Everyday Practices as Urban Marvellous Realism: Five Nomadic "Vagues" in Beirut

VOLUME 7 ISSUE 2

The International Journal of

Social, Political, and Community Agendas in the Arts

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The International Journal of Social, Political, and Community Agendas in the Arts …………………………………

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Everyday Practices as Urban Marvellous Realism: Five Nomadic “Vagues” in Beirut Carole Lévesque, University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada Abstract: Following the several political upheavals that have inhabited contemporary Beirut, the transfiguration of the city is now being conducted by massive capital investments and real estate speculation. Yet, despite this renewed transformation, pockets of the city are left stagnant, neither at war nor in reconstruction. While waiting to see which private investor might take over these areas, some have taken a life of their own, appearing as the only remaining spaces where alternatives might still be possible. It is through these forgotten neighborhoods that opportunities for other proposals emerge, where the city as a found object can project its own and differentiated future. This essay presents the district of Bachoura as one of such found urban pieces. Located in a pivotal position between thriving neighborhoods, Bachoura is, at most, a large “terrain vague” within the city center. Because it is still largely neglected by the recent reconstruction, the neighborhood holds a chance to contribute to alternative discourses on the found character of the city and on the value of everyday practices. Building on the intricacies of found situations, improvised uses and local narratives, a series of five nomadic and transitional personal infrastructures explore how the meeting of the literary marvellous realism, the “terrain vague” and temporary architecture can provide opportunities for creative proposals to emerge. These machine-like rooms, while decidedly grounded in the social condition, grow to be invented places without definite locations and propose that despite the yoke of neo-liberalist urban development, pieces of “Bachourianmarvellous-realness” could still stroll the new landscape.

Keywords: Everyday, Terrain Vague, Vague Urbain, Marvellous Realism, Temporary Architecture, Alejo Carpentier, Beirut, Bachoura, Solidere

The Recent Everyday Practice of Beirut

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ebanon is a country that has had a long history of successive conquests, destruction, violence and re-invention of its landscape. From the Phoenicians through to the French, the successive conquerors have left their marks throughout cities, villages and mountains.

The affirmation of one’s power through the re-construction of a new fabric appears as a familiar pattern. In its more recent history, political struggles have widely been manifested and fought in the capital, where several upheavals have inhabited contemporary Beirut and transformed the city yet again. Through the long and complex civil war, followed by occupation, assassinations, and bombardments, the city, first divided along what came to be known as the “Green Line”, saw huge numbers of civilians fleeing the country or being displaced within its boundaries, and neighborhoods severely damaged, sometimes to be abandoned, sometimes to take on a partial inhabitation. In 1994, the private venture group Solidere (Société libanaise pour le développement et la reconstruction de Beyrouth), led by former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, took over the central district, offering returns on investments in exchange for property rights.

While the processes and outcomes of the renewal strategy have been, and are still, widely discussed and questioned1, especially in regards to unequal negociations between the venture group, owners and displaced Lebanese squatters, it has brought to the city yet a new period of reconstruction and transformation, this time not in the name of an invader, but rather following the precepts of neo-liberal development, resulting in massive capital investment and real-estate speculation. Opinions about Solidere are generally of opposite perceptions: either it is seen as the only mechanism that could bring central Beirut back on its feet, or it is the unforgiving

1 Amongst a large number of journal articles and publications on the subject, the reader can refer to the following publications: Vale, Lawrence, Thomas Campanella (eds). 2005. The Resilient City: how modern cities recover from disaster. Oxford: Oxford University Press, and Rowe, Peter G., Hashim Sarkis. 1998. Projecting Beirut: Episodes in the Construction and Reconstruction of the Modern City. Munich: Prestel.

