+ Studio
Madane
Ji[Daruna]
Beirut River: Portrait + Injection
Community Activists
Citizen Scientists
Ji[Daruna]
Led by the Urbanists & Environmentalists Working Group
Ji[Daruna], meaning both ‘Our Barriers’ and ‘Our Home’ in Arabic, is a crowd-sourcing platform that transforms these barriers into a medium for collective accountability and reform. At its core, Ji[Daruna] aims to empower residents to document and report urban challenges, be they barriers, props, or objects encroaching on public spaces, through an open-source mapping platform monitored by municipalities. Ji[Daruna] encourages participatory governance and reshapes how urban challenges are addressed by connecting people to governance through a real time reporting process. The photographic reports go through a reporting form that classifies challenges into three main categories:
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Illegal Separators
- Joining Interventions
- Religious/ Ethnic Boundaries
While the platform itself has yet to be developed, the concept was simulated using our own public Google Maps link as part of a pilot study, laying the groundwork for a participatory model of urban reform.
ALUMNI | yara farhat + Zahera Abou Hamdan + Rynal Bou Imad + Ranim Kachmar + Maya hamadeh + lucinda semaan + Jad KabbanI + marie-lyn
Cultural Awareness and Sustainable Communities
The Program
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Urban Informalities Study
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Ji[Daruna] Exhibition [in collaboration with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation (FNF) Lebanon]
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#Statdsache x Ji[Daruna]
- Urban Informalities Speaking Campaign
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Graffiti of Oct 17th, an Exercise in Political Storytelling
This concept was first piloted in the Karantina-Nahr Beirut-Bourj Hammoud radius, a region deeply studied in Studio Madane’s Urban Injections.
Using Google Maps as a simulation tool, our working group, in collaboration with the Artists & Laborers working group, conducted photographic surveys, capturing the socio-political realities reflected in the physical environment to gain insights on the following inquiries:
How are the residents using barriers and props to define their living? What do these observations say about their status? How are authorities, unions of residents, business owners, and other stakeholders involved?
The mappers and surveyors went on several ‘kazdoura’ [strolls] between the areas and identified a lot of phenomena in the urban landscape. Key findings from the pilot included:
- Nearly 100% of barriers in the photographs invaded public space.
- About 50% occupied sidewalks, hindering mobility.
- Over 50% were immovable installations, reflecting deep-rooted urban disorder.
#Statdsache x Ji[Daruna]
Studio Madane and #Stadtsache have hopped on a series of conversations to explore innovative ways of democratizing urban development through digital tools. Rooted in Studio Madane’s ethnographic urban research project, Ji[Daruna], and inspired by #Stadtsache’s success in participatory urban research and planning, the collaboration aims to empower residents in Beirut’s neighborhouds to document and address urban challenges using real-time data transfer and geolocated photographic reporting, just as Ji[Daruna] promotes. This partnership dwells on shared values of community ownership, observation, reform, and bridging that gap between the people and governance.
These findings revealed not only urban violations but also the deeper socio-political dynamics, with one resident candidly sharing:
"By attempting to fix anything, we pose a threat to the dominant [political] parties..."
Through the Urban Informalities Speaking Campaign, these insights were shared in a series of videos, highlighting the photographed realities and their consequences on public spaces and governance.
Beyond barriers and props, the physical environment also serves as a canvas for public expression. When there is no other reliable source of expression or trusted media, the blank spaces of a city become a way to document [Baranko, 2020]. During the October 17 Revolution in Lebanon, Studio Madane gathered with its youngest youth for a field workshop to document the graffiti that emerged from those that revolted against the corrupt ruling class, and complemented each visual with a piece of text that serves as a powerful re-narration of history.
One can understand the public opinion of a country through the writings on its walls. A recent paper illustrates the example of Egypt and the “Revolutionary Wall on Mohamed Mahmoud Street near Tahrir Square.” It states that the wall served as an “important archive of contemporary Egyptian culture, politics, and revolution” but has since been destroyed, “the wall scrubbed of the human voices and experiences made visual by Cairo’s artists.” The wall is also described as a “truthful urban narrative of the uprising,” which the government has been trying to erase [Cory, 2022].
As was the case with Egypt, our very own documentation of major events and public opinions on our walls is critical. History taught at school is not one that aligns with the experiences of the Lebanese population. However, the writings on the wall and the expressions etched onto the surfaces of our environment remain undeniable [Fattah].