Paper Abstracts

• Angus Gavin  The Corporate Discourse: New Planning Mechanisms, Design Competitions, Regional Branding

> Planning mechanisms for the regeneration of central Beirut introduced US/UK models new to Lebanon. A 3D urban design plan, replacing exploitation coefficients, responds to market demand and townscape opportunities, allowing the salvage of valuable heritage through transfer of building rights. The plan is street-based, assigning high value to the public domain at 49% of the land area, enhancing the downtown with almost half of Beirut’s green spaces. A key objective of downtown renewal is to reposition Beirut, recovering some of its prewar pre-eminence from the rising global cities of the Gulf. Cities are everywhere in competition. We have sought the talents of internationally acclaimed architects and public space designers to help reposition Beirut as the Levant’s multi-confessional, cosmopolitan city of history, culture, education and commerce: leisure destination of choice for the Arab World, the diaspora and a growing clientele from the US, Europe and Asia. Finally, through experience gained in Beirut, one of the largest and most challenging inner city and waterfront regeneration projects in the world today, we have established a strong, regional ‘brand’ of sustainable, mixed-use urban development and place-making in the Mediterranean tradition. We are now exporting this to other countries in the MENA and Mediterranean regions.

• Omar Abdelaziz Hallaj  The Cultural Discourse on Regionalism in Urban Design: A Case Study on the Role of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture

> The Aga Khan Award for Architecture was initiated 35 years ago against out of a concern over the increasedmarginalization of Muslim communities. The positing of a Muslim collective against a universal international style was problematic though the Award was not concerned with a specific ideological construct of Islam. Its focus was set on communities rather than on Islam. The world inhabited by Muslim communities was thought to be sufficiently diverse that no one single ideological construct would be able of dominating it. The main concern was to identify alternative practices that could help communities reorganize the built environment to meet their local needs. In the process the Award evolved into one of the strongest advocates for regionalism. However, to avoid a normative practice based on religion, the Award became identified with local social practices of space making and not system building. The mission of the successive juries was to recognize best practices and encourage self confidence in Muslim communities to solve their own problems. Such initiatives are often limited and non-replicable; replication being a normative taboo to be avoided. Over the years the Award gained a solid professional image as a socially orientated Architectural Awards. Yet, in its very insistence on not being ideologically normative it codified regionalism disguised in small scale collective action. The paper will try to focus on a number of urban projects that were nominated, short listed and/or awarded. The objective is to try to highlight how the process of identifying winning urban design projects was handled within the process of localizing collective action. Therefore, the emphasis was placed on collective construction processes and not on processes of constructing the collective.

• Christoph Wessling  Merging the Intercultural and Cross-Cultural: The Case of Joint Urban Design Workshops between Germany and Universities in the Arab World

> Since 2006 we have organised Joint Urban Design Workshops; nearly every year at different Universities of our cooperation network with the Universities of Aleppo, Baghdad, Cairo/Giza, Damascus, the American University of Beirut and the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus. All workshops concentrated on tasks and case studies following the thematic focal of our network –Vitalization of Historic City Districts. Mixed student groups with students from all participating Universities designed development concepts for the specific task and each group started with the priority on one of our general topics: “development of public spaces”, “community based development strategies”, “new typologies” and “urban design guidelines and the integration of traffic development”. The intercultural teamwork within the workshops makes the different social and educational backgrounds as well as the various working procedures of students from Germany and the Middle East visible. Sometimes, they made work even difficult. Nevertheless and maybe rather therefore were student-groups able to present joint and convincing design-results – within the short-term working time. More than on account of a clear workshop-structure those results were chiefly possible due to the meeting of different experiences, which led to new approaches.

• Thomas Stellmach Aleppo City Development Strategy: An Ecological-Regional Design Perspective

