Date de publication:
Mercredi 22 Février 2012 - 10:35
Publié ici :
22 Février 2012Mis à jour le :
23 Juin 2017Mots-clefs:
- blogs
- carnet de recherche
- Beyrouth
- Beirut
- urban studies
Zone géographique:
- Moyen-Orient
Carnets de l'Ifpo: The Urban Observatory of Beirut: for a polysemic reading of both city and territory
The urban observatory has just celebrated its twentieth anniversary
After four years in Damascus, the Ifpo urban observatory has returned to Beirut since October 2011, where it was created exactly twenty years ago, in 1991. Beyond the purely factual description heading its institutional page, the department itself is relatively atypical, and this begins with its history.
Indeed initially it was a Franco-Lebanese reflection group linked to the CERMOC (Center of studies and research on the contemporary Middle East) devoted to the observation of an urban space in distress. It had been created in the wake of the civil war, having as its goal to "reflect upon the reconstruction of Beirut (...) and to uncover the different readings the city's space revealed and the meanings attached to these.".
The reconstruction projects, whoever they emanated from, whether these were public institutions (Conseil de Développement et de la Reconstruction, Direction Générale de l'Urbanisme, Municipalité and Mohafaza), foreign consultants (World Bank, Institut d'Aménagement et urbanisme de la Région Ile-de-France...), or different communitarian institutions, political parties, or even militia, were all seen as many representations of the urban space: "most often as attempts to legitimize their political, ideological or military options, these representations are not the fruit of chance: they are part of a symbolical representation of urban space of which they reveal the hidden codes" (ibid.).
At its very inception the polyvalence of the group's approach was at the core of its philosophy, as is shown by the composition of the founding team itself which counted such fields as urbanism and architecture but also human and social sciences (history, geography, anthropology, sociology) and finally economy.
With time, this legacy from the war reading, in which the city saw itself primarily as the theater of all the conflicts with their consequences, has become more diverse. On the one hand, the Observatory was institutionalized in 1993 as a permanent research structure belonging to the Ifpo (the erstwhile CERMOC), inside the Department of Contemporary Studies. On the other, given its atypical format- it is constituted of only one person, assisted by assistant researchers- thus necessarily bearing the imprint of a personality or a professional trajectory, yet remaining faithful to its original polyvalence. For instance with Jean-Luc Arnaud, a city historian, a specialist in the late Ottoman period, the studies led by the Observatory have extended to the entire agglomeration of Beirut. For his part Eric Huybrechts, architect and urban planner, worked on the urban spaces throughout the country while launching the project of a socio-geographical Atlas of Lebanon, which was pursued and co-directed later by Éric Verdeil, geographer, and the author of a thesis on the urban planners of Beirut. The merging of the different contemporary research units into one sole body, Ifpo, has in the end allowed for research on city and territorial planning in the Middle East in general, with the collaboration of full-time researchers or associate researchers in Syria, Jordan or Palestine, as well as the creation of an online publication , "Cities and Territories of the Middle-East" » by Fabrice Balanche, a specialist in the field of the political geography of Syria and Lebanon. In the autumn of 2006 the political context in Lebanon led to the Observatory's being removed to Damascus, where Valérie Clerc-Huybrechts, an architect, continued to lead from Syria a research concerning the habitat of the poorer populations, a part of her thesis bearing on the "irregular", also called "illegal" or "unformal" neighborhoods of Beirut. This research has also irrigated many Institute publications. Finally, recently, the opening of an Ifpo branch in Iraq, at Erbil, in the Iraqi Kurdistan, has consecrated the Ifpo's accession to a regional status with the recruiting of its new head, a specialist in contemporary urban history familiar with the Iraqi field, author of a Ph. D thesis on the modernization of Baghdad in the XXth century.
(...)
Written by Caecilia Pieri, english version by W. Parramore.
Autres billets du ou des carnets de l'IFRE
 Ifpo
Peu, si ce n’est pas étudiée, l’histoire de Jérusalem-Est...
|
 Ifpo
L’un des leaders les plus suivis dans le monde arabe est...
|
 Ifpo
Températures élevées, précipitations en baisse, violentes...
|
 Ifpo
Ce billet propose une réflexion sur les pratiques...
|
 Ifpo
Nous avons bu en mémoire de l’aimé tel vin
qui nous fit...
|
 Ifpo
Depuis 2009, et la guerre menée par l’armée israélienne à...
|
 Ifpo
An increasing interest in pipes as archaeological objects...
|
 Ifpo
Khawla gardera toujours en mémoire sa première intervention...
|
 Ifpo
En examinant le master plan de la ville d’Erbil, capitale...
|
Derniers contenus par mots-clefs
 Ifpo Beirut
This article presents the results of an ethnographic study...
|
 Ifpo archives
Enjeux du partage des données de terrain au Liban, en...
|
 Ifpo migrations
par Emmanuelle Durand
p. 125-134
https://journals....
|
 Ifpo Beyrouth
Séminaire « Une possibilité de Beyrouth. Projections...
|
 Ifpo enseignement
Date de disponibilité : 01 septembre 2016
Durée : deux ans...
|
 Ifpo arabe
Les stages intensifs de langue arabe sont organisés par le...
|
 Ifpo stage
Présentation
Le stage annuel de langue arabe est organisé...
|
 Ifpo Bains
Décembre 2015, Beyrouth : publication dans la revue Syria (...
|
Ifpo environnement urbain
Denis Cercle
Maitre de conférences en anthropologie à l’...
|