ZJ. This also happened in Beirut, and it was covered in the book The Arab City: Architecture and Representation, co-edited by Dean Andraos. During the post-civil war reconstruction period in Lebanon in 1990, many of the downtown modernist-era buildings were demolished because they did not belong to the "religious coexistence" marketing agenda of the real estate company handling the reconstruction effort. One of the first new buildings in Beirut that was finished in 2000 that falls under this forged religious narrative was the Mohammad Al-Amin mosque, which is the largest of the Ottoman-style revivalist mosques in Beirut, supported partially by Saudi Arabia, partially by Turkey. With the Post-Conflict Cities Lab, we will be able to investigate these spaces of worship, the messages they convey and how religiosity has a role to play in the reconstruction of post-conflict cities.

Q. How does the lab’s first project—“Urban Research and Practice in Post Conflict Settings in the Middle East and North Africa Region”—further its goals?

HBA. This project is based on the research I did for my first book that was published last year, For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers. In it I look at how many militias from the Lebanese civil war ended up becoming religious political organizations that were using planning, architecture and real estate tools to create and maintain their own territories. There’s always this assumption in urban planning that the future is going to be better than today. This notion of progress that has shaped the field was mostly a Eurocentric modernist tool of organizing territories and their futures, but in Lebanon and throughout the Middle East, people don’t think about the future in the same way. In Beirut, specifically, the future is not always about expectations of progress. For many people, it’s about segregation and living with pollution on a daily basis because in some areas the urban planning produced overlapping industrial and residential zones. How can we shape a different kind of future that is more collaborative and create communities across boundaries?

The Middle East is always thought of as an anomaly that doesn’t apply elsewhere, but with the Post-Conflict Cities Lab, we’re saying that you have to look at the Middle East because from there you can learn how to deal with severe issues that affect us globally. In Beirut, I’m studying how Syrian refugees and the lowest-income Lebanese found shelter in the peripheries of the city, in apartment buildings originally intended for the middle class, sold as places to enjoy birds and trees, but that ended up as failed, unfinished projects with no security.

AA. We tend to think about places like Lebanon and the Middle East as exceptions where nothing works, but my fear is that the future looks like Lebanon; it's a microcosm that has been under geopolitical strain for more than a century. You can learn a lot there about conflict and intentions, but also about resiliency and how people come together and overcome, as they are doing now. It’s a very sharp lens through which to look at the broader world, and architecture’s and planning’s roles in shaping the world.

Modernism in architecture and planning assumed a top-down belief in progress and tabula rasa, and post-modernism was a retraction with architecture and planning adopting self-critical positions that rendered the disciplines very scholarly and closed. We’re at a moment now where projects such as the Post-Conflict Cities Lab are trying to be both critical and engaged at the same time.