In the villages of Mount Lebanon, homes are realized through years of immigrants’ exchanged remittances, messages, objects, and visits. This online repository offers an expanded understanding of the homes of diasporic families and of diasporic homemaking—my term for the process through which individuals and families build their homeland houses while and from abroad or back and forth between locales. In the phrase “diasporic homemaking,” the adjective “diasporic” captures the world in and the conditions under which these subjects exist. It also modifies the meaning of “homemaking” to expand and encompass the ways in which these subjects experience and inhabit houses and the way they experience and manage their construction.
To understand how diasporic subjects build and make their homes while and from abroad or back and forth between locales, I set out to interview owners of remittance-funded houses in the districts of ’Aley and Shūf in the summer of 2022. What began as one visit to a distant relative turned into twelve; each person had mentioned and connected me to more relatives, friends, or acquaintances that the owners knew to have, or had, at some point, left Lebanon for al-mahjar.
In the Mountain, it was easy to find villagers who immigrated yet maintained connections back home. In fact, the region has a long history of steady migration: between 1890, during the collapse of the local silk economy, and the onset of World War I,
over one-third of the population left their villages and traveled to the Americas
seeking better financial opportunities.Khater, Inventing Home, 8.
Remittance-funded houses, whether a century-old or more recently built, are often referred to by the geographic location of the emigrants funding their construction: the American house next to the Saudi house, the French house, the Brazilian house... Sometimes, they even act as stand-ins for people.
Today, migration is an increasingly desperate measure embraced by struggling families across Lebanon, one largely triggered by the financial and economic collapse since late 2019. The local currency lost more than 90% of its value, banks are paralyzed, and savers have been locked out of dollar accounts or told that funds they can access are now
worth a fraction of their original value.Blair and Bassam, “Penny Pinching and Power Cuts; Lebanon’s Middle Class Squeezed by Crisis.” Reuters.
As a result of the crisis and its systemic consequences, emigration from Lebanon jumped by
446 percent between 2021 and 2022,Sheikh Moussa, “Emigration from Lebanon Jumps by 446 Percent in One Year.” Beirut Today.
making its diaspora today nearly
three times the size of the country’s population of 5 million.Vohra, “Lebanon Is in Terminal Brain Drain.” Foreign Policy.
In 2022, Lebanon received $6.8 billion in remittances, estimated to equal almost
38% of the country’s GDP.Lionell, “Animated Chart: Remittance Flows and GDP Impact by Country,” World Economic Forum.
Given these factors, contemporary diasporic homemaking in this context is both salient and easily delineated.
Different registers come together to allow our knowledge of the plurality of modes of existing in the world to inform our practices of homemaking. This project weaves snippets of conversations from in-person visits with the owners of remittance-funded houses throughout ’Aley and Shūf, two districts in the Mount- Lebanon governorate, with information detailing the political and economic factors affecting them. These are supplemented by existing theoretical, anthropological, and historical literature on migration.
Similar to the “lenticular condition,” diasporic homemaking is relational: it is tied to multiple locations, inhabits multiple realities, and is affected by position and distance. In this thesis, the built form tied to diasporic subjects is conceived in and through networks of communication technologies, money transfers, and airline travel. As a result, several signature architectural concepts are re-imagined and elaborated upon through architectural commentary. In the first chapter, “site” is no longer understood to simply be location, where the building is bound by coordinates or where owners have to be physically present; site, as captured through WhatsApp images, is dispersed, thus becoming the change that occurs throughout the conception and construction of their homes. Each following chapter similarly re-imagines and expands our use of architectural concepts such as “budget,” “program,” “phases,” “finishes,” “furniture, fixtures,” and “contracts.”