Mapping Beirut: Toward a History of the Translation of Space from the French Mandate through the Civil War (1920–91) PDF

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Mapping Beirut: Toward a History of the Translation of Space from the French Mandate through the Civil War (1920–91) Hatim El Hibri Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, 239 Greene St, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10003 USA What can we learn about the regional and global géographie des imagina...

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Mapping Beirut: Toward a History of the Translation of Space from the French Mandate through the Civil War (1920... Hatim El-Hibri Arab World Geographer

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Mapping Beirut: Toward a History of the Translation of Space from the French Mandate through the Civil War (1920–91) Hatim El Hibri Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, 239 Greene St, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10003 USA What can we learn about the regional and global history of Beirut through an investigation of the history of mapping? Maps are traces left behind by the operation of power, and they reflect the production of spatial relations and exclusions. The way in which Beirut has been understood as a symbol first for the promise, then the failure, of a secular, liberal multi-ethnic city in the Arab Middle East is revealing both of the geography of Eurocentric historical imaginaries and of the strengths, incoherence, and frailties of modern forms of power. Drawing on original archival research in Beirut, this article examines maps, urban plans, and aerial photography as a key site of translation—a term from actor–network theory that refers to the processes whereby one actor (not necessarily human) in some way affects another. It works toward a history of the translation of space by examining how maps, territories, and populations have been coproduced in three periods important to the mapping of Beirut: the French Mandate (1920– 46), the early years of Lebanese statehood in the Chehabist development era (late 1950s–60s), and the civil war (1975–1991).

géographie des imaginaires historiques eurocentriques, et les forces, les faiblesses et les incohérences des formes modernes du pouvoir. En se basant sur une recherche originale menée sur des archives à Beyrouth, cet article examine les cartes, les plans urbains et les photographies aériennes comme des formes de « traduction ». Ce terme, issu de la théorie de l’acteur-réseau, fait référence aux processus par lesquels un acteur (qui n’est pas nécessairement humain) en affecte un autre. Cet article construit ainsi une histoire de la traduction de l’espace en étudiant comment les cartes, les territoires et les populations ont été coproduits durant trois périodes importantes pour la cartographie de Beyrouth : le Mandat français (1920–46), les premières années de l’indépendance libanaise marquées par la période chéhabiste de développement (la fin des années 1950 et les années 1960), et enfin la guerre civile (1975–1991).

Keywords: history of cartography, urban studies, Beirut, governmentality, actor–network theory, Lebanon

The idea of the city—of the modernizing promise of organized urban life—has been a central, even assumed, characteristic of many modernist social imaginaries. The ills of society—biological or otherwise—have also frequently been understood as the mismanagement of its human bodies and spaces, or, perhaps even more interestingly, as the mismanagement of bodies through spaces. The way in which Beirut has been understood as a symbol first of the promise and then of the failure of a secular, liberal multi-ethnic city in the Arab Middle East is revealing both

Que pouvons-nous apprendre des facettes de l’histoire régionale et mondiale de Beyrouth grâce à l’étude de l’histoire de la cartographie ? Les cartes sont les traces de l’action du pouvoir ; elles reflètent la production de relations spatiales et d’exclusions. La façon dont Beyrouth a d’abord été lue comme le symbole de la promesse, ensuite comme celui de l’échec d’une ville laïque, libérale et multiethnique dans le Proche-Orient arabe, dévoile à la fois la

Mots clés : histoire de la cartographie, études urbaines, Beyrouth, gouvernementalité, théorie de l’acteur-réseau, Liban

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of the geography of Eurocentric historical imaginaries and of the strengths, incoherence, and frailties of modern forms of power. Beirut itself cannot be adequately conceived as an internally coherent space, disconnected from broader spheres or networks of influence and connectivity. What can we learn about the history of the politics of space of Beirut by examining the role of maps and mapping? I want to ask of these maps and plans, what institutional and technological processes were you a part of? What political and economic visions did you give form to? What sort of social life did you enjoy? How and to what extent did you translate back into the shape of the city? This study draws primarily on three archives in Beirut: the cartothèque of the Institut Français du le Proche-Orient (IFPO, formerly CERMOC); the American University of Beirut Special Collections; and the Lebanese National Archives. This archival research is supplemented by a small number of interviews with urban planners and architects who were personally involved with some of the historical projects in question. Confining my study to the archives located in Beirut serves multiple purposes. A study aiming at a total or comprehensive knowledge of all mappings of Beirut would have to travel to Istanbul, to touch on the massive Ottoman archives; it would also have to visit the archives of the French Foreign Affairs Office in Nantes and the Quai D’Orsay annexes to examine the maps not left behind after the collapse of the French Mandate in 1946, which constitute the numerical majority. The objective of this study, however, is to reflect on the maps left behind in Beirut, to note the absences created by the end of these two overlapping forms of imperial control. The study investigates what is local about the local, and how it became so. Only by looking at the maps left behind is it possible to reflect on the uses maps have been put to, and to begin to question how the cartographic trace continues to shape the space of Beirut.

