LIVING IN BEIRUT is increasingly difficult, because it is impossible to find a place to live. The city government has made a business out of selling building permits, and easily skirted laws allow for the indiscriminate construction of luxury skyscrapers. This is all happening in a place where real estate is ground zero for money laundering.
Is there any space for imagining a different approach to development? If so, what would that look like? The subject of After Doxiadis, a proposal for a new social housing project, 2013–, is a series of city plans commissioned by the Lebanese government in 1958 from the Greek architect and urban planner Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis. His proposals were never implemented, yet they give us a starting point for envisioning an alternative to today’s situation—one that land shortage may keep us from ever achieving.
Marwa Arsanios is a Beirut-based artist.