In this chapter, we leave the discursive dimension of memory behind and step into the streets of Beirut to examine the negotiation of memory that takes place in public space. Digging into urban space in Beirut is to enter a minefield of symbols. The city's many inhabitant groups all have richly varied ways of expressing their cultural, religious and political beliefs. Moving from quarter to quarter through Beirut in the early 2000s, one could not fail to notice the posters, flags and writings that dotted streets and buildings. Throughout the war the social fragmentation of Beirut was mirrored in symbolic form by various spatial practices. Popular clandestine expressions of allegiance and identity such as graffiti as well as orchestrated propaganda such as political posters and monuments were deployed in the contest over urban space. After the war, many of the divisions that were enforced by military barricades during the war remained in place on the symbolic level. The history of Beirut left its traces in both the architectural and the social fabric of the city: traces of pluralism, tolerance and coexistence but also traces of war and sharply drawn boundaries.

Leaving aside the controlled space of the reconstructed downtown area, the chapter turns towards some of the unprojected transformations that took place in residential Beirut after the war. To investigate the production of sectarian memory cultures, I examine the visual means employed by political parties and their supporters to demarcate their turfs in the city and some of the clandestine reactions to those signs.