Beirut

What will be? In ten or say 20 years. What will the towns, the big cities look like? Faceless metropolises, barely distinguishable due to the consequences of globalisation as feared by the architect and art historian Javier Maderuelo (Spain)? Or a place that also offers a high quality of life for young people and families as his colleague and fellow countryman Juan Herreros imagines. No-one attending the round table talks on Thursday at the AUB could say how it really would be. However, it is certain that the architects will contribute to the discussion more intensely in the future.

“We have to take part in the discussion and be more active”, Juan Herreros appealed to the participants. This is what architects and urban planners have already come to realise elsewhere, too. In Frankfurt, for example, the city government has started a discussion about future perspectives for the Rhine-Main metropolis. The renowned urban planner Albert Speer was asked to develop a concept paper for “Frankfurt 2030”. The city of finance has broken away more and more from its industrial roots in the past 15 years. So-called blue-collar jobs increasingly disappeared while the finance and advertising sector expanded at the same time. The high-rise framework plan that has just been approved plans 20 new locations for high-rise buildings altogether. They shall not only incorporate offices but also flats.

However, it is to be doubted whether they will correspond to Juan Herreros’ model. The flats concerned will be more like ultra-modern, expensive boarding-house flats. Families most likely will not move in there.

This also applies for the prospering Solidere quarter in Beirut, which is experiencing an incredible building boom. The entire city has been rebuilt after the civil war. Now it is the beach promenade’s turn. One high rise after the other is shooting from the floor there; it is mainly hotel chains that choose this location.

They are all there: Interconti, Ramada, Hyatt (under construction). On the ground floors of these luxury buildings, Porsche and Rolls Royce offer their stately cars for sale. There aren’t a lot of lights on in the residential buildings, however. They are said to be holiday apartments for rich Saudis or Lebanese expatriates who only use them a few weeks per year – at prices of up to a million dollars per flat.

Directly opposite, outrageously expensive yachts bob up and down in the marina. This hype and the high-rise blocks at the sea front are similar to the Spanish sea town of Benidorm – not exactly beautiful, but quite impressive. Bernard Khoury made clear that he does not think much of this development during the discussion in the department of architecture of AUB. “I am out, I have been excluded from the planning”, the AUB professor of international renown explained. And he did not make the impression that he was very unhappy about that.

Bernard Khoury appealed to his colleagues to focus more on private building projects. “99 percent of the cities are constructed by private people”, he said. And added: “There generally is nothing wrong with designing shopping malls or night clubs.” With regard to the building boom on Spain’s coasts, Juan Herreros was sorry that one had merely watched the development for too long and concentrated on constructing public buildings such as libraries.

Visitors to Beirut immediately are struck by the image of abandoned and unfinished buildings directly next to new high rises. That is why the former Holiday Inn hotel at the borders of the Solidere quarter is a tourist attraction and popular subject for photos. The building is one of the remainders of the civil war. You can still see the bullet holes caused by the machine guns in the ruin. However, several people have told me that the building has not been kept on purpose as a memorial. It has economic reasons that no-one is doing anything with it.

No-one can foresee what will happen to it. You need a lot of imagination to picture the cities of the future. As children have. Frankfurter Rundschau initiated a competition for pupils with the title “How I imagine Frankfurt will look like in 2030”. The outcome was hundreds of colourful drawings and models with a lot of life and only few cars. If it was up to these children, no-one would have to worry about the future of the cities.