BEIRUT: Imagine a Beirut covered in rooftop gardens, with vertical farms dotted throughout the city and people cycling or walking everywhere.

This parallel universe is one imagined by Sandra Rishani, architect and design teacher at the American University of Beirut, whose new blog, Beirut the Fantastic, has become a popular addition to the Lebanese blogosphere.

The “Fantastic,” Rishani explains, is not a reference to the state of Beirut but rather a nod to the literature genre, falling somewhere between the supernatural and the real.

“The ideas are vague enough that they could be possible but also wild enough that a lot of people would have to come together to make them happen,” she explains.

Each blog post highlights an issue facing the city and its infrastructure and then poses a unique solution, complete with sketches, seemingly from a Beirut of the future.

In one, the Burj al-Murr, the 40-story unfinished tower in Qantari, built in 1975 at the outbreak of the Civil War, is reborn as a lofty arboretum.

Costly and difficult to knock down, the tower has stood unused since the war. Rishani predicts that one day the Burj will be invested in and developed, but until then, she says, it should be turned into a towering tapestry of color.

“I was stuck in traffic coming to Hamra every afternoon,” she says, “and it’s just this huge gray wall. It seems clear to me, if it was a mountain of green it would be just fascinating.”

With plants and bushes spilling out of every window, “it would change color and would just make for a much more interesting traffic jam,” she adds.

The lack of green space is an issue Rishani explores frequently – in one post she highlights that Beirut would have to increase its proportion of green space, currently 1.8 percent, a whopping 22 times in order to meet the World Health Organization’s recommended quantity. In fact, she points out, 41 percent of Beirut would have to be demolished in order to make it a “healthy city.”

But Rishani is adamant that Beirut should not simply follow the example of any other city. “It has to make a pattern of its own,” she says. In a post she writes, “The assumption that green space must accumulate into large-scale spaces in order to optimize public usage reflects a Western stereotype of space utilization.”

As such, she envisages Beirut going green in its own way, with the roofs of all public buildings becoming gardens, and suspended nurseries across the city, all connected by elevated terraces.

This would also simultaneously increase the volume of public space in Beirut, currently a scarce commodity.

“People keep talking about sectarian divisions, but I think the divisions between income groups are much harsher in Lebanon. And I think that can mainly be attributed to the lack of public spaces,” Rishani believes.

Rishani recognizes that many of her ideas would require a huge amount of work in order to become a reality. The idea behind the blog, she says, is more to provoke a debate about Beirut, its heritage and its future.

The wilder blog posts, including a recent one which turned the city into an agricultural haven via hanging farms, are “mainly to invite people to dream of space and to wonder why we have such spaces, why we live like this, and to recognize the spaces around them,” she says.

“My main issue is that I think people need to dream big, and stop thinking about all the little things,” Rishani adds, saying that the global “localism” trend isn’t appropriate for Beirut.

“‘Thinking local’ is important but it’s also important not to get too bogged down in the tiny details. You have to look at the bigger picture. And if you look at Beirut, planning – in terms of infrastructure, housing and transport – has failed,” she adds.

The most effective, and tangible, way to improve how Beirut works as a city, Rishani says, would be to tackle public transport, basically a nonexistent concept in Lebanon’s capital.

“If we focus on transportation it would change the whole city. If we had public transport, and people couldn’t drive into the center of the city, everything would be so much faster and easier,” Rishani maintains.

“I think it would be a relatively easy issue to tackle and yet it would greatly improve the quality of people’s lives,” she adds.

Rishani insists she is not one of those architects who are “infatuated with space and believes it will solve everything.” But, she says, more attention needs to be paid to the effect that a city’s planning can have on its inhabitants.

“People don’t recognize how infrastructure, even small things such as a highway passing next to your house, how it will affect you and your neighborhood, how it might even divide your neighborhood.”

View Sandra Rishani’s blog at http://spatiallyjustenvironmentsbeirut.blogspot.com/.