Our Ventures

The BRPI Case - The Pilot

Field Research and Ethnography Turned to Physical and Digital Urban Strategy

The Karantina–Nahr Beirut–Bourj Hammoud corridor is one of the most contested urban perimeters in Beirut: a militarized post-explosion neighborhood, an immigrant district under unprecedented tension, and the polluted river that divides them. In 2022, Studio Madane chose the corridor as the pilot site for Urban Injections, supported by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation Lebanon.

The research question driving the work: does reform delivered by a political alternative actually shift citizens' political decision-making?

The Development

The fieldwork ran across four working groups: Urbanists & Environmentalists, Documenters & Visual Creators, Artists & Laborers, and Citizen Scientists, producing mappings, surveys, documented conversations, short films, and architectural experiments.

The team mapped seven plots across the corridor; each was a microcosm of Beirut's broader urban dysfunctions. One was selected: a dark, unsafe site overshadowed between the river and a major highway. Residents' testimonies, gathered over months, were synthesized into three civic rights the residents were being deprived of:

the right to gather
the right to trade, and
the right to power.

A photographic survey of the wider corridor revealed that nearly 100% of documented points showed barriers invading public space and almost 50% occupied sidewalks; more than half were immovable. But the inverse finding was the surprise: more than 50% of those informalities produced positive contributions such as the creation of extra usable space, increased planting, optimized walkability, and opportunities for communal use which the studio re-framed as targets for the civic reform proposal, not problems to remove.

The Beirut River remains a neglected wound, trapping residents in cycles of love for their birthplace and frustration at its stagnation. Organized Entropy aims to convey the intersections of these realities. Cries from the streets, alongside pulled knowledge from interviews, are compiled into written testimonies and audio albums, creating narratives for sociopolitical advocacy. The social impact aspect of the audiovisuals aim to inform documentation approaches to the problems either from experts or from the residents themselves.

Two Interventions Emerged

The first was physical: the Capsule Madane, a community-owned platform designed against the three civic rights, a recreational, trading, and self-powered hub for the selected plot. The second was digital: a co-governance platform allowing residents to log geolocated reports of urban violations they wanted rectified, paired with municipal monitoring tools so that observations on the ground could move directly into administrative action.

The digital platform was benchmarked against Catalunya's SITMUN system, where municipalities use geolocated participatory governance to advance reform while keeping residents and stakeholders inside the loop.

Lebanese Clientelism examines the inverse condition the BRPI methodology had to reckon with: that some residents have built lifelines inside the dysfunction itself, which is why reform from a political alternative can be received with reluctance rather than hope.

What this case demonstrates

BRPI is where Studio Madane's methodology in the architectural practice took shape first. The case integrates ethnographic fieldwork, community engagement, audiovisual survey research, 3D scanning, architectural prototyping, and digital platform design under a single research question! It used that integration to produce two distinct interventions rather than one all-purpose project. It is also one of our references for knowledge management across disciplines that rarely meet (urbanism, sociology, audio, and software).