| For many travellers
visiting a new city, the first impression is everything…
yet most interesting cities hide their true character behind a
facade of images and sounds that overwhelm the visitor’s
senses by their sheer newness. This generally makes for a very
shallow form of tourism that, although often interesting enough
by itself, gives a purely one-dimensional experience of the place.
Hardened urban tourists, on the other hand, know how to cut through
the first layer of smoke, and delve deep into the fabric of the
place. Granted, some places are easier to ‘crack’
than others, but in all cases, the effort can yield a magnificently
rewarding experience.
How many times have you landed into a new destination to find
it has nothing to do with your expectation of it? Whether that
expectation came from a travel brochure, a picture on the internet,
or from a friend’s account of their own visit there, more
often than not, your own subjective experience will have little
in common with that second-hand description.
I personally find that the best way to encounter a place is to
do so with a conscious recognition that in fact, I know nothing
of it until I’ve lived in it. Whenever I can, I make sure
I do the tourist-book thing on first arrival, getting all the
ruin watching and the museum visiting out of the way in the first
day or two of any trip, leaving the rest of my sojourn open to
any possibility.
Instead of seeing every single tourist-guide-recommended nook
on your first trip to an unknown place, I suggest you leave out
some of the more typical sites as an excuse for a potential, eventual
second trip in the future. Instead, try to lose yourself in the
day-to-day culture, as much as you can. Try to live at the same
rhythm the local population lives. Whether you manage to do it
or not, you will find yourself at the centre of a whole different
world, an enriching experience, a truly unforgettable sojourn.
Take the case of Beirut for example. For some, its name is still
associated with terrible violence and war. They have no idea that
it is in fact one of the safest cities of the world to visit,
and that the ‘war’ has ended more than twelve years
ago… For others, you mention Beirut and they immediately
reply ‘Aaah, I heard it was the Paris of the Middle East
once’. That sentence always makes me laugh. I wonder if
people from the Middle East ever thought of Paris as ‘the
Beirut of Europe’... I mean how can you compare a Central
European, riverside, ex-monarchic, ex-imperial, Cartesian, centuries-old
city with an Arab, Mediterranean, ex-colonised, chaotic, young
city?
Of course, it is easy to see how Beirut’s cafés-trottoir
lifestyle, its cosmopolitanism, or its French-speaking stylish
citizens make it a distant cousin of the French capital. Even
some of the left-over architecture from the city-centre is in
a French colonial style mixed with Ottoman mannerisms, and the
Place de l’Étoile in Beirut is of pure Hausmannian
descent. Yet it is precisely when you leave the newly-refurbished
Beirut Central District and lose yourself in the chaos and sensory
overload of the sprawling, shapeless city, that you realise how
complex this place is. Go beyond your initial recoil, and give
the chaos a chance, and Beirut will crawl under your skin like
a fascinating new friend, like an unruly lover.
For the untrained eye, the untrained ear, and the untrained mind,
the chaos is overwhelming. Yet even the most hard-bitten scientists
have learnt in the last few decades to recognise the creative
order deep within chaos. Trust me, I know what I’m saying:
as an architect and an urban designer, it is in theory my job
to put order in things. Yet one day at university, as I researched
ways to deal with the urban problems of Beirut, I was struck with
an unexpected realisation: Oxford’s sleepy, boring orderliness
stressed me more than Beirut’s chaos ever did.
You can imagine the face of my esteemed grey haired Oxford tutors
when I told them I wanted to show Beirut had more life-enhancing
lessons to give than to take. I eventually proved my thesis by
showing that even the science of physics had accepted the subjective
nature of the world, and that it even had developed a beautiful
language to describe chaotic behaviour as a form of order. In
fact they were so convinced in the end, that they helped me publish
a book about it, Quantum City (Architectural Press, Oxford, 2002),
in which I developed the ideas further. Let me give you some simple
examples of our general prejudice towards order and chaos.
One of the most commonly shocking things that make up the texture
of Beirut is the driving. For most Europeans, the anarchic unwieldy
mini-thriller episode that plays itself at every intersection
is simply scary. Funnily though, Beirut traffic intersections
are statistically less dangerous than say, London ones. While
the London driver would count totally on the law and everybody
else rigorously following the system, the Beiruti driver simply
cannot. Instead, he or she has adapted to an environment that
constantly leaves any option open. What that means is that even
though things look dangerously chaotic, in fact they obey a very
subtle set of unwritten laws that allow the whole system to self-regulate
and to remain robust.
