helping searching protesting official narratives say it was all a mistake that it was out of their hands congregating a mistake is another word for the systemic negligence failing that fuels the impunity of the ruling class sheltering stripping they say the city has to be rebuilt reconstructed gazing assessing we are not falling for that trap again defusing damaging rebuilding is the lingo of real estate vultures restoring who could care less about these neighborhoods their people reopening their character counting documenting we knew about that all too well as well in a city of post-war reconstruction destroying inhaling exhaling burning rescuing cleaning recycling gathering piling and so amid an unprecedented economic crisis collapsing a global pandemic counting and a failing nation state evaluating waiting we recover closing we have become allergic to the word resilience stealing all we can do counting is attempt to emerge healing from our collective traumas shaping whether lived hoping or inherited my name is Marilyn Antaki and I'm Ejissa Palemna I'm going to be starting with this first question Beirut Sport has historically been a lifeline to the city and country yet in many ways the port has increasingly been disconnected from the city now that the explosion rendered the port once again central to the discussion around Beirut's economic and physical recovery what are some of the ways we could start thinking about the port its reconstruction its relation to the city and residents and to Beirut's regional and geopolitical position Marwan Randoor, Rania Hossin, Antwerp Hake and Yisrin Salty can take the lead followed by an open discussion Analyst, if you can please turn on your cameras that would be great, thank you Hey, hi everybody, I'm Marwan Randoor Thanks for organizing this event I just want to take maybe one aspect of the question and react to it which is what are some of the ways in which we can start thinking about the relationship of the port to the city and its residents and I would suggest that basically maybe we need to ask the question of who are we advocating to who are we supporting in whatever we're acting at this moment I mean as a lot of studies have covered the including, you know, Munafa was and I wrote about this a decade ago is that, you know, Beirut is basically a series or a every reconstruction project has created or concentrated power in fewer hands be it the wealthy or political factions and so on and the history of Beirut is also a history of continuous sort of fracturing through policies regulations and reconstruction projects so I would like to maybe concentrate more on the less obvious if you want destruction that is created rather by reconstruction project but mostly by actually urban regulation and if we think about all the urban regulation that Beirut and Lebanon and a lot of other contexts were subjected to we can see the amount of destruction that has created and one example is the idea that Ekoshar at some point came up with Beirut being about the concentric rings of density from center outward I mean has over the years concentrated the density into the center which resulted in continuous destruction until this day of the historical fabric of the city and actually resulted in displacing people that have no place in the new developments that concentrated towards the center and so on we can also look at you know all the reconstruction projects I'm always thinking about if our lines and our regulations and text can produce sound they probably would produce sound much larger than the explosion of August 4th as this continuous destruction of the city that happened through the role of planners and designers in creating urban regulation for the city so if we look at Maram Khayel and Jim Maisie which are the more preserved if you want neighborhood they were preserved in spite of urban regulation in spite of urban visions and it's much more because of the residents and because of you know the basically issues of the economy and so on so I would advocate for abandoning that sort of role of producing regulations visions master plans and so on from you know to the city maybe concentrate more on civil rights maybe the right for you know clean air the right for natural ventilation the right of access to light the right of residents to stay in their historical home so rights that actually puts this these whatever we advocate for something outside urban regulation but part of civil rights which produce a different role and probably open us to a lot of more actors in the field and maybe focus more on the present we as planners designers we're very good at analyzing present conditions representing it and reproducing it and seek a role in the present and actually work with making sure that people have access to their rights and we affirm these rights in the public realm so the and maybe let the future be shaped by how people act and rather than imagine what the future could be maybe we can be surprised as we've always been surprised both on the high income level and the low income level have created residents have created their own way of inhabiting the city and maybe if we actually abandon our role as people that produce master plan visions and imagine what the future could be we can be more effective in carrying the residents to actually shape the city in whatever form it will take in the future what a follow-up on Marwan and thank you Hiba, Ji-Sap for hosting so what I want to think with you today is basically attention and the possibility of holding on to thinking about Beirut both the challenges of thinking of a place close to home but also the lure of not at least being surrounded by such a community of thinkers and doers so when the explosion happened on August 4th the eye of the store was somehow the port of Beirut so when the opportunity came to think of what that might be in terms of actively contributing to a vision in this context I kept going back to the port itself as part of the genesis of the city of Beirut but also as part of the genesis of the narrative of the city and the country as it's connected to ideas of the crossroads and in particular the port as a gateway so the port has been historically a lifeline to the national economy or at least to its tertiary sector or at least to the interest of the rise and the interest of the commercial and financial bourgeoisie it started as a concession within the Ottoman imperial government that capitalized Beirut and established the growth of a new real estate market so when looking at the violence of the port of Beirut there's the immediate violence and the trauma of the explosion as the video that we opened up our meeting so genuinely attests to but I think the violence and the trauma of the port is not only about this immediate explosion but it's also about the longer history of violence that the organization of the port and the interest and values that it stands for have put the city and the country into a transition so the port of Beirut was also the establishment of the Beirut Damascus road and one has to think of that historic relationship to Barra Sham when one is thinking now of the distance between Beirut to the nearby capital city being its nearest ports the port is also a major economic multiplier for prosperity and debt for the country so in which the port operators the city and the national government do not necessarily share the same economic goal the income is related to a flow of import and the state is heavily reliant on the income from the port of Beirut so one can clearly imagine that tension between an income that relies on import and between the possibility of the port to play its import-export relations with its possible relations not only to the tertiary sector but how we begin to think of the port as part of a plan in which other sectors of the economy are also part of that vision so how do we think of that what other programs could be part of that vision of a future that not only recovers a pre-August 4th war order all of which are implicated in this project of the port gateway vision one has to say as well that the port and the storage the criminal storage and explosion of the nitrate and the city is not the first instance in which stories of merchants of doubt and toxic attacks against the people of Lebanon have been perpetuated those who remember many stories of ships that landed with various European toxic ways discharged and managed by the same landlords in their own territories at the moment when the country was canonized so that there's a longer history to the toxicity of the port that extends beyond the immediate present so how do we think of the economic injury and ways of alternative models of economic development and reconstructions tariffs and taxations and privileges for later generation ports maybe that think of forms of industrial activities and logistics centers in their organization so what could be these other forms of port city-state interfaces that could allow us to think of Beirut and its role in the region now granted the narrative of the 19th century is no longer the context of the 21st century and specifically when we think of geopolitical context we think of how how it's important for these ports to adapt to changing trade patterns the demands of shipping line competition from other ports and cargo so the establishment of Beirut as the gateway for the Middle East Arabian hinterland has since been shadows by the establishments of mega ports in the Persian Gulf and by other competition existing or forthcoming in the northeastern Mediterranean ports so the imperative to think of reconfiguration of the economic vision of the port of Beirut and its urban vision is also tied to the imperative of thinking of Beirut at this expanded scale and I'm hoping I'm counting on this to anchor in real professional term what it would mean to be able to think of such a utility in its various roles so now Andres well thank you very much for inviting me this is a very needed discussion and I'm really honoured to be invited to it even though my knowledge of Beirut and Lebanon at large is very reduced but I would like to talk about the port following Hiba and the collective for Beirut's invitation because I've been working in the last years on a number of ports that were really facing in a very direct way the effects and also becoming actors in the making of murdering and crime inequality, consumerism, vulnerability exploitation, militarisation and I think that this is something that converts or kind of turns ports in something that is fundamental a fundamental state or kind of space inside for political action at the same time a fundamental space to rethink architectural practices the coastal line and ports in particular both actors but are also the result of the way forms of exploitation of human towards fellow humans and humans to other than humans have been developed through colonial industrialisation and this is something that I think it's very important in the context of GESAP that has historically engaged with exploring architecture as an ecosystem of practices where the local is highly enacted as trans territorial and in my personal interest as well to see architecture as something that operates across caves and is by that way of operating how I believe that a big part of its political agency unfolds basically 2700 tones of ammonium nitrate that were housed at the Beirut port and that detonated the start in all this huge emergency it's not an accident that it was ammonium nitrate and ammonium nitrate that was extracted from Antofarasta in Chile a site of huge violence it's been actually historical it was one of the first places Bolivia, Peru, Chile that was exploited under both British, Spanish, French, German rule, colonial rule and actually it was this nitrate that was used both as a fertilizer historically but also as the power for wars that saved the history of the entire region and across the world it was used in the world of independence in Chile Bolivia and Peru and it was again fueling wars across the world but when we think now of fertilizers and the way fertilizers have been mobilizing both the earthy resources of domain and violently domain countries across the world through colonial exploitation it also tells us not only colonization but exploitation over exploitation of other than human beings that were turned into resources and that violence was really not coming without a huge investment in militarization in power in the development of weapons and that is the violence that was also released through the explosion in the port of Beirut the architecture has been part of this in both sides all the time and in many other in all the kind of range of sides in 1971 El Salvador Allende nationalized a big part of the mining resources that were still exploited at that point by international corporations that were replicating the kind of prolonging the entire process of colonization but two years later that was the origin of the coup d'etat that also resulted in the death of Allende the violence now is challenging the exploitation of the sea in many different ways the exploitation of the biodiversity of the world by laboratories is also fueled by forms of militarization and colonial power and when we think of the way fertilizers are being imposed on the exploitation of the land and we think for instance of the actual Lebanon agricultural exploitation for instance in the Beka valley where the massive use of fertilizers and centralized production of agriculture is also behind the toxicity that the entire region is suffering in the aquifers and also contributing to the entire Mediterranean the effects of nitrates that it's really reducing it's very radically reducing the biodiversity of the Mediterranean sea but again this is an arena in which architecture is also provided alternatives and it's been part of community initiatives networks of association experiences the development of new technologies in which basically agriculture can happen in different ways at the same time that new forms of collective security with regards to water and the management of toxicity the collective management with toxicity and the coexistence with toxicity it's been explored and understood as something that could be politically dealt with under frame of justice when we think of the coastal line and the harbors and Lebanon the reality of Lebanon in the last decades including also Tripoli the huge effects of migrations that were forced migration of humans caused by war by inequality, by environmental violence by climate crisis like who could call them or has called them and provided evidences of is a reality that we have to acknowledge that also has been controlled produced as well as reflected registered by harbors like the Bayward port and that reality in the last decades the Mediterranean into a weapon to kill people as forensic ethnography has proved and we're facing that so when we're discussing the harbour it's inevitable to think of the news of the last three weeks of the sea and the sea and this is a reality architecture