Students: Nicolas Burckhardt, Harry Heyck
Location: Beirut
Date: October, 2009
Type: Research project, student work

Background
The coast line of southern Beirut represents something of a projection space for visionary modernistic ideas, and their failed realizations. Being an unpopulated area south of the city center, offering beautiful settings and views onto the Mediterranean Sea it was chosen by the French planner Ecochard as the location for a new city. The new city was meant to follow ‘idealistic’ planning strategies of classical modernism, with an emphasis on separation of functions, hierarchy of traffic flow and introduced the topic of hygiene in urban planning. The beach was of course the main attraction, as it represents one of the few sandy coastlines in the area of Beirut. The Beirut Golf Club had established itself in the area, in expectations of the upper middle class that would inhabit the area, but Ecochard’s scheme never materialized. Nevertheless a certain amount of middle class families moved to the area and several embassies eventually were located there. The area though slowly filled with informal settlements in the late 1950s following the short civil war of 1958. These settlements were inhabited by Shia migrants from Southern Lebanon who moved to the capital city because of conflicts and poverty in their home areas. With the beginning of the civil war ever more internal refugees moved to the coastal area of South Beirut, mostly Shia who had been displaced from their Eastern Beirut neighborhoods of Naba’a and Qarantina.

Themes
Today the area represents one of the most diverse neighborhoods of Beirut with sharpest divisions, boundaries and differences running straight through it. The still existing golf club sits like an island within informal settlements spreading north and south along the beach. They join holiday resorts, hotel complexes with large swimming pools in the north and delicately cling to the newly constructed runway of the extended Rafik Hariri International Airport with large intercontinental jets landing non stop throughout the day and night.
The area had been the focus of a large public development scheme, “Elissar”, initiated by Rafik Hariri and trying to upgrade the area and improve the social fabric. Eventually Elissar joined the list of failed (idealistic?) plans for the area when it got undermined and eroded by the interests of the main Shia parties Amal and Hezbollah. Instead of upgrading the area, the main intervention in the end was the construction of highways connecting the airport to the city center with tunnels in strategic places preventing visitors from seeing any misery.

Project
What is the future of Beirut’s southern coastline? How have religious and political interest groups and investment companies acted upon this area? What is the potential of large scale planning projects in a context of these actors? Are different methods of planning necessary?