Alexandre Paulikevitch – عل وحده و نص
Bouchra Ezzahir – La nuit nous appartient
Charbel Aoun – Free Tree
Dina Baroud – Tripoli Nuclear Zone
Fadi Shayya – In defense of concrete (follow)
Mira Minkara – Trablos,why the bad reputation? (follow)
Mona Merhi – Sahbeh, readership initiative (follow)
Munir Nabti – 6mins & 40 secs to wow your crowd (follow)
Nizar Ghanem – Terdad
Wadih Ayoub – To paint, I close my thick door (follow)
Waste – Flex, eco-friendly products

For further information please contact : 70 538100 or 03 591098.

I call for critical thinking and an alternative attitude to the status quo. We have to stop looking at nature as the opposite of the urban, and try to understand the urban as our contemporary nature. Only then, we can deal with enhancing the urban by targeting processes rather than products, as in the theoretical approaches of Landscape Urbanism and Ecological Landscape Design.

Read the policy memo on Scribd (and in Arabic).

Work Credits
Date: June 2010
Campaign: Access to Rights, Rights to Resources
Publisher: Green Line NGO
Website: greenline.org.lb

Charbel Dagher, professor of mass communication and political science, argues that the modern Arab Renaissance era (an-Nahda) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries might have been an era of (one-way) exchange with Western culture rather than the result of historical, local cultural evolution or accumulation.[ref] Employing Gramsci’s theoretical framework, the process of establishing the park in Beirut evidenced the prevalence of a hegemonic, dominant cultural system (Western culture) over a subordinate one (local culture).[ref] The same hegemony continued to prevail during the 1990s redesign of the park, as the project was initiated and funded by IAURIF [ref] and the design competition won by French landscape architect Jacques Sgard and Francophone Lebanese architect Pierre Neema. The result has been a design (i.e., a culture) that is alien to the local culture (i.e., practice) and that contributes to the production of a controlled, inaccessible space.

An excerpt from the article republished with the permission of Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFares.

Work Credits
Date: 2010
Book: Typographic Matchmaking in the City
Editor: Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFares
Publisher: Khatt Books, Amsterdam
Website: www.khattbooks.com

Maya Metni, Visual communication
Ahmad Khouja, Architecture
Cyrille Najjar, Product design
Fadi Shayya, Horsh Beirut
Emily Cremona, Fashion design
Linda Selwood Choueiri & Simon Mhanna, BHARAT – Arabic Design Workshop
Nahwa Al Muwatiniya, NGO
d2w Oxo, Biodegradable plastics – GDT s.a.r.l.
a3lab, Asterios Agkathidis: emerging technologies in architectural design
mating season: Dar Onboz, Publishers
HIBR, Newspaper
Eco Village, Sustainable project
Carwan, pop-up gallery for limited edition design

Dating back 350 years, Beirut’s unique 330,000 m² park is part of the historical Horsh Al-Sanawbar that once measured more than 1,250,000 m². Today the park is concealed from the lives of many Beiruti residents and visitors. Less than 20% is open to the public—with restrictions on practices—whilst over 80% is fenced off with barbed wire and can only be accessed by special permission from the Administrator of Beirut.

This policy memo was presented at IFI’s RAPP Program at the American University of Beirut on the occasion of launching ‘At the Edge of the City’.
Read the policy memo on Scribd, and watch the panel discussion on Youtube.

Work Credits
Date: March 2011
Program: Research, Advocacy & Public Policy-Making in the Arab World
Publisher: Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy & International Affairs, Beirut
Website: www.aub.edu.lb/ifi/

Visit At the Edge of the City

Horsh Infographics by Fadi Shayya, Lina Abou Reslan, & Nancy Hamad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.discursiveformations.net.

Recently in LAU Magazine, Kristen Hope Burchill’s article “Redefining Beirut’s Cityscape” featured At the Edge of the City amidst new projects where “a new generation of ethical designers and architects are challenging conventions.”

Yet a new generation of Lebanese, particularly those with an eye for art, are finding it more difficult to romanticize Lebanon’s paradoxical identity.
An emerging group of architects and graphic designers are mixing their aesthetic imperatives with a critical assessment of Beirut’s ongoing “postwar” reconstruction. (Hope Burchill, 2010)

– Read the full article by Burchill on LAU’s ISSUU Page.

Dear Friends, Colleagues, and Public Space Enthusiasts,

DISCURSIVE FORMATIONS book At the Edge of the City will be featured during the 2^nd edition of the Festival of Lebanese Art Books (FoLAB). The festival is organized by RectoVerso from 16 to 20 November 2010 at the UNESCO Palace; the opening ceremony is under the patronage of Dr. Tarek Mitri, Minister of Information.

FoLAB will feature over 800 titles of Lebanese art books, and At the Edge of the City will have a signing session on Wednesday 17 November at 7:00 PM. I hope you can join us and enjoy the festival, especially those who didn’t have a look at our work on Beirut’s public space.

Dear All,

Following up on my earlier post, I will present At the Edge of the City at This Is Not A Gateway {TINAG} 3^rd Annual Festival on Saturday 23^rd October at 5:00-6:00 pm, Hanbury Hall (E1), London.

The talk is titled “The grass is never greener except on the other side!” It focuses on reading park closure as a function of constructing landscape representations at city and country levels; the park is loaded with meanings of post-war reconciliation, and the space of everyday public life is dismissed.
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Festival Programme (PDF)

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Participants’ Page

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Festival Schedule

I look forward to interact with you at the festival (if you happen to be in London), and I end by an invitation from Deepa Naik and Trenton Oldfield:

And lastly, we hope to see you at the launch evening is on Thursday 21 October, 7:15pm. We are fortunate to have some delicious ‘Wines from Spain’, music & video clips from Mr Frisbee, special projections by Larisa Balzic, and of course the opening of your exhibitions and films. It will be a nice chance for fellow festival-goers and festival-participants to meet one another before the 3 days of events – one of the most important ‘outcomes’ of the festival has been the new working/friendship/romantic relationships that have been established as a result of the three days together.