Grounding heritage in locality an urban design intervention for Gemmayzeh's neighborhood ecological landscapes - by Ibrahim Hassan Mneimne

Abstract

The conventional conceptions / definitions of heritage have been the platform from which many heritage preservation policies have sought credibility. Unfortunately, many of those polices have proven to be failures or inapplicable at best, especially when addressing heritage at the national level. Accordingly, heritage has to be approached with a more appropriate conception. Sources that provide the essential constituents of any heritage site are: memory, identity and ownership. As a result, to sustain authentic heritage, one needs to link it back to practices of the users which generated this heritage in the first place. Such practices can best be found at the local levels in places such as neighborhoods. Accordingly, neighborhoods become an ever regenerating heritage site, sites that embody practices through the social construction, attachment, interaction and experiential elements of its local community. Such site setting will always contain the structural elements of an authentic heritage. Gemmayzeh is identified in this thesis as an urban neighborhood whose heritage is an outcome of its diversified constituents. Gemmayzeh is a repository for many Beiruti historic buildings and vegetation that area utilized and sustained by a closely knit social fabric casting a feel of “village” within the city. Heritage sites are of high importance to their city identity, hence a need for new intervention policies to sustain this heritage arises instead of leaving them subject to the threats of market driven forces. Heritage should be reread from a holistic ecological perceptive in order to produce an intervention satisfying the sustainability criteria. The methodology of Ecological Landscapes Design is a way to reach those desired goals using its Ecological Landscape Associations (ELA’s) and Landscape Character Zones. This methodology will be used to reread Gemmayzeh holistically and thus propose an intervention within the same frame of work tailored for each zone and for interrelations amongst those zones. This approach provides also a suitable framework to tackle the threats of gentrification that target heritage sites within a city resulting in eradicating heritage or at best purging their authenticity.