خبرة نسوية تقاطعية في استخدام النقل المشترك في لبنان

ميرا طفيلي:

“حلو جسمك”, “شو اسمك”, “وين بيتك”, “في منك ع جالو”… هذه وغيرها من العبارات الغير مرحب بها وهي قد تكون جزء من التجربة اليومية في المساحات والاماكن العامة للنساء في لبنان.

هذه الاعتداءات الصغيرة او البسيطة كم يبادر لاذهان البعض ترسم اطار دينامكية التنقل للنساء في المدينة ,ويجب اخذها في الاعتبار عند التخطيط لنقل اكثر استدامة في بيروت.

في الواقع ان الخوف من التحرش هو من اولى الوصمات المرتبطة بالنقل المشترك اليوم, وهو خوف يمنع الكثير من النساء من استخدام الباص. ان تجارب النساء في ركوب الباصات, تتأرجح بين هذا الخوف المستمر والمبالغ فيه والحقيقة المحزنة, و هذه التجارب تشكل نقطة انطلاق حيوية لاي حوار او ناقش عن الاندماج اجتماعي والتغيير المدني في النطاق العام و المشترك في المدينة.

بعيدا عن كل هذا الضجيج المرتبط بالنقل المشترك في بيروت, كل يوم اجد نفسي مندهشة امام ما يقوم به سائقو الحافلات لحماية النساء داخل حافلاتهم. ومن العادات الشائعة توفير السائق المقعد الامامي للجلوس بعيدا عن الركاب الذكور, اعطاء فسحة الركاب مجال امن للتحرك داخل الباص, وقد تذهب الامور بعض الاحيان الى اعطائي احد الركاب مقاعدهم حتى اتمكن من الجلوس بشكل مريح بعيدا عن اي من المتحرشين. والكثير من الركاب في كثير من الاحيان قد ساعدوني و دافعوا عني عن حصول اي مضايقات او عند شعوري بعدم الامان.

بيد أنه من المؤسف أن جميع هذه الجهود الإيجابية تندرج في نفس الخانة: فالطيبة والاخذ بعين الاعتبار انني أمراة لا يزلان يحدداني كأمرأة تستعمل الباص, “مفعول بها” وليست فاعلة, و يجب حمايتها .وانه سيكون من الأفضل بكثير إذا كانت هذه الأعمال اليومية تمتد نحو تثقيف وتوعية  الرجال الذين وضعوني في هذه الحالات في المقام الأول.

في احد المرات, ازعجني احد الركاب فوقف بعض الرجال واعطوني مقاعدهم ولكن لم يقم احد منهم بالاشارة الى المعتدي اواعلان عنه او حتى اخراجه من الحافلة. على الرغم من الترحيب بهذه التصرفات الحسنة التي تحمي النساء ولكن تبقى تصرفات كردات فعل وليست للحماية والوقاية الدائمة. ان مساعدة الناس بشكل سريع ولحظي لهو شيئ جيد ولكن اطار ثقافة هؤلاء الرجال ليس خارج النظام الأبوي بل انهم من قلب هذا النظام و من صلبه. ان شهامتهم  ليست الا كردة فعل طبيعية على فعل الاعتداء يستكمل بـموازنته بوقوفهم ضده لا اكثر, في حين ان النساء بقفون بشكل سلبي ومع الامتنان.

وهناك جانب آخر من مظاهر هذه التفاعلات المتناقضة: هو الانتقائية العنصرية والطبقية المتأصلة في اهتمامهم, فالنساء السود أو السوريات هن دائما أقل احتمالا للدفاع عنهن أو الاهتمام بهم من النساء اللبنانيات، مما يجعل النساء المهاجرات أكثر تعرضا للمضايقات. وهذا يثير الحاجة إلى جدال أكثر تعمقا وشمولية بشأن النقل المشترك باعتباره صورة مصغرة لمجتمعنا ككل.

