Subsidence : la mémoire inquiète des épaves urbaines

Abstract

In Beirut, a city scarred by decades of conflict and crisis, collective memory remains fragmented, caught between competing narratives and the absence of a unified memorial policy. This article examines the role of Beirut’s urban wrecks in shaping and transmitting an unsettled memory. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’s concept of social frameworks, it argues that, in the absence of a coherent national narrative, these urban traces become the vectors of an informal, spatially embedded memory.

Through an analysis of six emblematic sites (the Murr Tower, the Holiday Inn, the City Center Egg, Dalieh, the headquarters of Électricité du Liban, and the Beirut Port Silos) the article highlights how these urban wrecks act as powerful memory markers. These contemporary ruins carry an unsettled memory that belongs neither to historical memory nor to collective memory.

These six wrecks, neither museumified nor erased, function as de facto memorials, appropriated by residents, artists, and activists. They become collective cognitive devices in a brain-city where memories are physically inscribed into the urban space. As witnesses to a recent, unresolved past, they embody a traumatic history that resists closure.

Faced with the failure of resilience as an analytical framework, often invoked in Lebanon as the capacity to endure against adversity, the August 4, 2020, explosion at the Port of Beirut marks a critical inflection point, paving the way for alternative narratives, such as that of subsidence. Borrowed from geology, this term refers to the slow, irreversible sinking of land. Applied to the social field, it offers a lens for analyzing pathological adaptations that, while giving the illusion of continuity, deepen and perpetuate structural imbalances. Beirut’s electricity sector illustrates this logic: behind the apparent return of power in 2022 lies the widespread, polluting, and clientelist economy of private generators.

While the wrecks of Beirut offer a localized expression of subsidence, the concept also sheds light on global dynamics: climate change, biodiversity loss, the weakening of democratic institutions, the proliferation of disinformation, and the museumification and standardization of urban centers under the influence of real estate capitalism. Subsidence thus emerges as an analytical tool for understanding the slow erosion, accumulated imbalances, and pathological adaptations that define our contemporary world.