If You Think Heritage Preservation is Expensive, Try Demolition

 

If You Think Heritage Preservation is Expensive, Try Demolition

A Plea for the City of Tunis

By Sihem Lamine, June 2021

 

I originally wrote this text in French to be presented  at a panel discussion organized on the sidelines  of the exhibition “Tunis Centre-Ville X Patrimoini” held in February 2021. For reasons linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, the talk could not take place. A revised version of the French text was published in the magazine Archibat in May 2021. This is a slightly modified translation. Two recent, unrelated events led me to translate this text and make it available to a wider and different readership: Two months after I wrote this text, a beautiful house built in the early twentieth century was demolished in Mutuelleville, my neighborhood. After thisdemolition,the area was left looking like a toothless smile. The second event was a radio broadcast recorded a few weeks before, in which the Mayor of Tunis deplored the limited  budget allocated to demolitions  and called for setting upa municipality fund [Sunduq] to get rid of the many buildings that have become a hazard in the city.

 

When the storm subsides, those who will live in Tunis after us will wonder how, with no wars, no bombings, no major natural disasters, and without even an authoritarian master-plan enforced by some egocentric modernist leader, we could cause so much damage. They may also wonder how a free and sovereign people could have been more violent towards their own memory than their colonizers had been. They will ask how we could cause to ourselves pain that even an enemy would have refrained from inflicting on us. 

In a neighborhood like Lafayette, in downtown Tunis, demolitions are progressing so fast that Google’s street-view image-updates cannot keep pace anymore: They show buildings that have been torn down and exist no more. If demolitions keep being carried out at the same meteoric rate, one day we will  wake up in a different, unrecognizable city.  

This is a fictitious plea. No case is actually being considered by the courts of law, no claims filed, no trials or appeals. Nevertheless, there will be a tribunal, one day, and it will inevitably demand justice for this city. That day, we will be in the dock, accused of being the generation that let Tunis down. Our descendants will have the right to claim damages for having been disinherited of their rightful memory. That day, there will be no one to sue, in the international or national courts, but their own ancestors.

The reason why I engage in this advocacy is the lifelong tenderness and gratitude I have for this city. It goes beyond any explanation I could try to give. For Tunis, I also have interest, admiration, and respect. We have ceased to see this city because of the pollution, the trash, and the street signs heaped upon it, and also because of a number of unsightly grafts and architectural flops. But the city is, in fact, a survivor. Its urban fabric has miraculously endured against all the odds and thanks to minor but lasting and impactful urban tactics. Until very recently, there was a general confidence among those who live here or have an interest in the place that the ‘usual’ miracles would keep happening and thus allow us to bypass danger. Lately, however the faith I personally had in the collective wisdom that has up till now managed to preserve  Tunis from its expected grim fate   was brutally shaken.

The surviving mediaeval and modern parts of the city that bravely stand in the middle of an ocean of late twentieth century urban developments glow with mesmerizing beauty! They testify to the fact that, on this very land, incredible levels of resilience have been at play, keeping a firm grip on the land silently, for decades. Tunis is a city that has grown in size on its own will. None of its projected masterplans lasted long enough. Bourguiba’s large anti-slum degourbification campaign (1960-80) and the major plan for the restoration of the lagoon hit by an environmental disaster (1983) were certainly critical in shaping the future. But let’s not forget the attempt to open a thoroughfare across the Medina (aborted), the attempt to nibble at the fringes of the Belvedere Park (aborted), the projected  road junction in the middle of Place Pasteur (aborted), the densification strategy which -in twenty-five years- did not succeed in disfiguring the city center, but whose havoc can be clearly seen in a number of areas. This resilience of the urban fabric is the very reason why there are still battles to be fought for the city, today, and why these battles are worth the trouble.

In reality, we have lost so much control over the city in the last decades that we started believing it had a life of its own; a living entity with its own free will. We even ended up thinking that the city had developed a form of immunity against the incivilities of its inhabitants and the arrogance of its public officials. However, this is mere wishful thinking: It has to be admitted that a city is a manmade feature. Its management, transformation, preservation, or destruction are man’s work . Behind every success or failure, every beauty or ugliness, there are decisions and the relentlessness, dedication, common sense and non-sense of humans like you and me. With cities, as with other life matters, human beings are doomed to make choices and to bear their consequences.

The miraculous survival of many of the layers that constitute the urban archeology of Tunis did not go without a few gaping wounds.  You can see them on the city map, on aerial photographs, and even from the ground as you walk the city streets. Some have healed and others are still open and “bleeding.” Bab Souika: a gash that turned an entire part of the Medina’s northern urban fabric into a ghetto. The Qasba: the millennial-old power quarters torn to shreds by successive demolitions and reconstructions. Sidi al-Bashir and Bab Alioua: an urban abyss between the city-center and its southern neighborhoods. Cyrus le Grand: the flyover highay over Habib Bourguiba Avenue, a wall separating the city from its water front. Mutilations go on. Several forms of deterioration of the urban fabric are steadily progressing every day. The worst forms are taking place in the 19-20 neighborhoods of the city center where historical buildings are subjected either to shock demolitions or to slow death. The result of which is the same in the end. After a building has been offhandedly left to fall into an orchestrated decrepitude, year after year, the time comes when it is officially pronounced to be a hazard, and brought to brutal demise.

