Aim for ‘Athens’? A Mediterranean Model for Beirutis Pushing for Progress
Beirut is a special place. The city serves as a hub of shipping, trade, and commerce in the Mediterranean and Middle East. It has also given rise to, attracted, and hosted banks, construction firms, and consultancies that do business on a global scale: companies like Dar al-Handasah, Consolidated Contractors Company, the CAT Group — all based in or closely connected to Beirut — employ tens of thousands of individuals in Lebanon and around the world and each have more than fifty years of experience in initiating, designing, managing, constructing, and providing services in relation to world-scale projects throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa. Beirut hosts universities that remain the envy of the Arab world — and, indeed, the broader Middle East. Notwithstanding the efforts of certain GCC states to import brand-name universities or pump money into sector-specific scientific research, the American University of Beirut (“AUB”) and Universite Saint-Joseph — the two most prestigious of at least [two-dozen] other universities, many of which were already decent and are improving rapidly, that operate in and around the Beirut — offer a comprehensive, liberal education for students interested in arts, sciences, engineering, business, medicine, law, and a host of other fields.
Beirut’s bankers and doctors have built excellent service sectors, with professionals at the top of their fields practicing in the city itself and around the world. Beirut-based banks have restored their prewar standing as some of the most sophisticated — and safe, believe it or not — in the Middle East, despite being exposed to significant Lebanese sovereign debt and operating in an environment characterized by political turmoil and complexity brought on by sanctions and other U.S.-related legislation. Financiers from Beirut, or Lebanon, ply their trade at investment banks, private equity firms, and other enterprises in New York, London, Paris, Sao Paolo, Lagos, Dubai, and so on. The AUB Medical Center, the Clemenceau Medical Center, St. George’s Hospital, and others offer basic treatment and participate in cutting-edge procedures and projects ranging from genetic mapping to robotic surgery. Doctors trained in Beirut provide excellent health care to the Lebanese and others in the region, despite subpar facilities across much of Lebanon and a saturated market at home. (They also constitute one of the largest populations of foreign-trained doctors practicing in North American markets.) Pharmacists and pharmacologists do well in Beirut, too — and there is significant potential for a generic pharmaceuticals sector. Entrepreneurs and “engineers” — perhaps not the best term, in Beirut or elsewhere — have defied abhorrent real and virtual infrastructure to build up a nascent tech sector.
Beirutis remain politically, culturally, and socially dynamic — especially compared to their counterparts in the region. They maintain a healthy level of cultural pride, without descending into the sort of cultural protectionism all too often seen in other Middle Eastern — or even Mediterranean and European — cities. They engage in political protests — perhaps not as often as they should, perhaps not drawing the numbers that they could — more frequently (and in a more sophisticated manner) than many of their counterparts in the Arab world. Deep dissent remains more common and more acceptable than in other parts of the Middle East — including Israel and Turkey. Beirut’s publishers print more books, magazines, and papers than those of any other Arab city, save perhaps Cairo; they certainly print more riveting reads — on a wider and more controversial range of issues, and in Arabic, French, English, and Armenian — than Cairenes have been able to do since Nasser crushed cosmopolitanism throughout Egypt. The city’s cafes teem with intellectuals, students, businesspersons, and socialites — even the most vapid of which serve as sorts of “culture vultures,” creating necessary demand for books, films, theater, clothes, coffee, and booze. Designers — young and old, established and emergent — have been making their mark on the fashion circuit, from the catwalks of Milan to the red carpets of Los Angeles. And the culinary scene’s much more than decent: Lebanese cuisine itself is delicious and deceptively diverse; the French, Italian, Japanese, and Armenian offerings are good too — though those for Indian, southeast Asian, and Latin American food are relatively scarcer and less enticing. Beirutis, having the time and space they could not enjoy during the long-running Lebanese Civil War or the oppressive and oppressing Syrian occupation, have continued to form — and give life to — Tocquevillian voluntary associations that, in the long run, will only contribute to creativity and expression, even if only at a personal level. The nightlife remains rather vibrant and enticing. And then there’s the wine and weather, innumerable mountain escapes, valley excursions, and coastal cruises available to those willing to drive just an hour or two outside of the capital.
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But Beirut is a suffocating place, too.
