Reshaping Riyadh Alsolh Square: Mapping the Narratives of Protesting Crowds in Beirut

Abstract

The conception of the state's ownership of public space and its control over its physical and psychological accessibility have shaped the spaces and the extent of public engagement. On the other side, civil movements challenge this dominance and contribute to reshaping the spaces through different modes of political gatherings. Several spaces in the Middle East have developed their significance through the competition of conflictual actors. This paper aims at identifying the spatial tools of the occupational competition for dominating the space. The article examines the method of generating time-aware maps of the spatial practices of protesting crowd out from the scattered archive of visual and verbal narratives using ArcGIS. By employing 395 archived videos which documented the protest event of 22^nd – 24^th, August 2015 in <i>Riyadh Alsolh</i> square, Beirut – Lebanon, the paper produced 144 plural patterns of the protestors' crowd movement per 10 minutes within 250 m radius of <i>Riyadh Alsolh</i> square's surroundings. The article defined four patterns of the crowd's territory based on their physical, functional and relational characteristics. The conflictual sense of the contradictory crowds can be used to identify the status of competition for dominance. It also indicates the correlation between the features of the pattern and the potential of raising the conflictual sense. The examined method helps to analyse crowds' contribution in shaping public spaces during urban events; however, the more available spatiotemporal recordings, the more figured characteristics of the produced space.