هل هذه المشكلة متأصلة في واقع الحافلة كمساحة لقاء, أم أنها امتداد لثقافات معادية لاستقلالية المرأة على نطاق أوسع؟ انطلاقا من هذا التحليل المتقاطع، يخلص المرء إلى أن المضايقات في الحافلات هي مشكلة لا تعكس بشكل كبير مشكلة الامان في وسائل النقل المشترك، انما تعكس بشكل أكبر حقيقة تواجد المرأة في أي مكان عام في ظل النظام الأبوي.

لا ينبغي تجاهل المخاوف، ولكن يجب أن نضع هذه مخاوف في اطارها الصحيح: الشعور بالتهميش أو بعدم الانتماء أو بعدم الامان ليس أكثر حدة في الحافلة مما هو عليه في أي مكان حضري آخر. ومن وجهة نظري، لا يمكننا أن نجعل مساحات النقل المشترك أكثر أمانا وأكثر شموليتاُ للنساء دون التشكيك في المجتمع الأبوي والكاره للنساء. النقل المشترك جانب واحد من مجموعة أوسع من المسائل المثيرة للقلق: الحقوق الجندرية والاستقلال الجسد والعنصرية والطبقية والتضامن الاجتماعي.

وهذه المعركة لا يمكن أن تحدث عندما تتجنب النساء الحافلة. وبصفتنا نساء، نحتاج إلى اثبات وجودنا في هذا المجال الحضري الحيوي، ونحن بحاجة إلى تغيير شروط النقاش من المخاوف على سلامتنا إلى التزام مشترك بحقوقنا في المدينة. ما هو على امامنا في الحافلة يناسب صورة أكبر: استئصال الحوار من مشاكل النقل المشترك الى التضامن النسوي ومكافحة العنصرية. إن الاهتمام بالسلامة والكرامة والمساواة للجميع يعني قدرة أكثر فعالية على استعادة مستقبل بيروت للجميع.

***

هذا المقال قد كتبته ميرا طفيلي و نشر بالانكليزية في موقع Beirut Today .وترجمه الى العربية شادي فرج .

BRT in Focus: The Riders’ Perspective (Keserouen)

On the 28th of March, ELARD hosted its second focus group for the general public, this time at Haret Sakher, at the Saydet Al Maounet Church. The majority of attendants were youth from a scouting group, with a few women also connected to the organization also in attendance. Overall, around 20 people took part in the discussion, which touched on several points already heard in previous gatherings, while bringing particular aspects into sharper focus.

The overall discussion took on a for/against vibe, as though the BRT project was being put up for a vote. This atmosphere was productive, however, as it sparked critical conversations that are important at this stage of the Impact Assessment. One middle-aged woman raised a very interesting point about the whole process. She wanted more details about the design (numbers of buses, etc.), and inquired about the follow-up process (like receiving the final report that ELARD is preparing), insisting on her right to information. The team assured her that she would be able to request a copy from the government, thanks to the recently ratified transparency law (“2anoon el-shafafiyeh”).

As in the previous focus group meeting in the Matn region, concerns were raised over the narrowing of the highway. One person worried about the project failing (due to lack of ridership) after the investment and road changes have already been made, leaving a “useless” lane in the middle of the highway.

Others raised more specific concerns about the project design. One young man wondered whether 28 stops would translate to 28 minutes of stopping time, which he thought would mean too slow a journey, which he would prefer to cover by car. It would be interesting to see whether his calculation is accurate, since the BRT system uses prepaid boarding precisely for this reason: to shave off seconds at every stop. But more broadly than this, it would seem that a major challenge for encouraging people to make the switch from car travel to public transport is to — somehow — convince more people that public transport produces more value than just time. Even if the bus takes 30 minutes longer than it “should,” in comparison to single-occupant travel (because it has to “stop for other people”), this journey time is socially valuable. To expect buses to compete with cars at the level of Point A to Point B convenience for the individual user — others be damned — is simply ideological. Public transport is social. It cannot be tailored to individual whim, alone.