The Territorial and Urban Planning Code promulgated by decree in 1995 by the Ben Ali administration, did not did not deem it necessary to exclude the historical neighborhoods dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the densification initiative. Before they even knew what it actually meant, property owners in downtown Tunis and other Tunisian cities, were granted the right to raise and extend their historical buildings, and dramatically increase the value of their real estate. The formula “H=L+R+6” in which H is the building’s new height, L is the width of the street [largeur, in French], R is the setback within the parcel [retrait, in French], and 6 is the bonus of extra-meters awarded by the president. Issuing the formula was tantamount to unleashing a swarm of voracious termites against the city. The erosion of the historical center was launched, and has become impossible to stop. By giving to landlords the right to raise their buildings at least two stories higher, advantage was given to speculation, animated by rapid gain over other forms of architectural interventions –that could have been more caring- in the colonial neighborhoods of Tunis.

In Tunis, 1995 was the year of the beast. Soon, the legally-backed intrusion of speculators into the city’s historical-center was to become irreversible. In the absence of formal planning, urban development may be driven and catalyzed by acupuncture-style interventions and heaps of legal precedents. Whenever a restorations initiative is launched, it serves as an example. If, however, you blaze the trail with demolitions, demolition is demystified and becomes the rule. Thereafter, a moment comes when it is no longer possible to rely on collective intelligence, on positive emulation, nor on any other form of protective conservatism. Taking heartfelt initiatives for heritage preservation, raising awareness, involving youth and civil-society, dancing in the piazzas, and tagging walls with street art will all be useless! What was granted -by law- can only be reclaimed by law. What is a landscape, after all, if not a visible, habitable, usable embodiment of texts of law?

There is an emergency. In addition to the 1994 policy and the dramatic rise in the number of demolished historical buildings, consciences and attitudes seem to have changed during the last few decades. Within the very ranks of what used to be the valiant, but discreet, army advocating for heritage preservation within the circles of power and decision, and even within in the cultural and intellectual spheres, anti-heritage attitudes (that may be antisome forms of heritage and not others) have appeared. They adopt attitudes akin to those of anti-science or anti-environmentalist or flat-earthers who use arguments to deny scientifically-proven facts. Anti-heritage groups have arguments to contest, doubt and belittle the importance of historical objects and buildings, and the need for preservation. They are among us. They view those who speak  out against demolitions as nostalgic, lunatic, or even conspiracist. You can hear them argue “There is no way to save that building, it has become a threat, there are many others” or “Can you imagine the cost of restoring such an edifice?” or “To be honest, it is ugly”, “Don’t you worry, we intend to keep all the bits and pieces and put them back in place in the new structure!”, or “It was a colonial, you  know!”

A number of obscure mechanisms have been triggered to prove why certain buildings deserve priority for continued existence. Bundled with such mechanisms, is a major contradiction among investors in the city-center. They will invest in a building because of the historical nature of its neighborhood and then they demolish it because they can. Obviously, this will continue as long as it is authorized, but a time will come when this process of self-destruction will reach a tipping point beyond which the historical center will not be historical anymore. 

In practice, demolition is never punctual, in the same way as there is nothing surgical about “surgical strikes”, a euphemism for “total war”. When a parcel lies in ruin, it never does so on its own. An edifice that falls to the ground tears down more than its own structure. Similarly, a monument that is preserved saves much more than its own walls. The mechanism has a ripple-effect. What is spread in the ripple can be either the poison or the antidote. It’s up to us to choose.

To consider a historical center as the sum of a number of noticeable monuments (that are designed by, built by, dating from), to add them to a list of what should be preserved and -in the best-case scenario also provide for the protection of their perimeter , is a simplistic approach. An old city is mostly produced by the grammar that links monuments together (definitely not the tourist routes!). There is an invisible binding-syntax created by time in historical areas. It tightly holds the place together, as a coherent entity, formed by edifices that went through the ages together, on the same piece of land.

Identity is a recurrent issue when dealing with heritage. We often hear that neglecting or erasing a historical monument is an act that “affects our identity as Tunisians”. When the timber of Notre-Dame in Paris went up in flames, the identity was not (or very rarely) used as an argument. What needed to be restored -in addition to the monument itself and the holy space- is not a community’s identity, it is rather the landscape, the skyline, that binding element in the city. I would argue that, in our part of the world today, what needs to be restored through heritage is our dignity as a complex society that engaged in the deliberate destruction of its own memory. In Tunis, no single monument can be considered as the epitome of our collective identity or even to represent even a fragment of that identity: Neither the Medina alone, nor downtown alone, or the Zaytuna, or the Hotel du Lac alone, and not even their sum total can constitute an identity, be it a visual, built, material, or affective. However, the powerful urban and historical syntax behind their co-existence and the collective will to keep it in one piece and out of harm’s way is a strong identity marker. It is a projection in a collective future, as a community, as a culture, and as a civilization.