Social Power and the Translation of Space Maps are material traces of the operation of power, which tell us about the how of power. I am drawing here on the insights of actornetwork theory (ANT), which demands that we include how technical, material, and other non-human objects are made to come together, along with humans, in the shaping of social reality. The empirical egalitarianism of this social-scientific approach demands that equal agency be given to the instrument as to the user. Maps are a key moment in the translation of space. Translation is a term that ANT (Latour 2005) uses to describe how any one actor affects any other, and not just, for example, the changing of street names from Arabic to French, Ottoman Turkish, or English per se. Maps are highly technical documents, and they are evidence of how different organizations have attempted to know, manage, and shape space.1 Of course, something is always lost in translation. To focus on maps is not necessarily to presume that they effect the changes they depict. This has often been the case in Beirut, to the dismay, frustration, and joy of the actors involved. While the intentions of actors making maps are interesting, the reasons why maps and plans often end up left on the drafting table are more useful in understanding the ambiguities in the translation of space. ANT suggests that groups are only as real as the process of group formation that brings actors together in actor-networks. This informs my focus on the maps left behind in Beirut, as evidence both of the contingency of local history and of attempts to shape not just this urban space but regional and global conditions of possibility. Or, to put a twist on David Harvey’s term in his recent Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (2009), the processes that shape the conditions of possibility for life itself in its regional and global spatial relations of productivity. The purpose of this focus on the relationship between maps and broader efforts at social management is to investigate what

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Mapping Beirut Michel Foucault called governmentality, the organization of the conduct of conduct within and between the territories of modern states.2 Much of the literature examining biopower and the techniques of biopolitical management has focused on the life sciences, to illuminating effect.3 Yet the published versions of Foucault’s later lectures at the Collège de France, especially Security, Territory, Population (Foucault, Senellart, and Davidson 2007) and The Birth of Biopolitics (Foucault and Senellart 2008), suggest that the management and production of space is a compelling, intrinsic dimension of governmentality. At the nexus of the critical engagement with Foucault’s later thought (Crampton and Elden 2007) and critical cartography is a shared interest in the relationship between the production of space and the management of population. The strength of the approach outlined here is the critical edge it lends to understanding power as a practice alongside the cultural concepts that it fuses with: govern-mentality. Its limitation is that it does not speak as directly to lived experiences in Beirut as other types of historical or ethnographic investigation could. The management of population is always the condition of possibility of modern forms of racial or ethno-religious violence. An antiessentialist historical geography of the translation of space makes it possible to reflect on how groups are produced as groups. That governmentality has long allied itself with the visualization of space is a quality not lost on theorists of various stripes, leading many to a sometimes essentialist critique of media or of visuality itself (Jay 1993). More nuanced considerations of the co-implication of visuality and urban phenomena also have a varied pedigree, including thinkers as different (or unexpectedly similar) as Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel. Similar connections have been made within recent work in geography, drawing on Henri Lefebvre. For example, Karen Wells (2007) argues that the material culture and visual culture of cities should not be

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understood as separate domains, and emphasizes how “representational spaces” as well as the physical city shape and are shaped by ways of seeing. This formulation is to be commended for including a consideration of ways of seeing and material change in its account of the city. Yet this account would relegate phenomena such as maps, town planning, and other types of media to a different type of reality—that of the dematerialized and dematerializing spectacle. Following the Latourian impulse here means to include maps and mapping among other ways in which space is translated, such as construction projects, protests, watching films about the civil war, café conversations, car accidents, and digital file transfers. Mediation is a material process as well. As Olivier Coutard and Simon Guy (2007) argue, the dystopian “alarmist” narrative of the impact of technology on splintering cities should be replaced with an approach that emphasizes their mutual shaping and demonstrates that the urban is always a barely managed series of potentialities. Three Periods of Mapping I argue that there are three periods useful to understanding the types of mapping that occured in the years between 1920 and 1991, three periods which also roughly coincide with major changes to the political organization of Lebanon: the French Mandate, the early Republic, and the civil war. Introducing spatial scales (empires, cities, neighbourhoods) and periodizations such as these has the potential to conceal as much as it illuminates. For example, French technocratic and financial influence did not begin suddenly with the Mandate but had developed over many decades; in fact, on the eve of World War I, French financiers controlled almost two-thirds of the Ottoman Empire’s serviceable debt (Shorrock 1970). I hope that making these analytic distinctions will demonstrate the continuities between these periods in the mapping of Beirut as much as

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FIGURE 1 Aerial photography (1926) was a technical innovation key to creating highly accurate maps of the territory of the French Mandate.

