BRPI [Beirut River: Portrait & Injection]
The Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedoms collaborates with Studio Madane on a project called ‘The Beirut River: Portrait and Injections’, with Madane’s aspiration to engage the youth in socio political reform and decision-making through research and practice.
Studio Madane
Studio Madane is a Lebanese-based youth-led collective that initiates civic + sociopolitical reform and advocates for its progressivist program while working with & for marginalized communities including minorities, women, LGBTQ+ and other vulnerable groups.
Madane aims to yield an economically and socially sustainable Lebanon with operating and inclusive institutions as articulated in its socio-political vision for the country. The studio fosters active civil societies and merit-based ecosystems. It utilizes result-oriented and rights-based approaches to advance its hands-on projects and progressivist vision.
Studio Madane validates its sociopolitical plan through designing projects that promote urban regeneration, digitization, decentralization, public development, site analysis, social contracts, and more. Madane uses multidisciplinary practices, reflected by seven working groups, and engages different actors in society.
Seeing that recruitment has channeled different individuals from society [architects, artists, journalists, photographers, authors, researchers, volunteers, nappers, surveyors…] into different departments, a flexible system was crucial.
The ‘Work Dynamics Workshop’ was designed to allow separate working contracts for each working group. The members of each cluster built their own contracts which pertained to the working hours, working days, communication platform selection, and anything that related to the work ethic of those in the field.
Workflow
It is of the essence at Studio Madane to gather the youth to develop a workflow model that is custom to the context and actors in the project at hand. One step forward that the youth took, since the onset of the October 17th revolution in 2019, was their interest in converting all the slogans and noble objectives into practice.
Urban Environment
Photographic surveys were used to convey the socio-political realities through the physicalities of the urban environment. How are the residents using barriers and props to define their living? The authorities, unions of residents, business owners, and other stakeholders are potential collaborators in the lack of order in the cities.
Research Question
Does reform, the promise of Lebanon’s ‘leaders,’ affect people’s political decision-making when it arrives from a political alternative?
Narrative
The current political class has not changed in Lebanon for the past 30 years [Dr Lina Khatib, Lebanon's Politics and Politicians] and, with that, the living conditions continue to deteriorate. Despite that, affiliations to the same leaders persist because of the many promises they continue to make. Can providing these people an effective and useful alternative alter their affiliations? Can direct reform, perhaps civic reform in their neighborhoods, affect their political decision-making?
The Karantina - Nahr Beirut - Bourj Hammoud radius is a socially, demographically, ethnically, economically, environmentally, and politically controversial area. It is a radius that picks up a fraction of the capital Beirut, and a fraction of its northern suburbs [local christians, local muslims, and non-locals [Harake, Nabaa Neighborhood Profile, Bourj Hammoud, Beirut]. This ground provides multidisciplinary research the richness that it requires.
The mappers and surveyors from the Artists & Laborers working group went on several ´kazdoura´ [strolls] between the areas and identified a lot of phenomena in the urban landscape. The lines mark the paths taken, and the points mark socio-political, environmental, and physical informalities.
‘Kazdoura’ Map
Quantitative
In their first assessment, it was shown that almost 100% of the barriers in the photographs invade public space, and nearly 50% occupy sidewalks. More than half are immovable installations.
[0:50 - 1:33] “...by attempting to fix anything, we pose a threat to the dominant parties…” This testimony resonates with a lot of the locals’ thoughts who want to create change.
The recordings by the Documenters group testify the inability of locals to create change-making initiatives without threatening their position in society.
Album 02: State Exterminates Citizens
Track 07: “I Can’t Imagine Change, Forget It”
It is starting to become clear that political parties have completely consumed public offices, which has consequently caused municipalities to become bodies that are in opposition to the citizens. Citizens feel like they are unable to create the necessary reform, without turning themselves into a direct threat to the state.
Karantina evolved from a hub of economic prosperity in the country to an isolated and highly militarized island that has no infrastructure to recover from any inconvenience, let alone the August 4th explosion.
Bourj Hammoud is in the dark and witnessing unprecedented clashes between locals and immigrants, and between locals themselves of different ethnicities. Nahr Beirut continues to act as a wound in the middle, and the residents are ‘trapped’ because of their passion for their neighborhood of birth, but also suffocated.
