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Urban Injections
Ji[Daruna]
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Across our neighbourhoods, we encounter obstructed sidewalks, unlit stairwells, illegal dumping, and neglected infrastructure.
Residents often have no effective mechanism to report these issues, while municipalities operate with fragmented information and limited visibility over what is happening across their territories, and limited ability to fix things.
Ji[Daruna] is the fourth iteration of a question Studio Madane has been working on since 2021. Each stage produced something the current platform is built out of.
2026
The whole project was rebuilt from scratch, with six years of synthesis folded into it. The taxonomy that once organised a visual archive of Beirut’s urban informalities became Ji[Daruna]’s classification system. What once was a research method, in 2022, became a piece of software a municipal employee can open on a Tuesday morning and use without being taught or trained.
Studio Madane and #Stadtsache have hopped on a series of conversations to explore innovative ways of democratizing urban development through digital tools. Rooted in Studio Madane’s ethnographic urban research project, the collaboration aims to empower residents in Beirut’ neighborhouds to docuement and address urban challenges using real-time data transfer and geolocated photographic reporting. This partnership dwells on shared values of community ownership, observation, reform, and bridging the gap between people, state, and decision-making mechanisms.
Studio Madane brought Ji[Daruna] into a participatory community dialogue during a neighbourhood intervention in Barcelona. The conversation was about how a studio attends to a city at all: who is entitled to describe a problem, and what happens to that description afterwards. The prototype was put in residents' hands and tested against their own street. What came back set the standard the platform is still held to, that the tool has to be legible to the people using it and not only to the people studying them.
This was the year the work found its public and its language. In February in Barcelona and in July in Beirut, Studio Madane exhibited the printed photographic archive of how the city is treated, hung alongside a map of the kazdoura, the long walk through which all of it was gathered. It ran with a chain of short films produced by the Documenters and Visual Creators out of the ethnographic research. Shown together, the print, the map and the films made one argument: that the condition of a street is a description of how the people on it are being treated.
The work almost stopped. Brain drain emptied the team faster than it could be rebuilt, collaborators left the country mid-project, and what remained was a collective flatness that made ordinary coordination feel disproportionate. The step back was not strategic at first. It became strategic when the question turned from what we were documenting to why it mattered at all.
The answer came out of Karantina. As part of the survey work for the BRPI project, we conducted ethnographies that moved past casual urban informalities and into sociospatial diagnostics: reading the physical environment as evidence of how humans are treated in the city. The result was a visual archive with written material, organised in three categories.
1. Illegal separators: How people build their own comfort outside the law.
2. Joining interventions: How people build comfort regardless of legality, and in doing so make a neighbourhood's unmet needs legible enough for a municipality to read and act on.
3. Sectarian and party interventions: How organised political and religious parties mark, claim and administer public space, and what that indicates about who a neighbourhood belongs to.
From this came the first thing called Ji[Daruna]: an accessible public map platform (discontinued) for municipality members displaying geolocated written and photographic reports. It was rudimentary by design, built to test whether the workflow held end to end before anything larger was attempted. It held, and the three categories still structure how the platform reads a street.
In October 2021, a team of activists and artists went down into the streets of municipal Beirut and photographed what was written on them. It was post-revolution, post-pandemic, post-port explosion, and the walls were carrying what the institutions would not. The aim was to reverse the censorship: to take what authorities were painting over and put it back, as a bottom-up rewrite of the collective narrative. Each work was documented, explained and narrated, with the artists brought into the conversation about their own walls.The name Ji[Daruna] was born here. Jidaruna, our wall. [Daruna], our home. So was the premise everything since has rested on, that these speaking walls are our home and they say who we are.