"The City of Beirut": A Book by Professor Charles Churchill (THE CITY OF BEIRUT)

... At last a book has appeared about the city of Beirut that treats the economic and social life of the Beirutis; but it was written in English, because its author is a foreign social scientist, Mr. Charles Churchill, professor of statistics and sociology at the American University of Beirut. Mr. Churchill and those who assisted him undertook this effort because he felt — as the Lebanese themselves have not felt — that they lack a modern social study of their capital, especially since previous studies were mostly concerned with the science of man (Anthropology) on the one hand, and confined to the villager on the other, those who conducted them supposing that he represents the majority of the population. In his introduction Mr. Churchill contradicts this view, observing that the number of city dwellers in Lebanon exceeds the number of villagers — and this without also taking into account the extent of the city's influence on the villages...

The author intended to carry out this effort with the help of the Economic Institute at the American University of Beirut... But no sooner had the Ministry of Social Affairs heard of the start of the project than it took an interest in the matter and asked to share in the fascinating work and to ease the researchers' approach to the inhabitants, since it is in the light of sound information (Data) that projects of social reform are built. So in 1952 the Ministry issued a decree affirming the validity of the study and specifying its various purposes — social, sanitary, cultural, and economic — and requiring that it include all the families living in Beirut, regardless of their nationality...

The research began with a re-examination of the map of Beirut drawn up by the French in 1941. The employees of the Statistics Department were charged with this, devoting themselves to it after finishing their work at the department and examining it with care and precision: the map was divided into 68 sections, each of which was entrusted to a number of employees who corrected the positions of the roads and buildings and their heights within it. In the second step, before the interviews began, they divided the quarters of Beirut into points, each containing no more than a hundred buildings and no fewer than fifty, and each was given a number... When the campaign of interviews began, those conducting them — most of them university students — numbered no more than two. But they later increased until they became 28 persons, divided into fourteen pairs — a young man and a young woman — who conduct the interview together. They go to the appointed family in the evening, so that they may be able to meet its various members, and after making sure of winning their confidence they begin questioning the head of the family and its mistress about their birthplaces, their nationalities, the composition of their family, their age at marriage, and about the rest of the family's members, children abroad and others deceased; then about their economic circumstances, the rent of

their houses, and about their education: the number of years of their schooling, the kind of school and the country in which they studied, the languages they speak, write, and read, and other such details of their way of living, their income and expenditure, their debts, and their occupations... enough to compose a book about every family.

What the author of the study commends is the good welcome the Lebanese gave those charged with the interviews, and their giving of all the information with perfect good grace. As soon as the interviewers finished a single interview, they set about studying the results and laid them before the members of the responsible committee at its meetings; and so on, until the arduous work ended in statistical tables that are correct and very precise. Although they do not cover all the inhabitants of Beirut — particularly the people of Burj Hammoud and Furn al-Shubbak, who were excluded from the study for material reasons — on the whole they indicate the social tendencies of Beirut's inhabitants. Among them, for example: that in Beirut, where the percentage of males exceeds the percentage of females, 55% against 45%, most men marry between the ages of 26 and 30 and women between 16 and 20; and that the Beirutis do not like moving but stay fixed in one place. The statistics show that 44% have not moved from their homes in the last ten years, and that 27% have moved once; that 63% do not go to summer resorts, most of them being merchants and members of the liberal professions; that 80% prefer to work in the city for economic reasons; that 75% like their present work while 18% do not; and that only 5% go to the village for part of the time to work there.

It was likewise found that 59% of homes are without gardens; that 4% of Beirut's inhabitants still have no running water in their houses and are deprived of the means of comfort; that 44% are in debt to financial institutions and others; and that they spend little on their own amusement...

These are some of the many figures around which the research turned. The Ministry of Social Affairs takes them as a reference for studying the improvement of the Beirutis' life, and each of us ought to read them for information and enlightenment...

In the face of this study so rich in material, we are deeply indebted to Professor Churchill, because on the one hand he has furnished the foundations on which reform projects are built, and on the other he has opened the way for students of sociology and specialists to undertake such a study in the future.