Mind Map
The Documenters & Visual Creators, whose goal was to conduct and develop documentation for social impact, began their field work by conducting field surveys and testimonies from the residents. The testimonies were juxtaposed over the geography.
Organized Entropy
A film was conducted as a testament to the findings. What is the relationship between the residents, and between themselves and the land? A focus group of specific profiles was spoken to from the beginning of the project until the end.
Regional Map
The Urbanists and Environmentalists superimposed their architectural and social behavior-related findings onto the geography as well. It allowed them to spot the plot of intervention out of a selection of interesting sites.
Plot Selection
The selected plot for intervention was redrawn, and it acts as an updated and detailed plan in comparison to the one provided by the state. This document is downloadable and usable. The 3d scan is also a public document that can be used to get a different visualization of the plot.
Town hall 1
The collective discussion between all working group members and advisors had many takeaways, and the most important one was regarding future prospects. Now that the portrait is clearer, what types of interventions can be injected?
Joining Interventions
Many urban informalities showed positive contributions. These are attempts to achieve healing: extra space, planting, walkability, parking, sanitation… The two essentials were communal spaces, and storage/ disposal spaces.
Program of Civic Reform Proposal
The demands and end users were tabulated and crossed to each other in order to set guidelines for a potential civic intervention.
Dergelet, 2020
Wifi was installed in 35 public spaces in Cuba. The outcome of this injection to public spaces gathered a lot of people to common areas and gave significance to the public realm. The ambition is quite similar.
Photomontages
The sketches transformed to scenarios. The three pillars of the intervention[s] should align with resting/ playing + trading/ ‘newelne’ + powering/ charging/ wifi. A self-sufficient capsule that merges the three scenarios is intended to tap into the necessary sociopolitical healing.
Town hall 2
However, since there are many geolocations that were pinned as identically vulnerable, and could benefit from some of these scenarios, if not all, it is necessary to see the capsule as one injection within a series. This was a very important takeaway from the second town hall discussion.
Exploded Isometric
The capsule can be fragmented into three distinct installations, each accommodating for one of the previously mentioned scenarios, and can be merged into one capsule that hosts all.
Accessible Map
The next possible sites to investigate were all hosts of urban informalities and states of community dysfunction. The surveyors from the Artists & Laborers working group geolocated all their reports to an open Google Maps platform.
SITMUN
This technique of connecting an urban situation to a geolocation is familiar to some municipalities in Catalunya, Spain. Municipal Civil Protection encourages participatory governance to advance the action towards reform while including the residents and stakeholders.
Architectural Drawing of Civic Reform Proposal
The civic reform proposal was also proposed to the focus group. It included the architectural drawings of the capsule. These drawings are some of the drawings that are to be submitted to a separate construction-oriented grant. They were shared with the locals to convey the level of seriousness of the project.
Reflection
Despite their perception of freshness, contextuality, and practicality of Studio Madane’s proposal, residents still rendered them as another vision that is far from manifestation due to the multitude of tangible and intangible obstacles. Even if the proposed change was applied, it does not seem to have the competence to generate the necessary reset in people’s political choices; whereas, there was room for hope that several layers of applied change could alter people’s affiliations.
In this hands-on project, Studio Madane has developed the concept notes for a digital reform project and a civic reform project that are scalable and have both short and long term impact on our communities. There is a great idea regarding which citizen-centered, healing, and pragmatic direction should be taken, which is why the project is open to extension, especially in the application of the two reform proposals.
Lebanese Clientelism
As much as people are suffocating from their reality, they have also managed to take advantage of the condition to benefit themselves in whichever way they can. While some are bartering expensive tires for military protection, others are profiting financially. This reality cements the crises because of lifelines tied to it. It emphasizes the necessity of institutional reform that branches from socio political, and civic reform works in parallel.
Publications about BRPI
The approach towards this study is a pilot that can be implemented in different contexts to retrieve answers to the same question. This project was conducted by Studio Madane’s multidisciplinary approach towards socio-political reform, meaning the job happened transversely across distinct fields of work and craft. This generated diverse outcomes. The project was acknowledged by a couple media platforms and exhibited in Barcelona, Spain.