The timing was before the near breakdown of the Lebanese state from 2019 on, with the debilitating banking crisis, huge protests, shocking explosion, and failure of infrastructure that brought the country to an impasse.
To just give a few examples, Marwan Ghandour and Mona Fawaz, “Spatial Erasure: Reconstruction Projects in Beirut,” ArteEast Quarterly, Spring 2010; Howayda Al-Harithy and Dina Mneimneh, “The {Framing} of Heritage in the Post-War Reconstruction of Beirut Central District (Lebanon),” in Urban Recovery: Intersecting Displacement with Post War Reconstruction, ed. Howayda Al-Harithy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), 239–70; Aseel Sawalha, Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010); Craig Larkin, “Remaking Beirut: Contesting Memory, Space, and the Urban Imaginary of Lebanese Youth,” City & Community 9, no. 4 (2010): 414–42.
The background consists of a complex web of historical events, symbolic hierarchies in the region, and memories of the Syrian occupation in Lebanon, as well as the presence of Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Lebanese debates about identity and their role in the Arab region.
The relationship between architectural post-war reconstruction and the ethics of dealing with a difficult past was the topic of my PhD dissertation at the University of Cambridge, defended in 2018, and expanded into a forthcoming book.
Ievgeniia Dulko, Fulbright scholar in planning at the University of Illinois, wrote an MA dissertation mapping the extent of such initiatives.
See, for instance, comparative research by American sociologist Charles Tilly. He distinguished between four modes of comparison. Individualizing comparisons serve to highlight the particularities of a given case. In contrast, generalizing comparisons capture recurrent structures and processes across cases. Variation-finding comparisons aim to causally explain difference across cases. Encompassing comparisons treat cases as embedded in a shared social environment.
Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006); Colin McFarlane and Jennifer Robinson, “Introduction—Experiments in Comparative Urbanism,” Urban Geography 33, no. 6 (2012): 765–73.
Beirut and Sarajevo, for instance, both share an Ottoman past, an imperial makeover (French and Habsburg, respectively), modernization under Yugoslavia and independent Lebanon, then war destruction and rebuilding. They share a mix of religiously diverse populations that speak mutually intelligible languages. Nevertheless, the two cities, following wars in the late twentieth century, experienced very distinctive reconstruction processes and concepts, which can be attributed to the influence of local agency and contextual idiosyncrasies. See Gruia Bădescu, “Post-War Reconstruction in Contested Cities: Comparing Urban Outcomes in Sarajevo and Beirut,” in Urban Geopolitics: Rethinking Planning in Contested Cities, ed. Camillo Boano and Jonathan Rokem (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 17–31; Gruia Bădescu, “Traces of Empire: Architectural Heritage, Imperial Memory and Post-War Reconstruction in Sarajevo and Beirut,” History and Anthropology 30, no. 4 (2019): 1–16; Gruia Bădescu, “Cosmopolitan Heritage?: Post-War Reconstruction and Urban Imaginaries in Sarajevo and Beirut,” in Controversial Heritage and Divided Memories from the Nineteenth Through the Twentieth Centuries, ed. Marco Folin and Heleni Porfyriou (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 121–38.
Tilly defines an encompassing comparison as the act of comparing cases that are connected by belonging to the same larger social structure, or by relationships of dependency. For instance, comparing reconstruction between Kyiv and Bucha will not only have to consider differences of size, economic power, and level of destruction, but also the territorial relationships between the two and the fact that Bucha belongs to the Kyiv Oblast.
While the existence of various pre-invasion initiatives in Ukraine by international organizations has already established frameworks for absorbing financial resources, it is unclear how these organizations will deal with the exacerbated scale of destruction. The creation of agencies dealing with the Marshall Plan aid could be a valuable precedent to discuss more.
A. Mitscherlich, The Inhospitality of Our Cities (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965).
The Ukrainian government has even controversially announced a dissolution of planning mechanisms and the requirement of architecture stamps, suggesting that many architects are either fighting at the front or have fled the country.