the discontinuities within them. The lines between periods and locations are blurred in important ways, and the remaking of the relationship between one and the other is a political act. The French Mandate (1920–46) For this study, there are two main reasons to begin with the Mandate and not with the Late Ottoman period. The first is that the archives available in Beirut are most complete beginning in this period, and the second is the profound influence that mapping and urban planning projects of this period have continued to have on contemporary practices.4 The two overarching projects that guided mapping during the French Mandate were the institution of a comprehensive cadastral survey and the institution of large-scale planning projects initiated by a central government authority. Official work on the cadastral survey began in 1926, a year also marked by the rise of nationalist

revolt. Aerial photography was used to achieve accuracy in maps and for military policing of local uprisings (see Figure 1). The cadastral survey was entrusted to the private commission of M. Camille Duraffourd, who was in charge of the Office of Survey and Land Amelioration for Syria and Lebanon. To conduct the actual field surveys Duraffourd hired a number of Russian engineers whose most recent experience had been in the recently formed Yugoslavia. This transfer of expertise is telling not just for the parallel ways that Yugoslavia and Lebanon have been understood visually (think of the terms “Balkanization” and “Lebanonization,” and of similarities between the widely circulated images of post-war Beirut and Sarajevo). As Jeremy Crampton (2006) has shown, the racial ethnology now thoroughly deconstructed by anthropology (and a population science par excellence) was mustered to support the cartographic definition of the Yugoslav state. The Russian teams in Beirut

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FIGURE 2 The majority of the original cadastral maps from the 1930s were either lost during the collapse of the Mandate or taken back to France. This is one of the remaining examples, dated 1937.

were paid by the square metre, and Duraffourd also did well on the real-estate market. One of his properties, formerly a large guesthouse on the Corniche (a seaside promenade created during the Mandate on reclaimed land), was torn down only in early 2010; it is being replaced by a high-rise apartment building.5 The establishment of the cadastral system had several purposes. The first was to replace the Ottoman Defter Khane system with one based on the Napoleonic cadastre system and the Torrens land-title registration system. Work on the land-title registry began in the first years of the Mandate, and sought to identify land by plot and individual owner. This reform sought to replace the musha’ form of feudal land ownership, wherein villagers were leased land on an annual basis by local leaders, with a system whereby land was identified with the real-estate plot and not with a single owner per se. This new form of private property encouraged the

development of agriculture and industry on a scale to suit international markets. It also equipped colonial administrators with a new hierarchy of centralized, bureaucratic knowledge to supplant the existing one (Schaebler 2000, 280). For this reason, it was often resisted by feudal interests in rural areas. It also served the purpose of training a small local cadre of draftsmen. The other primary purpose of the cadastral system was to support large-scale planning, which in this case meant continuing and accelerating the centralization of economic activity in Beirut. The first such plan was the Beyrouth en Cinq Ans, drafted by Duraffourd, which formed the basis of the 1932 Plan Danger, named for the brothers Danger, who owned the French consultancy known as La Société des plans régulateurs de villes. The five-year plan included municipal codes and provisions for public spaces and gardens, sanitation, and infrastructure. The high level of accuracy of these maps,

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FIGURE 3 Detail of Duraffourd’s signature, 1937

and the skill required to make them, also performed a sense of mastery over space, essential to claims of expertise and bureaucratic competence (see Figure 2). The year 1932 also marked the arrival of Michel Ecochard, a Beaux-Arts trained architect and urbanist who would be a major figure in town planning in the Mandate. Duraffourd died suddenly in 1941, leaving his signature in the form of the cadastral system that Lebanon continues to use to this day and his actual signature in the archive on the cadastral maps themselves (see Figure 3); Ecochard’s career would continue into the 1960s. It was also in the early 1940s that the first comprehensive Master Plan for Beirut was drawn up by Ecochard, drawing on the earlier and ultimately unapproved Plan Danger. A highly gendered street violence was characteristic of both Mandate and local attempts to police the rapidly evolving urban space (Thompson 2000).6 While the repressive disciplining of space was a constant organizational demand on the part of the Mandate authorities (mapping directly supported the needs of both military and police forces), it is equally important to understand the types of circulation within and extending from the city that planning sought to foster. As Stuart Elden’s exegesis

of Foucault’s later work has shown (Elden 2002, 2007a, 2007b), modern forms of power, in the mode of governmentality, are ultimately concerned with organizing freedom, regulating conduct, and calculating and orchestrating the function of space and population. Thus the two central axes running north to south through the city centre, originally put in place by the Ottoman regime, were widened and improved during the Mandate to serve the military purpose of rapidly deploying troops to protect corporate interests near the port, as well as to facilitate the circulation of people and goods into and out of the city. It was also in this period that the first urban land-use maps of the entire city, detailed to the level of individual buildings (as in Figure 4), were created for the seemingly parallel uses of both capital and the military. As Mae Davie (2001) and Leila Tarazi Fawaz (1983) have also shown, French interest in Beirut was part of a reorientation of economic flows—from internal overland trade across the provinces, in which Beirut had played a marginal role, to a colony– metropole relationship based on maritime shipping. Yet French, German, and British interests had competed for contracts to construct and manage infrastructure in the Ottoman provinces since at least the mid-

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FIGURE 4 Military land-use maps, such as this one from 1944, are quite common.

19th century. As Beirut grew in importance during the 19th century, numerous projects were undertaken to re-outfit its...