Search

How does a profession that prides itself on standing for the common good and working through action –not mere analysis or gesturing- demonstrate its effectiveness in a city devastated by intractable political, economic, financial, health, and social crises? In this essay, I dive into the current context of planning in Beirut (Lebanon) where I have been deeply engaged for decades. Recognizing that planning is deeply embedded in the making of the ongoing overlapping crises in the country, I propose three pathways for thinking about a possible positive role for planning in these circumstances: (i) to (re)construct a source of legitimacy for planning by reconsidering who has custody over the planning process and how the legitimacy of planning is secured; (ii) to accept a "tactical" practice in which grand schemes are replaced with tentative, experimental, and incremental micro-interventions that may succeed or not in reaching an integrated vision and, (iii) to activate the performative dimension of planning, its ability to imagine shared spaces and allow for transgressing contemporary limited realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many states, including Lebanon, have used the Covid-19 pandemic as an occasion to reassert their power and to consolidate their policing and repressive apparatuses. We are far from a seamless scenario, however. Rather than a mere reproduction of the sectarian political system, we argue in this paper that the governance of the pandemic in Lebanon reveals tensions between powerful political parties, weakened public agencies, as well as multiple solidarity groups with diverging aspirations, colliding over the imagined future of the country. Using various sources of information (broadcast, print and online news media, social media), we build a database of the types of actors and the categories of actions across locations, and analyze the territorial and political variations of the governance of the pandemic. The paper demonstrates that the Covid-19 response in Lebanon operates through ongoing negotiations over the national territory in which timid yet visible aspirations for a non-sectarian country confront sectarian territorialities through back-and-forth cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rather than post-conflict peace-makers, planners can be instrumental to the perpetuation of the rationale of war in times of peace, "deeply entangled and professionally compromised", effectively "the technicians of the war yet to come" (p. 104). Akar, Hiba Bou For the War Yet to Come, Planning Beirut's Frontiers. [Extracted from the article]

Although property is a basic ingredient of planning, its repercussions on the profession have rarely been considered. Building on the critical analysis of property, I argue that planning is giving in to the “property effect,”the unquestioned assumption that natural and built landscapes are propertied. Looking specifically at one case-study of land-use planning in Tibneen (Lebanon), I show planning interventions replicate inequalities embedded in property relations, maintain the dominance of propertied representation of the landscape, and limit possible claims over natural and built landscapes to those formulated within the framework of the ownership model. Consequently, land-use planning determines the possible futures of particular towns and regions through the institutional structures of the property regimes in place and within the historically and geographically contingent political-economies where these regimes operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]