Despite these trends, in the post-socialist, post-war Yugoslav space, I found instances of resistance and rebellion, of idiosyncrasies and independence in style, and of resilient agency in architecture. In Sarajevo, architects like Amir Vuk Zec disrupted office architecture models and opted instead for a syncretic place-making that blends Sarajevo´s diverse influences and shows no compromise. For more, see Gruia Badescu, “The City as a World in Common: Syncretic Place-Making as a Spatial Approach to Peace,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 16, no. 5 (2022): 600-618.
The debate about Ukrainian Soviet-era architecture was already vibrant even before the war, see, for instance, the impassionate work of people like Ievgeniia Gubkina.
Insights from the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina show that internally displaced people often tend to stay in large cities when conflict ends, as they have better opportunities for jobs and livelihoods, despite the loss of their original home. See Stef Jansen and Staffan Löfving, Struggles for Home: Violence, Hope and the Movement of People (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009); Gruia Bădescu, “Dwelling in the Post-War City Urban Reconstruction and Home-Making in Sarajevo,” Revue d’études Comparatives Est-Ouest 46, no. 04 (2015): 35–60.
Reflecting on the experience of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we can discern how, over time, people who were once neighbors become estranged, constructing separate identities and nurturing distrust. Anthropologist Ivana Macek traces the transformation of perceptions by people who initially coexisted in harmony, but as time unfolded, began constructing separate identities and cultivating cautious and ambivalent emotions—a lack of confidence, distrust—towards those they increasingly perceived as belonging to a different group. Macek’s work is a testament to the profound changes that can occur in the crucible of conflict, where the shared fabric of community can unravel, leaving in its wake a tapestry woven with threads of division and suspicion. This opens the question of what is actually happening today in Ukraine’s occupied territories, and particularly in Donbas, with its longer Russian presence. To what extent identities have been reshaped by war and Putin’s propaganda is yet unclear, as are what tensions and frictions might emerge between people with different allegiances, radicalized by war, once the country is reunited.
This violence can manifest in multiple forms, including destruction through reconstruction, symbolic violence, cultural violence, and the showcasing of structural violence. See Dacia Viejo-Rose, Reconstructing Spain: Cultural Heritage and Memory after Civil War (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2011); Gruia Bădescu, “Urban Memory After War: Ruins and Reconstructions in Post- Yugoslav Cities,” in Contested Urban Spaces: Monuments, Traces, and Decentered Memories, ed. Ulrike Capdepón and Sarah Dornhof (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
Gruia Bădescu, “Beyond the Green Line: Sustainability and Beirut’s Post-War Reconstruction,” Development 54, no. 3 (2011): 358–67.
Gruia Bădescu, “The Modernist Abject: Ruins of Socialism, Reconstruction, and Populist Politics in Belgrade and Sarajevo,” in Memory and Populist Politics in Southeastern Europe, ed. Jody Jensen (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), 27–46.
Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (Reaktion Books, 2007); Robert M. Hayden, “Intersecting Religioscapes and Antagonistic Tolerance: Trajectories of Competition and Sharing of Religious Spaces in the Balkans,” Space and Polity 17, no. 3 (2013): 320–34; Gruia Bădescu, “Between Repair, Humiliation, and Identity Politics: Religious Buildings and Memorials in Post-War Sarajevo,” Journal of Religion & Society 21 (2019): 19-37.
See Gruia Bădescu, “Urban Geopolitics in’Ordinary’and’Contested’Cities: Perspectives from the European South-East,” Geopolitics 28, no. 5 (2022): 1–26.
According to Iryna Matsevko, historian and deputy vice chancellor at the Kharkiv School of Architecture, the reconstruction of the Balkans is a poignant precedent for Ukraine exactly from this perspective of international involvement. Linda Kinstler, “Architect Plan a City for the Future in Ukraine, While Bombs Still Fall,” New York Times, November 7, 2022, ➝.
For many of the Mostar Croats, the bridge was seen as a mere connection between the Muslim sections of the city and as a piece of Ottoman heritage, thus not the unifier that it was portrayed to be. Jon Calame and Amir Pasic, “Post-Conflict Reconstruction in Mostar: Cart before the Horse,” Divided Cities/Contested States Working Paper 7 (2009).
Bevan, The Destruction of Memory.
See Badescu, “Remaking the urban: International actors and the post-war reconstruction of cities” (forthcoming).