Take the Hotel du Lac in Tunis, for example. It is a singular half-a-century old brutalist building which has been vacant for the last ten of its existence, gradually falling into decrepitude and waiting for its destiny. Today, the building is threatened by demolition (or by an orchestrated decay leading to demolition). It provides a valuable case-study, an exercise in exploring the concepts of, and civil engagement in, what is commonly labeled as “Heritage preservation”. Most people are not emotionally affected by the Hotel du Lac as such. It is not one of its kind; other models of the same design were built elsewhere in the world; and it is at the edge of what could be legitimately considered as ‘Heritage”. If the building were in another place or city, it may –indeed- be erased without much regret. In Tunis, however, this specific monument has a mesmerizing power stemmingfrom its role as an unexpected witness in the urban fabric, an alien entity in the skyline.

The Hotel du Lac is a historical document made of building materials. It bears witness to the time when in Tunis, it was possible to produce exactly the same architecture as in London, Boston or Berlin. It bears witness to the rise of an ardent need for modernity within a North African post-colonial society. It bears witness to the 1970’s Tunis when the ultimate luxury consisted in producing a brutalist piece of architecture from which we could see the grandiose scenery of the Lake of Tunis, Mount Boukornine to the East, the rows of palm trees on either side of Mohamed V Avenue. And to the West, from the top of the concrete monster, you can see a mediaeval Islamic urban fabric, a ninth century Aghlabid dome, a tenth century Fatimid dome, a twelfth-century Almohad-Hafsid minaret, a number of seventeenth and eighteenth-century slender Ottoman minarets, a late nineteenth century monumental minaret (in the Zaytuna), an early twentieth century Catholic cathedral, an Art Nouveau theater... That is what is unique. The concrete, steel, and prefabricated elements that compose the brutalist structure oddly complete the narration. Most unexpectedly , they have become an inseparable part of the urban history of the city, and of its landscape.

A historical center could be compared to an open book. Like any other book, it does not exclusively belong to its owner of the time. However, the owner carries its responsibility for a time. Tearing pages out of the book is perverting the story it is telling, and the one in progress. Who is it, then, that benefits from a demolition in a historical center? No  one, in the long term. It is the venture of those who have been blinded by immediate benefit to the point of finding themselves acting against their own interests. It is a voyage into self-destruction. Heritage is –by definition- a rarity, an asset to which time has given a value that surpasses its intrinsic worth. Demolishing a monument is failing to see this value. Therefore, it is failing to see the potential afforded by the. In consequence, it is an insult to the future (not simply the urban future, but the economic and social ones as well).

In a popular adage, it is claimed that “If you think education is expensive, then try ignorance”. We could say something similar about heritage policies: “If you think preserving heritage is costly, then try demolition!”  Indeed, the urban has this in common with education: they belong in the longue duree. The tangible outcomes of any effort deployed in schools or universities (whether it is the successes or the failures) will be witnessed years later. Similarly, the cities we live in were mostly conceived and built before our time, be it by a few months. Any urban action taken today will affect people’s lives for the years to come.

With time, a building casts its mark in the landscape and becomes part of the inhabitants’ everyday life. Once green elements have grown around it and patina has settled like a trace, not like a scar, when several generations have seen, used and known the same building, it becomes charged with their stories, then it starts telling its own tale. Architects know too well that not all constructions and not all sites have this kind of talent for “durability”. It happens sometimes, though. When it happens, it is quite magical and should be treated with care. To demolish such architecture is to subject the urban and human environment where it stood to trauma whose shock wave can spread miles around and decades later. 

Demolition is not a choice: it is thoughtlessness. It is the lazy option. It is abuse of power. It reveals ignorance and violence. It is a failure statement. The right to cherish a memory –including through material culture- is a basic human right. Demolitions uproot fragments of memory from the visual and environment in which we live; it therefore affects the dignity of individuals, groups, communities. Clearly, the fight for heritage preservation cannot be separate from any fight for dignity. A nation-state does not keep archives for the sake of nostalgia or  history. It keeps archives because they are its raison d’etre: a state with no archives is an entity that holds no records to prove its legitimacy.  Isn’t stealing archives one of the first colonial gestures and an entry-point to the subordination of the colonized population? In Tunis, the historical monuments are the archives of the city. They stand testimony to our belonging to the land, which we take for granted, but which is a priceless gift.

Belonging to a city that has a long history is such a rare privilege. It is also a massive burden. The day a tribunal will be set up to ask what we could have done for this city, evidence will be needed to show that we were worthy of the bequest and that we –at least- tried to hold the ground. We will need to prove that we acted with dignity and did what we could to pass on what we have found –intact- like others before us had done.

Sihem Lamine