Kinship Flows: Informal Infrastructure Economies in Beirut's Dahieh
Figures 1 and 2: Exposed cables on a utility pole. Photos by author.
What first sparked my interest in visible infrastructure was a conversation I overheard between my mother and uncle concerning a severe injury a family friend had suffered during a football match in the streets of Chiyah, a neighborhood in Dahieh, the poorly developed southern suburb of Beirut. He received this injury after climbing an electric tower to fetch a football that got stuck on tangled cables. This is how much infrastructure is within the reach of residents, and climbing an electric tower to fetch a football would make more sense once I learned that these towers are climbed by people in Dahieh for very different reasons as well.
As one walks through Dahieh, the tangled and loosely organized cables obscuring one’s view of the sky do not go unnoticed (figures 1 and 2). The visibility of infrastructure in Beirut’s periphery is not a random occurrence, but a reflection of the systemic conditions that govern access to services like electricity and the Internet among others. When everyday life is disrupted by power outages, many of Dahieh’s residents make the most of this visibility and tangibility by rigging wires in an attempt to keep a constant flow of electricity and other services. These types of maneuvers speak to a larger desire to overcome the material conditions in which they live.
The history of entanglement of formal and informal urbanization processes in Dahieh can be traced back to the period of the Lebanese Civil War. For decades, piracy has become normalized in Dahieh as in many other areas in Beirut and Lebanon where access is not always determined by the state's provision of services, but by the availability and prevalence of alternative sources. When the Lebanese state has been absent or inadequate, matters of essential services have been left to political parties, private providers, and local communities.
Echoing Larkin’s take on the spectrum of (in)visibility of infrastructure, “Invisibility is certainly one aspect of infrastructure, but it is only one and at the extreme edge of a range of visibilities that move from unseen to grand spectacles and everything in between,”[1] this essay argues that the visibility of infrastructure is not only utilized by local businesses who capitalize on state failure to ensure pirated services to customers, but also to extend pirated access to those in need at no financial cost through upholding societal values of kinship.
Through discussing various examples of piracy, including pirating electricity, Internet connection, and television networks, this essay explores the social dynamics that emerge as a result of this failed infrastructure. It illustrates how residents of Dahieh challenge the position of piracy on the spectrum of formal and informal access, and shows how the physical visibility of infrastructure gave rise to a social phenomenon where residents come together to patch up a source of access for one another through piracy, thereby attaching this visibility to social values of kinship.
In solidarity or for profit, piracy, an act of taking matters of infrastructure into people’s own hands, has become a normalcy for many communities on the fringes of Beirut, fulfilling a significant portion of people’s need for services that formal channels fail to supply due to the state’s dysfunction and neglect. For some historic and political context, the essay presents a brief background on the urbanization of Dahieh and how its residents have come to view their positions in comparison with residents of other areas, mainly in the center of the city, and within a dual sectarian-class structure.
I conducted a field study in Dahieh where I had lived for a year before moving to Hamra, an area in municipal Beirut. The contrast in the state’s provision of essential services to both areas deepened my interest in the topic. I conducted interviews with the help of an interlocutor who was born and raised in Dahieh and had a number of invaluable contacts. I spoke with residents and business owners and asked them about the conditions of access and their relationship to the area’s exposed cables.
Peripheral Urban Beirut: A Brief Historical Account
The history of what Dahieh looked like in the past is a nostalgic dream that elderly residents often reminisce about. My grandmother tells the same story over and over again of how Dahieh was filled with greenery and orange orchards, then says “Look at it now, it's dirty and noisy.” The reason behind Dahieh’s face changing from a vast green land to an urban jungle is one that is relevant to most issues in Lebanon: the Civil War (1975-1990). Initially, Dahieh, and more specifically Haret Hreik, was a Christian area, but this changed during the Civil War when the Christian families fled the area due to bombing followed by the politico-sectarian division of the city.[2] Many Christian families sold their houses to Shiite families who were fleeing the war in the southern part of the country. Since the country was in a state of chaos, building regulations were lenient and Shiite developers saw this as an opportunity for unregulated urbanization.