Having said that, it is interesting to test out the assumed efficiency of car travel given the amount of traffic all modes have to face today. This week, one of our team members left Hamra at exactly 5 o’clock, in the direction of Fanar, for two consecutive days. On the first day, he took the Number 5/8, which was especially packed with passengers at that time. This route tends to be seen as circuitous, as the bus has to “stop for others” from Hamra, through Basta, Sassine, Bourj Hammoud, Jdeideh, etc., all the way to Ain Saadeh. Due to peak traffic, this trip took 2 hours. The next day, this exact same trip was done by car, taking a “more direct” route (Hamra, DT, Ashrafieh, Dekweneh, Fanar). Due to peak traffic, taking the car only saved 15 minutes. The point here is not that the bus will always match the car; it’s that traffic needs to be reduced before any mode can be called “efficient,” and the main cause of congestion is the personal car. Any comparison of journey time between the two modes must take this basic fact into account.

Another noteworthy theme in this focus group was the relatively high number of participants who wondered why the existing system isn’t improved. One young man asked why the state is investing in new routes if the work to better integrate existing routes isn’t already done: “If I have to buy three tickets, what will the overall cost be for me then? It might mean 8000LL each way overall, making it less affordable than paying to fill up my car.” He suggested that existing buses can also be upgraded and cleaned. Another young woman also worried about the total journey, since the BRT system only takes into consideration the coastal highway, though many people need a way to reach the highway from the surrounding hills (as we pointed out in the Matn discussion).

Another young man who rides buses also thought that improving the existing system was a good idea, but he suggested that no infrastructural upgrades would be enough, as the main reason that people don’t take the bus is psychosocial: “people don’t ride because they don’t want to be with certain people,” he said. The way he said this seemed to imply that he was referring to “newcomers” like Syrian refugees, but when he was pressed to reflect on why those people didn’t take the the bus before the Syrian crisis, the moderator steered the discussion elsewhere. We believe that opening up this thorny discussion is critical for project success, however: class disgust is an invisible barrier to increased ridership, and even if more mixing is achieved, there is no guarantee that social harmony will automatically emerge through propinquity.

This social, psychological and political dimension of public transport was flagged up more directly by one young woman who arrived late to the meeting. She didn’t care about buses because her parents don’t let her use them. “It doesn’t matter if they’re clean, because people on the bus are scary,” she said. She shared stories of harassment of friends, and said: “I wear short skirts and don’t want to be stared at.”

It’s issues like these that are often defined and pushed to one side as matters of “awareness,” as though technical solutions can really “fix” anything if the social conditions for their proper implementation are not addressed throughout the whole project design. For example, a solar-powered water pump will not be maintained by a village if people would rather hook up their televisions and computers to the grid, and keep sourcing water from their wells by hand, no matter how “efficient” the system is deemed by designers. In other words, things will only work as well as their users want them to, and designing for the wrong needs will only ensure project failure. We hope this assessment process can make this clear to the CDR, as we do not want to see this project fail.

BRT & Inclusion

If you’ve been following our story so far, you may remember an interview with us in The Daily Star that came out in July. In that article, our modest little project was paired with an interview with a prominent Member of Parliament, who seemed somewhat dismissive of our grassroots approach to public transport advocacy. He spoke about a BRT system that the government is pursuing, as though any single infrastructural project could stand alone in a complex sociotechnical “thing” like urban mobility.

Though the pairing of our project with something as complicated as a BRT system is somewhat odd – they serve completely different ends – the unintended (?) and productive consequence of the journalist’s choice to put these two interviews in conversation was to highlight an important difference in rhetoric, and not (necessarily) in goals. This difference being, namely, the one between making do with present realities (a tactical, citizen-centric approach), and imposing radically new ones (a strategic, state-centric approach).

