The project is predicated on the assumption that land sales between religious groups will soon be banned by the Lebanese parliament. In this scenario, the project proposes a division of land-rights and air-rights, so that the space above a building can be owned by an entity separate from the building owner. The result is a new kind of vertical zoning that overlaps and intersect the existing horizontal zoning.

The vertical zoning allows one biya to literally cross over another, rather than move through it. This system does not force people of different biya to live heterogeneously, which would violate the cultural practices of the city.

The proposed infrastructure is a privately owned high speed rail transportation system that latches on to existing building structures for its primary support. The train systems will be constructed by  a variety of (conflicting) religious and political entities because of the military advantages they provide. In a city without stable infrastructure, this train system would allow groups like Hezbollah to quickly connect their headquarters to their frontier territory, the city ports, the financial center, and the airport without moving through potential enemy territory.

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The side effect of this web of train lines is a whole range of new vertical interactions between biya. the new interactions entangle the infrastructure of different biya in the same geographic space. Since bombs are geographically targeted and unprecise, urbanicide bombings in Beirut become less and less feasible the more closely entwined the infrastructure of conflicting biya becomes. If a Hezbollah-built train line sits atop a Meronite Church-owned residential building when war breaks out between them, the Church won’t bomb the building because their people live inside. Hezbollah won’t bomb it because their resource mobility relies on its structure. The people living there are made safer by the entanglement. In this way, the agency of the Future War is reframed to produce side effects that limit the damage of conflict in Beirut.

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While the conceptual project spans the urban fabric of Beirut, the designed project identifies a site in which vertical entanglements between biya are happening in a dense area. The site is located at a circulatory bottleneck at the south of the city in a Christian neighborhood called Doha Aramoun. Proximity to ports, high ground, the airport, and the mountain pass makes this site militarily strategic, and the  convergence of the ocean and mountains reduce the available buildable space, thus increasing the infrastructural density and likelihood of interactions between biya.

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Beirut, Radically Abridged

Beirut, Lebanon has a long history of social and political conflict that has given rise to a unique urban condition driven by non-human authorship. Hiba Bou Akar, head of the Post-Conflict Urban Research Lab at Columbia, identifies this unique urbanism as a loss of hope in her book For the War Yet to Come. Typical urban planning strategies, according to Bou Akar, are characterized by a singular optimism which envisions a unified, better future for the city. In Beirut, the trauma of perpetual violent conflict has eliminated optimism for a unified future, and instead the urban planning is guided by anxiety-ridden militarism as both citizens and institutions try to prepare for the next war. Bou Akar identifies Future War as the author of the urban plan in Beirut.

To better understand the nature of this Future War, it is necessary to understand Beirut’s past. This is a gargantuan task. Beirut is one of the longest continuously inhabited urban centers in the world--the city began alongside Mesopotamia and has been a population center ever since. Even before that, Beirut had an ancient history. Within the modern municipal zone of Beirut, archeological sites contain evidence of Homo Neandethalensis, the rise of the anatomically modern human, the invention of shelters, the invention of farming, and so forth.

Arguably, the city’s urban history began with the Phoenicians around 2500 B.C., who were conquered by the Hellenes, who were conquered by the Romans, who were conquered by the Arab Caliphate, who were conquered by the Christians during the Crusades, who were conquered again by the Arab Caliphate, who was reconquered by the Ottomans, who eventually fell apart at the end of World War I, at which point the region was placed under a French mandate until its independence in 1946. All this to say that the city of Beirut has a long, tumultuous history, and a hugely diverse population of people who all have long cultural and religious ties to the land, and who have almost all experienced the city as both the colonizer and the colonized. When we consider Lebanon’s modern history of civil war and the influx of Syrian and Palestinean refugees, it is no wonder Beirut is in perpetual conflict. It is a city pulled a thousand ways.

This colorful history often earns Beirut the title of Most Cosmopolitan City in the Middle East. At the macro-scale, perhaps this is true. But in reality, the diverse populations of Beirut are strictly segregated along geographic lines that are in constant flux. Division between neighborhoods is such that many public infrastructures like roads and social services are provided by local, informal, military governments rather than the state. There has not been enough cohesion in municipal government to carry out a census since 1932. Borders between territories are the sites of ongoing conflict as different religious and cultural groups vie for high ground and other militarily strategic land. The land-grabbing strategy has reached such heights that the Lebanese parliament periodically considers a law that would outlaw the exchange of land between religious groups; Christians could only sell to Christians, Sunnis to Sunnis, and so forth.

This law is also a product of a unique cultural attitude in the city. The Arabic word biya translates literally to “a natural environment.” In Beirut, however, it has taken on new meaning. In Beirut, a biya is a homogenous neighborhood, and everyone wants to live in their natural biya. A healthy Christian biya is one where no Muslims live. If Muslims move in, it is no longer a healthy Christian biya, and Christians retreat to less diverse neighborhoods. This attitude might be one of the few commonalities between all the cultural groups of Beirut.

Hiba Bou Akar notes another novelty in the relationship between the people of Beirut and their city. She calls in “urbanicide.” It is a phenomenon where the urban infrastructure becomes the primary target in violent conflict, not the people, because it is understood that eliminating the right set of infrastructures will disallow certain groups from living in certain areas. In this way, the infrastructure of the city becomes its own party in the conflict.

Through the mechanisms of urbanicide and land-grabbing, it can be said that the Future War of Beirut is authoring the city’s urban form, like coronavirus in Madrid or terrorism in the Mojave Desert. Rather than changing this reality, the goal is to reframe the Future War’s entrance into human infrastructure. The goal is to provide a way for decisions inevitably based on military strategy to have the side effect of reducing the harm of the coming conflict.