> This talk sketches out an urban vision for the city of Aleppo‚ reflecting its skills, people, mechanisms and potentials, and outlines a conceptual urban framework on a city–wide scale, in which they can flourish and evolve. In contrast to the existing masterplan and a dominant culture of over-regulation – that proved to be useless given the overwhelming informality of Aleppo’s development – it proposes a strategy that accepts the underlying forces of the city. Instead of working against them, it instrumentalises these urban mechanisms to secure future qualities and steer urban development. Through principles of flat administrative hierarchies, participation, phasing, space reservation, layered decentralization, integrated mobility and the introduction of strong public spaces of various scales, it proposes the reorganization the city based on its existing structure, socio-economic and environmental potentials. Far from proposing a final state of desirable development, it enables opportunities for future transformation and growth scenarios, through integrating the different components of the city which are too often seen as isolated aspects. The analysis of aerial maps, demographic development and the existing ratified masterplan grounded these ideas in the reality of the city. An integral part of this process was to show the structure of the city to the stakeholders via a diagrammatic set of illustrations, layer by layer — green spaces, centres, transport systems – which enabled them to see the city they are so familiar with in a new light. Transparency in decision making and a flexible strategic approach (opposed to a rigid masterplan) were certainly the major components we could introduce as western planners to the local practice.

• Sandra Frem Transforming Nahr Beirut: From Obsolete Infrastructure to Infrastructural Landscape

> Trans[forming] Nahr Beirut is a project that tackles several critical challenges in Beirut: water shortage, lack of public space, urban and ecological fragmentation, and obsolete infrastructure in a city pressured by development. Responding to such conditions, the project proposes a transformative process on Beirut’s canalized river -Nahr Beirut, where such issues are intersected and magnified. In the proposed transformation, the obsolete flood mitigation channel mutates into an ecological corridor that harvests/grows water for the city and becomes an infrastructural landscape that combines water and mobility systems with opportunities for public space. This physical mutation is achieved through the deployment of water treatment and reclamation networks. Countering the top-down approach of a massive infrastructural intervention, the proposed networks are made of adaptive small-scale living systems that operate environmentally at the city scale. They embed multi-performative functions (hydrological /ecological/ connective) with landscaped and recreational civic spaces on top of them, thus presenting economical and social incentives to create public space along the river. In the phased implementation process, measures for reclaiming water and enhancing its quality become the driving agent for rehabilitation. Re-envisioning urban rivers as hybrid infrastructures offers us the opportunity for a new interpretation of their role in the Arab city -to allow them to regain their civic and environmental significance, and to redefine infrastructure’s new values and purposes in contemporary urbanism. I argue that the interdisciplinary approach used in this project- coupling infrastructural strategies with social and urban solutions – is a powerful method; relevant for the Arab world where water resources are limited and most often contested.

• Peter Gotsch Decoding Private Urbanism and Sustainability: Lessons from Neo-Towns

> This contribution examines the nature of urban design in the context of private urbanisation and discusses it’s repercussions to sustainable development, aiming at triggering a discussion on implications for the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region. The private sector plays a pivotal role in urban innovation and development. Banks, infrastructure firms, industrial conglomerates, and construction enterprises control urbanisation processes. Projects such as New Cairo, Alsunuth, or Qatar’s Pearl exemplify the trend in the MENA region. The desire for modernisation and world-class standards includes many green- and eco-city schemes. Seeking to appraise sustainability issues most approaches cope with the externalities of private urbanisation. In contrast this contribution aims at a deeper appreciation of the phenomenon. We argue that the lack of a profound understanding of the nature of private urban development (and of the political economy of urban design) hinders us from developing more sustainable and resilient solutions – in particular when it comes to the scale of buildings, neighbourhoods, and towns. The contribution draws on a comparative research project on privately developed towns (Gotsch 2010, www.neo-town.org). The lessons offered stem from Navi Mumbai (Mumbai), Alphaville-Tamboré (São Paulo), and Bumi Serpong Damai (Jakarta), a new generation of privately developed Neo-Towns.

• Rabih Shebli Design between Research and Practice: Case studies by the Center for Civic Engagement and Community Service at the American University of Beirut

> The Community Projects and Development Unit (CPDU), a division of the Center for Civic Engagement and Community Service (CCECS) – AUB, has been setting venues for involving students and faculty members from various departments in hands-on developmental projects within underserviced areas. As Team Leader I will present three case-study-projects by the CPDU in partnership with various departments at AUB and community representatives: “Reclaiming the Traditional Water Conservation Practices in Rural South Lebanon – case of Marwaheen Village”, “Urban Agriculture – Women’s Vocational Training Center – Ein El Hilwi Palestinian Refugee camp”, and “Upgrading Sabra Market”. All three projects belong to territories where the will of the state fades, and where the non-mastered non-planned areas establish self-governance bodies relative to each setting. Street-smart ingenuity enables local inhabitants to circumvent the daily challenges and counter the neglect or absence of the state departments. Order is maintained at a bear minimum and chaos is often neutralized to secure safety and access to basic services. A participatory planning /design model is fully adopted to implement grassroots initiatives that build on securing consensus on a general theme, incorporating local knowledge, and securing political-stakeholders’ support, bringing environmental design research into practice.

