Is Beirut's glitzy downtown redevelopment all that it seems?
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Version 0 of 1. Glamorous young couples twiddle their cocktail stirrers on the terraces of Beirut’s Zaitunay Bay, looking out across a balmy evening scene that could be lifted straight from Monaco or Cannes. The lights of glitzy towers twinkle on the water, as a group of teenage girls stroll along the teak boardwalk, posing for selfies in front of freshly polished super-yachts. At the end of the curving esplanade, the jagged form of a new yacht club, designed by shape-making American architect Steven Holl, juts out into the bay, topped with apartments that boast some of the most expensive views in the Middle East. It is “the premier seaside destination for luxury living and recreation,” according to the marketing blurb, “catering exclusively to the region’s cultural and social elite.” But, as Islamic State fighters gather at the border with Syria to the east, there is an uneasy tension in the air. It is a looming threat that not even a bottle of champagne on the region’s most exclusive terrace can mask. And there are signs that, beneath the veneer of waterfront sparkle, this optimistic image of Beirut’s glory days – revived like a phoenix, 20 years after the civil war blew the city to rubble – might not all be quite what it seems. The city centre now boasts immaculately rebuilt streets, lined with the stores of Gucci and Prada, Hermès and Louis Vuitton, but the whole place is strangely deserted. There are thickets of new apartment buildings, but few lights are switched on behind the curtains. There is none of the chaos and energy that defines Beirut. It just doesn’t feel Lebanese any more At the other end of the bay from the faceted steel structure of the yacht club stands the ghostly carcass of the old St George Hotel, a faded 1930s shell of what was once the stomping ground of film stars and royalty, diplomats and spies, the salacious social epicentre of old Beirut. It now stands as an eerie relic, with an enormous banner draped across its lifeless facade, printed with a three-storey no-entry sign emblazoned with the words: “STOP Solidere”. Beneath the empty building, a series of displays tells the story of the battle for the waterfront. “St George’s Bay is named after the legendary hero who slew the dragon terrorising its shores,” it reads. “Today the bay and its inhabitants are under renewed attack from a hybrid corporate monster, Solidere, which – neither private nor public – is devouring public property to line the pockets of its backers.” The gunfire and car bombs might have stopped for now, but landowners and developers are very much still at war. The man behind this urban-scale protest placard is Fady El-Khoury, owner of the St George Hotel, who has been in legal deadlock with Solidere, the development company behind the reconstruction of downtown Beirut, for the last 20 years. “It is the robbery of the century,” he tells me. “They have illegally seized the city from the people who own it, and put back an empty maquette of Beirut without any of the people. What they have done to the city is apocalyptic.” Solidere (an acronym of Société Libanaise pour le Développement et la Reconstruction de Beyrouth) has steered the development of the city centre for the last two decades, overseeing the postwar rebuilding of an area covering almost 200 hectares; and not without controversy. It is a strange private-public hybrid, founded in 1994 by billionaire businessman and then-prime minister Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated in 2005 – by a car bomb right outside the St George Hotel – since when his family has maintained a major stake in the company. It is incorporated as a private business, listed on the stock exchange, but it also enjoys special powers of compulsory purchase and regulatory authority, giving it the mandate to manage the city centre like a mini-fiefdom. It was the only way to run the comprehensive redevelopment of a place ravaged by 15 years of warfare, in the eyes of its supporters; but its critics have accused the company of using harassment and intimidation to drive the original residents out. Human rights lawyer Muhamad Mugraby has described their behaviour as a “form of vigilantism under colour of the law”. Former residents and business owners were compensated with shares in Solidere, rather than cash, at what many claim was well below the true value. Owners had the option to keep their property and return the shares, but only if they had sufficient funds to restore their buildings in line with Solidere’s strict preservation brief – which set high standards, too onerous for most to muster. El-Khoury was one of the few owners wealthy enough to resist; but he claims his plans to redevelop his hotel have been blocked ever since. The visitors might have stopped coming, but that hasn’t put the city off continuing with its frenzied building programme “They destroyed my marina,” he says, “and they’ve filled in the waterfront with enormous towers. When they finish their plan, the sun won’t be able to reach the bay. They will have drained the city of its life.” With 20 years and tens of