Yesterday, we had a chance to finally hear some details about this proposed BRT system, after being “teased” about it for a long time. A company called ELARD reached out to us and invited us to the first public consultation session they were organizing on the behalf of the Council for Development and Reconstruction, as part of an Environmental and Social Impact Assessment study they were conducting. This was a great opportunity to learn about the technical details of this proposed system (more on this below), but it also was a pleasant surprise — the event and our invitation seemed to indicate a serious (?) desire among policymakers to be a little more inclusive than we’ve been used to. Indeed, as Hanadi Musharrafiyeh of ELARD said in response to a great question about their participatory methodology, they could have easily stuck to the letter of the law and simply posted flyers calling people to the meeting at the Municipality of Jdeideh (and thus, dooming the session to formalistic oblivion); instead, they chose an “active” approach, reaching out to as many actors as they could, which we as Bus Map Project can attest to.

Above is a summary of the components of the project, but before we get into the details of what we learned during the session, it’s important to reflect a little further on this desire for inclusion. We’ve seen proceedings of public sessions for various projects in the 90s and 00s. One document we’ve seen — of a session held in Bourj Hammoud to discuss the construction of Dora Bridge — stands out in particular for us: in it, a certain official from the CDR assured session participants that the traffic capacity of the bridge should last until 2015, as a comprehensive, state-regulated public transport system would definitely be developed by then. We’re now in 2017, and most of us who care about our cities have little confidence in any projections, promises or assurances.

This mood was palpable in yesterday’s session, with Elias Maalouf of Train/Train directly addressing the issue by urging the consultants to avoid becoming “part of the long history of studies.” Having said this, however, we did sense a generally positive and open attitude within the session, and in the way that Fadi Matar in particular (representing CDR but not officially part of the panel discussion) responded to some questions and challenges from the audience. If this positive approach is genuine, then we can say that the rhetorical distinction between tactics/citizens and strategy/state need not be as stark as we tend to think.

Indeed, evidence for the bridging of this gap may be seen in the BRT project design itself (as it currently stands; the study is still in its feasibility stage, and not yet officially in the design phase): even though it’s being implemented by the CDR, the BRT project is meant to fit into a broader strategy produced by the Ministry of Public Works and Transport (see above), with the OCFTC (i.e. the Rail and Public Transport Authority) slated to operate the system. The very fact that the BRT will not use the old train right-of-way on the Seaside Highway, as we used to hear often whenever the BRT system was brought up in previous years, indicates that the CDR may be trying its best to work more delicately, and as a “team player.” Perhaps we’ve become too cynical as civil society actors, but we’d be lying if we didn’t say that we’ve come to expect more bullying and jockeying for power within “the” state (and perhaps there are more problems backstage than we’re currently aware of).

More strikingly, the issue of existing public transport operators came up several times during the discussion, both from the podium and among the audience. This a huge leap, for us, as it was only a few years ago that we heard extremely dismissive and stigmatizing language being used in similar sessions. Indeed, even a few months ago, in a presentation from the World Bank, the issue of existing operators was included at the very bottom of a long list of “challenges” on one slide, but not even verbalized by the speaker. Hence, the fact that a) at least two audience members asked about plans to “integrate” (damej) the existing system within the project, and b) this was already being planned for, both on a ‘social impact’ level (in upcoming focus groups), and on a ‘design’ level (as feeder links that the planners assume will remain active), is a major step forward, from our point of view. With this shift, even on the level of discourse, we are hopeful that the days of violent, tabula rasa infrastructural fantasies can be put behind us now (*fingers crossed*).

There’s a lot more we can say about the technical details of the proposed system, but we’ll leave that for another post. For now, we want to affirm that in this process, we see hints of a positive step towards a more inclusive, incremental approach to urbanism in Lebanon. As users of the existing public transport system with a stake in both championing and improving it, we look forward to helping push this conversation forward in any way we can, and hope to take part in the focus group sessions planned soon.

Good luck to everyone involved, and let’s keep on keeping on.

Interview: BMP in The Daily Star

The system is remarkably self-sustainable, even though it is almost entirely unregulated.

