+ Studio
Madane
Ji[Daruna]
Beirut River: Portrait + Injection
Community Activists
Citizen Scientists
Urban Injections
Led by the Urbanists & Environmentalists Working Group
Beirut, a city marked by several misused pressure points, has long grappled with the effects of rapid urbanization, social fragmentation, and environmental neglect.
These pressure points are places where public life has been constrained and Urban Injections works to amplify their value.
Through interventions that are scalable, replicable, and founded on community ownership, the project offers a model for urban regeneration not only in Beirut but also in cities facing similar challenges globally.
This initiative bridges the gap between grassroots action and urban design by rethinking how neighborhoods can function as engines of social, economic, and environmental vitality.
Impact
Innovation of Industry, Sustainable Communities, Restore Terrestrial Ecosystems, and Social Inclusion.
The Program
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The Beirut River Pilot’s Experiment
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The Urban Injections Exhibition [in collaboration with the
Friedrich Naumann Foundation (FNF) Lebanon]
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Modular Tactical Urbanism [from the Learning Program 2023]
- Urban Informalities Speaking Campaign
[from the Learning Program 2023]
- Urban Injection 2.0 [Helsinki’s Future Earth Summit 2024]
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The Beirut Port Studio [in collaboration with University of Pennsylvania , Public Works Studio, and the Lebanese American University]
The Beirut River Pilot’s Experiment
The Beirut River Pilot serves as the flagship project for Urban Injections, targeting the Karantina–Nahr Beirut–Bourj Hammoud corridor. This location experiences disabled public amenities, stakeholders, and communal spaces [Frem, 2009; Youssef & Ali, 2017]. These disabilities are coupled with vandalism [Frem, 2009] and infertility of the land [Trovato et al., 2016]. The area is also socio-politically diverse [Youssef & Ali, 2017] and hence ownership is very diverse which has created a lot of unresolved problems over time such as damage to the physical environment, troubles with coexistence, political instability. According to Youssef & Ali [2017], Nahr Beirut faces a myriad of challenges, including insufficient waste management, absence of wastewater management, sewage and storm water runoff into the river, absence of open and green spaces, as well as urban encroachment, high buildings, and population density along the river.
The project began with extensive fieldwork to identify pressure points, key urban spaces that, despite their current challenges, could serve as catalysts for civic and social transformation. Seven plots were mapped and analyzed, each representing a microcosm of Beirut’s broader struggles.
This plot, located between the polluted Beirut River and a major highway, is a dark, unsafe, and underutilized space overshadowed by its surroundings.
Field discussions and documented testimonies revealed several needs of the residents. The needs were characterized by rights that the residents are deprived of:
- The Civic Right to Gather: which calls for an open accessible platform, a recreational area for social interaction, rest, and cultural exchange;
- The Civic Right to Trade: which calls for the need of a trading platform, a space for community markets and local exchanges;
- The Civic Right to Power: which calls for a self-sufficiently electrically powered platform, a solar-powered hub providing light, device charging, and a sense of safety.
Urban Injections at the BRPI Exhibition
To make each platform modular and easy to reconfigure and replicate, the two architect interns from 2023’s Learning Program revisited the Capsule with intentions to parametrize is for manufacturing purposes, ensuring that the principles of tactical urbanism remain both flexible and impactful.
The Studio Madane earned a participation scholarhsip to Future Earth‘s Summit in Helsinki in 2024, and it was a member of room SDG 11 [Sustainable Cities & Communities], in which is was engaged in ideation, project design, grant writing, grant searching, presentation development, and pitching. Trophica Lab, from Bogota in Colombia, merged forces with Studio Madane to layer the Urban Injections even more by introducing mixed-communities in the Beirut River area as key stakeholders to the tactical urbanism initative and its community ownership.
The thesis statement that birthed from this in-depth study was: “Initiatives that support sustainable cities and communities, and prioritize long-term change, must focus on Human Systems, Urban Reform, and Social Cohesion. “
The pitch was made to members of other SDG rooms composed of change-makers, urbanists, scientists, engineers, and people from different domains, and then later submitted to several grant applicants. The project is currently on hold.
The Beirut Port Studio [University of Pennsylvania , Public Works Studio, and the Lebanese American University]
The Beirut Port Studio, a collaborative effort between the University of Pennsylvania, Public Works, and Studio Madane, has been delayed until further notice despite several planning conversations. This initiative was designed to develop tools and interventions to restore underutilized open and public spaces, aiming to sustainably support the communities affected by the August 4th explosion. By engaging directly with residents, the project seeks to create a framework that serves both the people and the city as a whole.
As Professor David Gouvernor, leading the project at the University of Pennsylvania, aptly describes to Studio Madane:
| “The goal is to keep the areas from informal occupation, to avoid losing the public realm. The trick here is to select the appropriate ‘custodians’ that will keep an eye on the land until the community clearly identifies them as public places and starts defending them on its own. For this idea to be successful, the custodians should be institutions, community organizations, or even individuals that the community trusts. They should also be able to give the best uses to these ‘open spaces,’ providing a sense of cultural attachment, from the earliest phases of occupation.”