• Lee Frederix Cultural Infrastructure for the Margins: A Machinic Approach to Nahr Beirut

> In broadening the definition of infrastructure to include social and cultural networks within the city, this current work takes inspiration from certain western models, both traditional and alternative, in addressing a case study of the marginal territories of contemporary Beirut. Attempting to investigate both the socio-economic and spatial aspects of marginality, the work conceptualizes the Beirut River, not as an environmental entity, but as an edge condition and as the potential site for operational strategies in the development of a cultural infrastructure. The work applies contemporary theories of machinic processes (Najle, 2003) to the site, but only after a conventional analysis has been carried out in order to diagnose pertinent landscape issues. This dual methodology highlights the complementarity between the two approaches, articulating systems and networks within the site and shifting “the attention away from the object qualities of space to the systems that condition the urban form” (Corner, 2006). The resulting ‘synthetic ecologies’ maps depict a process-based intervention that acts as a systemic catalyst and reconfigures the site as a horizontal network open for future appropriation and permutations. The diagrams are operational as opposed to quantitative in the sense that they emphasize means over ends and logic over compositional design (Corner, 2006). This inherent indeterminacy situates the work as a reflective exercise that creates open-ended and non-deterministic results, providing an alternative paradigm for investigating both the physical and socio-cultural margins of the city.

• Matthew Carmona Decoding Design Governance

> The relation between governance processes in our cities and the ‘public’ aspiration for better design quality has long been a contested arena. The debate turns on a number of often repeated tensions, between property rights and public interests, between design freedom and public taste, between those with design skills and those with none, between one definition of good design and another …. the list goes on. Yet despite the tensions, the desire for the state to have a role and stake in how buildings and spaces are shaped through planning and other means remains as popular as ever, and largely universal. So can the public sector legitimately influence design for the better and if so whose design and how? This is the key question asked in this talk which will draw on examples from the UK and Europe in order to make the case for a legitimate design governance.

• Mohamad Kashef Theory of Urban Space: Straddling the Divide

> This is a multidisciplinary theoretical exposé from urban geography and sociology, planning, architecture, urban design, and urban political economy. This study develops a nuanced theoretical understanding that straddles the intellectual divide between architecture, planning, and urban social sciences. It raises critical questions regarding the dialectics of human agency and social structures on the one hand and built forms and social and cultural conventions on the other. It mainly highlights intellectual discrepancies between architecture and planning studies which precipitate conflicting concepts of urban space and design approaches. The premise of this theoretical journey is that integrating architecture and planning as well as urban geography perspectives of built forms and development processes is crucial to establish a socially and culturally responsive urban design discourse. By exposing discrepancies and juxtaposing areas of disagreement among theories, the study lays the grounds for more in-depth studies aimed at developing an interdisciplinary understanding of urban form and design.

• Sam Jacoby Architectural Urbanism: The Operativity of Built Form

> The presumption of architectural urbanism is that typological reasoning provides the primary cross-disciplinary instruments. In the design of buildings and cities, we generally rely on received forms and established norms conveyed through typological knowledge that we either fulfill or reject. By abstracting the deep structures of build forms—by revealing their common organizational and structural diagrams—type can be analyzed and projected, permitting an operative definition of parameters affecting architectural form and its relationship to the city. Fundamental to making typo-diagrammatic knowledge instrumental to the multi-scalar city is the premise that architecture does not just exist as a specific object at one scale, but as a generic possibility. If urbanity can be said to be the synthesis of dominant types—critical buildings and urban armatures constitutive to its formation—typology presents both practice-driven formal solutions and equally a socio-political and cultural content, which are necessary to design, structure, and administer an urban plan. Therefore, a continued rethinking of the effect of types, including their often anticipated or endured expiry, is necessary. It inevitably raises new questions of control, difference, and participation, and ultimately discloses a different Idea of the City.