It’s rife with problems that will continue to destroy — as they have already been destroying — the spirit of many of its residents. If Beirut’s challenges, which are rooted in great conflicts and small inconveniences alike, tend to trigger creativity in a small slice of the population, they nevertheless prevent many — probably most — residents from unleashing their full potential. Indeed, Beirut’s problems are increasingly of the sort that just make it difficult for residents — setting aside any grand ambitions or ideas they may entertain — to get on with their daily lives: traffic, roads, and related infrastructure; public transportation; water; power; telecommunications; zoning, construction standards, and building practices; environmental factors, ranging from greenery per person to air quality and noise pollution; and — to put it politely — the ascent of assholes.
Beirutis must confront devilish drivers on roads that have been paved poorly, are often dusty and dirty, and are unceasingly jammed with cars, buses, (motor)bikes — mostly, but not solely, due to imbecilic traffic flow arrangements, inadequate parking capacity, and a mystical system of appearing and disappearing lanes. Access lanes, off-ramps, overpasses, and shoulders are unicorns that the Lebanese dream of — or claim to have seen on trips abroad. Few stoplights exist; fewer still are heeded — though that’s probably more of a cultural problem, to be fair. Zoning rules and other standards, including those mandating certain percentages of property to be kept green or dedicated to parking, are treated as cute conversation — not law. Roads are barricaded; sidewalks are barricaded, too — sometimes by the city and sometimes by citizens in desperate need of parking spots. Compounding the problem, Beirut lacks public transportation — well, except its “state donkeys” (a moniker given to mega-buses), minivans, and “service” taxis, which all merely add vehicles and reckless drivers to roads that are already congested by crazies.
Although Beirut receives more annual precipitation (around 825.5 mm) than London (around 594 mm) — than London, damn it! — and is nestled near the center of a mountainous, water-surplus state lush with streams and snow that make it easier to harness water resources, Beirutis lack a clean, efficient, reliable, and publically provided supply of water. They must purchase their drinking water privately and arrange for deliveries of water for household, industrial, and commercial use — all while coping with choric shortages in summer months. Aside from the water they haven’t harnessed to begin with, Beirut’s authorities waste an additional 20% to 60% — estimates vary, perhaps according to engineers’ political preferences, but even the lowest are too damn high — of the water piped to and through town.
More than a quarter-century after the Lebanese Civil War came to a close, the Lebanese state does not provide citizens in its capital with 24/7 power. Nor does the state — a mere instrument of Lebanese leaders — get out of the way to enable others, like municipal authorities or private companies operating at national, regional, or even district levels, to provide people with power (ideally produced in an efficient, steady, and large-scale fashion). Instead, the Lebanese make do with their private generators or procure supplemental services from a mafia-like class of friendly neighborhood providers. In all cases, the Lebanese must rely on unreliable, inefficient, costly, and downright dirty power providers.
At the other end of the technological spectrum, where the Lebanese state has not had to account for the legacies and burdens of the past, it neither provides nor allows others to provide fast, cheap, and reliable telecommunications services. Internet services have improved in the past five years, but they remain relatively costly and — by global and even regional standards — slow. If the problem is technical, then Lebanese leaders have made poor choices and investments — because they had every chance to, like leaders in East Africa, jump the learning and infrastructure curves. If the problem is political, as it probably is, then Lebanese leaders have once again squabbled until they’ve squandered.
And then there’s the trash… the health effects of which may not truly be felt for a couple of years, the putrid scent of which still lingers near Jdeideh, Monot, and Saifi Village — and Karantina, a “quarantine zone” that sometimes seems to promote, not prevent, pestilence.
Do cities around the world suffer similarly, sometimes? Yes, of course. New York and other cities in the American northeast have had their power cuts and brownouts. Montreal and Naples have had their garbage crises. Los Angeles, Houston, and many other cities — often in the American south and west, where sprawl is king — continue to cope with the same misguided, and dated, trends in urban planning that Beirut pushes in new projects even to this day. Boston’s “Big Dig,” a massive rerouting and reorganization project, took more than thirty years to design, plan, and implement (and that doesn’t include predecessor plans and post-“opening” works). Places as pleasant as Paris and London confront transportation and labor strikes, even as they struggle with infrastructure built well before the advent of the automobile or before their populations exploded in the 20th century.
But Beirutis must cope with crises for so long that they stop seeing them as crises — or even as “new normals” to be tolerated on the path to progress. And they must cope with layer upon layer, level upon level, of failure: in the 1990s, just after a fifteen-year-long civil war, infrastructure was destroyed and power was a problem. Now, infrastructure is so bad in some places that some Lebanese openly — though sardonically, of course — call for Israeli airstrikes in to “give us a second shot at design and development.” Power is still a problem, water has become a problem when it rarely was. The Internet, which didn’t exist in any commercial sense in the early 1990s, was dead on arrival. Traffic has gotten progressively worse.