From 1978 until the early 1980s, there was an urbanization boom in Haret Hreik; movie theaters, malls, and buildings started to spruce up. Another urbanization boom took place right after the end of the civil war because developers were anticipating the passing of a building law, which was finally passed in 1994.[3] This is partly why Dahieh looks the way it does with buildings so close to each other that some windows are blocked by another building’s facade, narrow roads and alleyways that a newcomer would easily lose their way, and pavements that are taken over by shops and cafés.
The post-Civil War period marked another stage in the urbanization of Dahieh among other peripheral areas in Beirut where urban upgrading has been left to sectarian political parties.[4] For example, Hezbollah and the Amal Movement – the two most powerful parties in Dahieh – worked together on more than one occasion to install necessary infrastructures by supporting local residents and developers. This highlights how political parties assume the role of the state by providing necessary infrastructures further complicating the spectrum of formal and informal. While it is interesting to consider how political parties can paradoxically guarantee access to services as a political party but fail to lobby the state to address such needs, delving into the specifics of the services provided by parties is outside the scope of this essay.
Hiba Bou Akar’s The War Yet to Come (2018) covers the sectarian-driven urban plans which shaped Sahrat al Choueifat, an urban area also located in the south of Beirut which was a Druze-populated area prior to the civil war. It was considered a Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) stronghold until it came to house Shiites whose apartment buildings were destroyed during the war. New apartment buildings that started mushrooming in Sahrat al Choueifat[5] were appealing to Shiites because they were somewhat affordable. But these apartments had their infrastructural shortcomings.
Bou Akar brings up a 2004 media coverage of street flooding due to inadequate sewage systems in Sahra Choueifat where a resident expresses her frustration with this infrastructural failure and complains that had the neighborhood been Christian, the problem would have been fixed the next day.[6] This sentiment was echoed by one of my interviewees who described the scenery in Dahieh as “disgusting” because of the exposed cables among other things. She also added, “My parents live in Baabda”, a Christian area in Mount Lebanon, “they have nice and clean scenery there.” Surely, this doesn’t mean that people of other sectarian backgrounds don’t have to worry about infrastructural failures, especially after the grave economic crisis that the country plummeted into at the end of 2019. However, the dual structure of sect and class in Lebanon is manifested in various ways, one of which is infrastructure, its performance and the ways it defines citizenship and socio-political positions.
Electricity in Lebanon: Center vs. Periphery
The history of electricity in Beirut is fraught with contention and frustration as a result of a long history of inadequate infrastructures, insufficient supply, and corruption. During the French Mandate from 1923 until 1946, residents of Beirut directed their frustrations towards the French electricity company Électricité de Beyrouth, demanding better service quality, and lower prices. In 1951 and 1952, Électricité de Beyrouth was dismissive of protest campaigns against electricity pricing and quality. In that period, the Lebanese government acted as the mediator between the people and the company, and as a result prices were lowered. However, this did not fix the root causes of the issue, as lower prices lead to more consumption which lead to electricity rationing during peak hours.
The Lebanese government placed limitations on the production, transmission, and allocation of electricity in 1964, assigning these responsibilities to a single government-run entity known as Électricité du Liban (EDL). Over the course of almost ten years, the government gradually integrated several different private electricity companies into this state-owned enterprise.[7] The post-Civil War era was a period when significant investments were made to rebuild infrastructure, yet electricity provision remained insufficient. As a result, people in Lebanon opted for coping mechanisms including “the purchase of a diesel generator for a single home, the collective purchase of a larger generator which is shared by residents in an apartment block, or individual households subscribing to neighborhood-level informal electricity providers (IEPs), who sell them a restricted amount of electricity during the power outages for a monthly fee.”[8]
The different sources of electricity provision which have been present in the country since the end of the Civil War– state grid by EDL and private generator subscription – often fail to meet basic everyday demands. This led to futile protests and state remedies that never fully follow through. This issue is most acute in the outskirts of Beirut. It is worth noting that since the economic crisis that the country plunged into in late 2019, the power grid has grown more precarious and residents all over the city now receive only 2-4 hours of state electricity per day. This is mainly due to EDL’s inability to meet users’ demands because of political mismanagement and disagreements among different political coalitions which have existed long before the current economic crisis and continue to hinder the state’s functioning. Although private generator subscriptions fill the gaps left by the state, they too fail to provide 24-hour electricity to subscribers due to fuel pricing, hoarding, and general fuel shortage.
