The current crop of books on Beirut has been produced by writers who have few first-hand memories of the Civil War, and rank the war of 2006 as a more formative experience. Their arguments about the city are psychogeographic, channeling Guy Debord and the Situationist International, concerning themselves with graffiti and the history of neighbourhoods outside the city centre.
The current crop of books on Beirut has been produced by writers who have few first-hand memories of the Civil War, and rank the war of 2006 as a more formative experience. Their arguments about the city are psychogeographic, channeling Guy Debord and the Situationist International, concerning themselves with graffiti and the history of neighbourhoods outside the city centre.
The current crop of books on Beirut has been produced by writers who have few first-hand memories of the Civil War, and rank the war of 2006 as a more formative experience. Their arguments about the city are psychogeographic, channeling Guy Debord and the Situationist International, concerning themselves with graffiti and the history of neighbourhoods outside the city centre.
The current crop of books on Beirut has been produced by writers who have few first-hand memories of the Civil War, and rank the war of 2006 as a more formative experience. Their arguments about the c

A psychogeographic tour through Beirut


  • English
  • Arabic

A few years ago, the photographer Rhea Karam was standing on the edge of a vacant lot in Hamra, taking pictures for a series about the urban landscape of Beirut. The space, surrounded by tall buildings on three sides with a street running along the fourth, was full of garbage. An expensive black sedan pulled up alongside Karam. A woman of a certain age - and of a certain type who would be affectionately or derisively addressed as tante (auntie) - cracked open one of the car's windows and bombarded Karam with abuse. "How dare you take pictures of this trash!" she shouted. "In a city as beautiful as this, how dare you focus on such ugliness?"

Karam was shocked but also amused. The woman had misread the situation. Karam had no intention of photographing ugliness. She was aiming, instead, for a radiant burst of graffiti on the far wall. Still, beyond missing the point by a laughably wide margin, the woman's anger was instructive. For her, the party at fault was not a population that wantonly litters and recklessly pollutes its own environment on a daily basis. Nor was it a widespread culture of impunity that regards trash collection as a task beneath the dignity of the local citizenry, relegated instead to an army of migrant workers. No, at fault here was a young artist who deigned to document a few self-evident facts, which is symptomatic of how Beirutis see their city not as it is but how they want it, imagine it, or remember it to be. In Beirut, the politics of seeing often demand a willful and selective blindness, backed up by baseless rhetoric. Say Beirut is beautiful and beautiful it will be. Never mind the ample evidence supporting the contrary point of view, that Beirut is just as often dirty, ugly and vulgar, or beautiful only to those wealthy enough to afford a blight-blocking view.

Born in Beirut and based in New York, Karam recently published her pictures as an elegantly over-sized book entitled Breathing Walls (Raidy, Dh240). Notable for its subtlety, the work chronicles her reconnection with Beirut after a long absence. It also documents a topsy-turvy period, from the aftermath of the war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 through the truce brokered by the Doha Accord in the spring of 2008, which diffused the political tensions that had erupted in street violence. Karam's pictures detail this narrative without framing a single flesh-and-blood figure. Instead, her images explore the material traces left behind on the surfaces of the city itself - graffiti, bullet holes, structural decay, shredded campaign posters, tattered propaganda flyers and more.

Breathing Walls is the record of a latter-day flâneuse wandering the streets of her erstwhile city, trying to read the freshest and most recent layer of its urban palimpsest. It is also one of several new books taking a strikingly youthful and experiential approach to the study of Beirut, emphasising facets of the city that are otherwise invisible, overlooked and ignored. In a way, these books signal the arrival of a second wave of engagements with the meaning and making of public space in Beirut. The first wave, including books such as Peter Rowe and Hashim Sarkis' Projecting Beirut: Episodes in the Construction and Reconstruction of a Modern City (Prestel, Dh278), began in the 1990s and followed the sharp rise of Solidere, the private real-estate company tasked by government decree with the rebuilding of the city centre. Urgent and often anguished, the first round of debate concerned collective memory and political amnesia in the aftermath of Lebanon 15-year civil war. It took issue with Solidere's Disneyfication of Downtown Beirut, its fetishising of French Mandate-era architecture, its refusal to knit the city centre into the urban fabric of peripheral neighbourhoods, and its emphasis on tourist-driven, economically self-selecting activities.

