Framework for Postwar Renewal During the 1975-90 Lebanese war,
Beirut's downtown bore the brunt of destruction with the entire
infrastructure and two-thirds of buildings left beyond salvage. Abandoned
during the war, many derelict structures were occupied by some 20,000
displaced families. The city center foreshore lay disfigured by 15 years
of uncontrolled dumping. The government's finances were stretched to the
limit on a nationwide recovery program and the country's public
institutions, weakened by war, were not capable of taking on a
large-scale and complex project of urban restructuring. In addition, the
fragmentation of private property ownership resulting from Lebanese
inheritance laws, made renewal through existing ownerships a practical
impossibility.
Lebanon's first postwar government was determined to
turn disaster into opportunity through a unique form of public-private
partnership. Creating a special zone, the Beirut Central District (BCD),
the government commissioned its urban planning and formed a private
development corporation - SOLIDERE - in which the BCD's former owners
and tenants pooled their property assets in exchange for controlling
shares, with new shareholders contributing the company's working
capital. SOLIDERE was required to fund the relocation of displaced
families, undertake the necessary clearances, construct the city
center's entire infrastructure and public domain and carry out
environmental reclamation and sea defense works on the new waterfront.
In exchange for financing on behalf of government all infrastructure and
land reclamation, the company was granted ownership of 29 hectares of
new development land on the reclaimed area.
The Master Plan goals
The city center Master Plan provides a
framework for regeneration based on these underlying goals:
To
reconnect the city after the trauma of war and recover Beirut's lost
regional role in competition with other cities. To replace the
traditional model of a single-use, employment-based CBD with a new kind
of mixed-use, residential downtown. To encourage a unique regional
identity, originating in the context, climate, history and culture of
the place. To provide extensive green spaces in the heart of a dense
city, re-establishing there the city's meeting point and common ground.
To reject the Modernist-inspired city of object buildings and
internal private malls and create a city of active public streets and
public spaces befitting the Mediterranean climate. To control the
massing of development by mandating maximum heights, streetwall controls
and other building envelopes. In conservation areas these prescribe a
scale in keeping with retained buildings, while elsewhere retaining the
form and scale of the street. High-rise development is limited to key
gateways or landmark sites that command spectacular views.
Public Domain: reclaiming the city's meeting point
In the
contemporary city the public domain is widely perceived as under threat
and in decline. The regeneration of Beirut's downtown is, however,
producing a public domain of the highest quality.
SOLIDERE was
required under its formation decree to build the entire infrastructure
and public space of the city center, comprising half its land area, and
deliver it to the public authority. The company finalized the majority
of the infrastructure in 1996 and continues to work through a rolling
program of more than 60 public parks, gardens, squares, pedestrian areas
and waterfront promenades. SOLIDERE is also undertaking the integrated
design of street furniture, signage and public area lighting as well as
commissioning public art for the city center. Public space is perceived
to exert a significant impact on land sales, as well as creating a
strong focus of attraction for the city as a whole. SOLIDERE is,
therefore, motivated to build a public domain of the highest quality.
Recent surveys estimate a total of 3 million visitors a year from across
Lebanon and overseas, making the city center the most active visitor
destination in the country. Key factors are the Mediterranean climate
and lifestyle that permit and encourage the social use of public space
in ways that are inconceivable elsewhere in the Middle East. Public
spaces in the downtown are rapidly emerging as one of central Beirut's
unique and differentiating assets.
Conservation of the multi-layered city
During the height of
excavations in the mid 90s, central Beirut was the largest urban
archeological site in the world, its output filling many gaps in
Beirut's 5,000-year history. Principal source of funding these
excavations, SOLIDERE has developed a strategic approach to the
integration of archeological sites within the urban fabric. These past
city layers are seen as a significant cultural resource and visitor
attraction, projecting the uniqueness of Beirut. Key features of the
strategy are the Heritage Trail and the Site Museum. The first stage of
the Trail will be inaugurated in 2005. Encircling the conservation area
it will link the main archeological sites and heritage buildings on a
four-kilometer walking tour, starting and finishing at the ancient Tell
[one of the main archeological finds]. Here a museum will be built, to
celebrate Beirut's most important finds, the remains of ancient
fortifications of the Canaanite-Phoenician city. Other smaller site
museums are planned at key historic locations along the Trail.
As
the Heritage Trail is launched, an extensive restoration program of
close to 300 buildings is nearing completion. The majority are
concentrated in the historic core, with other significant clusters in
the downtown's traditional residential districts. About one third of the
surviving urban fabric has been salvaged, creating a significant impact
on the overall project. As a total environment of conserved urban fabric
in a reconstructed public domain of the highest quality, the restoration
of Beirut's historic core represents a major urban regeneration
achievement on a global scale.
New Development: a mix of contextual infill and new city landmarks
Throughout its postwar renewal, Beirut aims to recover the eclectic
architectural models of the past, in which new influences from abroad
continually merge with existing traditions. The city will stand by its
differences, not adopt the collective identity of a global city. Its new
architecture develops out of its context - landform, views of the sea
and mountains, historical layers, value of the heritage, surviving
street patterns and public spaces, local architectural traditions and
the individual character of separate city quarters.
While
stimulating for the most part a modest urban architecture of the street
and square, the context also reveals landmark sites at key city
gateways, focal viewpoints, strategic and waterfront locations. Here a
freer planning regime is applied, creating major architectural
opportunities intended to appeal to world class designers. This is now
happening, with many international architects attracted to Beirut and
contributing to the repositioning of the city. In the immediate future
new development opportunities will open up on Martyrs' Square and the
Grand Axis of Beirut, termination of the wartime Green Line and now the
subject of an international design competition. The competition goals
are to give this historic place a new, popular identity, drive the
repositioning of the city within the region and help reconcile the
divisions that polarized Beirut during the war.
Creating the new city waterfront
Throughout the war years the
downtown foreshore became a dumping ground for the rubble of destroyed
buildings and the domestic waste of West Beirut, isolated from municipal
sanitation services. By the end of the war the landfill extended 25
hectares into the sea, creating an environmental hazard in the eastern
Mediterranean. Turning disaster into opportunity this landfill is being
recycled and incorporated within Beirut's New Waterfront District. When
completed, it will comprise a city park, corniche and quayside
promenades with some 29 hectares of new waterside development land. Many
sites will command spectacular views to sea and mountains, snowcapped
through winter and spring. The historic First Basin of the port will be
integrated within the project, with its new cruiseliner terminal and
public activities.
Altogether some 73 hectares of reclaimed land is
now enclosed within a terraced sea defense system designed to withstand
centennial storms, its unique caisson structure limited in height to
5.5m above sea level in order to protect sea views from deep within the
city's historic core. These sea defenses also provide harbor enclosures
to two new marinas, one now operational and containing a public town
quay designed to house shops and restaurants, alongside a Yacht Club and
residential apartments. The detailed urban planning for the New
Waterfront District was carried out for SOLIDERE by a consortium of
leading US firms, and won a major New Urbanism citation. The plan will
turn the downtown waterfront into the destination and climax of Beirut's
citywide corniche system, emphasizing mixed-use and leisure, with
landmark buildings framing spectacular views towards the sea and
mountains. The street network has also been designed to accommodate a
Formula One Grand Prix circuit.
