Commendation RIBA Award for Sustainable Design
In a city as dense as Beirut, where public spaces are scarce, securitized, and feared, the project maps potential spaces for non-sectarian commons. Building upon the theoretical statement Untangling Beirut's Sectarian Geographies, which tackled how sectarianism spatializes Beirut, the thesis identifies, categorizes, and catalogues Beirut's unbuildable lots. These sites, anomalies in the urban fabric that escape sectarian development, are too small by law and awkward in shape to be constructed.
Paired with material, legal, and logistical tactics, a non-exhaustive atlas of spaces is created as a toolkit for Beirut's dwellers to reclaim agency as actors of their built environment. Different insertions meander around the unbuildability of the sites, leveraging existing elements and resources through non-invasive structures. By retrieving and making visible vacant and municipal land, they answer the need for common civic spaces. Navigating sectarian geographies and the intricacies of infrastructures and real estate, the designs become secular and mundane structures of daily life. Dwellers negotiate to find space for alternative collective narratives on the fringes of sectarian planning.
Through this, the lots (representing around 1% of Beirut's surface) emerge as interstitial openings for potentially disruptive mobilizations, creating thresholds within the divisions in which the Lebanese operate.
Tutor(s)