Reshaping Riyadh Alsolh Square: Mapping the Narratives of Protesting Crowds in Beirut

Reem Albarakt; Gehan Selim; Amal Iaaly

doi:doi:10.11648/j.urp.20210604.13

| Peer-Reviewed

Reshaping Riyadh Alsolh Square: Mapping the Narratives of Protesting Crowds in Beirut

Reem Albarakt, Gehan Selim, Amal Iaaly

Published in Urban and Regional Planning (Volume 6, Issue 4)

Received: 8 August 2021 Accepted: 10 September 2021 Published: 19 November 2021

Views: Downloads:

Download PDF

Share This Article

Twitter
Linked In
Facebook

Abstract

The conception of the state's ownership of public space and its control over its physical and psychological accessibility have shaped the spaces and the extent of public engagement. On the other side, civil movements challenge this dominance and contribute to reshaping the spaces through different modes of political gatherings. Several spaces in the Middle East have developed their significance through the competition of conflictual actors. This paper aims at identifying the spatial tools of the occupational competition for dominating the space. The article examines the method of generating time-aware maps of the spatial practices of protesting crowd out from the scattered archive of visual and verbal narratives using ArcGIS. By employing 395 archived videos which documented the protest event of 22^nd – 24^th, August 2015 in Riyadh Alsolh square, Beirut – Lebanon, the paper produced 144 plural patterns of the protestors' crowd movement per 10 minutes within 250 m radius of Riyadh Alsolh square's surroundings. The article defined four patterns of the crowd's territory based on their physical, functional and relational characteristics. The conflictual sense of the contradictory crowds can be used to identify the status of competition for dominance. It also indicates the correlation between the features of the pattern and the potential of raising the conflictual sense. The examined method helps to analyse crowds' contribution in shaping public spaces during urban events; however, the more available spatiotemporal recordings, the more figured characteristics of the produced space.

Published in	Urban and Regional Planning (Volume 6, Issue 4)
DOI	10.11648/j.urp.20210604.13
Page(s)	115-122
Creative Commons	This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright	Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Science Publishing Group

Keywords

Public Space, Socio-political Movement, Spatial Contestation, Crowd Mapping, ArcGIS, Riyadh Alsolh Square, Beirut