Prior to this economic collapse, residents of Beirut’s periphery suffered a 6-hour power outage on the state-run grid, leaving the remaining hours to be supplied by private generator subscriptions. On the other hand, areas in municipal Beirut (hereinafter referred to as “central Beirut” to draw comparisons between center and periphery) only had to endure a 3-hour cut per day. The Lebanese government never explained why the outskirts were receiving fewer hours of electricity. However, Éric Verdeil speculates that it is a result of financial imperatives, given that central Beirut’s electricity users are “responsible for the highest electricity consumption in the country with little electricity theft and non-payment recorded there.”[9] Additionally, major banks and hotels are located in central Beirut and their uninterrupted access to electricity is vital to the country’s economy. Thus, in this view, central Beirut received a greater allocation of state-provided electricity in order to safeguard the key components of the Lebanese economy from the nationwide electricity shortage and ensure their continuous operation.
Residents of Dahieh, an area nominally known as a Hezbollah stronghold, have previously protested the uneven distribution of government electricity. On January 27, 2008, a protest ended with nine deaths. At the time, Hezbollah tried to calm down popular anger by bringing in new generators to Dahieh. This meant that more households would be able to have private subscriptions. But, unlike electricity provided by the state, subscriptions to private generators are more costly and are more vulnerable to the international price fluctuations of diesel.[10] In August of 2010, residents in Dahieh mobilized to demand more electricity hours again. Energy and Water Minister at the time, Gebran Bassil, condemned the protests and remarked that “protests against power cuts are politically motivated” and that “it is not permitted for a region where illegal hook-ups multiply to protest against power cuts.”[11]
This statement highlights the government's attitude towards the peripheries of Beirut. By labeling the protests as politically motivated, the government dismissed the legitimate concerns of the residents and further alienated them from the state. Additionally, Bassil's reference to illegal hook-ups suggests a blaming of the residents for the state’s problems, rather than acknowledging the systemic issues at play. Quotidian inconveniences caused by inadequate infrastructure, the government’s focus on central areas, and the ineffective protests prompt residents to think of other ways to maneuver a failed infrastructure.
Infrastructural Remedies: Local Attempts
Residents of Dahieh as urban citizens in Beirut cope with the state’s dysfunction through straddling the lines between formal and informal, and offering a new kind of visibility of infrastructure that is embedded in the community’s social values. The visibility of electric wires and their messy setups on utility poles makes pirating electricity physically within reach for those with the right skills. What this does for residents on the periphery is create social dynamics that are intertwined with the conditions of infrastructure and an understanding of electricity that is specific to the urban areas in which they live. Pirated access to services also distorts our understanding of formal and informal access. How can we decide that state-provided access is formal when informal channels cover a bigger portion of people’s needs? This part of the essay challenges inherited notions of formal and informal access by analyzing the grounded realities of Dahieh’s residents.
Mostly, electricity pirating efforts are carried out by experienced electrical technicians and one way through which they provide piracy services for residents is by hooking the customer’s wire to another neighborhood that has electricity since state’s portioned electricity takes shifts between neighborhoods. Here, kinship is an important factor as some technicians will only provide this service for family, close friends, and referrals. This kind of access to electricity does not add to the bills of the beneficiaries, as Ramon Lobato puts it “Piracy networks can be considered part of the informal sector, that subterranean zone of the economy that is largely untaxed, unregulated, and unmeasured.”[12] The mechanics of pirating electricity were explained to me by one of the electrical technicians with whom I spoke, “the first thing you need is a 6mm wire and then the bravery to climb up an electric tower… you need to go to a block that you know has a different turn in government electricity than your block and then you climb one of their electric towers and connect the 6mm to the first or second wire… after that, you bring your 6mm all the way back to your building and connect it to a separate disjoncteur (circuit breaker).”
