"Exploring Beirut's Transfor ..." a Beirut Travel Page by travelmad478

I visited Beirut on a business trip for two days in late 2005. The first day, I was completely free to wander around the city, and I spent about eight hours meandering my way in circles and spirals all over town. I started out in the Achrafieh neighborhood, where I was staying, and wound my way through Gemayze, downtown, the Corniche, and Hamra before wearing out. It was a great day, and really fascinating from many angles: architechtural, political, archeological, and cultural.

Beirut is now recovering from Lebanon's civil war and the country's unhappy status as a pawn in the continuing conflict between Israel and Syria. In the last few years, first Israel and then Syria retreated from Lebanon, leaving the country much freer to focus on its own redevelopment. The last ten years have seen quite a bit of improvement, but after the Syrian pullout in mid-2005, Lebanese citizens expect much faster change. I hope that the sense of political unity that now exists in Lebanon--following the stunning assassination of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri and the subsequent anti-Syrian protests--can sustain and create the conditions for the rapid reforms and development that the country really needs.

I'll talk more about Beirut's neighborhoods in the tip sections, but right now, the most striking feature of the city is the reconstruction project covering the entire downtown area. The whole situation is very interesting--in fact, the reason I went to Beirut in the first place was to meet with the management of the company in charge of this development, Solidere. The company was created in the early 1990s after the government effectively nationalized the entire land area of downtown Beirut, which at that time was a no-man's-land of devastated buildings, rubble, squatters and vermin left after decades of war and shelling. Solidere was given all of the land and the development rights, and the previous property holders were given shares in the company. Over the past ten years, Solidere has cleared all of the ruined buildings, developed new infrastructure for the whole area, built a sea wall and an entirely new seafront neighborhood using the debris from the old downtown, and begun constructing properties and selling land to other developers in accordance with a well-thought-out master plan. Everything you see in downtown Beirut now either belongs to Solidere or was sold by them to a developer for a specific project.

The Solidere project will continue for at least another ten or fifteen years, as downtown Beirut gradually fills in with offices, government buildings, residences, retail shops, hotels, parks, and restaurants. Eventually, a brand-new seafront neighborhood will go up to the north of today's downtown: the photo here shows the start of that construction. Today, the whole of central Beirut is a maze of construction sites. I hope I can make it back to the city over the next five or ten years to see the progress, and to enjoy what is going to be a beautiful and well-planned Mediterranean capital.

This is a photo taken from Solidere's website showing what the downtown area looked like before the reconstruction project.