References

[1]	Banerjee, T., 2001. The future of public space: beyond invented streets and reinvented places. Journal of the American planning association, 67 (1), pp. 9-24.
[2]	Lehtovuori, P., 2012. Towards experiential urbanism. Critical Sociology, 38 (1), pp. 71-87.
[3]	Tonnelat, S., 2010. The sociology of urban public spaces. Territorial evolution and planning solution: experiences from China and France, pp. 84-92.
[4]	Lofland, L. H., 2017. The public realm: Exploring the city's quintessential social territory. Routledge.
[5]	Habermas, Jiirgen, 2001. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[6]	Cornwall, A. and Coelho, V. S. eds., 2007. Spaces for change? the politics of citizen participation in new democratic arenas (Vol. 4). Zed Books.
[7]	Joseph, Isaac. 1998. La ville sans qualités. La tour d'Aigues, France: Editions de l'Aube.
[8]	Low, S. and Smith, N., 2013. Introduction: the imperative of public space. In The politics of public space (pp. 7-22). Routledge.
[9]	Parkinson, J. R., 2013. How is space public? Implications for spatial policy and democracy. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 31 (4), pp. 682-699.
[10]	Baocchi, G., 2001. ‘Participation, activism, and politics: the Porto Alegre experiment and deliberative democratic theory’, Politics and Society 29 (1): 43–72.
[11]	Heller, P., 2001. ‘Moving the state: the politics of democratic decentralization in Kerala, South Africa, and Porto Alegre’, Politics & Society 29 (1): 131–63.
[12]	Avritzer, L., 2002. Democracy and the Public Space in Latin America, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[13]	Kollmar, C. F., 2013. Public Space in Beirut:-Environmental Justice-Heinrich Böll Foundation.
[14]	Rosiny, S., 2015. A quarter century of ‘transitory power-sharing’. Lebanon’s unfulfilled Ta’if Agreement of 1989 revisited. Civil Wars, 17 (4), pp. 485-502.
[15]	Nagle, J., 2016. Between entrenchment, reform and transformation: ethnicity and Lebanon's.
[16]	Rizkallah, A., 2017. The paradox of power-sharing: stability and fragility in postwar Lebanon. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40 (12), pp. 2058-2076.
[17]	Hazbun, W., 2016. Assembling security in a ‘weak state:’the contentious politics of plural governance in Lebanon since 2005. Third World Quarterly, 37 (6), pp. 1053-1070.
[18]	Nagle, J., 2018. Beyond ethnic entrenchment and amelioration: an analysis of non-sectarian social movements and Lebanon’s consociationalism. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41 (7), pp. 1370-1389.
[19]	Haddad, S., 2009. Lebanon: from consociationalism to conciliation. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 15 (3-4), pp. 398-416.
[20]	Leenders R., 2012. Spoils of truce: Corruption and state-building in postwar Lebanon. Cornell University Press.
[21]	Nakhoul, S. 2015. “Lebanon’s Rubbish Crisis Exposes Political Rot.” Reuters, September 7.
[22]	Lehtovuori, P., 2016. Experience and conflict: The production of urban space. Routledge.
[23]	Kingston, P. 2013. Reproducing Sectarianism: Advocacy Networks and Politics of Civil Society in Postwar Lebanon. New York: SUNY Press.
[24]	Zbeeb, M., 2012. “$5 Million a Year: The Tip of the Sukleen Waste Pile.” Al-Akhbar, August 27.
[25]	Geha, C., 2018. Politics of a garbage crisis: Social networks, narratives, and frames of Lebanon’s 2015 protests and their aftermath. Social Movement Studies, pp. 1-15.
[26]	Dion, N., 2012. Spacing Freud: Space and Place in Psychoanalytic Theory (Doctoral dissertation).
[27]	Park, Robert Ezra. 1972. The crowd and the public, and other essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[28]	Houtzager, P., 2003. ‘Introduction: from polycentrism to the polity’, in P. Houtzager and M. Moore, eds, Changing Paths: International Development and the New Politics of Inclusion, Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press.
[29]	Skocpol, T., and M. P. Fiorina, 1999. ‘Making sense of the civic engagement debate’, in T. Skocpol and M. P. Fiorina, eds, Civic Engagement in American Democracy, Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press.
[30]	Chandoke, N., 2003. The Conceits of Civil Society, Delhi: Oxford University Press.
[31]	Friedland, R., 2009. The endless fields of Pierre Bourdieu. Organization, 16 (6), pp. 887-917.

Cite This Article

Plain Text BibTeX RIS

APA Style

Reem Albarakt, Gehan Selim, Amal Iaaly. (2021). Reshaping Riyadh Alsolh Square: Mapping the Narratives of Protesting Crowds in Beirut. Urban and Regional Planning, 6(4), 115-122. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.urp.20210604.13

Copy | Download

ACS Style

Reem Albarakt; Gehan Selim; Amal Iaaly. Reshaping Riyadh Alsolh Square: Mapping the Narratives of Protesting Crowds in Beirut. Urban Reg. Plan. 2021, 6(4), 115-122. doi: 10.11648/j.urp.20210604.13

Copy | Download

AMA Style

Reem Albarakt, Gehan Selim, Amal Iaaly. Reshaping Riyadh Alsolh Square: Mapping the Narratives of Protesting Crowds in Beirut. Urban Reg Plan. 2021;6(4):115-122. doi: 10.11648/j.urp.20210604.13