we see how architects are leading the development of new forms of transforming the Mediterranean and those are the projects we have to take into account but we're discussing the port of Bayward that moves from the scale of very local realities to the way those local realities are constructed and enacted through trans-colour design and neglectment and it's a very political question which is really the one that we're facing is how do we move from a culture of exploitation of humans to fellow humans and humans to other than humans but in the future we're seeing some impact in terms of the structural and the in-house and the different aspects of the countries and the fundamental cultural actually provide some measurements. And I think that that will, and it's very tentative, right? These are very, very difficult things to measure and everything is quite recent. So, and the scene keeps changing, but hopefully this will maybe ground the thinking about what other role can we imagine for the port or what other model can the port fit into? It'll ground that thinking in at least identifying the sizes of the interests around the current structure and where the port fits into that. It also tackles one specific aspect of the description of the panel that was read at the beginning, which is that yes, the port is a lifeline to the city and obviously the economy of the country, but in recent years, it's also become somewhat disconnected. And I try to maybe ground that in some of the sizes of economic flows that might provide an explanation to why that is. So, to ground this, give us a little bit of background and I know a lot of people are quite aware of this, but the numbers are staggering. This is a very recent snapshot of some economic metrics of the health of the economy in general, at least the intensity of economic activity only from last year and this year. And it's frightening, right? On every measure that you choose, things are deplorably worse, right? Poverty in only the span of a year has doubled, extreme poverty tripled, unemployment almost fourfold. So we are operating in an environment that is very crippled economically. So even as we try to imagine alternative futures for the port and for its relationship to the city, at least in the short to medium term, we have to heed the kind of collapse that the overall economy of the country is currently experiencing. And that's also say that 2019, we were already in recession. So the collapse starts before, but the free fall really is accelerated in the last year. In particular, I put in here imports and exports to try to one show the incredible reliance of import, really unhealthy reliance on import of the size of the economic flow of the country. So somewhere close to 40% of all the value that goes through the country in 2019 was imports, 40%. This is down, this is part of what it means to collapse is we can't afford the imports anymore. Exports relatively modest. Now, if we think of trade in general, export and import in value as a share of the size of our economic activity, which is with this real GDP is supposed to be proxying, do we come out as a country that is very dynamic in trade? No, we're quite average. It's not, we don't stick out in any way. If you add import and export and scale that to real GDP, we're really non distinct. Now, where's the port and all of this? Well, obviously this is, these are mostly happening through the port. In fact, about 70% of this trade is happening through the port. And so if we wanna get a sense of what size of the, what share of the economic activity is going through the port overall, of the overall economic activity, it's about 20%. And this is after the collapse, this is in 2020. So it's a conduit for 20% of the value that gets exchanged in this economy. And that's huge. And so the interests around that are gonna be quite massive. There's another way of looking at this, which actually brings the explosion into the picture. And before I turn to that, note that these projections for 2020, most of them were calculated based on trends up to July. So the picture is gonna look even more dire moving forward. There's been in the explosion where in the midst of a second surge of COVID and on the eve of an upcoming lockdown. So things are actually gonna be even worse than this already pretty grim picture. But so the port of explode, the port of Beirut explosion happens in August. And again, to try to scale what it means in terms of importance in monetary value, this large establishment, which is the port is about 7.4% of the estimated damages, physical damages of the overall explosion. So it's a relatively minimal share of physical damage that actually happened at the site of the port compared to the overall damage around it to all of the physical losses. But if we think of the associated losses in economic flows that are attributed to the explosion, that's about 3.2 billion. In fact, with the latest estimates of real GDP, that's about 10% of GDP. I'll close to 10% of GDP for this year, which is maybe close to 8% of GDP for this year just because of the explosion, that's terrifying. But how much of that lost activity was gonna happen through the port, 645 million. That's about 20% again. So anyway, you look at it, it's a huge lifeline. Now, why has it receded? Or why is it disconnected from our lives? Most of us are not traders, right? Most of us are not in most, many of the, at least the panelists I know, and then I also suspect some of the attendees, we're not part of the segment of society that actually deals with this. And it's no surprise because it turns out if you look at our markets and we haven't done a market study of concentration of businesses in a really long time and we're long overdue for one. But the most recent one, which is from about 17 years ago. And so things have only gotten more concentrated since then. The most recent one from 17 years ago tells us that something like 36% of local markets and they go through about almost 300 markets. So 300 markets for goods, right? So in about 36% of them, the biggest firm controls more than half the market. So we have extremely concentrated markets of traders. So these numbers are very much in the hands of very, very few with exclusive agencies, with import licenses, with overwhelming control of the market that they operate in. But typically they operate in more than one market, more than one good. And that's part of why we don't actually experience the port as 20% of everything that all the economic activity that actually happens in our daily lives. So yeah, with that, I think I've hit my three minutes and I will, I guess, open it up for discussion. Thank you everyone for amazing food for thought. We're gonna have few minutes only to discuss for this question before we move to question two. So we can have like three, four minutes, five minutes please for the audience, feel free to put your question in the question and A and we'll try to integrate them as we go. And hopefully if there are remaining questions, we will have more time to discuss them at the end as we talked about before. So feel free, whoever in the panelists wanna ask questions or push this conversation forward, feel free to do that before we move to question two. So for example, there's a question for you, Marwan, about can you please, from one of the audience, can you please give some examples of how residents can have a hand in the reconstruction, some small scale planning of the damage part of the city? So this is one question if you can take it and then I'll go through the other ones. Okay, the short answer is no, but I will try to expand a little bit on this. There's many more people on the ground that are much more aware of the conditions. I'm not in Beirut and I cannot claim that I can speak for the conditions there, but I can think of two things. One is at the risk of sounding neoliberal long-term work for our collective as designers and planners to actually deregulate the urban regulation, actually to make them out of commission in a way. Sounds too extreme, but I think they've never served the city and its population. So really releasing that thing and to move into a more civil right environment. The other is basically I see that the role of planners and designers can be really fractured, like to think of ourselves as citizens rather than the professionals and actually connect to the issues we care about and we connect to the group of people that we want to deal with, advocate for and provide channels for funding to support certain initiatives to create studies that are relevant to certain groups or certain people. And I don't see necessarily that our efforts need to be defined in one way as much as really connecting to the issue and to what's happening on the ground and affiliate ourselves and use our skills to actually support and push issues that we connect with the residents. That would be my best reaction to this. Thank you, Marat. There's a group of questions actually, I will put them together as a question about whether there's a necessity to have to keep the, where is it important to keep the support in Beirut or whether to move it somewhere else or whether Tripoli should take part of the load that Beirut has been taking. I mean, there are like four questions related to that so maybe Rania and Nasreen can talk a little bit about that. I think there are questions that Nasreen was answering about the poverty rate, et cetera, live. You can probably mention them in case other people are curious about that too. These are fantastic questions of how do we imagine the future of the port? And I think Nasreen began to point to possibilities in terms of diversification of the economic role of the port in that respect and thinking of possible complementary activities and where would these pockets be in its current location? Another possibility is to imagine in a country where national planning is still a possibility and probably Dean Sarkis might have more to say on that later. How do we think of the location of the port as part of the major questions? Now, when we think of that, we think of the recent history of the Lebanese Civil War and the fantastic history of the 33 ports that emerged during then. So where would you move the port to is an interesting rabbit hole. And I think it's worth entertaining the question, not least because it helps us point to some of the challenges of any deliberation process currently in Lebanon. So where would it move to? Would you move all of its role? Would you hold on to petroleum and grain exports because they're currently centralized into a few ports, cars as well, because there's certain restrictions on customs. Do you dissociate its cargo from its cruise ship industry? And then what kind of visions of an economic redevelopment of the city would you hit if you start to dissociate those? On the other hand, how do you kind of with clear conscience advocate for a reconstruction of a port with similar storage protocols when you know that such a proximity to the city center is a ticking bomb. So it's a great question. And I think it requires some careful considerations of how we can begin to think about those kinds of futures. Thanks, Rania, Ms. June. So this also maybe... Andrea, I mean, Andrea is probably... So maybe this ties it to some of the other questions that I read in the Q&A box is given the current power structure, one of the things that is under consideration in the rehabilitation or the development of new infrastructure around ports is also the potential future oil and gas exploration that is looming. And so that is another massive infrastructure gamble that we are embarking on, as well as we decide where to fit a port with refinery or with re-export for oil and gas. Part of the other considerations also is more balanced investment and development in general with some attention going to Tripoli more recently, partly because of the staggering poverty rates. So I know that there is interest, at least from multilateral organizations, the World Bank, various arms of the UN in devoting more time and attention to Tripoli, whether that also involves upgrading the Tripoli port, I've not heard, but there's certainly more headlines around Tripoli these days. Yeah, one very brief thing because one of the most difficult situations that not only be rude, but I think the planet is facing is that the sense of urgency tends to push to basically don't question the frame of advanced capitalism in which we operate. And that's something that is a huge difficulty because basically at the same time that there's a need for very urgent and rapid response to very dramatic situations, that can only be challenged. That sense of vulnerability, if we transform the frame in which we operate, and that's something that takes much longer. So how do we operate rapidly addressing issues that are dramatic and require a sense of nowness? At the same time, that sense of nowness is identified as something that requires for us to change the kind of social contract that we're part of. For me, this is a radical difficulty that we face because it puts for us to be in responding emergencies, perpetuating a system that is really the cause of those emergencies. And that requires intellectual, cultural, political articulation. The discussion of harbors tend to be constructed in terms of interharbor competition, in terms of how they attract investment, how much trading and circulation can they attract. How do we change that into something that could be more of a trans-regional alliance that could provide a bettering of the entire region in the terms that basically are the cause of this emergency that we're discussing? Thank you, everyone. Hopefully, as I said before, there is so many questions in the chat. And we are also very curious about more about the port. As we said, this hopefully is just the foundation for future conversations. So given that, we're going to move to question two. Thank you for the panelists for question number one. And Aya, please take the floor. Thank you, everyone. Great. Thank you. So my name is Aya Abdullah, and I'm a current EMARC student here at GSAP. And the second question is, in recent years, digital media, including alternative news reporting, counter-mapping, digital humanities, has played a pivotal role in uprisings and mass movements in Lebanon and globally. What new forms could digital media and soft infrastructures take in shaping alternative socioeconomic and political spheres outside the existing systems in Lebanon while taking into consideration the limited physical infrastructure available? And how can we start thinking about soft infrastructure provisions in terms of funding, educational setups, and perhaps global networks of support? So first, I'd like to ask this question to Habib Haddad, Laura Kurgan, Manan Ahmad, and Jean Asir. But then we can open it to the rest of the panelists for discussion. Thank you, Aya. So in the past year, as Lebanon has been going through all the stress tests, something occurred to me. I realized something, an amazing social phenomenon