Many challenges underline the urgency of reconsidering dominant approaches to development, land use, and the institutional framework that governs them, in addition to the political context, which requires a novel and creative counter-approach in Chekka and Surrounding Towns in North Lebanon.
As such, this competition is an open call for planners, designers, environmental scientists, agricultural engineers, economists and other professionals to draft an intervention framework, which simultaneously answers the concept of sustainable development and the immediate needs of the people, including job opportunities and a local economy, without compromising their health, the environment and local economic resources.
This competition proposes to address three strategic sites, which we found were open to complementary interventions within a wider developmental vision. These cases call upon us all, professionals and concerned citizens interested in the intersections between sustainable environment and social justice, to address the following questions:
1) Koura’s Middle Plain: The agricultural plain was subjected to excavation for clay extraction by the cement companies between 1967 and 1984. The pits have not been rehabilitated since, and continue to damage the soil and olive groves today. How can we rehabilitate the agricultural middle plain and the neglected clay extraction pits and redefine this site’s role in the area, its productivity, and its (economic) relevance to current and upcoming generations of Koura residents?