Copy | Download

@article{10.11648/j.urp.20210604.13,
  author = {Reem Albarakt and Gehan Selim and Amal Iaaly},
  title = {Reshaping Riyadh Alsolh Square: Mapping the Narratives of Protesting Crowds in Beirut},
  journal = {Urban and Regional Planning},
  volume = {6},
  number = {4},
  pages = {115-122},
  doi = {10.11648/j.urp.20210604.13},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.11648/j.urp.20210604.13},
  eprint = {https://article.sciencepublishinggroup.com/pdf/10.11648.j.urp.20210604.13},
  abstract = {The conception of the state's ownership of public space and its control over its physical and psychological accessibility have shaped the spaces and the extent of public engagement. On the other side, civil movements challenge this dominance and contribute to reshaping the spaces through different modes of political gatherings. Several spaces in the Middle East have developed their significance through the competition of conflictual actors. This paper aims at identifying the spatial tools of the occupational competition for dominating the space. The article examines the method of generating time-aware maps of the spatial practices of protesting crowd out from the scattered archive of visual and verbal narratives using ArcGIS. By employing 395 archived videos which documented the protest event of 22nd – 24th, August 2015 in Riyadh Alsolh square, Beirut – Lebanon, the paper produced 144 plural patterns of the protestors' crowd movement per 10 minutes within 250 m radius of Riyadh Alsolh square's surroundings. The article defined four patterns of the crowd's territory based on their physical, functional and relational characteristics. The conflictual sense of the contradictory crowds can be used to identify the status of competition for dominance. It also indicates the correlation between the features of the pattern and the potential of raising the conflictual sense. The examined method helps to analyse crowds' contribution in shaping public spaces during urban events; however, the more available spatiotemporal recordings, the more figured characteristics of the produced space.},
 year = {2021}
}

Copy | Download

TY  - JOUR
T1  - Reshaping Riyadh Alsolh Square: Mapping the Narratives of Protesting Crowds in Beirut
AU  - Reem Albarakt
AU  - Gehan Selim
AU  - Amal Iaaly
Y1  - 2021/11/19
PY  - 2021
N1  - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.urp.20210604.13
DO  - 10.11648/j.urp.20210604.13
T2  - Urban and Regional Planning
JF  - Urban and Regional Planning
JO  - Urban and Regional Planning
SP  - 115
EP  - 122
PB  - Science Publishing Group
SN  - 2575-1697
UR  - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.urp.20210604.13
AB  - The conception of the state's ownership of public space and its control over its physical and psychological accessibility have shaped the spaces and the extent of public engagement. On the other side, civil movements challenge this dominance and contribute to reshaping the spaces through different modes of political gatherings. Several spaces in the Middle East have developed their significance through the competition of conflictual actors. This paper aims at identifying the spatial tools of the occupational competition for dominating the space. The article examines the method of generating time-aware maps of the spatial practices of protesting crowd out from the scattered archive of visual and verbal narratives using ArcGIS. By employing 395 archived videos which documented the protest event of 22nd – 24th, August 2015 in Riyadh Alsolh square, Beirut – Lebanon, the paper produced 144 plural patterns of the protestors' crowd movement per 10 minutes within 250 m radius of Riyadh Alsolh square's surroundings. The article defined four patterns of the crowd's territory based on their physical, functional and relational characteristics. The conflictual sense of the contradictory crowds can be used to identify the status of competition for dominance. It also indicates the correlation between the features of the pattern and the potential of raising the conflictual sense. The examined method helps to analyse crowds' contribution in shaping public spaces during urban events; however, the more available spatiotemporal recordings, the more figured characteristics of the produced space.
VL  - 6
IS  - 4
ER  -

Copy | Download

Author Information

Reem Albarakt

Faculty of Engineering and Technology, Applied Science Private University, Amman, Jordan
Gehan Selim

Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
Amal Iaaly

Faculty of Engineering, University of Balamand, El-Koura, Lebanon

Download PDF

Sections

Plain Text BibTeX RIS

APA Style

Reem Albarakt, Gehan Selim, Amal Iaaly. (2021). Reshaping Riyadh Alsolh Square: Mapping the Narratives of Protesting Crowds in Beirut. Urban and Regional Planning, 6(4), 115-122. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.urp.20210604.13

Copy | Download

ACS Style

Reem Albarakt; Gehan Selim; Amal Iaaly. Reshaping Riyadh Alsolh Square: Mapping the Narratives of Protesting Crowds in Beirut. Urban Reg. Plan. 2021, 6(4), 115-122. doi: 10.11648/j.urp.20210604.13

