Snapshot
Student activists hung full-sized human foam core cut-outs over a dangerous highway in Beirut to draw attention to pedestrian fatalities, successfully pressuring the city council to build an overpass.
In 2011, one student was killed and four injured by cars on the highway leading to the Faculty of Public Health at Lebanese University in Beirut. I and hundreds of other students were outraged by the lack of concern for our lives and well-being, and we decided to do something about it. We wanted the city to install an overpass over that dangerous section of highway that we needed to cross every day.
First we tried a number of “traditional” protests and petitions. We protested at the university, but the university board didn't heed our demands. We protested outside the municipal offices, but the mayor told us that it wasn’t his responsibility. He said it was the responsibility of the Ministry of Infrastructure, yet there was no Minister for Infrastructure at that time. We hung banners on both sides of the highway but people were passing too fast, and didn’t pay attention. We even drew 3D paintings of bumps and holes on the highway. At the beginning it was effective: people slowed down, were confused, wondered what was going on, but after two weeks people knew that it was just paint, and, again, we were ignored.
We needed a tactic that wouldn’t put us physically in danger, but would let people feel the danger we felt every day when we crossed the highway.
We were looking for a protest method that would effectively draw attention to the problem, and also pressure the authorities to fix it. It had to be an emotional statement that directly motivated drivers to slow down, and also generally support our cause. It also had to be something we could do on a low budget. Finally, we didn’t want to take sides between the political and religious polarities in Lebanon, so we had to make it just a student health and quality-of-life campaign that was neither religious nor explicitly political. We needed a tactic that wouldn’t put us physically in danger, but would let people feel the danger we felt every day when we crossed the highway. That’s a lot of tricky requirements and constraints to balance. Only a creative, outside-the-box idea was going to fit the bill.
After much trial and error, we finally hit on a tactic that worked: we cut human shapes out of foam core and hung them over the highway, just above the tops of cars, but low enough for trucks to hit them. We worked with a painter who added statements to the body cut-outs. “Just as you hit this, you will hit a student” he wrote. And we added statistics: “If you hit a person while driving at 120 km/h, you will kill them in less than 2 seconds” and: “Every month a student is hit by a car on this highway.”
As people were driving, they would hit or nearly hit the hanging cut-outs. It unnerved them, and they slowed down and read the statements. The media became aware of the campaign and began running stories. Nine days later, our message reached the head of the Municipal Committee for Public Works. He called us and we met with him. We told him that we wanted a pedestrian bridge. Three weeks later, they started building the bridge and within another three months time we had our bridge. Victory!
With a little bit of creativity and a lot of persistence, we were able to prevent countless deaths and injuries to students and members of the public who could not afford private transport and had no choice but to cross that deadly highway in order to attend University. Private universities have more funds and enjoy better-serviced and equipped campuses; for students attending public universities, however, we have to fight for our equal rights. In this case, we did, and we won.
Key theory
A well-designed action should have a clear “logic”: demonstrating the what the problem is and what’s at stake with little additional explanation. The foam core cut-outs strung low across the highway did this in an intuitive and visual way; and the accompanying messages drove the point home: people were dying unnecessarily because they had no choice but to cross a dangerous highway. People driving towards the cut-outs and signs, or even reading about them in the media, could not fail but to viscerally understand the point of the protest, and become more sympathetic to it.
Key principle
Traffic deaths are a terrible tragedy, but each traffic death does not necessarily attract the media interest it deserves. By dramatizing the risks in a new and creative and visual way, protesters offered journalists a compelling story, and in the process, attracted widespread media and public attention to the issue.