Street Art and the ‘Right to the City’ in a Fragmented Metropolis: The Case of Beirut
Abstract as pdf
Corresponding Author:
Dimitri Ioannides
Mid-Sweden University Sweden
dimitri.ioannides@miun.se
Author(s):
Evangelia Petridou1
1Mid-Sweden University, Evangelia.Petridou@Miun.Se, SWE
In this paper, we examine how the demand of the citizens of Beirut for their ‘right to their city’ played out during the major popular uprising, which began on the 17 of October 2019. We focus on various forms of street art that had already been in place before the uprising as well as the large number of pieces that emerged during the days that followed the beginning of the demonstrations. Our intent was to flesh out how drawing on the walls of the Lebanese capital manifested itself as one of the key activities through which people, regardless of their sect, engaged in their struggle to improve their city and transform it to a space where leaders are corrupt-free, people’s living standards are much improved, the environment is cleaner and the human rights of everyone are respected. To perform this study, we conducted a group interview of Lebanese (street) artists to contextualize the city’s street art scene. The core materials for this consist of 147 photographs of street art, which we took during a weeks’ stay in Beirut in October 2019. We performed thematic narrative analysis on the material, which revealed five distinct themes. All of them reflect demands for a ‘right to city’ in nuanced ways. In this paper, we flesh them out with the use of one illustrative image per theme. While some images project overt political slogans and images others transmitted their message in a much more subtle manner. The study reveals that graffiti and other forms of street art are powerful means through which groups and individuals can project their messages in order to assert their self-preservation and, ultimately, their ‘right to the city’ in contested urban spaces.
The interplay of crisis and art