Some of the most vocal critics of Solidere were artists, architects, urban planners and urban theorists born in the 1960s. The current crop of books on Beirut has been produced by a younger generation, born primarily in the 1980s. They have few first-hand memories of the Civil War, and rank the war of 2006 as a more formative experience. Their arguments about the city are more psychogeographic, channeling Guy Debord and the Situationist International, and less overtly political or polemical. They are also less agitated or enthused by the state of the city centre, as if to say that battle has long been lost. They look, instead, to the seams, edges and peripheries, to Hamra and Mar Mikhael, to Bourj Hammoud and Dahiyeh, to the post-industrial concrete walls near the Beirut River (Nahr Beirut) and the city's phenomenal pine forest (Horsh al Sanawbar), a public park that has been mostly closed to the public for decades. They set Solidere aside and take up topics such as street art, the legacy of Beiruti modernism, real-estate speculation, the rise of private security firms and valet parking services as modern-day militias, and the subcultures of hip-hoppers, fishmongers, minority communities, counterfeit goods, crime rings, homosexuality and prostitution.

While Breathing Walls is a quiet book that lingers on the surface, Beirut Street Art (Art Lounge Publishing, Dh110) by Nino Azzi and Mayalynn Attieh (in collaboration with many others), is a bombastic celebration of graffiti that goes deep into the dominant forms and players active in the Lebanese capital. Bookended by a glossary of terms and a breathless international history of graffiti since New York in the 1970s, Beirut Street Art offers a compendium of elusive crews (from Esteem and No Pain in the 1980s through Red Eyed Kamikazes (REK) and Ashekman today) and tenuous connections (linking graffiti to music and graphic design, conflict in Beirut to division in Berlin and Belfast).

Slightly more studious is Tala F Saleh's Marking Beirut: A City Revealed through its Graffiti (Joseph Brakhya, Dh122), a spiral-bound brick of a book that builds on the author's final project for the American University of Beirut (AUB). Marking Beirut offers an analytical survey of graffiti art and street stencilling in the city. Saleh maps out the markings of various political parties - Amal's green insignia being the most prevalent urban glyph of them all - and includes in her book a series of pull-out, do-it-yourself stencils, in case readers want to start illustrating the streets for themselves, in defiance of the existing logic of politically inspired territorial markings.

Another book with roots at AUB is Lessons in Post-War Reconstruction: Case Studies from Lebanon in the Aftermath of the 2006 War (Routledge, Dh407) edited by Howayda al Harithy, a professor who chairs the university's department of architecture and design. After Lebanon's most recent full-scale war, a group of architects and urban planners at AUB created a kind of working group, called the Reconstruction Unit, to intervene in the reconstruction and recovery processes. Lessons in Post-War Reconstruction pulls together the experiences of some of the Reconstruction Unit's members, lending academic rigour to a subject - the tug of war between reconstruction schemes hatched the government and Hizbollah - which were much debated in the local press, then largely forgotten as the latter's fait accompli. The book also makes an intriguing case for the creation of reconstruction studies as a disciplinary subgenre of urban studies.

Where several chapters of Harithy's book focus on the urban history and experience of Dahiyeh (the Hizbollah stronghold in the southern suburbs of Beirut), Fadi Shayya's At the Edge of the City: Reinhabiting Public Space Toward the Recovery of Beirut's Horsh al-Sanawbar (Discursive Formations, Dh110) enlists 40 contributors to engage a single site. The Horsh is a pine forest appropriated by the municipality of Beirut in the 1870s, declared a public park in the 1960s, firebombed by Israeli forces in the 1980s, and, except for a small sliver, sealed off to residents and visitors since the 1990s (the argument being that the pine trees that have since been replanted are still too young and vulnerable to withstand public interaction, although adults over 35 years of age can apply for a special permit to enter the park). In Shayya's words, the closure of the park is "not right, not constitutional, and not just," and his book attempts to imagine and project possibilities for its public reactivation. Like Marking Beirut, At the Edge of the City comes with interactive bells and whistles: a DVD with a film by Lasse Lau called Pine Nuts, a pull-out poster designed by Danny Khoury, and serial nudges toward a complementary blog and online discussion forum.

