[SEMINAR - CITIES ARE BACK IN TOWN] Inhabiting Beirut’s Cycles of Boom and Bust

SEMINAR CITIES ARE BACK IN TOWN WORK IN PROCESS

Sciences Po, Room Goguel, 27 rue Saint-Guillaume, 75007 Paris

This presentation seeks to locate urban dwelling within the cycles of boom and bust that characterize today’s cities (Murray 2021). It focuses on the inhabitance of tenants coerced to live in the interstices of these cycles, occupying either residual spaces left in the aftermath of earlier (failed) investments or spaces held through predatory investments in anticipation of future redevelopment (Ren 2014). Following Blomley (2020), the research approaches this precarious condition through the lens of property law, focusing on the asymmetric relations of vulnerability produced by the dominant ownership model. It does so through in-depth investigations of dilapidated residential clusters and buildings scattered across Lebanon’s capital city Beirut. We specifically explore the process of ruination that develops at the intersections of capital flows, transforming regulatory environments, population movements, and shifting ownership patterns, showing how these intersections simultaneously generate displacements and shape opportunities of inhabitation. We argue that a proper assessment of how property law maintains precarious inhabitation should be understood in relation to the larger regulatory framework in which land is imagined and managed as asset. In turn, the logic of the “ownership model” which reduces the city to the sum of privately own lots restricts dramatically tenants’ ability to secure tenure or resist eviction by imposing an individuated process of negotiation and a limited ceiling for what one can claim, ultimately precluding the possibility of living outside the dominant extractive inhabitance that characterizes today’s Beirut. The research is part of a larger investigation of ongoing transformations in Beirut’s housing landscape conducted by the Housing Justice team at the Beirut Urban Lab

Speaker

Mona Fawaz is Professor in Urban Studies and Planning at the American University of Beirut She is also a research director and co-founder of the Beirut Urban Lab, a regional research center based at the American University of Beirut and invested in working towards more inclusive, just, and viable cities. She is currently visiting professor at the Departement of Geography at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and also Honorary Professor at the Department of Planning in the Bartlett School, at UCL. Mona’s research stems from the imperative of making cities more just, addressing urbanization through the lenses of informality and the law, land, housing, property and space, always responding to the urge of informing planning theory and practice. Her findings are published in scholarly articles, book sections, and reports, and she has held several international fellowships. She currently serves as editor for the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and she serves on the board of the journals Planning Theory and City and Society.

Information:

citiesarebackintown@sciencespo.fr