is happening in Lebanon. And that's what I call the on-demand formation of communities. So you've been having communities who come together, form, and then dissociate every time there's a stress that is happening. So we've seen, we see that happening obviously online through the social media tools. And I see that with my own friends. There's friends that I call my activist friends or my fighting against something friends that I only get to talk to every time something happens. And I've got to be thinking, these are, it almost feels like your immunity system kicking in when you get sick. But it got me thinking also about communities. I've been thinking about communities for a long time. And the way I think about building communities is in three buckets. Communities of purpose, of action, and of interest. And purpose, in this case, is clear. People come together to fight against something, against corruption, against economical collapse. But it's very hard to move that against something to for something. And the other two parts actually help you move there. So the second part I think of it is communities of interest. And this is also where online tools and to date, they technology can help. So when you think of these communities of interest, we think of education. But we also think of leveraging the diaspora, potentially for mentorship or for matching. And honestly, we also think of creating role models locally. When we look at today, I would say one of the main culprits in Lebanon's demise, or current kind of demise is the TV stations. I think when you look at the soap operas, how mind-numbing they are and the talk shows, how polarizing they are. But we don't see anyone, we don't see people talking about some of the local role models. There are great success stories that are coming out from Lebanon, maybe staying in Lebanon, maybe moving out of Lebanon. So I think that that's really important to think about, creating these role models, activating nodes, inspiring others to follow suit. And the other thing is, when we think about communities of action, this is where we start thinking about infrastructure, more hard infrastructure. So the communities of action is when we bring these people together in a place and we start creating this sort of independence connection where we can actually come up with creative ideas and solutions and maybe create kind of industries. So this is, today you've seen spaces in Beirut, actually like Beirut Digital District, which is actually a pretty amazing space in Bechura that has integrated within the community but allowed also a group of young entrepreneurs and tech entrepreneurs to come and flourish. You've seen stuff happening obviously also on campuses, specifically at AUB. And the communities of action is somehow the easiest but the toughest. It's the easiest because it's known what we need to do to actually activate a community and create an economy. But it's also hard because to get there, it actually takes a lot of effort. It takes to change a culture, to change behavior. And also on the communities of action part, the other thing to think about is how to basically create a path to scale. So it's great that we're able to bring these communities online and start thinking about solutions that they can solve, whether it's their social entrepreneurs, whether they're for-profit entrepreneurs, whether they're artists, but how can we can help scale our impact? And that comes in through, again, known mechanisms whether through its investing or through market policies, et cetera. Now, the optimist in me always wants to find positive news in anything. And today, as depressing as the situation is in Lebanon, I think there is definitely a moment today, an opportunity where we can look at these moments that are created through communities of purpose, of being against something and try to transform them into movements, long-lasting movements. And you know what, actually it does work. I have seen it, I've been part of it. I saw it work for maybe about four or five years, from 2011 to 2016, where we saw a really abundance of energy and creativity. And we've seen even some interesting investment mechanisms, whether it's from international folks like the World Bank and EBRD and the EIBs, or even locally, like the 331 circular that came from the Central Bank at some point. And but obviously many of those are not surviving, but I think there's definitely a quite opportune time to move it. I think the main thing is that unfortunately, we're seeing a hemorrhaging of talent and it's whether we wanna embrace that and help this talent succeed elsewhere with anticipation that we're gonna have a revolving door as things stabilize, or whether we're gonna work to stop that hemorrhaging. Have you, thank you. Laura next. Hi everyone. And happy, I'm really happy to follow on to what you're saying, because I have some similar ideas, but not necessarily based in Beirut. So first of all, I just wanna say, I left Beirut on the very day that the economic protests started in October. And I think it's the last international flight I was on prior to the pandemic. I think I did some travel within the United States after that, but so Beirut, I miss Beirut. And also within that meeting and Mona Fawaz was the one who invited me and it was also through Hibis Ford Foundation Grant, I met an incredible group of activist mappers. And the reason I was there was because there was actually not even a three-dimensional model of Beirut, which is so common in the United States in the way that we have access to open data just doesn't exist in Beirut. And that was part of our collaboration. So I don't know where that project is right now, but maybe Mona can talk to it later. But just to follow on what Habib was saying, I've been writing a lot lately about the structure and design of networks and the echo chambers and polarizations they built they build because of the ways in which they are designed. So because our social media is designed so that advertising can be directly directed to me because of that all kinds of other political agents can also direct messages to me. And that's how all the filter bubbles exist that all of us have so much difficulty of getting out of. Following that, so that was an article about an algorithm called homophily. And then after that I've just finished something and both of these are on eFlex if you wanna look is more about weak ties. And although that algorithm was also based in a history of segregation, the ways in which you can activate ties across difference is something that we could reinforce as a way to redesign our networks. In other ways. And so I know that that sounds very abstract. So maybe I'll just bring it to the ground by telling you about a seminar that I'm teaching right now on public interest technology, which Aya is in. And I hope she will agree that we're making some real headway over there. And our students are being asked, public interest technology is usually defined as technology in the public interest. Well, that doesn't help very much. And what we've been trying to get our students to ask is which publics are included and excluded by technology. And so most importantly, we're asking sort of how to design and build and control and govern with new communication systems. And this is actually a quite utopian thing that we're asking our students to do with various levels of success that telling them technology should be built to fit communities or should be built to adapt to communities rather than the networks in which we're operating within today. And so within that, and there's a lot of projects, but I'll just foreground one of them because it's through an organization that started by another one of GSAP's Columbia called Community Tech NYC. And so some of our students are working with them to design public interest technology in Appalachia in Tennessee and in the United States. And what they're doing is building very low tech hardware and software and almost sort of creating a curated internet that is specific to the local community. And once you edit out the whole of the internet and address something to specific communities, you can actually allow them to establish peer-to-peer networks where they can communicate as Habibi's saying in on-demand communities. And then once you do that, you can actually foster a way of learning both hardware and software and teaching people how to create their own networks and then perhaps slowly build up towards a larger version of the internet. So anyway, I think that's my intervention. I do think that in these contexts of extreme emergencies and of so much disinformation, we really need to take back our networks and try to rebuild them in different ways while acknowledging the deep history. At the same time, I found out about what happened in Beirut on Facebook and I hate Facebook but that is where all my friends who are gathered on the screen, I connect with them on either Facebook or Twitter. So I often find out about things through those networks rather than through the New York Times which nowadays is only about the elections. I just found out today from one of my students in Lima, Peru that the president there has just been impeached and there's huge violence on the streets of Lima. I did not find that out from my news networks. Thank you, Laura. Okay. Manan, please. Thank you. Thank you, Hiba and thank you, Laila. Thank you, G-Seph for at first holding this really important and enlightening conversation and for inviting me to be a part of it. I wanted to say a couple of things that are building upon Habib's and Laura's points in terms of communities and networks and kind of reflect on two of my experiences working after disaster. One was in 2005 earthquake in Kashmir and Pakistan that displaced at least a couple of 100,000 people. And I, if I remember correctly, had something like 80,000, 90,000 fatalities. And part of our mobilization that happened as a result of that earthquake taught a lot to me at least as a graduate student on what some good things in the sense of lo-fi infrastructure, creating communities that are gathered around as Habib was saying an emergency response, mutual aid networks that allowed for new types of solidarities to emerge. And also thinking about domestic and regional contacts in a new way outside of the kind of political formations or the ways in which affiliations really work. Much of that work was done through listservs and through phones. This is again, 2005. I'll come back to the bad points later, bad lessons later. And then further in 2017, in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, we did a work here at Columbia for Puerto Rico thinking about mapping, did a mapathon and again, creating some of these mutual aid networks this time through WhatsApp, et cetera. And again, we did a lot of thinking about what lo-fi networks look like, how to do multimodal and multimodal types of connections. And as our collective was interested in archiving, how do we kind of have a repository of knowledge that we can turn back to? Laura mentioned three-dimensional mapping, but we can think of all kinds of things including food repositories, including first care health repositories. So how do we kind of conceptualize these types of aid through mutual aid networks, but how do we archive that knowledge so people continue to rely on its abundance? Some of these ways in which we can think of creating these mutual aid networks in during the COVID era have been utilized by my colleagues both in South Asia, in India specifically as the, how do I say, forced migration as a result of lockdown happened that forced the dispossessed and the working poor to actually leave their environments, their work environments in Northern India and Delhi and travel by foot thousands of miles. And so how to kind of think about these kinds of efforts, these kinds of emergencies through lo-fi or through a distributed channel of activity. There are clear ways forward in those. And there are many, many, many of my colleagues in this conversation today who are much, much better experts at this. But I wanted to actually highlight some of the things that I learned in my experiences that are negative. And I want to start with what happened at the end of aftermath of the 2005 earthquake and our efforts to rebuild communities, efforts to literally rebuild houses and think about architecture, especially non-urban architecture in a new way through sustainable techniques, going back in fact, going back thousands of years in Cholistan and in Tahrir and Sindh. And what I learned was that the attention, the international aid and the NGO attention dwindles as soon as the new cycle dwindles. And in its aftermath, what we saw in the late 2000s in Pakistan was the rise of what we now call in retrospect, the land mafias. And the land mafia is basically we're able to repurpose much of the work that we had done or had hoped to do and created very, very extensive land holdings from which there was forced migration and displacement of the farmers and the villagers. These are already displaced people who had been put in precarious financial and obviously precarious to their life situations. So the hyper displacement and dispossession that followed in 2007, eight, nine prompts us to kind of think about how in the wake of disasters as we do emergency relief, how do we think about the populations that are dispossessed to begin with that are under the radar to begin with? Everything from informal economies to infrastructures of support that a middle class or a upper middle class or an industry that requires cheap expendable labor relies upon. And as we think about disasters, how do we encourage ourselves to rethink the target populations? Those who demand relief at the utmost, not just in the moment after, but long term. And I think it goes back to, I think it was Marwan in the first panel, kind of thinking about maybe civic rights that need to be re-imagined in the wake of the disaster. But I would actually maybe extend that and say the idea of the civic itself must be re-imagined. We need to re-imagine who gets to be constituted in the category of civic, whether they are, and again, speaking from the perspective of Pakistan, a lot of the conversation ended up being where the people who make their livelihood from farming or from animal husbandry were not considered to be part of the civic. They were dispossessed as well as easily displaced and they don't have political recognition. And the political landscape is in fact grounded upon erasing their subjectivities. So how do we as activists, as academics, as architects, as historians, as digital infrastructure folks, how do we kind of think about these particular individuals? And there are, I can assure you, just as many in Beirut as there were in Pakistan, and how do we build a new mutual aid networks that do not do the same type of inequity that have been part of the pre-disaster, pre-Earthquake, pre-blast? I'll stop there, thank you so much. Beautiful, Manan, thank you, Jean. Thank you, thanks for having me and