We loved sharing our bottom-up, incremental vision of infrastructural activism with The Daily Star!

What do you think? Are we “hiding behind our fingers” as one commenter claims?

Statement of Solidarity with Ongoing Protests in Beirut | #Aug29

On August 22, a campaign based around the ongoing waste (mis)management crisis in Lebanon became much much more. The movement called طلعت ريحتكم struck a chord with people across Lebanon, and brought thousands into Riad al-Solh Square to voice their anger over a wide range of policy failures and socioeconomic issues. At the center of this discontent is the generalized syndrome of deadlock in governance in the country, but others have gone further in their diagnoses. Many have focused on the endemic culture of nepotism and corruption among the semi-feudal political class ruling the country. Others have struck at the root, focusing on the confessional system itself as the perpetual engine of division, unaccountability and immobilism. Others have dug even deeper into the capitalist system as the context of contexts for our problems.

In the days that followed that fateful Saturday, several factors have pushed and pulled the movement in different directions. First, there was the inexplicable and inexcusable state violence against protesters, which fueled anger and encouraged more people to join. Second, there were the fears of party-orchestrated infiltration and sabotage, and the resulting controversy among movement supporters over the classist and sectarian overtones of these fears, and the ways that protest organizers chose to respond to them. Finally, there was the plurality of proposals and counterproposals for the way forward with movement demands, stemming from the various criss-crossing analyses described above. By August 29, the movement grew far beyond its initial scope and framing as #YouStink, and became a true platform for mass political action.

Today, a host of inspiring groups, new and established, are active “in the square” — community-based campaigns like عكار_مش_مزبلة, citizen journalism projects like أخبار الساحة, recycling initiatives like Sar Lezem Rassak Yifroz, anti-capitalist fora like المنشور, student organizations like AUB Secular Club, and advocacy networks like National Campaign for Sustainable Transportation, etc.

This means that the visions, missions and approaches are now many. Where do we go from here?

Bus Map Project was conceived as a modest, small-scale intervention in the gaps between state neglect and policy-oriented advocacy. We chose a pragmatic approach that strategically set aside the twin issues of rights and demands. We stubbornly focused on the present — on the bus system as it exists today, without quick judgement or dismissal — because we felt that other pro-transit campaigns have either focused too much on the past (e.g. the state’s neglect of public transport) or too much on the future (e.g. a desired public transport system). More fundamentally, we chose an approach that would bypass the state altogether — with or without a president, with or without a parliament, with or without a responsive Ministry of Public Works & Transport, we want to begin collectively building our own tools that help us make sense of and navigate our cities.

We support the current climate of protest. We believe that more awareness of the systemic problems that produce so many failures across so many sectors — from housing to transport to the environment — is important. Our project has only just started, but we wish to contribute to this ongoing conversation sparked by #YouStink by calling for more small-scale, closely-allied, locally-based, and non-state reliant projects focused on the tail-end of the crises created by Lebanon’s broken system of governance. The movement’s broader slogans — anti-corruption, secularism, electoral reform, parliamentary renewal — are of vital importance, but we believe that Lebanon also needs solutions in the here-and-now. We need better representation, better institutions, etc, but we also need less dependence, less centralization, less delegation of our power to connect and work together as civic actors.

This is not a call to “de-politicize” the movement — that is impossible. It is, however, a plea for more fidelity to the immediate, to the concrete, and to ourselves. There is strength in numbers — a single-issue campaign acting alone will struggle to accomplish anything, but a sustained and focused project acting within a broad network of supportive campaigns is more likely to succeed, for the benefit of all. Yalla.

If you are interested in learning more about how you can help Bus Map Project, please do not hesitate to contact us.


#مستمرون

The Bus as Social Diagnostic

“My bus ride to work each day thus provides a glimpse into the simmering sectarian divisions of the city.”

We often see our city’s fragments and divisions, but what about the networks and connections that stitch them together?

This bus ride is also a glimpse into what endures despite division.