This electricity-sharing system is popular among residents of Beirut’s peripheries. In Everyday Sectarianism in Lebanon (2017), Nucho writes of a woman named Vrejouhie who lives in Sanjak camp – which was destroyed in phases to make room for a residential project called St. Jacques Plaza – in Bourj Hammoud, a northern Beirut periphery that is largely inhabited by a Lebanese-Armenian population, where government electricity is only provided for a few hours a day. Vrejouhie applied a technique to have a continuous flow of electricity without having to pay for a private electricity subscription. She had a neighbor on the other side of the camp and both women had shifting turns in electricity provision; when one has state electricity the other doesn’t. The neighbors “connected their electricity lines together, so that each one can access electricity when their respective side is cut. […] with Vrejouhie’s system of sharing, she could always keep her refrigerator running, unless in the unlikely event that both adjacent grids were cut [...].”[13]
This electricity-sharing system is so prevalent in peripheral areas that most residents do not question it. Electricity piracy is approached with a sense of normalcy. Most of my interviewees seemed indifferent when I assured them that their identity would not be disclosed and said that they weren’t worried about it because “everybody does it, even the government knows,” according to one business owner with whom I spoke.
Prompted by fuel shortage and soaring diesel prices as a result of economic crises, this family business owner in Dahieh compensated for long electricity cuts by connecting his store to another cable in a nearby block where electricity hours were on a different shift. He told me that he is aware that this is illegal, “in the law, there are rights and duties. We pay our duties but have no rights.”
A plumber who lives on the ground floor explained that unbearable summer heat and the need for continuous air conditioning prompted him to ask the nearby small restaurant owner if he would share the business’s electricity with his household, “I can’t pay for a subscription (for a diesel generator) and if I were to rely on the government’s electricity, I wouldn’t know how many hours of electricity I would get per day… some days it's on for an hour and a half and other days they provide it for less than that.” He continues, “I approached him and told them that I don’t have a stable income to pay for electricity subscription and he was willing to hook his business’s cable to my house with no problems.”
Kinship is a sentiment that I came across time and time again during my research. It was highlighted again during a conversation with an electrician who carries out the process of wire-hooking. When I asked him if he would hook a wire from one block to another for any customer he replied “No, I only do it for people who were referred to me by family or friends… I don’t charge anything for it… I consider it a favor.” Having connections within the community is important to access basic services. These types of “favors” for some residents in Dahieh are a source of a semi-stable electricity flow that comes at no financial cost since this pirated access to shared electricity is unbilled. Sharing electricity among Dahieh residents can be considered a form of communal solidarity as a surrogate for the state’s failures and neglect. However, there is another side to piracy that is carried out by local businesses that capitalize on the unmet needs of people.
My interlocutor told me most landlords largely prefer renting their properties without contracts to evade taxes. The absence of a contract makes it difficult for tenants to apply for a landline telephone, which is needed for an Internet subscription from Ogero, the state-owned operator in Lebanon that provides telephone and broadband Internet services to residents and businesses at a lower cost than most private Internet providers. Most tenants would not ask property owners to apply for a landline since it is a complicated bureaucratic process. Thus, tenants resort to alternative sources for their Internet connections namely illegal providers. Internet subscriptions to these providers are more costly than Ogero’s but are still within the budget of many tenants and cost less than private Internet subscriptions. Illegal Internet providers have landline subscriptions and provide pirated Internet to customers at a compromised speed. Nonetheless, an illicit subscription is not just the most affordable option, but it is also the sole means of obtaining an Internet connection for tenants without a contract.