• Mohamed Al Assam The Urban Renewal of “Holy Shrine” Cities in Iraq: Case studies of Kadhimiya / Baghdad, Najaf and Karbala

> The deterioration of Iraqi Historic Cities was part of a major collapse of Civil Values and “Ruralization” of the Urban Life, due to colonization, political unrest and military actions, which disrupt a smooth and continuous civil developments and prosperity. This talk will present Dewan’s interventions in three urban renewal projects in Iraq awarded to the office: Kadhimiya / Baghdad, Najaf and Karbala). First I will provide a brief historical background of the three “Holy Shrines” cities, in terms of their development, deterioration and status quo, followed by our documentation, surveys and analysis of the existing conditions in order to reach workable urban scenarios and development alternatives for the future. I will also stress the following major challenges facing projects of this delicate nature and scale: 1) Spatial: how to accommodate the increasing number of pilgrims in a city that is medieval and still protect the integrity of the urban fabric. 2) Political: how to work with the politically layered authority, and different (often contradicted) stake holders. 3) Heritage: what is heritage and how to address it? 4) Residents, Visitors or “Bricks”? who has the priority? I will try to sketch our visions for the type of future we want, and to whom this future is intended for.

• Anne Vernez Moudon From Research to Practice: Re-Designing the Automobile City

> Urban design has a rich history as a theory-driven field guiding practice. The theory is normative, defining ideal urban forms. Yet rarely are its applications evaluated to establish a knowledge base for practice. Other disciplines provide substantive knowledge on how city form functions and affects society and economy. Different streams of research have recently flagged the negative impacts of the over-reliance on inner-city motorized transport, showing that: land consumption associated with urban vehicular infrastructure exacerbates the costs of intra-city travel; urban traffic congestion lowers productivity and contributes to unacceptable levels of air and water pollution; environmental toxicity is linked to increasing rates of asthma and cancers; automobile dependency aggravates increases in sedentary life styles, leading to obesity, diabetes 2, and cardio-vascular diseases; and motor-vehicle collisions are third in causes of disability-adjusted life year loss. While most cities continue to favor automobiles over other forms of transport, some have sought to reverse the trend: Seoul, New York, and Shanghai provide directions for re-capturing urban space as places inhabited by humans rather than cars. These cities serve as testing grounds for the generation of future urban design theories.

• Heiko Schmid Dubai’s Economy of Fascination: Urban Growth between Sustainability and Economic Success

> Large investments in the real estate and tourism sector, as well as rising numbers of investors, tourists and immigrants, have led to a sustained boom in Dubai. At the same time, and against the background of urban governance and the transfer of competences to private and semi-state actors, a brisk urban transformation has been embarked upon, with the creation of countless entertainment, shopping, and artificial worlds. This development is primarily characterised by the theming of everyday life, but above all an “Economy of Fascination”. The centerpiece of the presentation is an analysis of the most important factors for the success of themed urban landscapes such as Dubai. Nevertheless, the current global economic crisis has left its marks on Dubai and points up the vulnerability of such urban development most clearly. While the crisis has caused a standstill of most of Dubai’s megaprojects, it could also be seen as a chance for the city: The years of prosperity have led to a discrepancy between public planning and private-sector project development causing difficulties in terms of providing the necessary public infrastructure. Against this background the current crisis could be used to overcome the existing deficits of Dubai’s master planning.

• Anne-Marie Galmstrup Designing a New Financial District in Riyadh

> The physical planning of our cities influences our immediate surroundings; not only from a subjective visual viewpoint but in the way they are used and how people engage with each other. Buildings are more than a beautiful envelope and urban plans are more than the bird’s eye view perspective. New master planned cities, together with today’s larger privatization, do not necessarily destroy our public realm – but they need to respond to their setting and function at eyelevel. Cities mature and change over time as they grow with their inhabitants. New planned cities often do not have much time to grow and are sometimes developed based on direct solutions vs. strategic visions. Through examples, such as the King Abdullah Financial District in Riyadh, will the talk focus on the architects and planner’s visionary image of a project vs. the clients and the issue of collaboration process vs. negotiation.

• Caecilia Pieri Baghdad: A Pending Globalization?

