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Much of the literature covering forced population displacement has neglected spatial implications, dealing with place as mere context. Building on a case study of the city of Halba (Lebanon) where it maps a process of contingent encounters through which disparate resources, individuals, and groups are stitched together to generate large-scale housing projects that shelter refugees, this paper demonstrates the importance of studying displacement through a grounded reading of the spatial transformations it implicates. The paper maps multiple private and public actors who exploit cracks and connect seemingly disparate material flows (e.g., humanitarian aid, public housing subsidies) and institutional systems (e.g., humanitarian, public, private, religious) in ways that catalyze and accelerate the production of housing in order to derive profit from the opportunities afforded by the refugee crisis. Thus, developers, buyers, residents, brokers, public agents, and other actors all support a flow of informal profitable exchanges that are far from seamless economic transactions, mixing instead capitalist profiteering with human solidarity, religious morality, or kinship obligations that all buttress the possibility of these encounters and their materialization into new configurations of urban quarters. The arrangements formed through these processes, the paper shows, are strongly reflective of existing social hierarchies and inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between property and gentrification, building on a case study of the neighbourhood of Mar Mikhael (Beirut, Lebanon). First, we discuss the ways in which the distribution of property ownership shapes processes of displacement. We then investigate how property is made and reorganized through processes of gentrification, arguing that the mechanisms through which gentrification occurs in Mar Mikhael are intimately connected to the very logic in which land is conceptualized and managed as property through the ownership model. A dominant logic of managing the city as the sum of privately owned property lots dictates the necessity to streamline and clarify property titles, empowering developers who can forcibly acquire lots even when other property claimants are reluctant to sell. We further argue that a proper assessment of the role of property in gentrification processes can only be made in relation to the larger regulatory framework in which land is imagined and managed (e.g. as shelter, as asset), and that facilitates or limits gentrification by creating the financial incentives for developers to activate the legal property framework in different contexts. The logic of private ownership has dramatic effects on the ability of neighbourhood residents to resist gentrification, particularly because it imposes an individuated process of negotiation and a limited ceiling for what one can reclaim, ultimately precluding the possibility of claiming one’s right to the city both within and outside the property framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Taking the provision of building permits as an entry point to its analysis, the paper documents the widespread practice of issuing ‘exceptions’ on which planning agencies in Beirut (Lebanon) frequently rely in their management of urban developments. The paper analyses ‘exceptions’ as a variable set of policy departures that take numerous forms (e.g. tolerance, concession, incentive), temporalities (before/after building), justifications (e.g. for political/social or developmental reasons), and materialise in different legal statuses (e.g. within the framework of the law/as temporary, extra-legal measures). It furthermore unravels a grammar that structures the allocation of specific forms of exceptions to particular social groups and urban spaces. The paper argues that although they are typically described as aberrations, exceptions cannot amount to the lack of the planning. Exceptions are rather a planning strategy that introduces a margin of manoeuver for planning authorities, without conceding radical changes in the structure organising access to the city. Furthermore, like other planning interventions, exceptions to building permit procedures perform to define, and consolidate, and/or reconfigure the entitlement of various social groups to dwell in the city but also to take part in its government, materialising hence in the reorganisation of urban territories and sovereignty arrangements. Ultimately, an invisible zoning dictated by these exceptions restructures the city in the variegated geography of centre, periphery, slum, camp, political territory, and others, and classifies urban dwellers into tolerated populations, political constituencies, outsiders, etc. The paper is based on the analysis of over 200 building permits in five areas of the city and more than 1000 decisions taken by public planning agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research looks at post-2006-war reconstruction of the southern suburbs of Beirut under the auspices of Hezbollah (the Islamic resistance movement in Lebanon). The project was widely acclaimed as an alternative to current neoliberal planning practices in the Middle East and beyond. Based on a critical reading of the conception of property issues in this planning project, the article argues that this reconstruction presents a new geometry or alternative to the mainstream configuration of neoliberal urbanism, rather than a departure from its precepts. The reason for this is that the adopted language of property corresponds closely with the conception of property advocated by neoliberal planning, one that enshrines private, individual ownership as sacred and desirable and that works to strengthen its model in the city. I further argue that the 'neoliberal planning regime' within which Hezbollah's urban intervention occurs is not accidental; rather, it is necessary for the party's control of this space's future and for consolidating its territory in the city. It is hence expected that Hezbollah's planning in the city will produce the same decried effects as neoliberal planning elsewhere in the city rather than usher an innovative, progressive model of planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Lefebvre's theorization of space in order to examine the compatibility of neoliberalism and the right to the city, this study investigates how the formation of informal settlements since the 1950s had provided low-income dwellers in Beirut (Lebanon) a means to conceive of and engage in city making (neighbourhood production, management, and organization) at a time when state regulations and/or market constraints would have excluded them from the city. It also examines how the prevailing neoliberal ideology of the 1990s, as translated through Lebanon's sectarian-clientelist regime, is curtailing these possibilities. Evidence for the article was drawn from interviews with dwellers, developers and public officials, as well as from archival searches and aerial photographs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents the early development of an informal settlement in Beirut (Lebanon) through the trajectories of the developers who participated in its production, looking specifically at the role that social networks played in the process. Drawing primarily on the methodological approach developed by Pierre Bourdieu, my analysis reveals that social networks play a central role as conduits for developers to access the necessary housing ingredients and market securities they need to conduct their businesses. Social networks also function as accumulated capital, enabling developers to strengthen their hold over the production of housing in the neighborhood. My analysis also indicates that while some of these networks were inherited, many were built through patient investments deployed by these developers within the changing limitations of the micro (neighborhood) and macro (city-wide) contexts. Finally, the changing distribution of social networks in this neighborhood determined when and how different social agents were able to participate as developers in the production and exchange of housing. These findings are important since they generate new insights into how (informal land) markets work, the practices of developers in this type of neighborhood, as well as the yet unstudied mechanisms of informal housing production in the Lebanese context. [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]