A call for sustainable growth in post war Lebanon : using scenario assessment method for strategic visioning in Aramoun -

Abstract

This thesis seeks to investigate an adequate urban planning and design framework that can address the threats of urban sprawl and environmental degradation that threaten the suburbs of Beirut (Lebanon) and many other large cities in the country. The thesis takes for case study Aramoun, a town located 20 km from Beirut. Since the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990, and owing to a variety of factors including the development of a modern infrastructure network connecting Beirut to its peripheries, but also skyrocketing land prices in the Lebanese capital city, an ill-defined post-civil war displacement policy (Bou Akar 2005), and others, Aramoun has attracted developers who invested in relatively large-scale, typically affordable housing projects. The wave of construction took the shape of scattered low quality developments and residential compounds that have spread on hilltops and valleys, and in the absence of a coherent development strategy. The thesis begins by investigating the existing master plan development guidelines, arguing that both in terms of its development and guidelines, the master plan fails to fulfill its promising of organizing and channeling building development because it falls prey to personal interests among local and regional stakeholders and second, and mostly, because it is blind to the actual processes of building development in the town. In order to develop an alternative planning framework, the thesis articulates a full-fledge analysis of development and growth patterns, showing that rather than a single logic of growth, Aramoun is torn between a local, relatively modest and slow pattern of growth and another, suburban process of production. While these two processes are intertwined at several levels, they also need to be understood in their differing speeds and logics. This realization then informs a design and planning intervention in the form of a visualization exercise in which ten town dwellers are invited to participate in the selection of future development scenarios. Thi