FEED | Habitat - Building a New Beirut

WHILE A GOOD guidebook typically lasts five or six years, those written for travelers to Lebanon are anachronisms within six months of publication. The political and economic winds blow so fast that "facts on the ground" often seem weightless: Landmarks, hotels, and boundary lines are swept up -- and new ones take their place with hardly a pause. This is true of other countries in the Middle East, but in none of them is change as tangible or as rapid as in Lebanon. In Jordan, Iran, Syria, and some of the Gulf states, old dictatorships experiment with reform -- women are given the vote, press censorship is loosened, state concerns are privatized -- but in Lebanon change is not a matter of legal rights so much as physical landscape; and it is not an experiment, it is settled policy. With Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon last summer, the region was left open for reconstruction, development, and tourism. An Israeli prison in the town of Khayam, infamous as a place of torture during the occupation, has been converted by the Hizbullah into a grim museum (they left the electrical nodes dangling); the crusader-era Beaufort Castle, used by the Israelis as an army bunker, is now thronged with local picnickers. Another metamorphosis, less dramatic but perhaps more significant than the liberation of the south, is taking place in the center of Beirut.

The Company for the Development and Reconstruction of the Beirut Central District -- known by its French acronym, Solidere -- was incorporated in 1994. It is a private real estate company, charged with developing, restoring, and rebuilding 1.8 million square meters of Beirut's downtown. Its design team, whose composition has changed several times during the past ten years, is made up of international and local planners. Its huge cranes forest the area, humming with life. Solidere is the brainchild of Rafiq Hariri, a Lebanese-born, Sunni entrepreneur who became a billionaire in the Saudi construction business before he was appointed prime minister of Lebanon in 1992. He resigned the office in 1998 and was appointed again this past October, after his ticket swept the elections. He is a major stockholder in Solidere, owning approximately seven percent of company shares. In the words of one urban planner, Solidere is "an unorthodox manner of solving an unorthodox situation." For a long time, Beirut was a metaphor of urban barbarity; the reconstruction is an attempt, as the planner told me, "to capture the world by surprise."

From a Lebanese standpoint, the importance of Solidere in economic, social, and political terms is enormous. Company stocks account for ninety percent of daily trading done on the Beirut stock exchange, making Solidere the motor of the Lebanese economy -- when it coughs, the whole carriage shudders. The area Solidere is charged with reconstructing -- the downtown district also known as the Bourj -- contains the most expensive real estate in Beirut. Before the civil war, it was the commercial and social hub of the city, housing the government buildings, the banks and souks, a red light district, and places of popular entertainment. As Beirut's other neighborhoods came more and more to resemble sectarian enclaves, the Bourj was distinguished as a place of meeting -- an almost miraculous, though secular, common ground. During the civil war, the city was split in two, between the Christian east and Muslim west. The Bourj squatted over the dividing line, and after fifteen years of sniping, shelling, and bombardment, it lay in unpicturesque ruin.

Postwar Beirut is no less tribalized than the prewar version; though there is now traffic between the eastern and western halves of the city, confessional identities have not relaxed, and may even have become more rigid. The idea of a dialogue on national reconciliation is frequently floated, and then quietly allowed to sink under the newest sectarian scandal. So, although most Beirutis would agree to the importance of reconstruction, there is no national mood to ease its way: Every aspect of the reconstruction is a matter of fierce debate, with the combatants usually ranged along predictably sectarian lines. These debates, and their political consequences, can sometimes slow even Solidere's momentum.

When Solidere broke ground in 1993 to lay infrastructure networks, they uncovered an archaeological mille-feuille. Local and international archaeological teams started digging in 1993, and by 1997 they had excavated a Phoenician tell, Persian house foundations, Hellenistic sewage pipes, a Roman forum, and Byzantine mosaics, to mention only the bigger finds. Downtown Beirut quickly became the largest urban archaeological project in the world. These discoveries, strangely unanticipated in the early master plan drawn up by Solidere, threw a wrench in the redevelopment process. It turned an already controversial project into what one archaeologist called "a political minefield." In any country, current political stances inflect understandings of the past. But in Lebanon, this tendency acquires an exaggerated, almost cartoonish aspect: Christian historians have manufactured a mythology of Phoenician forebears; Muslim scholars have countered with their own, usually Arabist, version of events.

Helen Sader, an archaeologist at the American University of Beirut who managed excavations of the ancient tell, had had enough of the sectarian debates that swirl around what she believes to be a scientific enterprise. But she had no illusions about what is at stake. "The real fight, the real battle, is one of identity: the identity of modern Lebanon. All this has crystallized in the excavations of downtown Beirut because this is the first time after the war that the people were faced with their own history."