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corporation that has destroyed what was left of the pre-war fabric; it is either seen as the pragmatics of urban development mixed with clever economics, or neo-liberalism at its worst, making downtown Beirut a private city for the affluent; it is either understood as the good will of a venture wanting to inject life back into the Lebanese capital, or one that has sold the soul of Beirut to international developers and land owners. Despite these diverging opinions, one must admit that the rapid transformation of the city center brought a relative sentiment of calm and hope that peace might endure (even if this sentiment is disproportionately inflated by the influx of foreign fortunes and accompanied by armed policemen and soldiers guarding the newly rebuilt areas), giving Beirut a chance to redefine itself again as a worldly capital. While this state of affairs needs to be acknowledged, one also needs to see that Solidere did very little, if nothing at all, for the city as a larger entity in regards to infrastructure, public transportation and diversity within the center. One also has to see that the spirit in which Solidere has acted since its creation has opened wide the door to further major luxurious developments to take place within historical and more popular neighborhoods. It has, in addition, laid the ground for itself and others alike to plan incremental developments further back into the city towards peripheral neighborhoods.

If it is quite normal for a city to be constituted by all sorts of neighborhoods, lots or areas, some more prosperous than others, some better taken care of than others, the obvious inequalities from one neighborhood to the next, from one building to the next, are everywhere in Beirut: derelict buildings next door to high-tech towers, city blocks without proper electricity next to fully air-conditioned ones, construction workers living in desperate conditions within the site of the luxurious towers they build. And if both Solidere and the general speculation present a healthy image of the city’s rebirth, infrastructure remains inadequate in most of greater Beirut: if located within the municipality’s boundary, electricity is most often available on a regular schedule with only 3 hour-long power cuts per day, but randomly provided with daily 3 to 12 hour-long cuts when outside the boundary; water provision, unsafe for drinking, is off and on during the summer months; garbage is most often picked up by the private company Sukleen, but often discarded in abandoned houses or parcels, thrown to the sea, or burnt along a mountainside. Density per square kilometer is usually high, with a stock of buildings in a wide range of conditions.

While Solidere and other major development companies are busy rebuilding Beirut, transforming its once mid-size scale to high-end residential high-rises, a few pockets of the city have been left stagnant, no longer at war, nor in re-construction. While waiting to see which private investors will eventually take over the remaining areas, some have taken a life of their own, secluded from the general rapid urban development, and at the same time appearing as the only remaining neighborhoods where alternatives to the flattening speculation might still be possible. This essay proposes to explore, within Bachoura, one of these neighborhoods, how the meeting of the literary marvellous realism, the terrain vague and temporary architecture can provide opportunities for creative proposals to emerge, and where the city as a found object can begin to project its own and differentiated space.

Terrains Vagues and the Everyday Experience of the City The spatial experience of the city is physical, social, spontaneous and surprising: its perception is built in the instant, in the moment of a sudden meeting on the street, along a façade, behind a building. The city is discovered haphazardly: it is complicit in building our perceptions of it.

Manuel de Solà-Morales proposed, in Designing Cities, that the uses we make of our cities, our own personal uses, is what constitutes, for each of us and in particular ways, the city. Once we learn how to appropriate its spaces, learn how to transform its uses, then will we be in a position to transfigure urban fragments in intelligible and potentially pleasant ways. We must see in this pleasure the idea of a “healthy” dialogue: too often do we consider the city through its ills, its symptoms and various discomforts, as if we lived in hypochondriac urban bodies. In an approach that could be qualified as optimist, Sola-Morales acknowledges in the city a dynamism that we must utilize and reinforce, an energy that must stimulate urban space so that we not feed it 22

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already made solutions, seductive forms or straight forward answers to complex questions. The “architect’s ideal role in the city”, and here we should add the artist’s, the urban designer’s, or even the creative user’s, to borrow a term defined by Jonathan Hill2, “is not necessarily the invention of forms or the solution of problems, but the creation of meanings, the clarification of what is obscure and the enrichment of what is muddled.”3 In other words, our ideal role should be that of the creation, or the stimulation of the conditions of desire.