Copy | Download

AMA Style

Reem Albarakt, Gehan Selim, Amal Iaaly. Reshaping Riyadh Alsolh Square: Mapping the Narratives of Protesting Crowds in Beirut. Urban Reg Plan. 2021;6(4):115-122. doi: 10.11648/j.urp.20210604.13

Copy | Download

@article{10.11648/j.urp.20210604.13,
  author = {Reem Albarakt and Gehan Selim and Amal Iaaly},
  title = {Reshaping Riyadh Alsolh Square: Mapping the Narratives of Protesting Crowds in Beirut},
  journal = {Urban and Regional Planning},
  volume = {6},
  number = {4},
  pages = {115-122},
  doi = {10.11648/j.urp.20210604.13},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.11648/j.urp.20210604.13},
  eprint = {https://article.sciencepublishinggroup.com/pdf/10.11648.j.urp.20210604.13},
  abstract = {The conception of the state's ownership of public space and its control over its physical and psychological accessibility have shaped the spaces and the extent of public engagement. On the other side, civil movements challenge this dominance and contribute to reshaping the spaces through different modes of political gatherings. Several spaces in the Middle East have developed their significance through the competition of conflictual actors. This paper aims at identifying the spatial tools of the occupational competition for dominating the space. The article examines the method of generating time-aware maps of the spatial practices of protesting crowd out from the scattered archive of visual and verbal narratives using ArcGIS. By employing 395 archived videos which documented the protest event of 22nd – 24th, August 2015 in Riyadh Alsolh square, Beirut – Lebanon, the paper produced 144 plural patterns of the protestors' crowd movement per 10 minutes within 250 m radius of Riyadh Alsolh square's surroundings. The article defined four patterns of the crowd's territory based on their physical, functional and relational characteristics. The conflictual sense of the contradictory crowds can be used to identify the status of competition for dominance. It also indicates the correlation between the features of the pattern and the potential of raising the conflictual sense. The examined method helps to analyse crowds' contribution in shaping public spaces during urban events; however, the more available spatiotemporal recordings, the more figured characteristics of the produced space.},
 year = {2021}
}

Copy | Download

TY  - JOUR
T1  - Reshaping Riyadh Alsolh Square: Mapping the Narratives of Protesting Crowds in Beirut
AU  - Reem Albarakt
AU  - Gehan Selim
AU  - Amal Iaaly
Y1  - 2021/11/19
PY  - 2021
N1  - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.urp.20210604.13
DO  - 10.11648/j.urp.20210604.13
T2  - Urban and Regional Planning
JF  - Urban and Regional Planning
JO  - Urban and Regional Planning
SP  - 115
EP  - 122
PB  - Science Publishing Group
SN  - 2575-1697
UR  - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.urp.20210604.13
AB  - The conception of the state's ownership of public space and its control over its physical and psychological accessibility have shaped the spaces and the extent of public engagement. On the other side, civil movements challenge this dominance and contribute to reshaping the spaces through different modes of political gatherings. Several spaces in the Middle East have developed their significance through the competition of conflictual actors. This paper aims at identifying the spatial tools of the occupational competition for dominating the space. The article examines the method of generating time-aware maps of the spatial practices of protesting crowd out from the scattered archive of visual and verbal narratives using ArcGIS. By employing 395 archived videos which documented the protest event of 22nd – 24th, August 2015 in Riyadh Alsolh square, Beirut – Lebanon, the paper produced 144 plural patterns of the protestors' crowd movement per 10 minutes within 250 m radius of Riyadh Alsolh square's surroundings. The article defined four patterns of the crowd's territory based on their physical, functional and relational characteristics. The conflictual sense of the contradictory crowds can be used to identify the status of competition for dominance. It also indicates the correlation between the features of the pattern and the potential of raising the conflictual sense. The examined method helps to analyse crowds' contribution in shaping public spaces during urban events; however, the more available spatiotemporal recordings, the more figured characteristics of the produced space.
VL  - 6
IS  - 4
ER  -

Copy | Download