The politics of memory in the reconstruction of Downtown Beirut

• Author / Creator

  Nassif, Rawane

• At the end of the Lebanese war in 1990, the newly elected Prime Minister, Rafic Hariri, assigned the reconstruction of Downtown Beirut to his own private company Solidere. Solidere destroyed most of the remains of the old Downtown and replaced it with a new modern one. Focusing on Solidere‟s urban plan, this work examines the choices contained in this plan, the effects it has on the memory of the war, the relationship between modernity and forgetting in terms of the Souks and the meaning of Downtown in a Beirut context. I base my interviews on the postwar Beiruti youth between the ages of 18 and 35 who never saw the prewar Downtown but who were old enough to have seen the destroyed old one and the reconstruction process. The present work also observes how memory became a discourse used by Solidere in order to market a Lebanese identity in a global market.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Forgetting
  • Solidere
  • Memory
  • Politics
  • Beirut
  • Space
  • Modernity

• Graduation date

  Fall 2011

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R36W3T

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.