Post-Blast Beirut as Heterotopia

The sea as a dynamic space, Fragmented land, Projected Islands

Academic | Studio Spring 2021

Location: Beirut, Lebanon

Instructors : Prof. Robert Saliba - Prof. Hana Alamuddin

Design Proposal: Razan F. Elmrayed

The heterotopic approach challenges the existing order of post-blast Beirut and attempts to articulate a model that reciprocates the conditions inherent in contexts of crisis. The literature likens heterotopic structures to linguistic disorder and describes it as a process that seeks to map out the knowledge underlying several, juxtaposed sites of resistance or conflict. The design development attempts to speculate the possibilities of integrating heterotopic urban conditions as an extension of the urban character and the performance of post-blast Beirut, in order to identify strategies through which heterotopia is no more fought but exercised.

Since the Mediterranean plays a crucial role in Beirut’s growth and sustenance, the heterotopic dimension of Beirut is present most prominently along the sea/city edge. As such, Beirut’s port area consists of heterotopic patches that serve to fragment the shore edge through spatial and vocational conflictions, that seek to exploit the sea on one end and the and land on the other further expanding the divide. The august blast has deepened the separation between these patches and has reinforced the spatial conditioning of their heterotopic identities, resulting in abandoned, damaged and isolated islands that neither engage the sea nor the city. Rather, they now behave as buffer zones alienating the relationship between the two.

Since different parts of Beirut encounter many of the previously discussed hterotopic conditions, it is viable to identify strategies through which heterotopia is no more fought but rather exercised, to use it as a tool for acknowledging heterotopic conditions as valid urban phenomenons that has the potential to be appropriated and reinforced efficiently through design. As such the study reiterates notions of fragmentation and division in attempt to identify their inherent space of opportunity, wherefore strategies of separation are tested through context related heterotopic conditions to better Inform the theoretical understanding of Beirut’s post-blast area.