Revisiting Dalieh: Open Ideas Competition Results & Updates

Revisiting Dalieh: Open Ideas Competition Results & Updates

Revisiting Dalieh: Open Ideas Competition Results & Updates

By : Cities Page Editors

In June 2015, The Civil Campaign to Preserve the Dalieh of Beirut announced its open ideas competition results at the Lebanese Ministry of Environment. The Civil Campaign is a coalition of individuals invested in safeguarding Beirut’s livability, advocating for the protection of the city’s seafront as a shared space and open access zone. The campaign had launched its open ideas competition on 24 March 2015, under the patronage of the Lebanese Ministry of Environment, the American University of Beirut’s Asfari Institute for Civil Society and the Nature Conservation Center. The competition called for participants “to articulate creative, sensitive, and environmentally sustainable design proposals for the conservation and future development of Dalieh.”

On 30 June 2015, the competition jury–composed of architects, landscape architects, an economist, and a lawyer–met and shortlisted seven entries out of the twenty submissions. The jury then selected three winning entries, featured below.

Jadaliyya Cities Page editors have endorsed The Civil Campaign to Preserve the Dalieh of Beirut since its launch, and continue to do so. We have published on Cities in December 2014 the Campaign’s Open Letter to Mr. Rem Koolhas, to which Mr. Koolhas responded in the comments section—a response that was later disseminated on social media, and in other e-zines. We hope the results of this open idea competition will inform Mr. Koolhas and other designers who may become involved in plans to develop the Dalieh of Beirut into a commercial venture to reconsider their commitments, and take a firm position against any real estate developments on this remarkable site that do not respect and conserve its ecology.

By publishing the winning entries of the Dalieh’s open ideas competition on Jadaliyya, we are disseminating to a wide public the range of alternative possibilities to develop the Dalieh of Beirut in environmentally sustainable ways that respect the site’s urban history, socio-spatial practices, and ecology. We hope this information will mobilize more urban activists to rally the cause of the Civil Campaign. The statement by the minister of environment to declare Dalieh a natural reserve demonstrates the range of impact such mobilization can have on the built and natural environments. The recent inclusion of Dalieh on the World Monuments Watch 2016 list is an additional testimony. We also hope the case of Dalieh will mobilize the political consciousness of urban dwellers of Beirut, and other Lebanese cities, against the increasing impunity of real estate development across Lebanon which is robbing us all of shared spaces, and instigate waves of collective action to reclaim rights to the commons. The recent protests in Beirut, associated with the garbage crisis, have incorporated such actions, as urban activists removed forcefully the fence that was installed around Dalieh earlier this year, and appropriated the open areas of Zaitunah Bay.

In this bundle, we feature the the campaign’s press release about the competition, the competition jury’s report, the campaign’s background report on Dalieh, as well as the three winning entries’ presentation texts and maps.

 

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412