Too often do we attribute a bad reputation to desire –man is enslaved to his desires, and consider that desire is, amongst other things, the demonstration of a shortcoming, of envy or of dissatisfaction. But William James’ theory of emotions teaches us that “to desire” is equivalent to “to imagine” 4: we imagine situations that bring us pleasure and happiness because they help us in seeking the wonderful. To desire is to have a sentiment lived in the present, in the immediacy, in all its urgency. While it may seem obvious to associate desire and pleasure to idleness and uselessness, the urban pleasure of the latter finds its purpose in its ability to construct contradictions to the expectations we usually lend to the city. Henri Lefèbvre saw these diverted uses as being meaningful in what he called “transfunctionality” 5, suggesting that uselessness is fundamentally linked to play, and like play, has many uses while it is, simultaneously, not useful at all. To be successful, the pleasure of uselessness must be devious, ingratiate itself with the city, and wedge itself within the existing context.

While we might have to find our own ways to trigger desire, small parts of cities’ fabric have already found theirs, in an unwanted or unforeseen turn of events perhaps, but that nonetheless leave the pleasures of imagination inhabit the everyday experience and occupation of the city.

Tugged between buildings, forgotten behind infrastructures, hiding within fences, left-over, abandoned or simply deemed unworthy of construction areas are pieces of the city where chance is possible, where ad-hoc situations are welcomed and where appropriations are the engine of their well-being. Also known as terrains vagues, they are both reminiscent of an economic failure and the locus of imaginative beginnings. It is no surprise that terrains vagues have become, over the years, amongst the favorite spaces for art installations, demonstrations, local events and the likes. While its true nature is really that of a stagnant capital, the terrain vague reverses its financial downturn into possible urban opportunities.

When coining the term terrain vague in his contribution to Anyplace, Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubiò proposed that empty or abandoned spaces, that is, precisely limited grounds fit for construction either unused or underused, were portions of cities that offered evocative potentials of free, available and unengaged exploitation 6. Though Solà-Morales Rubiò was in fact speaking in terms of a positive fascination, it is easy to imagine the perceived threat that lies within its boundaries: largely considered as eyesores spoiling the politically correct image of the wishedfor city, empty lots are most often ignored, relegated to parking lots or worse, to inner city garbage dumps. It is therefore quite common to hear observations on these various unwanted areas using a descriptive vocabulary filled with negativity. The simple denomination of these areas demonstrates common disdain: badlands, derelict sites, brown fields, dead zones; and again in their descriptive characteristics: uncertain, undefined, imprecise, disengaged. Based on this first set of words, one could argue that such sites manifest, land-wise, what Foucault proposed with his heterotopias, where the enacted utopia of the unwanted site and possible affiliated uses, 2

Hill identifies three types of users: the passive user, who is coherent, foreseeable and who accepts the authority of the architect; the reactive user, who can modify certain characteristics of a given space but who acts, still, within the spectrum of possibilities provided by the architect; and the creative user who creates new spaces, who radically transforms a given space or engages in transgressive behaviors. While passive and reactive users depend on existing, determined and fixed conditions, the creative user consciously deviates from or pushes the limits of given spaces and their associated behaviors. Hill, Jonathan. 2003. Actions of Architecture, Architects and Creative Users. London: Routeledge.

3 Solà-Morales, Manuel. 1999. Manual de Solè Morales: progettare città = Desiging Cities. Milan: Electa, 53 4 James, William. 2007(1890). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Cosimo Classics.

5 Lefèbvre, Henri. 1940. Critique of Everyday Life, volume 1. London, New York: Verso 6 Solà-Morales Rubiò, Ignasi de. 1995. Terrain Vague. In Cynthia Davidson (ed.). Anyplace. Cambridge: MIT Press, 118123

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or lack thereof, take place within our cities. For Foucault, the “utopia of the real” implied activities set in locations at odds with normative experience such as the cemetery or the roadside motel, representing real places but contesting and reversing reality7. They are meant to allow protagonists to expose the forbidden, to transgress the normative or to participate in unlawful acts. If Foucault thought of these sites as being at odds with standardized, acceptable activities and behaviors, it is easy to imagine the terrain vague as an equivalently obscure, misunderstood place denouncing the “real” city.

What the terrain vague suggests, within its denunciation, is that there can be a way to project the future within what is already there and experienceable, that small projections of reality exist within the existing fabric of the everyday. What it essentially attempts to do is to brush away the fear that the everyday is hopeless, fearful or simply ordinary. Rather, it proposes that found situations contain the imaginative requirements to a different future, if one is willing to observe and is prepared to admit the possibility of a stored creative potential in the most unexpected places.

