One project I am currently working on is based in the Burj Al-Barajneh refugee camp, originally home to Palestinian refugees in Lebanon since 1948, it is now also host to Palestinian and Syrian refugees who came to Lebanon in the past 10 years, and to poor migrant worker. I am working with architects and engineers and the local community, attempting to find solutions to the problems of electricity & water supply and generation in the camp, to the dangerous electricity network and poor governance. While engineers look at the technical side, with a colleague, we are looking at the social-political and governance angle.
The jumble of electricity wires in the alleyways of the camp
Like everything in Lebanon today, we are living through the entanglements (much like the wires in the pictures) building up over the decades, with the Israeli colonisation of Palestine in 1948 that made Palestinians into refugees in Lebanon, civil wars, oppressive regimes, and capitalist corrupt exploitative regimes. We live now in a country where electricity cuts are the norm, reaching up to 14 hours a day in some areas.
In the camp today, residents dependent on salty water and inadequate electricity supply largely because the state sees itself as not responsible to provide energy to refugees. They are also dependent on exploitative private electricity generator owners, failing humanitarian regimes of support and highly politicised conflict-ridden local social networks and committees unable to take the lead in finding solutions. Drug use and poverty are rampant.
A huge and costly water treatment project implemented by the UN is not operation, because of bad project design and difficulty of managing it locally. Instead, camp residents rely on filling water gallons from taps that are open only for a few hours a day.
Yet we are also living through an emergent moment. Although we see the beginning of the collapse of the old, the vision of what will become is too elusive. Many of the spaces for imagination (universities, media, NGOs) have been strangled by the exploitative economic systems and oppressive regimes.
How can we imagine a different tomorrow when we do not have that space?
At the centre of these spaces is coming together, thinking together, and finding ways to bring things forwards.
One such example of a collective space for imagination, in another area of Lebanon is a citizen assembly on electricity in Hamra -