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As people in Lebanon catch their breath, hoping for a fragile ceasefire to hold, can we dare to imagine a post-disaster scenario that brings us together, as citizens of one nation with multiple political beliefs and yet a shared commitment to live together?

Could reconstruction processes place us on a pathway to recover some sense of collective identity under the custody of a state with some form of legitimacy, or will we repeat the same patterns of earlier so-called “reconstruction” projects which consolidated the divisions brought by the violence they were meant to mend and hollowed out further public agencies to the benefit of patrons building constituencies through favours?

As an urbanist who has lived her life in Lebanon and witnessed its multiple disasters that took the form of both “wars” and “reconstructions”, I want to offer a few pathways to consider through the lens of city planning.

To be sure, city planning isn’t a substitute for a wider process of national recovery that restores accountability and trust in public agencies and recovers democratic and transparent processes in the governance of a country ravaged by years of predatory rule.

However, through its emphasis on the shared dimension of city life and a bias for participatory processes that bring people together to consider how they envision their future collectively, city planning can provide concrete places to start a direly needed conversation.

Let me note that the scale of the damage left by Israel’s last war on Lebanon is devastating, and that in Beirut, just like in Beqaa and the South, destruction exceeds the 2006 recordĚýby several folds.

Let me further note that Lebanon faces the challenge of recovery with the country on its knees, having suffered multiple overlapping crises and failed to address any. Four years into its dual financial and political meltdowns, no steps have been taken towards recovery and of the population is now below the poverty line.Ěý

Moreover, the country has not elected a president for over two years, and it has been managed by a caretaker government for over four. Meanwhile, the war rages again in Syria, suggesting that the 13-year old refugee crisis is unlikely to ease up soon. Against all odds, however, there are things that can be done.

A first step is to recognise that Lebanon’s previous experiences in post-disaster recovery are far from successful.

Indeed, the consistent practice of state agencies delegating coordination and regulatory roles to non-state actors, be they private, non-profit, or political actors, invariably led to consolidating the effects of the wars that preceded them.

Lebanon must learn from past disasters

There is a long list that starts back in 1990 with the delegation of the reconstruction of Beirut’s historic core to a private real-estate agency and which continues to-date, most recently with the 2020 Beirut port explosion.

Each experience eroded further trust in the state and undermined whatever remains of a sense of collectiveness among citizens in the affected areas.

Rather than building on the solidarities that unfailingly surge during the eruption of violence, as we recently witnessed during Israel’s assault on the country, scattered and divisive recovery efforts orchestrated by rivaling actors placed citizens in competition with each other over meager financial compensations and/or directed them towards patrons who could guarantee the legal protections and financial resources needed to rebuild their homes. Consequently, the aftermaths of wars consolidated patterns typically attributed to the war.

It is neither possible nor desirable for Lebanese public agencies to take full charge of reconstruction projects.

However, it is possible for these agencies to play a central role at both regulatory and planning levels to forge a direct bond between citizens and the state, without mediation, to equalize among citizens, without patronage, and to encourage collective deliberative processes that bring residents in devastated areas together in neighbourhood-level interventions through which the common good is given ascendency over individual private interests.

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First, Lebanon’s parliament must approve immediately a regulatory framework that allows residents who lost their homes to rebuild them, as they were, to the extent that they don’t violate public land and/or critical elements of the public good.

Short of this measure, Lebanon’s current building and zoning regulations will make it impossible for many people who lost their homes to reconstruct them.Ěý

This practice, in turn, will consolidate the widespread belief that the law in Lebanon is unjust. A one-time exception is far from an ideal design solution, but it has the merit of recognising citizens’ right to housing and recovery, and to hence secure these citizens don’t need the mediation of patrons to rebuild their homes.

This is due to an array of factors that include the inadequacy of existing building laws to account for the specificity of rural architectures as well as the multiple regularisation policies that exceptionally legalised the statuses of numerous buildings in exchange for penalties without ever reconsidering the inadequacy of the regulatory frameworks themselves and/or an intervention that improves spatially neighbourhoods.