Marvellous Realism and the Vague Urbain The creative potential of the everyday is well illustrated in the literary marvellous realism of the Swiss-Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, where the play of images from reality challenges perceptions of the acceptable, of the imaginable and of hidden possible realities. According to Carpentier, we only need to be attentive to the emergence of the unusual waiting to be seen amongst the real, so that the most ordinary everyday can compete with the most creative imagination. In The Kingdom of this World, a novel set in French occupied Haiti, Ti Noël, the main character, shows us that the most wonderful revelations can jump at us inadvertently: While his master was being shaved, Ti Noël could gaze his fill at the four wax heads that adorned the counter by the door. The curls of the wigs, opening into a pool of ringlets on the red baize, framed expressionless faces. (…) By an amusing coincidence, in the window of the tripe-shop next door there were calves’ heads, skinned and each with a sprig of parsley across the tongue, which possessed the same waxy quality. (...)

Only a wooden wall separated the two counters, and it amused Ti Noël to think that alongside the pale calves’ heads, heads of white men were served on the same tablecloth. Just as fowl for a banquet are adorned with their feathers, so some experienced, macabre cook might have trimmed the heads with their best wigs.8 In his surreal vision of masters’ heads being served for dinner, Carpentier proposes that there is no separation between the everyday banalities and the wonders of an imaginary world, and shows that reality is itself wonderful. That is, in the sense of being unexpected, meaningful, and imaginative, more than a simple naïve happiness. Carpentier explores different ways in which the marvellous can augment the layers of the narrative by embedding other realities within situations so that they surpass our understanding of the possible daily life of a colony, creating, with the addition of the different explorations, a plausible sense in which every encountered moment can be the seed for the wonderful to grow. As if on a pendulum, Carpentier crafts, throughout the novel, exchanges between natural elements, body parts, functions, landscapes, colors and sentiments, embedding resonances between seemingly unrelated objects, events, or believes. For example, while a mysterious poison spreads over the colony, killing animals and white masters, Ti Noël rejoices at the coming uprising of the long awaited for king-warrior, and in his imagining of the coming events, weaves a known reality with one where exchanges blur the limits at which reality begins to transform: 7 Foucault, Michel. 1984 (1967). Des espaces autres. Hétérotopies. In Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, n°5, octobre, 46-49 8 Carpentier, Alejo. 1957 (1954). The Kingdom of this World. Trans. Harriet de Onis. New York : The Noonday Press, 10-11

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in that great hour -said Ti Noël- the blood of the Whites would run into the brooks, and the loas, drunk with joy, would bury their faces in it and drink until their lungs were full. 9 Through repetition of themes, Carpentier is also successful at generating a growing belief that what might have seemed absurd or unreal, is in fact everywhere around us and that through the observation of these repetitions, the unreal is integrated to our experience of the real. It also provides an understanding of the everyday as a space in which the wonderful cohabit with the ordinary. As such, following Ti Noël's observation on the calves' heads in the tripe-store window, he begins to observe how indeed, "the morning was rampant with heads"10, remarking on the various prints hung in front of the bookseller, picturing kings and dignitaries, until he hears the "voice of his master, who emerged from the barber's with heavily powdered cheeks. His face now bore a startling resemblance to the four dull wax faces that stood in a row along the counter, smiling stupidly." 11 The presence of the heads continues as Ti Noël has to carry, across town and into the plantation, a "chill skull under his arm, thinking how much it probably resembled the baldhead of his master hidden beneath his wig."12 In insisting on the presence of heads, on the different formats that heads appear and on the versatility between two or three dimensional, printed, powdered, with a wig, or parsley, animal or human, over a body, on a shelf or under an arm, heads are no longer the essential part of a complete being that one carries at the upper extremity of one's body, but rather become an apparatus that is at most decorative and interchangeable. As Carpentier relates the dramatic end of the colony and the eventual enslavement of Haitians by their new king, the marvellous-real gains its raison d'être as one builds one’s vision of an everyday reality that encompasses beauty, wonder, and surprises, but mostly, that trains the eye to be acute for wonderful ordinariness that surpasses, enriches and transforms reality.