thanks for organizing this very timely discussion. I'm gonna focus more on a case study, which is basically megaphone, which is the media platform. I'm running with a bunch of comrades and friends. But first, I'd like to talk about the question of infrastructure in a rather explicit way. So, I mean, today, 100 days after the explosion and the year after the revolution, there is a paradox that I'm just gonna say the obvious, which is this huge mismatch between the fact that we have won at the level of idea in framing basically the political situation and framing the fact that we are facing a regime and that this regime needs to be toppled and cannot be reformed and basically putting together the different elements, the economic, the clientele, the political, in depicting basically that regime. And we have failed miserably in holding it accountable in making major political wins. And I mean, something that has come again every time we were discussing this is the lack of political infrastructure prior to the big opportunity that was October 17th, which is the absence of political party, the absence of syndicates that were basically would have been able potentially to materialize people's interest into proper roadmaps and mobilize people. So, what you also realize is that it's extremely hard to build those infrastructure in crisis mode. So, those infrastructure, a few of them, Megaphone being one of them existed prior to the uprising, prior to that opportunity. And I believe that, I mean, at the media level, Megaphone in addition to other platforms have contributed somehow to bridge that asymmetry that we have with the regime in place. So, three years ago when we started, I mean, traditional media was still overwhelmingly dominating the narrative, dominating who gets represented, who gets a voice in the public conversation. A big chunk of the population was also alienated from the public conversation, the use particularly. And that was due both to the fact that these traditional media in terms of their approach, in terms of their interest, but also in terms of how they dealt with the emerging and new technologies was obsolete by all means. So, we saw it as an opportunity as political activists, none of us was journalist by training or even by practice. And we thought that there was a window basically to change hats and to start developing that media platform. It started as a Facebook page and like everybody else in the region, a phenomenon that started in 2011, we decided to subvert those tools and to basically transform them into political platform and eventually professionalize that transformation to have a full-fledged media that can exist on those platforms. So, Megaphone managed three years later to basically provide a key role and pivoted role also in this uprising, in documenting, in deconstructing official narratives, in informing and breaking down information, but in also providing platform for marginalized groups, migrant worker, the LGBT community, refugees and so on to have a place in this conversation. And I'd like to talk a bit about how this came into being because, I mean, one of the main reasons why those political, mediatic, syndical infrastructure didn't exist was a matter of resources and also a matter of, I mean, means. So, when we started, as I said, there wasn't expertise necessarily and also we didn't go about it in a very didactic way. So, we were driven by impact. So, we thought about it more as a political project using the tools and also the ethics of journalism. And also, we thought about it as sort of an open lab in a sense that we threw those videos on Facebook and then they picked up and then we find them. But everybody who was joining this project from the designers to people who have sort of knowledge and user experience and media were bringing their own additions. Even business-wise, it wasn't a project that made any sense, it was a project that was volunteer, run and based to a large extent. And basically with time was able to just get professionalized and to, yeah, I'm asked to wrap up. Sorry, I took too long. Just to add basically in terms of sustainability of that model, more and more Megaphone is trying to sort of bridge the gap between us as a media entity and the different knowledge producing entities. So, a lot of people who are actually on this panel are some of our partners in terms of producing and mainstreamizing some of the work that they've been doing through videos and through those different tools. Also, in terms of sustainability, in terms of funding, we're much more going into a community-led, a community-funded form of journalism and trying to withdraw progressively from just the media development sphere that wouldn't allow us to be sustainable for a very long time. Sorry if I took too long. Sorry, thank you for Megaphone too. So we have several questions in the chat. As you can imagine with managing such a big event, we need to be careful with the time. So I'm just gonna put a group of questions into two main concerns. First, how to think about the infrastructure, the soft infrastructure that's needed in a country like Lebanon where like with the socioeconomic and political situation, but also how can we cultivate the soft infrastructure so that it speaks to the multiplicity of communities in Beirut without perpetuating exclusionary barriers such as criticism, patriotism, capitalism, I guess, sectarianism too. So this is a general question. The other group of questions is related to the gentrification that's something like the Beirut design BDD has generated. So while thinking about soft infrastructure and supporting IT, how can we think about, for example, something like the implication for gentrification that this is causing to the surrounding neighborhoods? And it's a question for Habib. Thank you. Can we go first, Hiba? You can go first, yes. So I actually just answered the question on BDD, just from what I know is that they've been actually quite conscious about hiring the local community into their own staff and have been investing in education and in schools around them. So I think, I'm not sure. I don't know, I don't have other compares. I'll leave that to the architects in the group to talk more about it. But from what I've seen from a community perspective, I've seen them integrate quite well. To the question on government, in fact, that's a great question, but in fact, you don't want government engagement in creating communities. In fact, government engagement is what messes up communities. And if seen that happen in some parts of the Gulf where you've seen like big headlines, creating the new city of economic development for the next hundred startups or creating the blah, blah, blah, whatever. And more often than not, these end up becoming empty shells of real estate projects that don't really seek active communities. Communities bubble up. Think of it as the soup, the traditional soup that emerges in a city like Beirut or Damascus or think of like an empty mall that is built up with a really ugly, just kind of hallways and walking. That's kind of an energy I would think about that. Now government is important to create infrastructures like internet or to allow the smooth policies. But honestly, I've had a company with 40 people in Beirut. And I can say this on the record now because I'm not there anymore, but we didn't even have Daman. I mean, I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm saying that the rules are there, but also you don't have to follow the rules when, I mean, I didn't, okay. I have to give a, not follow, you can create your own rules basically, right? So meaning you don't need to get bucked down by government bureaucracy. And more often than not in Lebanon, you can do that. I don't vouch for doing that on a Daman level, but you can do that, operate. The one thing I'd like to leave you with your research on that question is the monopoly game. Monopoly when it first was invented on the question of capitalism was had a rule such that it was actually, I think it was more of a rentier kind of rules and over time it actually evolved to become a capitalistic game. And what you saw in this game in this particular sector is actually you didn't have to change much of the systems there. You had to change the goal, the outcome, the rule. And then when you did that, the whole culture of monopoly changed a lot. So it's really just about changing the rules and the goals you're going to go after, which can actually change a lot in terms of whether you're capitalistic or on the other side as well. Okay, thank you Habib. So we're gonna move in the interest of time to question three, please. From now on, actually all the questions and answers we'll discuss at the end. So please let's move to question three. Thank you for panelists for question two. Amazing discussion. Yes, please the collective take the floor. Thank you all. I'm Charles Hajj, I'm a GCSEB alumni and I'll be asking a third question. So the explosion damaged over 250,000 residential units. The blast has highlighted the longstanding housing crisis and social spatial inequalities of the city that has been for long dominated by a financialization strategy of housing that is for profit oriented developer and bank center. A context where affordable forms of housing are close to non-existent. While rental options for housing, there are the most affordable forms are being dismantled. This housing problematic also intersects with the translate international angiization of all aspects of the built environment in a city deemed a republic of NGOs. The situation has ignited a critical debate on how these non-governmental actors will shape the public interest and promote residents centered participation in housing recovery. Given this, how can we rethink housing and land policies, building and zoning laws, housing production as well as rental markets, while simultaneously thinking about the social fabric, socioeconomic crisis, and ecological emergencies that loom over the city? So Abir Saksou, Rana Samara, Karim Namour, and Zia Jamaluddin will take the lead and then we'll move on to the next question. We'll start with Abir. Thank you everybody and hello. I will just first start by putting some of the state policies towards housing in historical context. And to understand them historically, we can understand them along three stages. The first was exemplified by sporadic laws to rent control and housing interventions in response to disasters. This was mainly the pre 1960s period. From the early 60s to the 90s, we witnessed a marginal housing policy hinting a little bit at the right to housing and the establishment of some housing institutions. But it also missed on any comprehensive and integrated vision to achieve the right to decent housing for all constituents of society. And which this brings us to the last 20 years where the little fair housing legislations that were in place were abolished or made ineffective. And the new housing policy was an essential part of a system based on serving the interests of capital. A policy based on home ownership through loans sponsored by the central bank in service of its monetary policy. It primarily benefited banks and investors under the pretext of the sanctity of private property and at the expense of city dwellers. So as a result, residents today are in a constant crisis suffering from inadequate and unbegnified housing conditions. No one actually records this slow violence and households across all factions of society are left alone to face such housing violations. As such, Public Works Housing Monitor has been monitoring evictions, reading them as a citywide condition and responding to them. As an example from September, from the beginning of September to mid October, we tracked 58 cases of threatened evictions affecting almost 200 people in Beirut. The largest numbers of these threats was in Quarantina, a marginal neighborhood heavily damaged by the blast. In short, there's a need for comprehensive housing demands that put these struggles at the forefront of public debate and that of course try to disrupt the dominant notion that land is at the service of a rentier economy. Equally important for rethinking housing and land policies is to actually rethink the role of city dwellers in this process. In the neighborhoods damaged by the blast, residents have actually been made absent from discussions around reconstruction. They're also being dealt with individually, merely as recipients of aid. This has been practiced from all across private and public actors on the ground. Residents also witnessed the involvement of sectarian parties in their innovation efforts, which fed into clientelistic relations at the expense of collective rights. So also in public works, we're conducting neighborhood meetings with the aim of building a residence association through which residents can reinstate their voices, their collective concerns and their control over the renovation of their homes. We firmly believe that it is only through such a framework, such a representative and organizational framework that we can start to make housing claims and land claims and actually reverse the effects of financialization that the neighborhoods had been subjected to. Thank you Abiyarana. I'm going to share with you today the experience, Musaaned Energy always established just in 2020. So it's a very young NGO that I'm going to share the experience of on the ground post Beirut Blast. So the NGOization is a new term that of course has come to fruition post Beirut Blast mainly and in the absence, almost rejection and defiance actually of the government, not only by the people but also by donors. It's non-governmental agencies, initiatives in civil society as a whole that has stepped in to fill the many gaps that have left behind by the incompetent governance. So NGOs have been almost forced to build capacity, migrate private sector and academic expertise to contribute to the ongoing process of reconstructing. So intuitively at first, at a humanitarian level, it was a question of relief. So from the day after the blast, of course we are all aware of the feet on the ground, the cleaning of the streets and it was really very intuitive, very sporadic and very unstructured which got things going quickly. So then came the challenge of transforming relief work to reconstruction work. And this is really what was the fine line and the transition that was not acknowledged that relief work for the first period cannot ascend automatically into reconstruction. And yes, there was little process or thought invested in this transition to reconstruction. So the two phases were simply merged and then the absence of a legal framework despite the many efforts and the parties who were the beginning involved in trying to regulate structure, the process, it obviously did not, it failed and coming through. So there's a total absence of a legal framework for reconstruction, a total absence of urban planning of strategic thinking. And there's an ongoing sporadic coordination and collaboration on the ground. So