Land and Real estate economy in Lebanon

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Conference at the Cermoc

Published in : “Observatoire de Recherches sur Beyrouth et la Reconstruction, Lettre d’information” N°12, 2000

October 1998

Analysis of the role of real estate in the Lebanese economy as wall as in the social and political imagination of the Lebanese, notably during the period of the “reconstruction”.

Seminar on Urban Planning and land policies in Lebanon

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Held in June July 2000

The seminar was jointly organized by the author and by Eric Huybrechts, then director of the CERMOC (Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Moyen-Orient Contemporain), in collaboration with the Ministry of Public Works, the General Directorate of Urban Planning and the Order of Engineers.

The proceedings of the seminar present a comprehensive picture of the multiple facets of the facts and practices of urban planning and land development in Lebanon.

The seminar gathered the practitioners of planning in the administration and in the private sector, the local authorities, the sectoral administrations and a number of European experts.

It had a determining influence on the decision of the Lebanese Government to launch the studies of the “National Physical master Plan for Lebanon”, few months later.

table of access to the documents : in french – in arabic.

The large urban projects and the cities

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Conference at the CERMOC

30 November 2000
The conference dealt with the often shady relations that develop between architects and politicians and with the game of mirrors that flourishes notably around “large political architectural projects”.

The National Physical Master Plan and the Durable construction

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Conference at USEK

May 2007
After a reflection on the concepts of durability, inertia, adaptability and irreversibility, the text re-examines the conditions of production of the NPMPL and the reasons for the delays in its adoption and implementation.

What future for the International fair and Tripoli ?

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Reworking of a conference given at Safadi Foundation, in Tripoli, 15 December 2007, in commemoration of Oscar Niemeyer’s centenary
15 December 2007

The word « fair » refers to a heterogeneous array of commercial-political demonstrations, none of its still living forms seeming to fit with the present situation of the city of Tripoli. The urban site inherited from the fair and the need to develop and integrate the city for which the fair project has been designed are far more important than its merchant or symbolic functionality.

Tripoli is socially and urbanly in distress. It could not overcome the war traumas. It is internally dismembered and cut from its environment. The site of the fair is being manipulated to serve as a no-man’s-land in the territorial stakes and as a support for wheeler-dealer speculations.

By revisiting the initial concept of the project and by taking profit of the potentialities of the grandiose site, it is possible to find the support for a set of major structuring equipments that the NPMPL has planned for Tripoli, while keeping the door open for a wide range of activities that Niemeyer wished to welcome under the vast tent of the fair.

 

In French