Equally interactive is Beyroutes: A Guide to Beirut (Archis, Dh75), a project initiated by the collective Studio Beirut. Published as the first in Archis' Never Walk Alonely Planet series, Beyroutes spoofs the typical tourist guidebook format, offering alternative and delightfully subversive takes on the city, replete with walking tours of assassination sites, a guide to surviving Dahiyeh (no cameras, no alcohol, no public displays of affection), a litany of useful terms and phrases ("did you flip it?" being a personal favorite, referring to the generator switches that kick in during power cuts) and a smattering of affecting oral testimonies on Beirut's hidden and forgotten places.

The best and most probing of the present pile of publications, Beyroutes tackles the city in layers: "first impression city," "official city", "emotional city" and "invented city". It includes excerpts from a transcript of the artist and architect Tony Chakar's "Catastrophic Space Tour", a surprisingly moving walk through Achrafieh, available online in its entirety as an MP3 file. "Let's take it slow, easygoing," says Chakar. "I know that many of you know this city very well and there's nothing new I can show you. I only want you to see it through new eyes. It's always hard to describe what's in front of you, to find the exact words, but when you do, the whole world is illuminated. It's a beautiful feeling. I will try my very best." Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a staff writer for The Review in Beirut.

Journeys into the urban environment's hidden meanings Lights Out for the Territory Iain Sinclair Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory is a captivating, disturbing and elegiac journey across the British capital, filled with hidden patterns and fascinatingly interconnected narratives. Brooklyn Was Mine Edited by Chris Knutsen and Valerie Steiker A wonderful collection of meditations and short stories on the New York borough. Includes contributions from Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Lethem and Dinaw Mengestu.

History's medical milestones

1799 - First small pox vaccine administered

1846 - First public demonstration of anaesthesia in surgery

1861 - Louis Pasteur published his germ theory which proved that bacteria caused diseases

1895 - Discovery of x-rays

1923 - Heart valve surgery performed successfully for first time

1928 - Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin

1953 - Structure of DNA discovered

1952 - First organ transplant - a kidney - takes place 

1954 - Clinical trials of birth control pill

1979 - MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging, scanned used to diagnose illness and injury.

1998 - The first adult live-donor liver transplant is carried out

Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.

Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.

Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.

Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.

“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.

Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.

From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.

Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.

BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.

Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.

Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.

“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.

Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.

“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.

“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”

The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”

Some of Darwish's last words

"They see their tomorrows slipping out of their reach. And though it seems to them that everything outside this reality is heaven, yet they do not want to go to that heaven. They stay, because they are afflicted with hope." - Mahmoud Darwish, to attendees of the Palestine Festival of Literature, 2008

His life in brief: Born in a village near Galilee, he lived in exile for most of his life and started writing poetry after high school. He was arrested several times by Israel for what were deemed to be inciteful poems. Most of his work focused on the love and yearning for his homeland, and he was regarded the Palestinian poet of resistance. Over the course of his life, he published more than 30 poetry collections and books of prose, with his work translated into more than 20 languages. Many of his poems were set to music by Arab composers, most significantly Marcel Khalife. Darwish died on August 9, 2008 after undergoing heart surgery in the United States. He was later buried in Ramallah where a shrine was erected in his honour.