And, again, the trash…
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Against that backdrop, more than a few Beirutis have persisted in their push for progress. Drawing upon a long, if ineffective, tradition of public engagement, they’ve tried to retain and even reclaim the sort of dynamism that has marked their city since the mid-19th century. In addition to creating commercial, culinary, and cultural endeavors — and providing private solutions to what are, or should be, public problems — they’ve increasingly formed, funded, supported, written about, and supported groups and coalitions for change. Through organizations like KAFA, MARCH, Helem, Nahwa al-Muwatiniyah, EDGE — and countless others — they’ve worked to improve the deplorable state of women’s rights, combat censorship, change perception of and rules relating to the LGBT community, improve awareness of issues, and introduce new options for governance at local, regional, and national levels.
Now, taking the next step on their long path, they’ve increasingly formed coalitions of citizens — like Beirut Madinati — to push for progress politically, contesting municipal elections in a city where dominant parties or factional alignments have snuffed out competition over the past three decades. They’ve put together policy platforms and civic campaigns, with different degrees of sophistication, commitment, and drive. They have, then, gone from thinking to speaking and writing about their city’s problems to acting about them.
Beirut Madinati is more than a cabal of two-dozen candidates drawn from Beirut’s various communities. It’s more than an idea-driven, policy-oriented opposition that has the audacity to believe it can change the small things that make or break city life in the day-to-day. And it is more than a seed of dissent, which if nurtured and cultivated properly could eventually crack through edifice of elites in Beirut and beyond. It is also, at the deepest and most desperate of levels, a gasp at hope in a sea of humiliation.
But what are Beirutis aiming — or able to aim — for? What can the citizens of this city hope, and then strive, for? What should they insist that their leaders deliver even in the face of the peculiar problems that they’ve trotted out as excuses — regional instability, sectarian sensitivities, states-within-states — to mask their utter failure thus far? Well, perhaps they could aim for “Athens.”
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From the posh rooftop bars of A for Athens and 360, all seems well in Athens — as well as it often seems in Beirut, when peering down from Iris or Capitole. Greeks and foreign residents — all relatively well off, to be sure — posture and preen. They look across to this or that captivating conversationalist, far afield to the majestic, crumbling Acropolis, and down at a square littered with salesmen, beggars, and fat tourists who’ve chosen to spend their time here shopping for pairs of chemically softened blue jeans at American Eagle Outfitters. A few blocks down the meandering street, or alley, a horde of manic Mediterranean men and women huddle over little cups of white wine. Gulping down coffee on a set of steps as pretty as any in the whole of the Mediterranean, with little candles flickering in the breeze, a man bursts into song — for little apparent reason and with less apparent talent. Well into the night, people sit at cafes, stroll down alleys, and sample the wares of electronics and convenience stores that — apparently — double as nightclubs.
But Athens isn’t some picturesque paradise. It’s had a rough history and an especially turbulent past few years. In 2010, the Greek economy collapsed: after a decade-long boom driven by shipping, tourism, real estate, and a massive government-driven infrastructure overhaul — sound familiar? — Greeks discovered that they were exposed to bad banking bets (unlike banks in Beirut, where the Lebanese Central Bank had maintained conservative reserve requirements and issued circulars discouraging investment in subprime mortgages, derivatives, and other risky instruments). They were also worse off because they’d borrowed much of their debt from international lenders, like banks in France or Germany, unlike the Lebanese state which has borrowed most heavily from banks in Beirut — and, in turn, the Lebanese people — which has created a sordid, but stabilizing, sort of interdependence. The Greeks also lacked certain advantages that the Lebanese enjoyed at the onset of the Great Recession: a flow of petrodollars, investments, remittances, and expatriates returning from the Arab Gulf states — having been fired or seen their salaries reduced during the crisis — armed with money, ideas, experience, and a newfound need to make things work in Beirut. Greece’s government debt has since soared to 179% of GDP (and has hovered above 170% for most of the past five years). Meanwhile, the ranks of the unemployed — to say nothing of the underemployed, which would include professional and graduate degree holders working in service-sector jobs as baristas, waiters, tour guides, and taxi drivers — have stood at around a quarter of the workforce for most of that time too. And, now, under a rather rigid credit control program, anyone banking through an account in Greece must limit withdrawals to €420 per week — an average of €60 a day, although authorities have now permitted rollovers within each relevant week.
