Civil Campaign to Protect the Dalieh of Raouche in Beirut

The Dalieh of Raouche is a large publicly accessible rock situated at the extremity of West Beirut peninsula (see map and photos below). Like many coastal sites in Lebanon, it is currently the object of a private development plan, which tackles many questions about legal property, as well as social, ecological, and archaeological preservation. In December 2014, the Civil Campaign to Protect the Dalieh of Raouche wrote an open-letter to Rem Koolhaas, the master-planner of the project, in order to raise this questions in the public debate. This letter was shared at a scale that went beyond the sole city of Beirut (and of Lebanon), and the questions I asked four of its members (architect Abir Saksouk, environmentalists Amira Halabi & Ali Darwish, and artist Tania El Khoury) can resonate for many other struggle against politically-backed capitalist real-estate development.

WEBSITE:

– https://www.facebook.com/dalieh.org (in Arabic)

REFERENCE ARTICLES:

– Beirut Report, “Major project by celebrity architect revealed in Dalieh” (December 15, 2014)
– Beirut Report, “The fight for Dalieh, one of Beirut’s last public shores” (May 10, 2014)
– Beirut Report, “The fencing of Dalieh” (June 6, 2014)
– Yazan al-Saadi, “Daliyeh and the Ongoing Struggle for Beirut’s Public Spaces,” on Jadaliyya (May 12, 2014)

ASSOCIATED PODCAST CONVERSATION ON ARCHIPELAGO:

– About similar questions of coastal property in Spain: “Blurred Territories: Sovereignty Claims and Techno-Logical Legislations” with Daniel Fernández Pascual (October 2013)

MAP AND PHOTOGRAPHS:

– All following photographs by Léopold Lambert (February 2015):