this disconnect between the reality on the ground and the higher level if you want of participatory approach of structuring of legality is all coming together on the ground. And these challenges are counterbalanced if you want by the ongoing fantastic energy of the people of civil society. And it's not only the people who are on the ground and in Beirut but also the many expats around the world that have come together in the age of the digital platform who have contributed to this dialogue, to this reconstruction effort, not only in terms of providing the expertise but also the much needed funds that have channeled primarily through NGOs whereby the donors have almost refused to funnel money through more public entities or institutions for the lack of change. So the NGOs have been put in a position whereby they have to step up to fill that gap and play the role from everything, from design consultant to fund or grant manager to implementing partner on the ground. So there's this ongoing dichotomy of urgency versus sustainable intervention. So we're working under sort of a post Beirut context where there is an urgency and every day the urgency grows to actually intervene and rehabilitate and bring people back to their homes. And this urgency is prohibits if you want the more the luxury of thinking further, more strategically, more capacity where we are still working with a mandate to relief human, so at the Salad our target for instance is 2050 commercial and residential units. And with that we have a turnover of 50 units weekly. So to date we've completed 700 units, 900 are under rehabilitation. So the pace of work and the scale of operations is gigantic. And this happens of course with a team, a great team of 25 small to medium size contractors of an in-house team of experts of contractors ranging from experts in historic restoration to those more specialized in food and beverage where we've committed to supporting rehabilitation of restaurants in Marim Khayyil and the scale of the neighborhood glass supplier. So our investment in rehabilitation is not an investment only in rebuilding the stone but really, and this is where the emphasis should be is that we are reinvesting in revitalizing socioeconomic cycle which ironically and sadly has been moved by the blast. The construction industry is booming in Beirut obviously. Experts from all over Lebanon are actually coming into Beirut to provide the expertise, the volunteer work and it's really a fantastic spirit. So in the meantime, as an NGO you're not only building capacity of managing a huge operation on the ground but you're also going digital to aggregate data to visualize it to share it transparently with donors and partners and continue the ongoing raising of funds for the different needs. Within that context, I have two points. We still working with the shelter sector and I know we will continue to work on that. The shelter sector is already in dire straits so the policy of bring back better is a challenge in itself and the funds, I just want to talk on that. There's a need to diversify donor investment beyond the strict shelter understanding and to go to historic preservation SMEs and to livelihoods. Thank you. Thank you, Rana, sorry. Again, I hope this is just the beginning of a future conversation. Karim and Danzia. Thank you, Hiba. I'm gonna try to be brief. I'm gonna introduce myself because forgot to introduce me at the beginning of the session. I'm Karim Amour, I'm a lawyer researcher, a board member of the legal agenda and the host of the Kennedy podcast. I'm just, you guys. Yes, it's okay, it's okay. I'm gonna try to be very brief. So I'm gonna go through an overview of housing policies in Lebanon and then specifically speak about what happened after the blast. As an overview, we can already say that there's a clear evidence that the state is progressively disappearing when it comes to housing policies leaving basically doing a de facto privatization of the sector, whether by private companies or even privatization by NGO. But to speak about the background, I'm gonna mention three patterns that we see when evaluating housing policies in Lebanon. So basically the first one is a perverted concept of what housing policies are because Abir spoke about this, there's this sacralization of the right to property. And basically the Lebanese government, the Lebanese authorities view the right to property as the main component of the right to housing. And there are two separate things unrelated at all. But the sacralization of the right to property made it so that most housing policies are property-oriented, financial contributing to the financial markets and the objectives are targeted towards encouraging real estate investment and complete disregard to the right to housing. This brings us to the second pattern, which is if housing policies existed, they are thus classist and discriminatory because this is evidenced by three decades of encouraging basically real estate loans because housing is understood as owning property in Lebanon, not as being a rentee or having affordable housing or social housing, et cetera. So encouraging real estate loans also means lack of affordable housing to people who cannot get loans. And they're also not taking into consideration three main factors. So the increase in living conditions and the cost of living in Lebanon and not linking this at all to either rents or salaries. So basically, there is no rent control. The minimum wage is a dire compared to the cost of living and they are neither intertwined nor connected. And this is very problematic and this is why it creates a policy that is classist and discriminatory. Third pattern, before I move to something more specific is the fact that the housing policies themselves are illegal, most of them are not law regulations. And this is evident by one, the fact that building laws themselves are not being respected. For instance, when the Ministry of Interior grants municipalities the right to issue construction permits against in violation of the building law. They also do not protect urbanism law and master plans that were established either in regions or the general master plan that was established in Lebanon that I would come back to later because it's actually very interesting. And so basically the right to property doesn't, is sacralized to a degree where people seem to believe that they have the right to dispose of their property as they wish. This is what I mean when I say that the general master plan is not respected master plans are not respected because there are no limitations as to how you use your property. So this is another level of perversion of the right to property doing whatever you want with your property and by this violating basically urbanism law than master plan. Third violation is the constitution itself because the right to property was so much sacralized that basically the right to housing was ignored and the right to social justice were ignored. So these are basically the two first pattern. The third one is the complete absence of an ecological approach to housing, whether in terms of the type of land, the use of the land, cultural heritage, the social fabric and the historical background. And we've seen this before in the Bayard Blast. We've seen it in the Manukhaya region to give a concrete example that was progressively gentrified. Manukhaya is a region that is mainly in the social fabric made of working class forces, old trends. So it was an area that was shocked through gentrification either by the development of restaurants, the culture of Arabian land. So it really increased rents there and basically created this like an incarnation of the absence of logical approach. This brings me to the response to the Bayard Blast and basically the main response was that the law, the parliament issued a very speedy law that reproduced all of these patterns. That is the law for the protection of areas affected by the Bayard Blast. I've already spoken about the background of the areas that were affected and what we saw when we read the law recently because it was published at the end of this September is that it basically, even though it withheld real estate operations in the area and stipulated for compensation for the inhabitants, however, it did not forbid construction permits for real estate companies, for Solider, for instance, for empty lots, for instance. It did not control eventual bidding that may arise and how they may arise. Would they be coherent with the milieu that they are built in or not? The exemption in terms of building to those actors basically will also affect the market price of the area and therefore be completely incoherent with the history of the area. Furthermore, there was very little protection for cultural heritage buildings that exist in the area. So for instance, it does not stipulate what cultural or historical building is. So it's basically left to a very short list of buildings that are mentioned at the level of the Ministry of Culture, that would be protected, whereas others that may very well have a lot of cultural significance or historical significance would not be protected because they are not on that list. Furthermore, again, there was absolutely no mention about rent control. So a lot of people who are living there will continue paying rents without any control. Adding to this factor, what Nisreen mentioned earlier in terms of economic collapse that the country saw, what also was mentioned in terms of the pandemic and effects on either the economy or on living conditions, we still haven't seen to this day any law related to rent control. This goes to show how the government, how the parliament, how legislators view housing in Lebanon. Renting is not viewed as a consequence of the right to housing. The right to housing is only viewed as the right to property and the right to dispose of your property the way you want, given the many exemptions we've seen and the violations of the law, we've seen even on governmental level. I will end on this note because I can see that. I'm gonna end. So basically, two notes. The fact that only the area protected by the 2020 law were the Saifi, Irmail, Mdawa and Port areas excluding other areas where only residents get damages but do not get protected in terms of building and reconstruction shows that this also has a sectarian approach to it because basically the only areas that were protected were mainly inhabited by Christian communities in Beirut. So this is what pushed us to call this law a form of real estate sectarianism basically. And this is my final note. So basically what we've seen either with the pandemic or with the Beirut Blast is the development of disaster capitalism and the fact that state is being completely absent in it. However, disaster capitalism doesn't need to be something very bad. We can also use it to rethink how we want the spaces either housing or work or public spaces to be reconstructed in a way that would profit public interest rather than private interest. I will end it here and leave the rest for the discussion. Thank you, Karim, again, sorry, Ziad. Yes, hi. Hello, everyone. Thank you for having me. And I would like to thank also my colleagues on this panel for contextualizing the question of housing in Beirut today. Also, it's nice to see everyone and I hope our friends and colleagues in Beirut are doing okay considering everything. In the few minutes that I have, I will try to lay out three provocations to outline potential affordable housing strategy that might address issues beyond the immediate humanitarian needs that have been triggered by the explosion. So I'll go straight into it. The first provocation, I would probably title it a new housing typology, infrastructure and construction system poses design thinking as the drive to imagine new affordable housing while engaging with larger systems. Addressing the high need for urban housing increases the city's density. Architects should leverage this as an opportunity to address failing urban infrastructure asking how an alternative shared and localized infrastructure can potentially imagine new models of collectivity and public space. With the absence of the state, as has been noted, design investigation could also imagine multiple potential projects stakeholders to support these initiatives by basically exploring housing unit scales and types, their mix, aggregation, flexibility, combination and hybridity. This financial support must be coupled with a critical understanding of the construction industry in Lebanon, its material economy and its environmental impact while actively engaging with issues of labor rights whether foreign labor or local labor. The second provocation probably titled it site construction rewriting the building code calls for exactly the rewriting of Lebanon's antiquated building code. This code has produced buildings that stand with no regard for the city's topography, landscape or historic fabric. Reconceiving the notion of quote unquote site beyond property lines, setback, building envelopes and footprints opens the potential to create new laws that are more in sync with Beirut's historical, environmental and physical characteristics. The third call to action titled form and informal expanding housing architecture history are used for the importance of historical research. In the most architectural history constructed around the investigation of regional housing typologies and forms of settlement, could move design proposals beyond the persistent unproductive opposition between modernity and tradition, allowing us for instance to ask what related potentials exist in Beirut's on the present generic compute slab buildings. Here the informal physical transformation of this generic slab building type clearly visible across the city is evidence of both the spatial adaptability and the inhabitants resilience in the face of decades of economic hardship and conflicts. Thank you. I think I'll try to stay within the two minutes. Thanks, yeah. Okay, we're gonna move to, I wrote in the, we're gonna move to question five first because some of the panelists need to leave and then we'll go back to question four. So please spend us for question five, turn your videos on and the collective tickets. Yeah, the bug I don't see some alumni. This is not the first time Lebanon and Beirut embark on projects of reconstruction. The most recent of which are the reconstructions of heart attack project twad after 2006, the reconstruction of downtown Beirut after the civil war with the notorious solidary project, having these controversial models of reconstruction in our back mirror. How can we think differently about the agency of architecture, urban planning and design, both pathologically and in practice in registering trauma, assisting collective healing and the development of shared coexistence rooted in an environment. Hashem Serkis, Mona Fawaz, Adrian Lahoud and Mark Vasuta are going to take the lead on this one. Good afternoon. Good evening, everybody. Gisa, thank you very much for transferring your