Reconstructing Beirut : Memory and space in a postwar Arab city
Sawalha Aseel, ethnologie, sociologie urbaine, renouvellement urbain, guerre, aménagement de l'espace, patrimoine urbain, déplacement de population, recomposition socio-spatiale, reconstruction, Beirut, Beyrouth
<div>Once the cosmopolitan center of the Middle East, Beirut was devastated by the civil war that ran from 1975 to 1991, which dislocated many residents, disrupted normal municipal functions, and destroyed the vibrant downtown district. The aftermath of the war was an unstable situation Sawalha considers "a postwar state of emergency," even as the state strove to restore normalcy. This ethnography centers on various groups' responses to Beirut's large, privatized urban-renewal project that unfolded during this turbulent moment.<br />
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At the core of the study is the theme of remembering space. The official process of rebuilding the city as a node in the global economy collided with local day-to-day concerns, and all arguments invariably inspired narratives of what happened before and during the war. Sawalha explains how Beirutis invoked their past experiences of specific sites to vie for the power to shape those sites in the future. Rather than focus on a single site, the ethnography crosses multiple urban sites and social groups, to survey varied groups with interests in particular spaces. The book contextualizes these spatial conflicts within the discourses of the city's historical accounts and the much-debated concept of heritage, voiced in academic writing, politics, and journalism. In the afterword, Sawalha links these conflicts to the social and political crises of early twenty-first-century Beirut.</div>
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<b>Aseel Sawalha </b>is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Pace University in New York City</div>
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Aseel Sawalha
University of Texas Press
2010
192
Ouvrage
Reconciliation through reintegration?
, aménagement urbain, mixité sociale, ségrégation sociale, ségrégation urbaine, voisinage, conflit urbain, interaction sociale, intégration, Beirut, Beyrouth
<b>Abstract from the author : </b></div>
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Reconciliation through reintegration? : a study on spatial proximity and social relations in two post-civil war Beirut neighborhoods.</div>
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Although the Lebanese Civil War ended in 1991 and Beirut became a reunified city, much of it remains divided between a Christian East and a Muslim West. Beyond certain parts of the capital, many of its residential neighborhoods remain almost entirely religiously homogeneous. This study takes an in-depth look at two neighborhoods undergoing sectarian integration. Relying on neighborhood observations and face-to-face interviews with over 30 residents, it highlights the reasons that residents have chosen to reside in non-co-religious neighborhoods. Factors facilitating sectarian residential integration seem to include a past history in the neighborhood, historical ownership of assets in the area, appealing neighborhood attributes, affordability, and location (vis a vis other destinations and activities). Mixing appears to be a function of larger dynamics as well, such as the rising price of real estate that excludes many groups from other desirable areas. This study reveals that rising real estate prices in and around Beirut are driving people to reside in more affordable, yet non-co-religious neighborhoods. I analyze the extent to which and under what conditions spatial proximity actually leads to social relations between non-co-religionists. Integration alone does not seem to guarantee interaction. Factors limiting cross-sectarian interaction within the same neighborhood appear to include an absence of neighborhood attachment and identification, high levels of personal activity in other locations, involuntary or temporary relocation, and co-religious clustering. Factors facilitating the production of cross-sectarian social relations within a neighborhood include high levels of neighborhood engagement and activity, experience growing up in a mixed neighborhood, attendance at a religiously-mixed school, and weak political party affiliation. I speculate that a relatively apolitical, secular, and non-polarizing environment facilitates integration. Alternatively, the presence of polarizing political and religious images and symbols can act as barriers, essentially keeping non-co-religionists out. I also speculate that with rising real estate prices, more families may be forced to live in non-co-religious or polarized neighborhoods and this may introduce increasing tension. Public policies should thus focus on improving relations between non-co-religionists living in mixed neighborhoods. Enhancing civic engagement of all the groups in such integrated environments may head-off tensions and instability and strengthen collective community identification.</div>
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<b>Zeina Saab </b>received her Master in City Planning (MCP) degree from Massachussetts Institute of Technology and is currently working in Beirut as a Project monitor and evalutor for USAid.</div>