During my research, I came across a popular illegal Internet provider who operates through a legitimate front. One of the employees told me that this sort of subscription is popular in the area and that “important people” are involved in it. I assured him that his identity would remain anonymous to which he seemed indifferent. I asked him whether or not he is worried about sharing this information and he responded that “This network involves people that are much more powerful than I am, I won’t be held accountable before they do.” Whether this is true or not, such attitudes towards piracy shift pirated access from alternative to conventional.
The normalcy with which piracy is approached in Dahieh and the heavy reliance on pirated access can extend to non-essential and complementary services. Television network piracy, for example, can be categorized as entertainment. It allows households to have access to global media platforms without having to pay for official subscriptions. This is provided by altering receivers, allowing them to hack subscription-based channels and connecting households, albeit with subpar viewing experiences as the videos may frequently freeze or glitch. An elderly couple who are customers of one local provider told me that they like having the Disney channel on their television for their grandchildren. I asked them if they had considered opting for the official subscription for quality reasons and the wife replied “this works just fine… we don’t need this access from the company (referring to official subscriptions).
Conclusion
This essay aimed to showcase that while piracy efforts in Dahieh are made for different reasons – kinship and profit – they both not only add a new layer to infrastructural visibility but also further complicate the spectrum of formal and informal. In a country where state-provided services heavily emphasize central areas and neglect the fringes populated by working-class citizens, these piracy efforts are not arbitrary. The essay discussed the contested history of Dahieh’s urbanization in an attempt to offer some context and prove that piracy efforts do not exist in a vacuum.
Through interviews, we saw how residents of Dahieh viewed themselves in the context of a sect-class structure and how relationships within communities can alleviate harsh realities, as for example, they support one another in attaining a semi-constant flow of electricity. We examined how illegal businesses capitalize on gaps left by the state. When official access fails to provide, the gaps are covered by favors from residents to one another and illegal providers, inviting us to examine the nuances of what we consider “formal” and “informal”. This understanding not only gauges our knowledge of how residents in contested urban areas fulfill access, but it also uncovers how the conditions and functionality of infrastructure affect the social fabrics within which they live.
Notes
[1] Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42, no. 1 (2013): pp. 327-343, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522.
[2] Hiba Bou Akar, For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut's Frontiers (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).
[3] Abby Sewell, “More than a 'Hezbollah Stronghold': The Complicated Past and Present of Haret Hreik,” L'Orient Today, March 6, 2021, https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1254383/more-than-a-hezbollah-stronghold-the-complicated-past-and-present-of-haret-hreik.html.
[4] Bou Akar, For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut's Frontiers.
[5] Distinction to be made between the names: Sahrat al Choueifat and Choueifat.
[6] Bou Akar, For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut's Frontiers, 75.
[7] Ziad Abu-Rish, “On Power Cuts, Protests, and Institutions: A Brief History of Electricity in Beirut (Part One),” Jadaliyya, July 10, 2017, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/30564.
[8] Dana Abi Ghanem, “Energy, the City and Everyday Life: Living with Power Outages in Post-War Lebanon,” Energy Research &Amp; Social Science 36 (2018): pp. 36-43, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.11.012.
[9] Eric Verdeil, “Beirut: Metropolis of Darkness: The Politics of Urban Electricity Grids,” in Energy, Power and Protest on the Urban Grid: Geographies of the Electric City, ed. Andrés Luque-Ayala and Jonathan Silver (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 155-175.
[10] Eric Verdeil, “Beirut: Metropolis of Darkness: The Politics of Urban Electricity Grids, 160.
[11] Eric Verdeil, “Beirut: Metropolis of Darkness: The Politics of Urban Electricity Grids.
[12] Ramon Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution (London: Palgrave Macmillan; British Film Institute, 2019).
[13] Joanne Nucho, Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
Author
Danah El Kaouri holds a Master's degree in Sociology, Anthropology, and Media studies from the American University in Beirut. Her research focuses on examining the impact of capitalism on urban and social levels by studying built environments, urban divisions, and daily life experiences.