spirit, the spirit of convening and openly discussing hot topics in our field to Beirut and to virtual space. And you always do this with radiant passion and with optimism. It is really this issue of convening, really of bringing together the efforts of reconstruction to become more than the sum of their parts that I would like to focus on. Your efforts, our efforts at MIT in collaboration with AUB in Dar al-Handasa, the efforts of all those involved here today are a few of many, many efforts on the ground. We all believe in grassroots movements and we all believe in the power of individual initiatives and of the people. But we often forget that one of the recurring and underlying reasons for the failure of grassroots movements all over the world is the inability to add up, the inability to coordinate. I just want to start by making a statement that there is no such thing as an organic evolution of organic movements into a collective effort if this effort is not willfully coordinated. So what you are doing is a step, a much needed step in that direction. To this I would like to add a few observations and they are three main ones. Firstly, I hope that this event is the beginning of a coordinated effort to coordinate, to collaborate and yes, to come up with collective visions. In that sense, I want to insist that they should not exclude the state institutions and the state's infrastructure. I do hope that we do not mistake the failure and corruption of the state with the need for a state with the importance of the idea of a state. We should keep that alive in our efforts. Secondly, I would also like to highlight our capability, what we do as architects and planners in the process of convening and creating a collective vision. Now against this capability come two major challenges. And these are two tendencies that are ingrained both in Lebanon, the way we do planning and in the fields we represent that would seem antithetical to the direction that the grassroots approach is suggesting today. Firstly, we tend to put the physical first and we also tend to work from the big picture down. Architecture and urban planning have received extensive criticism, most of it valid for their primarily physical approach to planning and for their top-down approach. However, I would like to argue that there is no instrument more powerful than that of the physical of the spatial image in capturing the imagination and inspiring social and political ideas and in mobilizing them. Very simple example, we really do not know fully what the community is until we imagine it in spatial terms. Secondly, there is nothing more powerful than the ability of the architectural image in articulating a collective imaginary, no matter how singular it is as an image. We just need to spend time thinking about how to reconcile the collective imaginary with individual imaginaries. So please, let us not abandon our strengths as we attempt to correct their negative consequences. My last point is related to this issue but bringing it back to Beirut. In the vein of putting the physical first, I would like to highlight two aspects of the post-explosion and the opportunities that it opens. Firstly, what is most unique about Lebanon is really its geography and its size. We talk about Beirut and Lebanon interchangeably and we are one of the few countries, let's face it in the world, that has been able to over its modern history to put together national physical plans, one after the other. We talk about national physical planning, we propose it and we in some cases implement parts of it. That's partly the problem. In that sense, any chance, any opportunity to rethink Beirut, such as the one we're talking about, is an opportunity to think or rethink the whole country and its geography, no matter how defined it has thankfully been to human intervention. Second aspect of this point is that the explosion of the harbor presents a real opportunity for us for re-centering Beirut. And I mean re-centering here in a very literal spatial way. Even though the reconstruction of the downtown in the 90s was supposed to focus on the business center and the port together, it quickly pushed out of the port and focused on the city center alone and on speculative commercial development. The explosion has brought the harbor back into the picture and is inevitably shifting the center of the city's efforts and its imagination to include the city's most viable economic region, infrastructure, transportation, public health and preservation and inhabited neighborhoods and their intersections. This bodes well for any future and further thinking about the city's planning and that of Lebanon, not only because it expands from a center, sorry, not only because it enters much more deeply into the economic future of the country, but also because it expands from a center focused on static space and within the national boundaries such as the downtown to a new center linked to a broader regional and global network that transcend the confines of the national physical boundaries. In short, I come back to the importance and dare I say to the primacy of the physical dimension of what we do and to appeal to you at Columbia from MIT, the bastion of the technical and the social aspects of what we do to please hold on to the physical and aesthetic dimensions and to keep up the efforts of coordinating across dimensions and across geographies. Thank you. Beautiful, thank you, Dean Sarkis on to Munafawa. Thank you, Heba, and thank you everyone for organizing and for having me here and thank you, Hashem, for this plea that I would really echo in many ways. Indeed, like you, I think that it's very easy to pass a severe negative judgment on the role of planning in previous recoveries in Lebanon specifically since this is how the question was framed. It can range from ineffective to destructive depending on the angle you take. And while some, I mean, I think for the reconstruction of Beirut downtown, the whole edifice has come to a logical conclusion in October, 2019 and crumbled partially during the port explosion. So there's not much need for a conversation. Potentially some may think that the reconstruction of the Southern suburbs of Beirut under Hezbollah's vibe was a pro-people recovery as some of our American colleagues have attempted to claim. However, with marijuana and other colleagues, I think we've really shown that the way this reconstruction has happened has really trapped people in their role as supporters of the party. And then the process really sort of made them potential targets when the party is aimed at as far as this is positive. So this is far from positive. Still, even as I say this, I think that I'm reluctant as a planner, as a teacher, as a thinker to drop planning precisely because it's one of the remaining only spaces in Beirut that we think of the collective, that we think of the we that brings us together as people who share specific urban spaces as refugees, as migrants, as landlords, as tenants, as shoppers, and despite the fact that these publics may have ruptures, that they're sectarian, that they're divided, that they're patriarchal and classed, still there is an effort that is being done that we feel particularly in moments of recovery where we attempt to reconstruct, re-imagine those spaces in which we live together and in doing so re-identify ourselves as a collective. And this is something which is incredibly important. Besides that, what happens if we these things as they are, as in the provocation that Marwan Hondur started with? Well, I mean, if we look at how things were before we started in the districts that were affected by the blast, we find that displacement was already happening galore because of central bank incentives and the central national financial policy that was encouraging banks and real estate investors to use homes and in general the city as a place to store their capital. We find that heritage was being destroyed because it was much more valuable to destroy a building and replace it with a tower for those who owned it, particularly in the context of a dysfunctional rent though and no protections for the right to live or work. In this context, simply saying we can leave people to their own self and they can reconstruct their houses, I think is really dangerous because it basically is not leaving them in a space where they can imagine the regulations and transform them. We're actually leaving them vulnerable in a context where it is impossible to recover one's home as we're seeing today, in fact, with the ongoing recovery. That's why I firmly believe that planning is important and it's important as a tool very much in line with what Dean Sarkis has said to allow people to imagine the possibility of this collective, to come together and envision and dream for its role as a performative practice that can really allow us to think together about what it means to have a neighborhood that connects Marim Khayel and Jameyze to Quarantina without the rapture. That reimagines Quarantina not as the dump of Beirut but actually as its lived space, as a place where people have the right as refugees, as migrants, as workers of the poor to stay in the city and have their public spaces and their living neighborhoods as a place to connect the city to its port and to recover Beirut downtown, not as a real estate asset, but actually as a place where we can live and meet, just like we did in October, 2019, that can have public spaces and a real infrastructure that allows us to recover the city. So I really think from this perspective, planning is very powerful. It doesn't come with the tools of master planning and other tools that imagine sort of a main state that's a custodian of the public good in this difficult moment because this doesn't exist, but this doesn't exempt us from putting together this collective vision and I'll stop here. Thank you, Mona, inspiring as always on to Dean Lahouk. Thank you. I don't know how to follow both of those presentations at all. It's an honor to be here. Thank you very much, Heba, for the invitation. I have a short and hopefully very simple intervention to make this incredible discussion. The first thing to say is that I've not been in Lebanon during the revolution so I didn't participate in direct actions in roadblocks, in protests, teachings. And I think it's important to state that because I think those processes are vital and their aliveness and their openness and their contagious sense of joy and rage and humor, which we experienced is so precious and important. And I think being at a distance necessitates that anything I say should defer to that unfinished project. So perhaps a reformulation of the question that I ask myself all the time is what role can the diaspora play in supporting that process? And I hope that this gathering is part of answering that question. I agree with Andres, I don't think it's a transformative political project that is possible without the necessary, transformative architectural project that's possible without a necessary political, financial and institutional support. I think the easier question is for architects is what to build and how to build. I think the more difficult question is how to transform the political economy of architecture in alignment with progressive institutional forms, how to participate in the construction of new institutions, institutions that can better secure the lives of Lebanese people. I agree with the other participants. I think the trauma of the blast is in continuity with the historical debilitation of the Lebanese people and Lebanon's ecosystems by its political class. So I wanna ask maybe in the immediate term, what new vulnerabilities does the blast produce within that history of debilitation? What new forms of expropriation and dispossession might flow from that event? How can we begin to guard against those processes which no doubt have already begun? Revolution is a process. I agree with Hashim. I think coordination is important and now's the time to do it. But I also think ambiguities in the early stages of revolution are not only natural but also politically productive. And so maybe we could try to distinguish between strategic and tactical aims if between let's say emergencies and political horizons. And if the strategic aim of the revolution was to dictate the entire political class and replace it with the democratic alternative, then the tactical aims are all the steps that are required to go from where we are now to a socially, ecologically viable future. So maybe rather than ask what kinds of solutions architects might be able to provide, we could ask what kinds of problems can be kept alive, can be exacerbated, and used for political ends. There was a question in the chat in the second session that read, how can we cultivate this soft infrastructure so that it speaks to the multiplicity of communities in Beirut without perpetuating exclusionary barriers such as classism, patriotism, and capitalism? A partial answer to that I think is to identify practical problems that are transversal to those exclusionary communities and to use them to build new communities of interest. And so to conclude, maybe just a question to my fellow participants about the concentration of work and the concentration of our effort, what are the one or two key political campaigns that architects can contribute to that have the potential to trouble the political class and to mobilize popular support outside of existing networks of patterning? Great, Adrian, thank you. We move to Mark. I also want to thank Hiba and the collective and all of my colleagues on the panel for this really great and important conversation. I'm going to add a few brief comments, maybe, that circle around trauma and what I would call is the fundamental incomprehensibility of the blast itself. And I suppose I have to make a distinction, which is that I don't, unlike almost everyone on this panel, I don't work on Beirut. I'm not Lebanese, I'm not from Beirut, but I have spent a lot of time working in Beirut. And so I'm going to speak a little bit about that. And my familiarity with Beirut is, in part, through a collaboration with the Arab Image Foundation a few years ago on a book and exhibition looking at the Iraqi architect, Rifat Chatterjee and his photo archives. And at the time, Chatterjee explained to me that his obsessive photography of his buildings and Baghdad was an attempt to preserve them against the damage to come. The damage he imagined would be caused by the instabilities of the burgeoning oil economy and the unstable politics of Iraq in the 70s and 80s. And because many of his buildings were eventually destroyed by the Iraq wars, we refer to Chatterjee's photos as the product of his grim clairvoyance. The very first time we visited the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut some years earlier, Zayna Arida, the director at the time, claimed that they were saving funds to build blast walls to protect the archive, blast walls that I suppose never came. So Zayna's claim was a second instance of