If one driver burns a red light at a busy London intersection,
you can imagine the resulting chaos: at least five taxi cabs and
a double-decker will pile up, and the grid will be stuck for hours.
In Beirut (and I feel it is similar in Rome or Milan), the other
drivers would be able to avoid collision at the very last moment,
thanks to their higher alertness, linked to their understanding
of each other’s temperament.
Mind you, I am not trying to condone irresponsible driving or
anarchy! I am merely pointing out the interesting and unexpected
patterns that make the most chaotic of environments function.
In fact, a lot of the driving in Lebanon is regulated by continuous
eye contact between the different drivers. With a wink or a nudge
of the head, or a firm stare, little messages are exchanged that
hint at the driver’s mood or their next manoeuvre much more
reliably than their honking or their turning signals. You just
need to learn this language through experience. Meanwhile, just
relax when you’re in the passenger seat of a Lebanese driver,
it is really much safer than you would think.
Alternatively of course, you can just walk. Incredibly, walking
is a pastime loathed by Beirutis in spite of the wonderful weather
and the diversity of their city. But wandering around Beirut,
or Cairo, or Alexandria, or any dense city for that matter, brings
wonderful experiences to the real flaneur.
There is the obvious joy of wandering in the traditional souks
or on the Mediterranean corniche, but nothing beats walking deep
in the living neighbourhoods to get a feel for the tempo of a
place. In Arabic, the word for ‘neighbourhood’ is
‘Hayy’; the same word also means ‘alive’.
Its plural, ‘Ahyaa’ means ‘the living beings’.
All people who live in the hayy are ‘abnaa al-hayy’,
literally ‘the offspring of the hayy’. I find this
very interesting, when compared to more western concepts of the
neighbourhood, which in English would mean ‘the vicinity’,
or the French ‘Quartier’ which literally means a geometric
area. It’s almost as if the relation between the people
and the place they inhabit is more organic in the Middle East.
It is closer to the ancient Greek concept of the polis, which
meant both the city and the citizen.
Traversing the hayy has its own rules of course. One crucial thing
to understand is the concept of territoriality that regulates
this seemingly chaotic setting. Do not expect fences or ‘Keep
Out’ signs to tell you where you can tread and where you
cannot. Here as well, the rules and the boundaries exist in another,
non physical dimension.
Private and public areas overlap organically and dynamically,
shifting admissibility according to the different times of the
day. You will have to rely on your own sensitivity and perception.
Look out for tell-tale signs by the amount of activity on the
street. A change in atmosphere as you walk will tell you when
you have crossed some form of threshold.
In the rare absence of people outside, the sound of TV or of someone
doing the dishes behind an open front door, the smell of cooking
or the sight of drying clothes, flower pots or a caged bird, or
a small neighbourhood shrine, are the hints you are looking for
to know where to step. Avoid going too close to people’s
windows in the afternoon, when there is a general sense of calm
in the street, as the children are playing football while the
parents have their siesta.
If you see two elderly men playing checkers outside a shop, it
is okay to stand and watch them play, they will be flattered.
But avoid breaking their concentration by asking for directions…
If people stare at you as they realise you are a stranger to their
street, just smile at them, or even say ‘marhaba!’
for hello.
Remember, your own body language is what they are trying to interpret.
It is the clue to your identity: hesitancy, as someone who has
lost their way, or inquisitiveness, as someone looking for the
house of a friend, will shift their curiosity between indifference,
welcome or alarm… Do not worry about your own safety, there
is no danger in trespassing by mistake, you will find that most
people are highly tolerant of strangers, and would happily invite
you in for a coffee (by shouting ‘Tafaddal!’) or guide
you in any way they can.
These quick examples are of course limited by the format of this
article. Wandering the streets of a city will also bring you to
discover magical shops, secret gardens and a diverse, hidden architecture.
Yet what makes a place live is its people, and their interaction
with their environment. Unfortunately, most architects and urbanists
are trained to analyse and affect the physical environment only.
There are many reasons for this I won’t go into here, but
what I fail to comprehend is why this has also become the attitude
of mass tourists, who seem more interested in dead ruins than
in live people. I hope more of us will discover the joys of wandering
the streets we do not know. Maybe one day it would help us understand
how different social patterns are simply variations on the theme
of order, or how chaos can be an organic expression of life’s
own yearning for itself.
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