‘Slums' into Skyscrapers:The Urban History, Spatial Production and Erasure of Beirut's Ghalghoul Neighbourhood, 1840-1970

Abstract

This thesis reconstructs the unwritten history and spatial production of Ghalghoul, a popular, peri-central neighbourhood of Beirut throughout Lebanon’s late Ottoman, French Mandate, and post-independence periods. It is based on an analysis of a variety of sources, including city and cadastral maps, urbanism plans, parliamentary debates and decrees, contemporary scientific surveys, photography, and Lebanon’s bourgeois Francophone press. This thesis shows how between 1958 and 1970, urban planners, architects, social scientists, bureaucrats, and journalists promoted Ghalghoul’s erasure via an urban renewal project. To justify its erasure, they produced distorting representations of the architecturally, functionally, religiously, and socio-economically diverse and lively quarter. These misrepresented Ghalghoul as dilapidated, insalubrious, frozen, and lacking notable economic, social, or cultural value as well as dynamism. However, this thesis argues that the project itself generated several of these alleged conditions it claimed to cure. The thesis demonstrates that class played a significant role in the process as it demonstrates that in Ghalghoul’s erasure, the interests of the more affluent were privileged over the mostly lower- and middle-class residents of the neighbourhood. Moreover, the thesis identified longue-durée trends in Ghalghoul’s urban planning as, due to personal and ideological continuities, all later reconstruction schemes adopted similar justifications for the neighbourhood’s demolition, which Solidere realized in 1995.