Jana Haidar

Masarat Presents is a project that curates walking city tours weaving narratives of placemaking that go beyond the official and colonial narratives of the history and heritage of Beirut. These tours are rooted in rigorous research, exploring the social, cultural, economic, and political contexts that have shaped the development of spaces and communities within the city.

By posing alternative narratives of the historical production of space in our cities, Masarat Presents seeks to introduce a new body of social knowledge into the practice of urban policy.

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Masarat kicked off as my attempt to explore Beirut as a student in architecture. It evolved along my career in urban research into a unique tool offering new perspectives on the conception of space in Beirut through history. The project also experiments with the prospects and potential of a walking tour as not just a research output, but also a research tool. Several collaborations between Masarat and other researchers and research institutions attest to the versatile roles a walking tour can play throughout the life cycle of a research project.

In a moment in time when narratives of history, space, land, and belonging take center stage, where false narratives are weaponized with the explicit purpose of erasure, it has become more urgent than ever to document our own histories and tell our own stories.