a grim clairvoyance. The all too obvious symmetry between the AIF situation and the content of the Chatterjee archives helped us realize that although we were all equipped to think about the power and authority of archives, we were less able to think about their vulnerability. And maybe this registers a little bit with a question around vulnerability that Adrian just raised. One of my points in referring to these encounters is to not only reveal another improbable symmetry between the Chatterjee AIF project and the damage caused by the recent Beirut explosion, but to also ask about the terms of the instability that both Chatterjee and Zayna Arida describe. In the recent blast, the instability is obviously the catastrophic explosiveness of ammonium nitrate when heated by oil, welding, and fireworks. But it's also the instability of a political system that allowed the port to operate as a system of graft, referred to according to the New York Times as Alibaba's cave. But the instability is also legible in the relation of the blast to other politically motivated targeted blasts, the long series of car bombs that Zayna Arida was referencing. Which is to say, how to think the boundary between accident and attack is something that comes up in this case. How to think the relationship between accident and predictability, the accidentology that Verrilli and others were writing about almost 20 years ago. And so how to see the blast and the damage is not only an effect of this instability, but also as something anticipated, an attack through accident, through neglectful instability, an attack on the city, its people, and its buildings. And in part in response to the prompt, we can say that we can also obviously see the relation to these attacks and the history of development in Beirut. And I'm thinking of Sarai McDazzy's description of the blasting mania that characterized the reconstruction of downtown, not only for Soledare, but for other earlier post-war reconstruction episodes, in which more damage was done to buildings through the blasting of damaged buildings than during the war itself. And in those descriptions, blasting appears like a consuming economy that in Beirut has wrapped together neoliberalism politics and the registration and the deregistration of history. Or to put it even more bluntly, the blast as politics by other means, a technique of urbanization and de-urbanization, the source as well as a symptom of trauma. Wonderful, Mark, thank you. Thank you for the amazing panel. Thank you for the food for thought. We're gonna move now to last question on heritage. I know some of the panelists need to leave. So I wanna thank people who need to leave at this moment. Thank you for making this event. Possibly thank you for joining and then we'll continue. Please stay for our last question and for the open discussion onto the last question. Thank you, Dean LaHouse. Thank you, Dean Saiti. Thank you, Mark and Muna. Good evening. I'm Mula Saramun, Gisa Apilamna. Among the 8,000 affected buildings, 640 are historic buildings, approximately 60 of which are at risk of collapse after the survey of the Lebanese director general of archaeology. What are the practices and technologies that can assist in the rehabilitation efforts to preserve the city's heritage? What are the different axes that we need to think about when we think about heritage reconstruction and its role in developing a shared history as well as vehicle for economic recovery? The lead to this question will be given to Wael Sinno, Zayna Bahrani, Habir Satsu. And we regret to inform you that due to timing, Khorkha Tehropailos has had to drop out of the event. We thank him for his attention and we will link to his current work with the G-SAP Historic Preservation Department in the chat. So please, Wael, go ahead. Yes, hi, everyone. First, I'd like to thank Kiba and the team for organizing this very exciting discussion and for all your efforts. So regarding my answer, I'll be talking about mainly four aspects. The first one is the conservation management plan, mainly the data. So having access to data, especially during such times, is very crucial in order to ensure a very efficient and fast response to any type of emergency. And when it comes to heritage buildings, it is even more crucial because any type of intervention will have a very important effect or impact on the authenticity of these buildings. Normally, in normal cases, each heritage building should have a restitution plan that includes records, archives, documentation, photos, drawings, a proper documentation that shows the first photo, let's say, and the last one of these buildings. And whenever we want to do like renovation works, we always take the documentation of the restitution plan to ensure that our response and our intervention is very specific to specific contexts and characteristics of these buildings. However, unfortunately, in Lebanon, we don't have this type of documentation, which was very highly needed, especially that most of our heritage buildings were either affected with minor or major damages or even some of them were partially or fully collapsed. And as stated by UNESCO, almost 8,000 heritage buildings were affected and 60 are at risk of collapse. And so due to the absence of documentation, it is very crucial and important to draft a very efficient and systematic methodology on how to rehabilitate these buildings in order to ensure, to preserve their characteristics and their authenticity. This can be done, for example, by adopting solutions that fall under innovative techniques and practices, like for example, the HBIM, the Heritage Building Information Management, where we go assess and survey the building, produce a 3D-as-built model of the space and incorporate all the potential interventions based on specific criteria and guidelines, and mainly to ensure a building back better approach through sustainable and green techniques. For example, here we can include the energy component as well because we have this opportunity now. Another aspect is the resilience plan. So we live in a seismic prone area, we are classified as a medium zone with high risk of seismic activities, where lots of actual earthquakes take place even if we don't feel them. And these types of earthquakes has a high effect on the built environment, and specifically the heritage buildings, which were not designed to actually withstand such natural vibrations. And also it was shown after the blast that our infrastructure is very weak, be it the buildings or the underground networks. So even most of the buildings that were affected by the blast, where heritage buildings, as I said earlier, they cannot take lateral forces, they work on gravity. So this is why now we have to take the opportunity during the ongoing rehabilitation works on including elements such as the bracing elements, the structural frames or shear walls, to make them resilient. We have to take this opportunity now to have a resilient plan for each heritage buildings. So moving to the third aspect, which is the human approach, most of the heritage buildings are not public, and we have lots of HLP, housing, land and property problems. So other than the physical component of the heritage buildings, we need to promote reforms to endorse the owners and the residents' rights. This could be reflected in a national plan for heritage conservation, where well-protected laws are developed and endorsed. I think also this is a very important point to touch on the social aspect and to ensure the social cohesion between the rural community, between the owners and the residents, because we know that this topic specifically, the heritage buildings, we have lots of problems when it comes to the housing and the land and the property. And the fourth aspect is a very important one as well, which is to actually create a comprehensive heritage map for the city of Beirut in order to promote it as a heritage jam. However here, it is not only about the heritage buildings, it is also, we have around 8,000 creative and cultural industries in Lebanon out of which 4,000 were actually affected. For example, the exhibition spaces, the museums, the art centers, which are not well-promoted and I'm sure that none, we don't know all of them. So this is why it's also very important now to have a law that protect them and to focus not only on the heritage-built environment but also on the skills and the culture that were derived from our ancestors. This will have a great influence on the economy and will create a sort of economic wheel. For example, when we have tourists in Lebanon, it shouldn't be a rule, like they have to go outside Beirut to check our heritage and see what we have in Lebanon. They can actually dig deeper in Beirut and see all these hidden gems, the real skills and cultures, the culture that we have in Beirut. So mainly as an objective, we should have heritage as a catalyst for economic growth and social inclusion. This is my intervention. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Professor Bahrain. Thank you so much, Hiba, and to the collective for inviting me to join all of you today. I have to say at the outset that I also, I'm not somebody who's been working in Beirut at all. So I'm kind of an outsider to this work and I'm happy to be a part of it because one of the things that I would like to advocate for is forming allegiances. And I think that the reason that Hiba asked me to join you today is because I work in Iraq and most of my work or I would say pretty much all my career has been working in a post-disaster situation or I shouldn't say post-disaster because it's a continuing disaster. It's not a disaster that's ended. So we continue with the challenge of working within such a disaster zone. So how do you deal with these issues? Of course, when I first heard about the Beirut blast, I was heartbroken as everyone else for all of my friends and even family that I have there. But one of my immediate thoughts right afterwards was about exploitation, the potential exploitation. And the reason that this came to my mind is not simply because I'm a pessimist, but because of what I've seen happen in the place where I work, Iraq. So heritage preservation, we have heard that there are all of these buildings that have been damaged and heritage preservation is of course a very important thing. But I think what I would like to warn or caution is that it works, although we often tend to think of it as somehow unrelated to politics because it's heritage, that it actually works within frames of power. And so I would caution that we have to be careful about what we call authorized heritage discourse. And I think that we need some really radical changes in the way that we talk about these things and the way that things are done. So I would be cautious of authorized heritage discourse and with the regimes of funding that are associated with it. Because this is something that you're going to have to deal with in Beirut very soon. And the regimes of funding have to do with how the work is conducted, when the funding begins and ends, what you're allowed to do, also how heritage buildings and neighborhoods are defined. And so of course what happens is with international stakeholders and privatization and NGOization coming in, what happens is that a redefinition of neighborhoods along sectarian lines. And this is something that I've seen happening in Iraq. I would like to say that it's just something that's happened internally and blame it on the Iraqi government. But unfortunately it's also to be put, the onus also has to be put on international organizations that are supporting a sectarian view and imposing it through regimes of funding that we have to depend upon to do our work there. So it's led to actually greater disaster and greater violence and greater toxicity, I would say. So I appreciate what Marwan said at the beginning about deregulation and getting rid of such things. Because I do think that what we need across the region, I think what we need are some truly radical changes in our vision, in the way that we dream about what we want for our future. We have to hope for really radical differences and changes. And I think the only way that we can do those is to go ahead and take the lead ourselves. But I also at the same time worry about deregulation because what's happened in the world where I work on the ground, I mean, not theoretically but really right there in the field and working on these issues in so many ways that this has been used, it's a two-edged sword because it's also again been used for exploitation. And then private interests have come in and allowed neighborhoods to be destroyed and the interest of building something that would be more profitable for outside forces and so on and so forth. And of course, a part of this has become a way to kind of perpetuate forms of ethnic cleansing by forced movements of people from neighborhoods in the interest of preserving or reconstructing a heritage neighborhood. But in fact, what it ends up being is forcibly relocating people because a particular ethnicity or sect happened to live there. So I just want to warn about these terrible things that have happened that I've experienced over the past 18 years of my work in Iraq. I've tried to do what I consider a kind of a counter mapping and documentation of historical architecture and monuments throughout the country. And I think of this as a kind of a counter mapping. And I have to, I mean, since somebody mentioned that I've had a chat with her, I would like to have a shout out to him in his memory because his work is among my predecessors my predecessors, my Iraqi predecessors who did try to document all kinds of things before it was too late. And I see my work as being along those lines. And I hope that we can continue to have these conversations with people in Beirut. And another thing that I thought of with the explosion or what I read at the time was this beautiful poem by Muhammad Mehdi Al-Jawahri about Beirut and Baghdad, Beirut and Baghdad being sort of sisters in confronting and facing disaster and pain and how the pain of Beirut is really the pain of Baghdad and that we carry your pain in our hearts. And I hope that we can form these allegiances and work together towards a more hopeful future and not be too pessimistic about all of the disasters that we've confronted. Thank you Zainab so much for the food of thought and we're gonna call on Abyr as a resident of a heritage architecture to maybe provide that kind of perspective. Thank you. Former resident. I will just briefly echo on the reconstruction law that Karim already mentioned because it's also important to say that this reconstruction law because there's always a very big concern in the public discourse about heritage. The law also focuses on heritage in response to like a big call where the state tried to show that it has been responding to the ongoing debate which is really a lot about a mere focus on buildings. And this is what the law does. It focuses on buildings without any motivation to