In some cases, it is due to the inflexibility of the modern building law that fails to recognise the specificity of old towns and their architectures.ĚýAcross villages of the South and the Beqaa, old homes that shaped the narrow streets and formed the historical character of small towns could not be rebuilt along the old urban morphologies without ignoring modern building and zoning regulations passed by planning agencies who did not reconsider a post-war scenario and failed to study local building character when they adopted generic urban regulations over the past few decades.

In others, it is due to the multiple practice of earlier regularisations that normalised repeated exceptions to the law. If the 2006 post-war reconstruction can teach us anything, it is that residents who are banned from rebuilding their homes will look for a patron who can “protect” their right to housing despite the law, and they will obtain the right to reconstruction as a concession secured by a political actor rather than a substantive citizen right.

In Beirut’s suburbs, the residents who had just lost their homes were lumped as “Hezbollah’s constituencies” and caught in a standoff between the Sanioura government and the Party.

No longer a right, the rebuilding of their homes became a matter of political negotiation. Indeed, many of the multi-story residential buildings destroyed by Israel’s airstrikes had benefited from an amnesty after the civil war that regularised their status, but their residents could not rebuild what they legally owned without a renewed clearance.

Attacked by the Israeli army as “Hezbollah supporters” for their sheer residence in the neighborhood, these residents were criminalised by their government for the same reasons and they were accused of breaking building and zoning regulations despite the fact that their homes had been fully legalised a decade earlier.

Unable to obtain building permits, their only choice was to delegate the task to Hezbollah who took over the responsibility of reconstruction — incidentally building without permits, and regularising the status of the buildings after the fact when parliament finally passed an amnesty in 2014 (8 years after the war) allowing residents who had lost their homes to rebuild them as they were.

Second, it is imperative to unify compensation packages and organise them at units that bring collectivities together. In the aftermath of the port blast, just like back in 2006, residents of neighbourhoods affected by violence were thrown in competition with each other as each looked to convince actors disbursing aid that they were more deserving.

The early moments of solidarity and collaborative recovery quickly turned into in-fighting as desperate households sought to secure enough aid in dire times.

Therefore, it is critical to adopt neighbourhood scale interventions, whenever possible, as opposed to approaching reconstruction as the sum of individual apartments, to bring the residents of towns and urban quarters together, as neighbours and co-building owners as needed, and to seek to the extent possible equitable and collective frameworks of recovery that foster collaborative practices.

Most importantly, it is critical to place emphasis on the collective through area-based and neighbourhood level projects. Israel’s recent violence in Lebanon was a war on the collective memory and the relationships that tie people together with their land.

By forcing displacement and targeting collective buildings and landmarks (e.g., municipalities, town souk), natural landscapes and indigenous architectures, and erasing entire districts, Israel effectively erased the spatial embodiments of people’s being together.

In this context, a lack of attention to the historical character of the towns that are being rebuilt, the architectural typologies native of the cities and towns that were erased, and the natural landscapes that characterise them threaten to severe permanently the memory of these places, and consequently the bonds that keep together their residents.

Only a reconstruction that starts from collective spaces of memory, public spaces, shared streets, and public landmarks can reverse this trend and prioritise what brings Lebanon together over private interest.

The chances of a public recovery embodying this sense of the collective at the national scale are slim today, and those of using the reconstruction as an opportunity to rebuild trust in (at least pieces of) the state are even slimmer.

There is nonetheless a glimmer of hope in the initiatives taken by some municipalities to lead the path for recovery across Lebanon. Perhaps if donor and international agencies begin to empower these public actors and initiate neighbourhood-led recovery efforts with them, there may be chances to move towards more successful experiences than in previous decades.

Mona Fawaz is Professor in Urban Studies and Planning at the American University of Beirut. She recently co-founded the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut, a regional research center invested in working towards more inclusive, just, and viable cities. Mona is also the director of the Social Justice and the City research program based at the Issam Fares Institute of Public Policy at AUB. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University during the 2014/15 academic year and in Summer 2017. She has served on numerous national, regional and international juries, including the Aga Khan awards in 2019.

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