The playground of the studio will be the strip of road extending from the eastern entrance of Beirut and reaching the end of the city of Jounieh.
Known as “Al Autostrade” in colloquial Arabic, this infrastructure was initially built as the northern highway linking the coastal cities from Beirut to Tripoli as part of the great projects of the Chehabi era.
Through the anarchy of the civil war of 1975 1990, it was irreversibly transformed into an active commercial strip. Along its path new centralities has emerged, and the original design of a closed highway, was totally altered.
Al Autostrade, has heavily disrupted since its construction the traditional links between the territory and the sea as well as the relation between the coastal towns and their hinterland. The new hybrid infrastructure, with two fringes of informal activities, induces daily giant traffic jams and annihilates any potential public transportation system. This situation epitomizes a vision of the city focusing on car mobility.
In light of the local energy crisis and the global climatic crisis, the city has to consider other options and adopt alternative visions that would include public, common and shared transportation systems that would take place on the strip and irrigate the suburban sprawl on the hills overlooking the highway.
The objective of the studio is to rethink the future of the infrastructure as well as the linear city that grew by its two sided and the transversal connection to the sea and the mountain. The focus will be on public transportation amenities.