The eye trained for marvellous-realness, when set outside the novel, finds its best room for exercise within the city, through the network of terrains vagues. When considered as a network of open land, in the sense of physically empty as much as in the sense of open-ended, terrains vagues generate an independent layer within which alternative urban systems can take place. One of such systems appears in well-defined areas where the marvellous-real is at its extreme: areas of soon to come transformation, inhabited terrains vagues, or what I shall call a vague urbain13.

While the grand scale developments are busy redefining central, or even peripheral areas of cities, there sometimes remain large inhabited areas completely neglected, overseen, ignored, defying and challenging how the city is to be perceived and lived. Though the logic of the present argument should simply be content that such areas exist, it also knows that their state of vagueness is only temporary and that they will inevitably fall under pressure. The question is really how long will they resist and to what cost. But while they are indeed resisting, they provide a space for dwellers to put their cleverness at play and to demonstrate how the ingenuity entailed in times of need and of urban laissez-faire can invent and create other possible perceptions and uses of the city. It also provides the urban wanderer with a space where to reflect upon a city's trajectory.

Contrary to the terrain vague, these areas do not create an independent network as such, but create, within their well-defined boundaries, thriving urban systems. Just like an ecosystem organizes itself in ways to sustain its various parts, the vague urbain develops an independent organizational mode of operation. Considered in terms of sustainable communities, the model of the vague appears almost as a potential solution: walkability, local economy, mixed used areas, active local culture, inclusive participation, are to a large extent present. What truly differs from 9

Carpentier, The Kingdom of this World, 42 Carpentier, The Kingdom of this World, 11 11 Carpentier, The Kingdom of this World, 15 12 Carpentier, The Kingdom of this World, 15 13 Lévesque, Carole. 2013. Welcome to Bachoura, or the found city as interstice. In Barron, Patrick (ed.). Terrain Vague: the interstitial as Site, Concept, Intervention. New York: Routledge.

10

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the politically correct model is that the independent organization can only be temporary, can only exist because eyes are looking away or because no one has yet managed or dared to venture within its limits. Until land and properties are sold and occupants evicted, until “proper” replacement quarters are built, vagues urbains offer the possibility for the most basic, ordinary, banal, free activities to take place, in the ways that make sense to the inhabitants, and in ways that negative liberty, imagination and the wonderful can find their space of negotiation.

Bachourian Marvellous-Realness Cornered by prosperous Solidere and Monot (another thriving neighborhood where fashionable restaurants, bars and boutiques of local designers and imported goods have grown), Bachoura is a large inhabited and vibrant vague urbain within Beirut city center, standing still and resisting, for the time being, pressures from fierce investors and speculators’ fashionable residential towers. In a state of in-between, without a future other than the eventual tabula-rasa that will make way for developers 14, and a present overwhelmed with the weight of the recent past, Bachoura appears, for now, as one of the few remaining neighborhoods in central Beirut where finding an imagined other is possible, and where differentiated fragments can be projected.

Source(s): Lévesque, 2011

Bachoura’s first encroachment was a triangular cemetery embedded in the hill and emerging out, towards Beirut, as the hill gently slops down towards what used to be a compact and walled city, concentrated around its sou'q on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. Amongst the first settlers of the area, besides a few bourgeois private summer residences, was a hospital and orphanage, built next to the cemetery, of which remains a partial foundation wall, leaving clear a large area now used by the local children as a soccer field. The urbanization of Beirut grew steadily during the Ottoman period and long haussmanian avenues were stretched out during the French mandate, reaching out to most of the remote neighborhoods in the periphery. While the municipal district of Bachoura was drawn around the cemetery, the Damascus Road drew a clear cut to the east. The north-south axis was maintained, while the southern east-west road, linking Hamra to the Beirut River remained an important cross-city artery. Bachoura had crossing streets 14

At the time of writing this essay, in April 2012, the speculative pressure had already gained terrain: evictions, throughout the neighborhood, began in the summer of 2011; projects on the northern edge included luxurious office, residential, hotel and commercial center towers, all at various stages of the design process; on the southern edge, Independence street was incrementally being transformed into a commercial artery with mid-rise commercial buildings, constructing a new very effective frontier-wall.