Key facilities
  • Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
  • Premier League-standard football pitch
  • 400m Olympic running track
  • NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
  • 600-seat auditorium
  • Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
  • An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
  • Specialist robotics and science laboratories
  • AR and VR-enabled learning centres
  • Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets

1,000 Books to Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List
James Mustich, Workman

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Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer
Christopher Celenza,
Reaktion Books

Draw for Europa League last-16

Istanbul Basaksehir v Copenhagen; Olympiakos Piraeus v Wolverhampton Wanderers

Rangers v Bayer Leverkusen; VfL Wolfsburg v Shakhtar Donetsk; Inter Milan v Getafe

Sevilla v AS Roma; Eintracht Frankfurt or Salzburg v Basel; LASK v Manchester United

The Greatest Royal Rumble card as it stands

The Greatest Royal Rumble card as it stands

50-man Royal Rumble - names entered so far include Braun Strowman, Daniel Bryan, Kurt Angle, Big Show, Kane, Chris Jericho, The New Day and Elias

Universal Championship Brock Lesnar (champion) v Roman Reigns in a steel cage match

WWE World Heavyweight ChampionshipAJ Styles (champion) v Shinsuke Nakamura

Intercontinental Championship Seth Rollins (champion) v The Miz v Finn Balor v Samoa Joe

United States Championship Jeff Hardy (champion) v Jinder Mahal

SmackDown Tag Team Championship The Bludgeon Brothers (champions) v The Usos

Raw Tag Team Championship (currently vacant) Cesaro and Sheamus v Matt Hardy and Bray Wyatt

Casket match The Undertaker v Chris Jericho

Singles match John Cena v Triple H

Cruiserweight Championship Cedric Alexander v tba

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The years Ramadan fell in May

1987

1954

1921

1888

While you're here

Michael Young: Where is Lebanon headed?

Kareem Shaheen: I owe everything to Beirut

Raghida Dergham: We have to bounce back

5 of the most-popular Airbnb locations in Dubai

Bobby Grudziecki, chief operating officer of Frank Porter, identifies the five most popular areas in Dubai for those looking to make the most out of their properties and the rates owners can secure:

• Dubai Marina

The Marina and Jumeirah Beach Residence are popular locations, says Mr Grudziecki, due to their closeness to the beach, restaurants and hotels.

Frank Porter’s average Airbnb rent:
One bedroom: Dh482 to Dh739 
Two bedroom: Dh627 to Dh960 
Three bedroom: Dh721 to Dh1,104

• Downtown

Within walking distance of the Dubai Mall, Burj Khalifa and the famous fountains, this location combines business and leisure.  “Sure it’s for tourists,” says Mr Grudziecki. “Though Downtown [still caters to business people] because it’s close to Dubai International Financial Centre."

Frank Porter’s average Airbnb rent:
One bedroom: Dh497 to Dh772
Two bedroom: Dh646 to Dh1,003
Three bedroom: Dh743 to Dh1,154

• City Walk

The rising star of the Dubai property market, this area is lined with pristine sidewalks, boutiques and cafes and close to the new entertainment venue Coca Cola Arena.  “Downtown and Marina are pretty much the same prices,” Mr Grudziecki says, “but City Walk is higher.”

Frank Porter’s average Airbnb rent:
One bedroom: Dh524 to Dh809 
Two bedroom: Dh682 to Dh1,052 
Three bedroom: Dh784 to Dh1,210 

• Jumeirah Lake Towers

Dubai Marina’s little brother JLT resides on the other side of Sheikh Zayed road but is still close enough to beachside outlets and attractions. The big selling point for Airbnb renters, however, is that “it’s cheaper than Dubai Marina”, Mr Grudziecki says.

Frank Porter’s average Airbnb rent:
One bedroom: Dh422 to Dh629 
Two bedroom: Dh549 to Dh818 
Three bedroom: Dh631 to Dh941

• Palm Jumeirah

Palm Jumeirah's proximity to luxury resorts is attractive, especially for big families, says Mr Grudziecki, as Airbnb renters can secure competitive rates on one of the world’s most famous tourist destinations.

Frank Porter’s average Airbnb rent:
One bedroom: Dh503 to Dh770 
Two bedroom: Dh654 to Dh1,002 
Three bedroom: Dh752 to Dh1,152 

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Sole survivors
  • Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
  • George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
  • Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
  • Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.