Carole Lévesque
Publication
The essay also recounts a series of small scale architectural interventions built in the spring of 2010 in the St-George church, in the heart of Bachoura. As part of a design exploration led at the American University of Beirut byt the Welcoming City Design Studio, these interventions demonstrate how the appropriation of the terrain vague can provoke temporary public spaces and uses to emerge, change the perception of what is allowable in the city and bring Bachoura out of its interstice to be seen as an active participant in the future of Beirut. These interventions, informal places, while decidedly grounded in the social condition, emerge as seeds of inflection, as alternatives to the privatized development of the city: alternatives where the will to create unveil marginalized potentials.
