Twenty Years of City Debates - The 20th Edition's Introductory Note

After 20 years, we have come to think of this event as a precious moment to engage with colleagues and students in the School of Architecture and Design (SoAD) in intense theoretical and practical discussions where we approach the challenges of our times as urbanists, scholars, and practitioners. We start with questions that trouble us, explore how others have addressed them through practical projects and scholarly investigations, and we assemble a list of speakers and discussants who have also been wrestling through these dilemmas. Whenever we can, we give priority to our regional context, but we are also eager to think comparatively with colleagues working in other regions and national contexts, to engage the practice of urban planning and design, trespass beyond academic walls, but remain in conversation with a scholarly community.

Every year after City Debates, many students are on a high, having met people they had sometimes read and discussed for weeks, feeling –to quote one of them-, part of “a community of practice”, or – to quote another –, “it’s like I went inside YouTube for 2 days.”

Sadly, it is hard to be in such a joyful mood today. We are on the 152^nd day of war on Gaza where cities and refugee camps are in rubble and land is devastated… and we are still counting the dead, and sometimes thinking that death is mercy. The death toll is also staggering in the West Bank and in South Lebanon. Palestine is being erased in front of our eyes. Allow me to ask for a minute of silence for all those who lost their lives in this unfolding genocide.

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Organizing an urban conference at times like these is no easy task. To be honest, I can hardly think of a City Debates edition over the past 20 years when we were not concerned about a last-minute challenge (yet, it is the first time we don’t have a last-minute cancellation). If the current circumstances are harsh, they are not entirely exceptional.Through the years, we have felt the urge to keep our voices up in this part of the world. We have committed to keep the discussions and collective reflections going, and loudly, as a first step in braving oppression and injustices in a region sadly notorious for its attack on free speech, free ideas, and free minds.

This year, however, the critical questions are hard to answer: What can you talk about, how can talking even help, and who does it support when less than 280km away children are dying of starvation and thirst? What can we hope to accomplish, and it is delusional to think we can accomplish anything? Are we being complicit with genocide when we keep going with academic life? In the past months, I have – and I am guessing many others too – reconsidered for the nth time my career choice: Why didn’t I go to medical school, or take on law at least, so I could find a way to be relevant and make a difference? This overwhelming feeling of futility and sadness left me wondering whether it was even ethical to organize a conference.

At the Beirut Urban Lab, we began to look for ways in which we can put our skillset to use. Shortly after the beginning of the war on Gaza, we opted to put some of our mapping and visualization skills to initiate media activism. We started by mapping Lebanon’s southern border and visualizing data that monitors the escalation of violence. Since then, we have extended this work to the West Bank (soon to be released), while also another team has been mapping Gaza (and my colleague, Howayda Al-Harithy, will present it during the conference). 

Thinking through the relevance of continuing an academic debate, we found that there are things that propel us to keep talking, sharing, organizing collective discussions and reflections, learning, imagining, and writing. I’ll mention a few.

1. Defy Silencing: Already in November, Ghassan Hage (incidentally our keynote speaker for City Debates’ second edition in 2004), shared in an essay published online the feeling that, and I quote, “the Gaza war is firmly propelling us along a historical path where the ‘warrior’ will rule over the ‘intellectual’, a world determined to de-valorize the work of ‘thinking critically’ and where I, as an academic, will belong to less and less.”¹ Hage was reflecting on the “shut up or else” culture he experienced first during the civil war, here in Lebanon, where his unpopular opinion (that Palestinians did not want to build a country in Lebanon) put him in confrontation with another individual. The latter, short of arguments, threatened him with a weapon. Until recently, many of us thought the “shut up or else” was for our part of the world, where from Egypt to Syria going through Jordan and Iraq, everyone suffers harsh silencing and policing. Clearly, however, we were naïve, and silencing has shown to be as much the vicious norm of the West in the past months as Hage experienced when he was recently asked to leave his position in the Max Plank Institute, in Germany, (for being racist!) last month. Like Hage, many colleagues have lived through silencing in the past months, losing jobs, being cast as anti-Semitic for speaking against a genocide. Clearly, however, we were naïve, and silencing has shown to be as much the vicious norm of the West in the past months as Hage experienced when he was asked to leave his position in the Max Plank Institute in Germany (for being racist!). Like Hage, many colleagues have lived through silencing in the past months, losing jobs, being cast as anti-Semitic for speaking against a genocide. Clearly, “shut up or else” is not only happening in the Arab World. In these circumstances, organizing a discussion in which we could share freely, think collectively, and affirm our right to imagine otherwise made the space offered by City Debates at AUB in Lebanon quite unique; a space worth defending, maintaining, keeping, and cultivating. It makes it all the more important because City Debates is this year dedicating several panels to AUB’s first Palestine Week, a faculty-led event championed by our colleague Bana Bashour that invites everyone on campus to learn, share, and think about Palestine’s past, presents and possible futures.