> Between the Tanzimat period and the current situation which witnesses obstructed living circulations because of security devices, and despite its leading role in the fields of modern arts, culture and knowledge starting from the Thirties, Baghdad has never ceased to suffer from arbitrary and aborted attempts at modernizing its urban shape and space. Various exported or recycled patterns have repeatedly proved inadequate to the local context, and the continuous political instability has been hardly compatible with the long term vision of urban planning. Today, a new process of metropolization is about to begin through large-scale and advertised urban projects in areas which are far away from the hyper-centre. This (deliberately?) does not face the most serious problem of Baghdad’s centre: a newly installed “civil war urbanism”, with an urban layout of concrete T-Walls which corresponds either to the main ethno-sectarian dividing lines, or to the regressive pre-modern grid of “mini green zones” cropping everywhere. Last, the peripheral-like degradation of the hyper-centre illustrates the worst aspects of a pending globalization: a close and unsolvable intermingling between slums and middle-class housing which weakens any hope of short-term civil reconciliation.

• Momen El-Houseiny Tahrir Square: The Dialectics of Modernity

> Celebratory night-shots of Tahrir Square became global incidents of power and popular imaginary for non-violent revolutions. These representations celebrated the capacities modern public space finally came to embrace after decades of policing and authoritarian regimes. The “modernity” promise of the public space originally imported from Parisian urbanism to Cairo during the nineteenth century has finally harbored in the 21st century. Or these were the thoughts urban historians hailed the “liberated” public space referring to its historical genii. Tahrir representations were so mesmerizing in effect that were too totalizing and abstract from the grounded realities. The reality is a compound contingency of informal street-tactics that the frenzy shots of the formal public space of “Tahrir” have underscored. The dialectics of modernity and public space soon came to realization. The same “liberating” space became a bare witness to “massacres.” The reality is that the Parisian urbanism was first drafted with a military mindset to coerce the potential revolt of the French people. So were its realization in Cairo and many cities in the 21st century. This promise to control the masses and run over them with armored vehicles in wide-open streets was the promise citizens in Cairo were to realize only in 201.

• Rachid Chamoun Reclaiming Beirut’s Central District Public Square(s)

> Many areas throughout Lebanon suffer from transpiring warfare conditions, dire economic and social situations, and this has been continuing for years. These tragic conditions are considered as an integral part of the socio-technical interactions of the metropolitan region of Beirut. There are many actions and re-actions that have had a decisive impact on the reclaimed- post- war- city; (public and private actions/institutional and governmental actions). These actions and reactions have been activated by ideological, religious and or political diversity as a source of tensions, competing territorial claims, polarisation and seclusion in the form of public protests. This paper seeks to evaluate the recurring urban conditions: (urbanization and demographics changes); draws upon the confusion and declares the various problematic issues which derive mainly from the lack of a proper physical frame (formal vs. informal settlements, temporary vs. permanents urban patterns, public events, public protests, etc…) that regulates the distribution, movement and spatial perception of people within and beyond the city. As a result of these conditions, Beirut has been captured by pertinent protests since March 8th / 14th 2005 and was reclaimed as a public space/ tent city? December 1st 2007. The social meaning and relevance of this research is based on defending and protecting freedoms, negotiating peaceful settlement of conflicts, supporting the power in its democratic trends and decisions, and promoting civil society. Furthermore, this research is stimulated and shared through the participation of a pluralistic global community that encompasses a broad spectrum of research by scientists, planners, architects, political scientists and other scholars with original views on urban development, creativity, planning and politics.

• Sinan Hassan Two Square and One City: The Umayyad and Abbasid Squares in Damascus

> The term “contestation” is challenging and usually synonymous with conflict and controversy. It is also close to my personal striving nature and the characteristics of the Umayyad and Abbasid squares. Such a (personal) state / definition of contestation, stems from a post-structuralist contestation of conventional methods in architecture and is imported from other fields. It aims at contesting the official narration, the conventional architectural representation of history, the local discourse of heritage and identity, the presumed disciplinary autonomy of architecture and its conventions, the local urban discourse of “roundabouts” and “public squares”, the term “Arab or Islamic city”, and the way we usually qualify the “City” (as opposed to mere urban agglomeration). As such, I will be interrogating the civility and civicness, but also the “Citiness” of (our) cities. The talk is divided into two parts: a general theory intended to establish the intellectual background and titled “Urban manifesto: The capital C and the Citiness of Cities”, and a section titled “Two courts and one city: The Abbasid and Umayyad squares” outlining the operational mechanisms of two unique case studies. Hence, the paper outlines the major relevant theoretical underpinnings, as well as the diverse scholarly themes of this author/designer, and his interdisciplinary approach to design. This is exemplified in interventions in a peculiar city like Damascus; namely two of its most geographically important urban peripheral poles: two large public squares.