Although this thesis was of course a requirement for my undergraduate degree, it was also a project that became so multifaceted, personal and even communal. I could tell you about my thesis in double the amount of words I wrote it in (which is slightly over 10,000 words), but to avoid being ineloquent I’ll share simply what inspired the project and what propelled it further. My thesis was based off of an essay I had written before in another class on a building in Downtown Beirut called The Egg (Al-Bayda). I knew little of it other than it being revitalized during the 2019 Thawra and that it had been occupied by different groups of people, who all brought forward something different during this time of unrest and uprising.

I soon became infatuated with the idea that the urban dweller could be an urban designer, or specifically have a stake in the functionalization and appearance of the built environment as a means for pursuing justice. It’s what can be understood as the manifestation of counter-society within a Thawra (revolution) temporality through placemaking (Read Roberto Roccu (2019) who theorizes such ‘Arab uprisings/protests as a rupture to or tear at the capitalist time and fabric so as to momentarily create an alternative time and space; for more literature on my definition of place-making read Toolis (2017), Fincher, Pardy & Shaw (2016), Nagle (2021), Sinno (2020)).

Of course, an academic lens requires being critical and never taking anything at face value. When the self-directed course began in September 2023, I was soon pushed to seek out deeper truths and more honest analyses of what had really been happening at the Egg. This especially included the intricacies and tensions that come with activism in general, and specific to the Lebanese political landscape. Let’s just say there was so much to unpack.

The course was led by a wonderful mentor of mine and head of the Middle East Studies Program at UBC, Dr. Pheroze Unwalla, and in our bi-weekly meetings I shared our small classroom with 4 other extremely capable academics who soon became friends. We largely bonded over how excruciatingly difficult it is to write a thesis, ensuring quality, authenticity and well-evidenced theses. I started walking out of that class both inspired and with throbbing a migraine. But the process, regardless of how our paper’s ended up, was deeply rewarding and fulfilling.

By March 2024, we presented our papers at the Middle East Islamic Consortium (MEICON) Student Conference and by that time we had totally different ideas of what our papers were compared to when we started. It was fun to see something tangible at the end of the road and get to present and discuss our work to friends, peers and colleagues at universities across the province. It was both nerve wrecking and relieving to see how our work would be received outside of the little microcosm of our classroom.

The bigger hurdle had been submitting the paper – especially for someone who always goes over word count, and at one point was dealing with 13,000 words. In any case, when the deadline came around, I remembered a large lesson that Pheroze reminded us of: this thesis would never be perfect or ‘complete’ even after working on it for 8 months. And he was right, the project wasn’t over. For one, many of the analyses I drew from the Egg and the Thawra were extremely relevant to the nuanced and sometimes tumultuous ways we were seeing activism on campuses on Turtle Island unfold during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Soon many of my analyses were becoming embodied lesson all around me and for others who were leaders in the organizing space.

On top of that, the project had been one of the main reasons that I’ve chosen urban design as the next path I’d tread after I graduated. This was partially due to the nature of my research and the potential I saw in grounded, just urban design practices, but it was also because the project allowed me to dip into my creative side. Having pursued an arts degree in human geography, the majority of my coursework was in the form of writing. But in this thesis, there was a self-made opportunity to express my visual interests in the Egg and my artistic skills through the digital collage you see at the top of the page. It guided the visual aesthetic of my MEICON presentation and has currently inspired a zine I’m working on, as well as a potential project that I may or may not get a grant for.

It's all to say this project is still with me and taught me so much about the creative process of turning impalpable hunches into tangible ideas and purpose.

After all this you’re probably wondering what my paper is actually about. But seeing as I might be in the process of publishing it soon, I’ll just give you a taste of it through my abstract:

Lebanese Place-Making and the Egg: Imagined Pasts and Futures in the 2019 Revolution

“Placemaking” as a practice typically refers to a people-centered approach taken up by communities to gather, express, and improve the “livability” of their cities (Toolis, 2017). At the onset of the October 2019 Uprisings in Lebanon, many scholars, urban dwellers, students, organizers and artists gathered in and around Beirut’s unique Egg building, a prewar cinema complex that became a convening space for revolutionary organizing and expression. As such, those occupying and surrounding the Egg employed diverse placemaking practices to raise political concerns and express pathways for (economic) justice. Practices – including public lectures, teach-ins, public art, and others – which were then used to stake claims over the space, economic justice, and Lebanon’s future.

This project examines those practices and how accompanying political tensions and imaginaries incapacitated the efforts of many in the movement. In the case of the Egg, there is an assumption within placemaking literature that when a community engages in public, political dialogue, that it can help overcome divisions or create ‘collective’ narratives. However, this project will show that this is neither inherently true nor desirable. In the case of the Egg, these divisions worsened through heated disagreements as to what politics or imaginaries were ‘acceptable’ for building the movement.

In sum, I argue that unaddressed (or uncritiqued) imaginaries and political tensions incapacitated the impact of these placemaking practices within the movement. Following this argument, my project grapples with questions of what it means to subvert prescribed Lebanese imaginaries and lean into imaginative pathways towards just futurities and solidarities.