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allowing direct passages from downtown Beirut to Basta, the southern district, and beyond, until 1968, when an elevated highway was built over the northern boundary, eliminating any direct connection with the center, as well as sectioning the district in two distinctive parts.

Soon after the war began in the 1970s, two supposedly temporary metal bridges were built over Independence Street so as to ease the cross-city traffic. The bridges have well outlived the war and are still there today, having killed any chance of community ties or dialogue between Bachoura and Basta.

Source(s): Lévesque, 2011

The proximity of the neighborhood to the Damascus road was fatal for the community who, for the most part, fled to more secure places early on in the civil war. The Damascus road, to the eastern edge, was used as the divide between east and west Beirut: buildings along the divide became homes to snipers, while the inner layers of buildings became shields to further-in residences. The Green Line, literally green with over-grown vegetation that flourished over the 15 years’ long civil war, spread the devastation to the adjacent neighborhoods, including Bachoura. Not only was Bachoura unfortunately located along the green battlefield, it was also neighbor to downtown, where all had been abandoned to snipers, wild dogs and corpses.

Following the decree of the amnesty law of 1991, downtown was eventually cleaned, taken down in most parts, and built anew. While other neighborhoods followed with their reconstruction, Bachoura remained, for the most part, intact, or one should say, as a post-warlooking zone. Most buildings were eventually claimed by displaced south-Lebanese, others turned into workers’ housing, providing them with one-room apartments, or larger, but overcrowded ones, with the recent addition of Syrian construction workers’ informal settlements who have built shelters along the cemetery wall.

Submerged under everyday banalities, this vague urbain, itself punctuated with a large number of various size terrains vagues, fell into an everlasting present. Yet, under the initial protective layer now maintained by its inhabitants, still lie possibilities of hopeful selfdetermination. Coincidentally, it’s local name, Khandaq el-Ghamiq, brings with it a whole alternative imaginative field: “the deep ditch”, in its English translation, suggests a world of its own, physically divided from a world further above, with the promise of never before seen combinations and constructions, be them real or imaginary.

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While there is a general disregard for the social, architectural and urban value of the neighborhood, Bachoura is not derelict: despite the closed confinements of the neighborhood between three major roadways, two of which are elevated, and the cemetery, also at a higher topography, together defining very clearly the extent of its (non) participation in the city, the neighborhood is filled with commerce, craftsmanship, a public school and several confessional ones, a mosque, and a vibrant market-street.

While it is certain that its disappearance is imminent, Bachoura is not vacant: despite its empty buildings either newly renovated, tumbling down or simply sitting, it is densely inhabited with people of all ages, occupying every corner in all sorts of creative ways.

If Bachoura is neither derelict nor abandoned, it is, without a doubt, uncertain, occupying a temporal no man’s land. Its permanence is being challenged and though it is still used as a territory worthy of inhabitation, it is now under the transformative eye of nascent prosperity.

Whether one’s worries lie in the historical buildings or with the residents of the neighborhood, all will be disposed of. But this is not to say we should fall into a pre-emptive nostalgia of a past that is still here. What is particularly relevant, meaningful and promising about this particular vague urbain is its creative potential before the moment of its transformation, when other possibilities can still be captured and imagined.

If Bachoura is clearly not a space offered to spontaneous appropriations, as Luc Lévesque would describe the terrain vague15, mostly due to its political “flavors” which trigger, more often than not suspicion and surveillance, it is nevertheless a terrain surprisingly open to curiosity and imagination. It also appears as a model of urban practice that finds its purpose and definition amongst its details. Unlike a crafted physical detail as found in the work of a highly skilled or experienced carpenter that could appear within an improvised or even meant-to-be-permanent construction, details in Bachoura come under the guise of meaningful events, repeated practices and accidental encounters. The Bachourian details are the means by which to construe both social and physical fabrics, to borrow and extend the idea of Frascari 16. They are also the means for Bachourians to find the capacity to articulate an everyday marvellous-realness and the substance for their occupation of the city.