Athenians and Beirutis have suffered through state and municipal incompetence, irresponsible fiscal policies, large-scale infrastructure developments — the Olympics 2004 for Athens, Solidere and Asia 2000 for Beirut — that did not generate value or attract participation in other segments of the economy, and political polarization. Over time, they’ve come to suffer from crises of confidence. But if Athenians and Beirutis have lost confidence in their leaders, Beirutis have for the most part lost confidence in themselves — in that they believe that they cannot bring about the sort of change they’d like, in their heart of hearts. Unlike Beirutis and other Lebanese, who for the past decade have only protested on a large scale at the behest of the very leaders and political parties that have bequeathed them so much misery, Athenians and other Greeks have mobilized — to varying degrees and with varying degrees of success, sure — against their political and economic establishment. Athenians and other Greeks have protested and protested, mobilized and mobilized, time and again. They have dissented, regardless of what the world thinks of their dissent. In 2010, 2011, 2012, and in almost every year since, they’ve held massive policy-driven protests — each including hundreds of thousands of people — that dwarf those in Beirut regarding, for instance, power rationing in 2013, water cuts in 2014, and the trash crisis that has affected the Lebanese capital since mid-2015.
And Athenians have more to show for their troubles — more to show, at the end of the day, for the massive amounts of money borrowed, skimmed, and pumped into the city. Athens is a far more livable city than Beirut — and yet retains many of the Mediterranean quirks, impulses, and indeed faults that make Beirut such a special and stimulating place to begin with. Athenians have an integrated public transportation network of metros, trains, and buses (efficient and cheap, for those willing to use them and/or pay, but without the ticket totalitarians that check everyone’s fare in London or Berlin); clean and reliable tap water to drink and state-provided or state-guaranteed water for industrial, commercial, and other household uses; single-source power all day and all night; decent roads, though the Greek authorities spend less per unit of asphalt than their Lebanese counterparts do, lined with sidewalks in every district of the city; green spaces, public plazas, and well-kept parks in almost every neighborhood — including a massive conservation in the northern neighborhood of Marousi. And, yes, they have a corniche too.
The city’s chaotic, still. Athenians haven’t mastered their Mediterranean impulses entirely: they saunter in the streets instead of on sidewalks, drive drunk (and generally drive like devils), herd themselves on to metro cars before passengers have had a chance to exit, substitute water-based hygienic showers or baths with chemically-enhanced musk, and deface even well-kept buildings with graffiti in a manner that most Beirutis would find contemptible.
But they have sidewalks to ignore, metro cars rush onto and stink up with their cologne, clean water to use or not use as they see fit, power to take for granted, and zoning rules that at least enforced to the degree required to throw a coat of fresh paint on otherwise decrepit buildings. They — not universally, but more often than not — stop at red lights, observe the right of way, and refrain from leaning on the horn when tapping on the brakes will (fucking!) suffice. They don’t litter while complaining about the filth and grime that has engulfed their city and, to the extent they do chuck this cigarette butt or water bottle onto the street, have managed to procure the services of collection and cleaning companies that do their job for (relatively) fair and more transparent rates. (They do not suffer through the indignity of walking in their own trash and shit and piss — a sort of rotten cherry tossed on a decades-old layer cake of incompetence and graft.) And they stand in line — sort of. They’ve found a middle ground, an Aristotelian mean for urban existence on the Mediterranean.
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Beirutis could aim for Athens. It’s not a perfect city. It’s not particularly prosperous these days, despite the veneer made by the well-to-do. Like many other cities these days, Athens is increasingly a place of contrast — and conflict — between rich and poor, young and old, driven and disenchanted, right and left, traditionalists and progressives.
But Beirut’s problems are inescapable and indiscriminate, in the worst of ways: rich, poor, Christian, Muslim, young, old, townies and transients are all affected and disheartened by them. Neither the rich nor the poor can escape traffic. Neither Christians nor Muslims can escape the scent of shit. Neither the young nor the old can work or live in peace, free of a culture of corruption that remains at the root of every unit of power not generated, every ounce of water wasted, every megabyte not uploaded, and every bag of trash not collected.
If both Beirut and Athens are alive and lively, allowing their residents and visitors a way of and joy in life that eludes residents of larger Western metropolises, only one of them is objectively livable. And that city is not Beirut — not today, not yet.
But perhaps that’ll change, tomorrow, if Beirutis see their opportunity and seize their fate.