link it to the social fabric, to communities and to livelihoods. And this is very reminiscent of the heritage preservation efforts in post civil war Beirut which were detached from housing rights and hence led to mass waves of demolitions and displacement. And so along the same approach, a lot of the heritage assessments being done on the ground by private and public actors do not include in these assessments any form of occupancy in the surveys or do not include socioeconomic conditions of inhabitants. So for instance, a lot of the inhabitants of these 640 historic buildings are old tenants. Because these buildings are in a very bad condition, there is a need for a very quick renovation to ensure a quick return of residents. However, so far procedures that have been put to renovate historic buildings have been tied to a very complicated bureaucratic process, very stringent renovation criteria. And of course, the need for renovation permits that are only linked to the acceptance of the landlord. So we've seen a lot of cases where not only old tenants but tenants in general who are willing to return and willing to them pay their renovation but this has been blocked by the control of the landlord who doesn't want to renovate because to some land owners and in Marim Khayel in the surrounding areas, a lot of these cases are real estate developers. Some of them are using this as a chance to actually evict tenants, whether they're rent control tenants or tenants under the current rent law. And so as such, like if residents are not taken into consideration, really the 640 historic buildings that will be renovated will actually turn into a process of gentrification. It will halt the return of residents and it will make their rental value in the market much higher. So as such, there's really a need today to possibly shift the debate from heritage buildings towards actually the historic socioeconomic life of these neighborhoods. So in fact, if we think of the area of Marim Khayel, there is a local economy that existed since the 1920s. We can understand this local economy as a historic one. It consisted of crafts of all businesses and so on. And this old economy had been deteriorating for the past 10 years before the explosion while heritage buildings were actually still standing. And so creating a further rupture between the built historic buildings and what actually happened in these historic buildings won't actually lead us anywhere. I think it will reproduce the conditions that were happening since before the blast in terms of waves of displacement and the rupture of socioeconomic relations. And just to end up, I think we really need to go back here to prioritizing users to think of their role in defending these houses. And here just like to link back to the discussion that was happening, there is a real fear that us as professionals or practitioners or planners or so on, if we do not think of users and residents of the neighborhoods as like an important part of what's happening, we will also play a role in further marginalizing them because they do not have existing organizational frameworks. They do not own institutions. We own institutions. We're part of NGOs, of universities and so on. But they don't, neighborhood committees don't exist. Organizational frameworks for residents don't exist. They have been actually been explicitly killed throughout the years of the civil war and after. And as such, we really need to be aware of that and understand our positionality in that. And put, it takes a lot of effort but actually play a leading role with them. And I will end here. Thank you. Thank you, Aviyeh. Thank you, everyone. And what a great note to end on. So we are way past our time, but it's fine. We're gonna stay. Please, whoever can stay, turn your video on. There are many questions already in the Q&A. I know we're about 160 people are still with us. So if you guys have questions in the audience, please post them for us. And I'm gonna leave it for the collective to moderate this session and the panelists who are still online. Hi, my name is Deena Mahmood. I'm a GSAP alumna. So me and Maya are gonna be moderating the Q&A. Again, feel free to type any more questions in the chat. We'll be directing questions to people in certain questions and other questions will be left open. So Maya is gonna start with the first question. Hi, everyone. So we tried to combine a few questions from the chat. The first one is about the port and how can the port maintain its economic functionality and avoid being overtaken by developers and gentrification? What do you think about opening it up to the public and integrating and connecting it to the city after it's rehabilitation? And what are your thoughts on converting the silos or the site into a memorial monument? I'd like to open it for any of the panelists who'd like to answer. Anyone? Diyad, Mona? I can do it. I mean, I can try to start a conversation and maybe throw a few ignorant provocations that would get others to intervene. I'll just say that the Port of Beirut has really changed a lot its position and its interaction with the city. As you guys know, the port, the neighborhoods that were affected by the blast were all developed in connection to the port. Whether it's Quarantina, which was the city's quarantine or whether it's Beirut downtown, and the expansion of the port that made Beirut the city it is, the port was an integral element. And these neighborhoods housed all the services that had to do with the port. Except in the post-Civil War era, the port increasingly became this piece of infrastructure that's dissociated from the city. It became more and more a transporting area and it turned its back to the city. And the pier that exploded was an old storage place where they used to leave the things that no one asked for, including, believe it or not, apparently, what was it, 2,800 tons of ammonium nitrate? So, and fireworks next to that. So in the last decade, there has already been calls among colleagues and urbanists to try and recover that piece of the port as a connection to the city, as an open area and to create a continuity of the city's coast and bring it all the way here. And many of my colleagues are thinking about this as they're teaching studios right now and thinking about the city, how we connect that piece of the port, at least back to the city and recover it. I personally think that while this can be a long-term ambitious, really nice project, it is potentially more important immediately to think about what can be recovered immediately as a place that's still livable, that people are still using before we lose it also to vulture capitalism. That's why I feel that particularly in the absence of a state or a custodian of the common good that would actually champion a pro-people recovery, we need to start with the neighborhoods. And if we're gonna start with the neighborhoods and with people who live there, because they're the only people who can make these things accountable, while the port and the commemoration are all wonderful initiatives, and I can only imagine what beautiful urban design and urban planning interventions can be. It may be more critical right now to begin to think what do we set in place in the neighborhoods to recover them not only as individual home, but also as collectives and as places that are lived in and that function as economic engines for a different economy of the city. Because right now what we're seeing is everything is closing up, the stores are closing, people are leaving, the tenants are leaving. So don't be so worried honestly, and I'll stop here, I swear to heaven. Don't be so worried about gentrification because there is no gentrification. There's just very rapid impoverishment and anyone who can come and open the small store and send stuff and sell some stuff and allow people in the neighborhoods to benefit a little bit would be great. And here there's no time limit, go ahead. Thank you, Mona. Thank you. Anyone like to add anything? Maybe Madhavarn or Mark? I probably want to ask the people in Beirut, aren't there also investors coming in and seeing the opportunity of the disaster as a way to, so shouldn't also there be some thinking about the protection against all of these? I mean, we know that it happened in every previous battle and this is one of the few that I was not in Beirut. So the, is it, I'm wondering, should we worry about gentrification from that perspective and the fact that there is probably a lot of investors that are now interested in these neighborhoods that are more preserved than other places in the city? I don't want to answer one of the questions for us that we can be directed to you. There is a question directed to Karina Mood, I think he's still on, hopefully. There you are, hi. So how is the refugee influx of the last few years affected gentrification, rent prices and displacement in Beirut? And how do we include minorities and refugees in the frameworks of reconstruction? That's a very good question because actually in the area in the Manchai area, you had a lot of non-Libani residents, basically a lot of domestic workers who lived there, a lot of refugees that's who lived there. I'm not really sure I could, I can answer as a lawyer how it affected gentrification but I can tell you that the narrative basically from the point of view of refugees and domestic workers and foreign workers in general was completely absent from the post Beirut blast. It was thanks to initiatives and organizations like the anti-racism movement who basically really put forth this narrative, noting that a lot of those refugees and a lot of those foreign workers, a big chunk of them are undocumented workers basically. So they are in the most vulnerable situation amongst the residents who lived there and they basically have almost no protective mechanism legally. This of course would affect access to housing because they wouldn't be able to register rents officially, so they would have to resort to very informal housing. A lot of them were in informal housing before so they had no guarantees in terms of damages. Some of them were injured, some of them lost their houses and they have no alternatives. So again, this is where unfortunately, I mean, unfortunately, unfortunately NGOs are stepping in. I say unfortunately because I want the state to intervene really here in this sphere. I don't want this trend of having privatizations through NGO happen because it really benefits the neoliberal philosophy that basically really govern the Lebanese state for the last couple of decades. I'm gonna take also this opportunity just to correct myself on something because I don't want Mona to hit me. She already did a little bit on WhatsApp. I didn't mean that there was a good side to disaster capitalism. I just meant that disaster is also an opportunity to rethink space and basically fight all radical ideas that come from neoliberal policies and that profits from disaster. So I'm trying to really turn the table on neoliberalism here by saying that when the disaster happens, like the pandemic, like the virus blasts, it is also an opportunity for other radical ideas that to emerge, for instance, in terms of rethinking public space, in terms of rethinking housing, what sort of housing do we want and work space? So just I want this on record so that I would hear the end of it from Mona, actually. Thank you, Karim. I'd like to move to a question that Nesveen marked as that she would answer it. So it's actually one of the first few questions. What do you think is the most realistic approach to move forward given what happened in the past 100 days? Will it be a city indulged in even more ruins? Or do you think it's realistic to expect some sort of rebuild in the areas most affected, considering the surge of COVID, Nesveen? I'll confess that I clicked that by mistake, but I can still attempt. So if you walk around the neighborhoods, there actually is activity. There's some rebuilding. There's a lot of fixing happening. A lot of it is initiatives like the ones that I know was describing and was actually involved in that Mona has been describing and documenting. So no, I think that that comment painted an extremely bleak scenario. We're not there. I'd like to link that to the question that Marwan just asked, which is about investors coming in and vultures coming in and it's sort of part of the disaster capitalism. Yes, the explosion is going to aggravate the same incentives that really were already there because of the economic crisis. So here it's concentrated geographically and yes, potentially it is a neighborhood that has a specific aesthetic appeal or some sort of culture to it that maybe can be financialized. But this kind of dispossession has been happening ever since the economic collapse. It's less centralized. It's less geographically concentrated. And it's probably across a lot of sectors, not just real estate, but this is the impoverishment that we were trying to grapple with here and trying to identify and diagnose and map as accurately as we can and as comprehensively as we can. And this is probably a very brute show of it, a sort of a brute manifestation of it. But it's just an accelerated, magnified form but it is happening anyway. It's happening everywhere, not just in that neighborhood and not just because of the poor explosion, just because of the general impoverishment and the ability and the huge disparities that I was describing and the ability for some actors to just sit back and wait until things are dire enough that they can reap incredible resources for very little. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Just as there was a question in that chat and we're gonna have to hear about the building for the war yet to come. And I chose specifically not to speak today because of that. But my answer to that is actually that the categories of peace war explosion crisis are very not distinct. And I think this is where we need to start rather than idealizing what peace is and what war is about. But the questions of what we tried to talk about today is how to build for whom, for what kind of future or futures is a much needed conversation that we need to continue to have. And I hope that today's event was just a start or more actually of a continuation of the amazing work that many of you here on the screen have been doing. And I'm sure many of the people who are listening to us, I wanna thank everyone for keeping the hope going. Although many of us here have been through many reconstructions and we've talked about it. But as I said, the collective gave me a lot of hope and I think this conversation was also a very hopeful note too. So let's keep the warrior to come to the side and hope for a better kind of future that is different than what we had previously. I wanna thank the collective for being an amazing group, people I was by pleasure. Thank you for the panelists, for being my mentors and people who continue to inspire me. And till soon again, I wanna thank everyone and hopefully we'll continue to do this in the future.