Five Marvellously Vague Rooms In an effort to reveal, maintain and extend Bachourian details, I elaborated five nomadic and transitory personal infrastructures. Just as engineered infrastructures are essential to a city’s well being, so these machine-like rooms manifest, physically, essential practices found in Bachoura: the practices of storytelling, of walking and filching. While storytelling acts as a spatial and temporal trajectory, as a means to create sense, memory and value, walking appears as a search and need for the safeguard of found everyday details and seeds of potential occupation. If Thoreau spoke of walking as living amongst the untamed 17, walking, in Bachourian terms, supposes that one encounters and may prolong personal, yet collectively shared stories of the urban wild. It is the act of walking that links the stories so as to understand the untamed and the resilient. And here, a practice of filching begins: the collection of stories allows for surreptitious transformations and occupations of the city, which allow, in return, the creation of urban alternative narratives. The fugitive and transitory personal infrastructures thus stem from found situations and events, to become, as they belong to soon-to-disappear places, people, buildings and practices, invented places without definite locations, being pushed, rolled, pulled, swung or carried in the new city as nomadic personal terrains vagues. Whether A room for keeping 15 Lévesque, Luc. 2002. The Terrain vague as material – some observations. In House Boat/ occupations symbiotiques, Hull/Gatineau, AXNEO 7, 6-7 16 Frascari suggests that the detail entailed in construction processes, is more than a mere assembly of materials. For Frascari, both the construction and the construing of architecture as a discipline and ontology are anchored within the detail. Frascari, Marco. 1996(1984). The Tell-the-Tale Detail. in Nesbitt, Kate. Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: an Anthology of Architectural Theory, 1965-1995. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 498-51 17 Thoreau, Henry David. 1970 (1862). Walking. Carlisle, MA : Applewood Books.

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distractions away, A room for going where you don't need to be, A room for carrying stones, A room for hiding in the shadows of a room or A room for sharing essential things, all five seek to link the creative dimensions of Bachoura’s everyday, its margins, unstable context and imminent disappearance, with the possibility of an infiltration of Bachourian ways within the developing context: when Bachoura becomes a newer version of Solidere, the infrastructures will allow for pieces of Bachourian-marvellous-realness to wander and glean the new landscape. In trying to understand and seize the Bachourian everyday, the nomadic terrains vagues hope to rid us of a fear that the everyday is an ordinary and hopeless place. They rather propose that found situations contain the extraordinary and the imaginative, that they contain, in other words, a necessary wonderful.

Source(s): Lévesque, 2011

Whether referring to Lefèbvre’s everyday, where everydayness breathes temporality, or de Certeau’s proposal of the future being somewhere embedded in the present, a field of possible actions18, the nomadic personal infrastructures assert that the found can be a site of ambiguous temporality and inhabitation. That is why the infrastructures are presented in orthogonal projections: their drawing builds a dialogue between the informality of a found and projected everyday, a personification of knowledge through which the body produces and stores a silent knowledge, with the neutral communication of the architectural drawing. In this way, the drawings contribute to introduce the informality of the vague urbain, as a bodily knowledge, in the scholarly discourses of architecture and the cities it builds. The vagueness and strangeness of the infrastructures and the situations from which they emerge are thus associated, through their drawing, with an engineered savoir-faire.

Source(s): Lévesque, 2011

18

Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Entering the world of architectural representation, the rooms propose that the found city and its everyday is a field of imagination, embedded in a continuous succession of what might first seem as banal events. But as Jean-Francois Lyotard asserts in his Peregrinations, it is by paying close attention to small differences that the “real” events of the everyday are revealed: There are many events whose occurrence doesn’t offer any matter to be confronted, many happenings inside of which nothingness remains hidden and imperceptible, events without barricades. They come to us concealed under the appearance of everyday occurrences. To become sensitive to their quality as actual events, to become competent in listening to their sound underneath silence or noise, to become open to the “It happens that” rather than to the “What happens”, requires at the very least a high degree of refinement in the perception of small differences. 19