2. Activating the progressive potential of our disciplines, carrying the responsibility we hold as academics to put forward a political imaginary: Another reason that propels us to organize City Debates is the necessity to create spaces where we can collectively imagine pathways towards alternative futures, particularly from the positions of the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and urban design.  It has become common to represent, and for very good reason, urban design and urban planning as one of the culprits of colonialism. Luminaries of the planning discipline such as Patrick Geddes or Abercrombie who established the first school of planning in England are also known to have drawn the first drafts of the spatial colonization of Palestinian cities such as Jaffa and Jerusalem. Similarly, Howard’s Garden City model forms a basis for greenwashing (illegal) Israeli settlements built on the blood of indigenous populations. Planning has also been widely associated with the mainstreaming of neoliberal economic forces and other right-wing populist projects, all of which undermine the emancipatory imaginaries many of us uphold. Today, we recognize that many of the assumptions carried in the profession have not held true, and it was possible to hijack collective ideals and morph them into projects of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing. Yet planning is also imagined in the context of socialist ideals and progressive being-together, premised on the imaginary of communities coming together to shape collectively the spaces they share. In this context, we see the importance of asking: Can planning still be a framework through which we can forge a new imaginary for being together? Can some of the tools of architecture, planning, and design allow us to project or perform collectivities? And, if not, what are the avenues, pathways, or spaces that can offer such opportunities?

Many of the City Debates participants this year have experimented with these ideas. For example, Nadi Abousaada will uncover a history of architectural modernist conversations that predate and transcend the Judaization of Palestinian cities. Sandi Hilal will recognize the collective labor that goes into shaping camps as spaces of collective memory and life. Nour Joudah will speak about when possible collective futures are transposed on the dispossessed landscapes of 1948 Palestine. The possibilities of a collective recovery in Gaza in conversations and processes that defy borders will be described by Howayda Al-Harithy. Beyond Palestine, colleagues will also speak of the spaces for maneuver that public decision-makers can invent, that principles of “care” can inspire, that social movements can forge, or that techno-fixes can foreclose. What can we learn from those and how can they help us forge new possibilities for more just futures?

To go back to why City Debates, I should say that there was an added urgency for us to take charge of initiating the conversation when the invites and requests came from international organizations and colleagues to answer questions of how will we rebuild Gaza. Indeed, those of us who have past experiences working with post-disaster recovery are being asked to help design for the day after. Amidst horrifying representations of erasures put forward by Israeli designers, and the no less horrifying prospect that we can accept the confines of a Zionist future in approaching the day after the Gaza war, many of us are eager to reflect collectively on possible visions and positions for a post-Zionist future, to learn from those for whom Gaza City or any of its spaces are precious, to recognize historical and geographic continuities and uncover ways of recovering them.

3. And last, the importance of thinking through and facing disruptions. This was, after all, the theme of our conference. By titling City Debates’ 20^th edition disrupted urbanisms, we aimed to point to the ways in which cities have grown and been ruled in ways that rarely - if ever - reflected the emancipatory imaginaries that accompanied much of the early urban literature, from Max Weber’s “city air makes one free” to Lefebvre’s Right to the City. We aimed, for this 20^th edition, to curate a reflection that sheds light on several destabilizing forces that have reconfigured the ways in which cities are ruled, and profoundly destabilized their spatial and social organization or the patterns of their everyday lives. Our focus, hence, was on the forces of rule that have derailed the progressive potentials that cities were imagined to have. By disruptions, I am thinking for example of the intersections of urbanization with Climate Change, Artificial Intelligence, Philanthropy and Aid as (undemocratic, yet bottom-up) modalities of city-governance, financial capitalism and its ravaging effects on every element of urban fabrics, the militarization of public security and its dominance over other social arms of the state, without forgetting, of course, the many changing faces of colonialism. We invited colleagues whose work has illuminated aspects about the working of these mechanisms, and we are grateful to those who joined us to share their reflections. Today, the question for us all seems to be: Can we still stitch emancipatory narratives for our cities - at this very time, from our position in Beirut, under the threat of a regional war, four years into the free fall financial meltdown and political crisis in Lebanon that had brought to the fore the threats of the mounting NGO republic, in a city largely ruled by developers?

Before I allow you to dive into it, allow me to take you through a tour of 20 years of debates in which some of these themes were already sometimes approached.