billions of dollars under the bridge, Solidere’s plan to create the “finest city centre in the Middle East” is now about halfway complete. It has been dogged by years of continual sectarian violence and political upheaval, navigating between the wills of 18 different religious groups and their competing claims. So is the outcome living up to El-Khoury’s worst fears? The masterplan, led in-house from the beginning by British architect and urbanist Angus Gavin, formerly of the London Docklands Development Corporation, is an odd mixture of careful urban design and preservation, dotted with showy outbursts by big name global architects. A good number of streets have been impeccably restored to their beaux-arts glory, with colonnaded pavements and beautifully carved stonework along cornices and window reveals, reviving the fusion of French colonial and Levantine vernacular. Badly damaged plots have been infilled with contemporary blocks that riff subtly off the proportions and details of their neighbours, the result of a strict design code that specified everything from the choice of five buttery shades of limestone, to the height of the street-frontage, to the two-storey set-back at the upper levels, ensuring the continuation of the handsome urban grain. An initial plan to retain some pockmarked and battle-scarred facades was sadly trumped by a desire for collective amnesia, wiping away all reminders of the conflict. The result is impressive, but unavoidably Disney in tone. These new pseudo-historic streets recall their former selves, but they have been reincarnated as upmarket doppelgängers, precious replicas of what had been the well-worn and well-loved blocks of these lower-class neighbourhoods. The grocer and fishmonger have been exchanged for the luxury boutique and high-end restaurant, while the apartments above the shops have mostly been sold to Gulf investors and wealthy expats, their sky-high prices out of the reach of the majority of locals, in a city with a desperate shortage of affordable housing. “The financial segregation of the city is only getting worse,” says Fabio Sukkar, an economics graduate who still lives with his parents in Beirut, struggling to find a place to rent. “There’s no middle class here any more, just super rich and the rest of us. It’s the result of a mafia country.” In the eyes of one local architect, the restored downtown is “well made, but utterly sterile”. “There is none of the chaos and energy that defines Beirut,” he adds. “It just doesn’t feel Lebanese any more.” It is a criticism that has been levelled with greater ferocity at the flagship project that lies next door, the Beirut Souks, designed by Spanish architect Rafael Moneo with Kevin Dash, which opened in 2009. This $300m complex, built on the site that has been the city’s bustling trading centre for the last 5,000 years, takes the form of a vast shopping mall – roughly the size of London’s Westfield Stratford City in floor area. It follows the ancient Greek street grid, but does so in stridently modern form with a series of grand vaulted arcades and interlocking courtyard blocks. But the resulting place feels less souk than Duty Free airport lounge. It is a monotonous world of more swanky high street brands, from Burberry to Tag Heuer, staffed by idle shop assistants awaiting the promised customer footfall that has yet to arrive. It has none of the density of urban life of the souks of Tripoli, in the north of Lebanon, or any of the intense sensory overload of the usual bustling markets of the arab world. The overriding impression is of lots of expensive marble, polished and patrolled by an army of cleaners and security guards. The mall is planned to be joined by another high-end department store, designed in the form of a twisted rattan basket by Zaha Hadid, along with a spa and “wellness centre” with serviced apartments stacked on top, by the American leather-clad architect of luxury, Peter Marino. There will one day be a field of tower blocks extending out towards the sea on a 70 hectare area of reclaimed land Other nearby blocks have been given to an eclectic mix of architects from around the world: Italian Giancarlo de Carlo rubs shoulders with neo-classicists Robert Adam and Dimitri Porphyrios, doing their fusty thing alongside Japanese metabolist Arata Isozaki and Spanish postmodernist Ricardo Bofill. There will one day be buildings by Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki too, on a diverse shopping list compiled by Gavin and his team. But it is a strangely scattergun approach of commissioning, and one in which the project often seems to have been given to the practice’s B-team, as if they scarcely believed it would ever be built. “If we build it, they will come” has no doubt been Solidere’s mantra. But they’ve built a lot of it already and no-one’s really turned up. “It’s so empty that it feels like night time during the day,” says Beirut entrepreneur and film producer Georges Schoucair, who knows something about how to create atmosphere, being in the process of commissioning Lebanon’s most moody architect, Bernard Khoury, to design a new arts complex in the city. “They’ve got the mix totally wrong. A dozen shops