Eltayeb, Abir Mahmoud; (2024) The Legislative Dimension of Design Within Planning: A Diachronic Analysis of the Lebanese Building Law and its Implementation in Beirut. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text Abir Mahmoud Eltayeb-PhD dissertation-revision-16.10.2024.pdf - Accepted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 December 2025. Download (6MB)

Abstract

This Ph.D. stemmed from an interest in academic work at the intersection of architectural design and law, focusing on how former mandate authorities in the Middle East – for example, the French mandate authorities – devised and implemented building laws in former protectorates to bring modernity and order. It is situated alongside studies that emphasised the extent to which government documents (for example, laws, regulations, codes, and spatial plans) shape and configure building forms and urban morphologies. However, they focused on popular experiences with these documents in European countries and the United States of America since the 1900s. They did not delve into lesser-known experiences in Middle Eastern countries such as Lebanon, a former protectorate that gained independence from the French mandate of its territories in 1943. Therefore, this Ph.D. aimed to contribute a new type of scholarship on the legislative dimension of design that argues the following: that ideological milestones in the history of design (from a fascination with traditional environments to modernism and, by extension, contemporary postmodernism) unfolded globally in academia and academic outputs between the 1920s and 1970s and reflected in the contents of building laws in some Middle Eastern countries between the 1920s and 1940s. This transfer of ideologies happened through the presence of the colonial and mandate systems. Subsequently, they reflected in cities (re)designed through these building laws. Accordingly, taking the Building Law in Lebanon as a case study, the Ph.D. asked: how did mandate urban planners, Lebanese architects who helped write the initial versions of the Building Law between 1940 and 1971, and parliamentary committees since 1971 translate global design ideologies (and their principles) to a set of local legislative criteria – i.e., spatial formulas, in the format of written text, that determine building and urban forms and morphologies? In doing so, the findings of the Ph.D. conceptualised the Building Law as a technical document of the present period in Lebanon and an artefact of the design ideologies of past periods. It also conceptualised the profession of architecture, through the spatial formulas in the Building Law, as a purely formulaic exercise in spatial abstraction and production in the spirit of modernism, with catastrophic ramifications for the capital city of Beirut.

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