Beirut
City of Beirut
Work in progress… and regress
(text and image by Rania Sassine)
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Beirut seems to have recovered from the civil war that ended almost twenty years ago.
We had time to rebuilt most of the physical places that got destructed. A car tour in the city today makes you wonder where the scars of the war are now.
The real scars are in the void… and in the heads.
We filled the whole city with tall buildings and totally neglected the void, or what I call the public domain.
The right of every citizen to a park, a square, a market, a beach, a wifi…
Reconciliation and healing happens there, and from there moves to people unconsciousness and cure them.
There is no common city without communal feelings and shared ground: a healthy accessible public domain that will be the pride of its citizens, their collective work and their way of looking at the future.
The purpose of my study is to restore everything in the public domain to the public use and the public care (after a certain work on public civility). The city remaining spots of public spaces or the temporary informal ones created by need should be gathered in one global vision of public spaces spread out throughout the entire city and layered by a network of connectivity that will link it all.
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