shut every week because the rents are too high.” The mix, it is clear, was aimed at catering to wealthy Arab tourists, but Beirut’s tourist economy has been hit hard by the travel ban imposed by most Gulf nations since the Syrian crisis erupted. Recent years have seen a fraction of the number of holidaying Sheiks coming to burn money on luxury goods and illicit pleasures. Solidere’s business plan was predicated on an eternal continuation the city’s long-cherished role as the playground of the Middle East, wallowing in the gushing fountain of Saudi money as if it would never be switched off. But with an increasingly deserted downtown of echoing streets, exacerbated by a necklace of army roadblocks, necessitated by the parliament building being located here, it is a gamble that’s looking less and less likely to pay off. The visitors might have stopped coming, but that hasn’t put the city off continuing with its frenzied building programme. The global financial crisis – from which Lebanon remained largely protected due to its cautious banking practices – had the effect of accelerating the flow of capital from shakier shores into the Beiruti building boom. And the steroidal spawn of this influx is now growing up. Although still wrapped in construction hoardings and topped with nodding cranes, the scale of Solidere’s next phases is rapidly becoming apparent to the west of the city centre, in the luxury residential district of Mina El Hosn. There, the gargantuan staggered cliff-face of Norman Foster’s 3 Beirut complex has now reached its full height of 120 metres, revealed as a fattened wall of three towers spread across an entire city block. The distinctive profile of its neighbour, the Beirut Terraces by Herzog & de Meuron, can now be seen, teetering like a precipitous pile of paperwork on the skyline. Perhaps a stack of banknotes would be a better analogy: the penthouses of this $500m “vertical village of 130 living experiences” will command upwards of $13m a piece. “What if you could be ordered a lifestyle?” asks the development’s promotional website. Judging by the dark windows of the city’s completed residential towers so far, the answer will be of little concern to the investor-buyers, mostly Lebanese expats, who might only visit a few days a year. And there is more of this on the way. The city model in Solidere’s HQ reads like a Who’s Who of architecture, each developer racing to plant their own luxurious totem pole on the horizon. There is a monstrous slab by Jean Nouvel, thankfully on hold and now unlikely to go ahead, as well as a 315m glass tower planned by Renzo Piano – on a site that specified a 120m height limit. There will also, one day, be a field of tower blocks extending out towards the sea on a 70 hectare area of reclaimed land, which for now lies empty as a dormant wasteland. It is an act of urban vandalism on a monumental scale, erecting a great wall between the bay and sites inland that have enjoyed an elevated view for centuries. It also seems like a perverse move for Solidere itself: once hemmed in by a wall of towers, the value of its own central conservation area will be reduced. This rash of tall buildings is the result of a change in planning law, passed in 2004, which loosened restrictions on the height of towers in crowded neighbourhoods. “When you read the text of the 2004 law it is obviously written by developers,” says Mona Fawaz, an urban planning professor at the American University of Beirut, speaking to Al Jazeera. “It has all sorts of tricks to build a little more, and to build a little higher.” She describes the recent spate of towers sitting on hefty podium blocks as a worrying transformation, “where the ground floor has a gate instead of a store,” causing fundamental damage to the character of the streets. “Once you don’t have a store you don’t have someone putting out a chair on the street,” she says. “You get a gate and an SUV driving out.” Such projects are also contributing to the rapid demise of the city’s remaining built heritage, as ancient sites are bulldozed to make way for these vertical extrusions of inflated land values. Beirut has already lost a third of the 300 buildings designated as “top priority heritage”, according to Lebanon’s culture ministry. They’ve been swept away along with the social fabric they supported. It is an anything-goes outcome that undermines the precious details fought for by Angus Gavin and his architects in the central conservation areas, a neglect of the bigger picture that compromises the entire experience of the city. “To make a project like this work,” says a former Solidere director, “you have to make it an exclusive club that every developer wants to join.” Only it is a club that seems to have rapidly got out of hand, its bullish members calling the shots, the Beirut development industry being no stranger to political pressure, bribery and threats. “When Solidere began, we saw cities around the world using star architects, and thought ‘why don’t we do it here too?’” he adds wistfully. “Perhaps we ended up overdoing it.” Join Oliver Wainwright, Owen Hatherley and Mike Herd for a Guardian Masterclass on how to write about cities on Tuesday 27 January |