URBAN PROJECT IN GEMMAYZÉ is the analysis with a view to safeguarding and enhancing the architectural and urban heritage of the Beirut district of GEMMAYZÉ.

The project was developed within a joint workshop, born from an agreement between the Paris-Belleville School of Architecture (EAPB) and the School of Architecture of the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA).

GEMMAYZÉ is a traditional district of Beirut, in full transformation.

Its main street, Gouraud Street, stretches from east to west, parallel to the sea, from downtown Beirut where it begins. This Gouraud Street, the backbone of the neighborhood, has a network of passages and

streets, on either side, like a fishbone. It is thus connected to the sea, on the north side, and to the hill of Achrafieh, on the south side.

Traditionally a street for all businesses, large and small, it supplies itself with goods through its industrious streets which descend towards the port.

It is also connected to the aristocratic and bourgeois hill of Achrafieh and the Sursock district, still green today, by stepped alleys, dead ends, passages, gardens and green wastelands...

Its membership in the life of the port owes its shops, stores and vaulted ground floor warehouses, on which the beautiful bourgeois houses of the great merchants were built at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, during the French mandate. This is its heritage dimension.

With the expansion of Beirut and the emergence of new peripheral districts and new commercial centers, Gouraud Street, like the city center, is gradually losing its importance, its luster... it is deteriorating.

Its facades fade, become covered with commercial signs... And new buildings, without character or connection with the neighborhood, replace the abandoned gardens and houses. But life goes on, perhaps more popularly.

The war in Lebanon, from 1975 to 1990, accentuated this degradation of the city, Saifi and the entrance to the Gemmayzė district were badly affected,