Source(s): Lévesque, 2011

With these nomadic personal infrastructures in mind, it becomes possible to think of the found city, of the “It happens that”, as a valuable present worthy of exploration, suggesting that the city as found is something we need to be ready for and willing to imagine. The imaginable city lies in our ability to find the vividness of possible situations intersecting with the ordinary and the everyday. Not only is the city as found something we need to imagine, the city as a site of found seeds of immanent alternatives can provide the means to resist the shortsightedness common to many urban development visions and supply the material from which to build hopeful potentials. It also becomes possible to think of Beirut as a city where temporary fragments can be welcomed as explorations questioning the relentless destruction of its found urban character and as practices for imagining other possible futures within the city.

19

Lyotard, Jean-François. 1988. Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event. New York: Columbia Press, 18

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LÉVESQUE: EVERYDAY PRACTICES AS URBAN WONDERFUL REALNESS

REFERENCES Carpentier, Alejo. 1957 (1954). The Kingdom of this World. Trans. Harriet de Onis. New York : The Noonday Press.

Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1984 (1967). Des espaces autres. Hétérotopies. In Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, n°5, octobre, 46-49 Frascari, Marco. 1996(1984). The Tell-the-Tale Detail. in Nesbitt, Kate. Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: an Anthology of Architectural Theory, 1965-1995. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 498-51.

Hill, Jonathan. 2003. Actions of Architecture, Architects and Creative Users. London: Routeledge.

James, William. 2007(1890). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Cosimo Classics.

Lefèbvre, Henri. 1940. Critique of Everyday Life, volume 1. London, New York: Verso.

Lévesque, Carole. 2013. Welcome to Bachoura, or the found city as interstice. In Barron, Patrick (ed.). Terrain Vague: the interstitial as Site, Concept, Intervention. New York: Routledge.

Lévesque, Luc. 2002. The Terrain vague as material – some observations. In House Boat/ occupations symbiotiques, Hull/Gatineau, AXNEO 7, 6-7 Lyotard, Jean-François. 1988. Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event. New York: Columbia Press.

Rowe, Peter G., Hashim Sarkis. 1998. Projecting Beirut: Episodes in the Construction and Reconstruction of the Modern City. Munich: Prestel.

Solà-Morales, Manuel. 1999. Manual de Solè Morales: progettare città = Desiging Cities.

Milan: Electa.

Solà-Morales Rubiò, Ignasi de. 1995. Terrain Vague. In Cynthia Davidson (ed.). Anyplace.

Cambridge: MIT Press, 118-123 Thoreau, Henry David. 1970(1862). Walking. Carlisle, MA : Applewood Books.

Vale, Lawrence, Thomas Campanella (eds). 2005. The Resilient City: how modern cities recover from disaster. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Carole Lévesque: Carole Lévesque holds an M.Arch from the University of British-Columbia and a PhD in the history and theory of architecture from the University of Montreal. Her work focuses on the potentials of small scale, temporary architecture in contributing to debates within the discipline and practices of architecture, and on alternative currents in the development of the contemporary city. She has taught at the schools of architecture of the University of Montreal and the American University of Beirut. She is professor at the School of Design at the University of Quebec in Montreal where she teaches graduate design studios, history, theory and criticism of design, as well as undergraduate thematic seminars. She is the author of À propos de l’inutile en architecture.

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The International Journal of Social, Political, and Community Agendas in the Arts is one of four thematically focused journals in the collection of journals that support the Arts and Society knowledge community—its journals, book series, conference and online community.

The journal explores the various points of interface of arts practices and communities, including the arts expressions of community and group identities, arts policies, art and government, art as activism, museums and galleries as institutions, arts in advertising, and public arts.

As well as papers of a traditional scholarly type, this journal invites presentations of practice—including experimental forms of documentation and exegeses that can with equal validity be interrogated through a process of academic peer review. This, for instance, might take the form of a series of images representing

ISSN 2326-9960

artistic practice, together with explanatory notes that articulate this practice with other, significantly similar or different and explicitly referenced practices.

The International Journal of Social, Political, and Community Agendas in the Arts is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.