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Users outside MIT may view a full-text PDF copy of this thesis, in order to access a printable version an MIT login in required.</div>
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Zeina Saab
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2009
243
Autre
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/46676
Levant : Splendour and catastrophe on the Mediterranean
Smyrna, Alexandria, Beirut, Beyrouth, Alexandrie, Smyrne, Levant, Middle East, Moyen Orient, histoire urbaine, culture urbaine, cosmopolitisme, Mansel Philip
<div><b>Abstract from the publisher : </b></div> </div> Levant is a book of cities. It describes three former centers of great wealth, pleasure, and freedom—Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut—cities of the Levant region along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. In these key ports at the crossroads of East and West, against all expectations, cosmopolitanism and nationalism flourished simultaneously. People freely switched identities and languages, released from the prisons of religion and nationality. Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived and worshipped as neighbors.<br /> <br /> Distinguished historian Philip Mansel is the first to recount the colorful, contradictory histories of Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut in the modern age. He begins in the early days of the French alliance with the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century and continues through the cities' mid-twentieth-century fates: Smyrna burned; Alexandria Egyptianized; Beirut lacerated by civil war.<br /> <br /> Mansel looks back to discern what these remarkable Levantine cities were like, how they differed from other cities, why they shone forth as cultural beacons. He also embarks on a quest: to discover whether, as often claimed, these cities were truly cosmopolitan, possessing the elixir of coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews for which the world yearns. Or, below the glittering surface, were they volcanoes waiting to erupt, as the catastrophes of the twentieth century suggest? In the pages of the past, Mansel finds important messages for the fractured world of today.</div> </div> <b>Philip Mansel</b> is a historian of France and the Ottoman Empire. His publications include histories of Constantinople and nineteenth-century Paris, as well as biographies of Louis XVIII and the Prince de Ligne.</div> </div>
Philip Mansel
John Murray (UK) Yale University Press (US, forthcoming)
November 2010
480
Ouvrage
City and soul in divided societies
, conflit urbain, ségrégation urbaine, cadre de vie, urbanité, société urbaine, violence urbaine, Jerusalem, Jérusalem, Beirut, Beyrouth, Belfast, Johannesburg, Nicosia, Nicosie, Sarajevo, Mostar, Bilbao, Barcelona, Barcelone, Bollens Scott A.
<div><b>Abstract from the publisher:</b></div> </div> In this unique book Scott A. Bollens combines personal narrative with academic analysis in telling the story of inflammatory nationalistic and ethnic conflict in nine cities – Jerusalem, Beirut, Belfast, Johannesburg, Nicosia, Sarajevo, Mostar, Bilbao, and Barcelona. Reporting on 17 years of research and over 240 interviews with political leaders, planners, architects, community representatives, and academics, he blends personal reflections, reportage from a wealth of original interviews, and the presentation of hard data in a multidimensional and interdisciplinary exploration of these urban environments of damage, trauma, healing, and repair.<br /> <br /> City and Soul reveals what it is like living and working in these cities, going inside the head of the researcher. This approach extends the reader’s understanding of these places and connects more intimately with the lived urban experience. Bollens observes that a city disabled by nationalistic strife looks like a callous landscape of securitized space, divisions and wounds, frozen in time and in place. Yet, the soul in these cities perseveres.<br /> <br /> Written for general readers and academic specialists alike, City and Soul integrates facts, opinions, photographs, and observations in original ways in order to illuminate the substantial challenges of living in, and governing, polarized and unsettled cities.</div> </div> <b>Scott A. Bollens </b>is Professor of Urban Planning at the University of California, Irvine.</div> </div>
Scott A. Bollens
Routledge
September 2011
288
Ouvrage
Beirut normal
, histoire urbaine, géographie urbaine, identité, développement urbain, guerre, reconstruction, Beirut, Sarkis Hashim, Beyrouth
<div><b>Abstract from the distributor : </b></div>
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Is there anything to say about Beirut beyond the obvious, and by now exhausted, lessons of post-war reconstruction and identity politics? What is a "Beirut normal"? Is it worth examining? The lecture puts forward these questions not in order to diminish the city's architectural output but to reveal aspects of the city that have been overwhelmed by the discourses of war and politics. Through a series of specific architectural and urban analyses, the lecture proposes that a certain urbanism could be derived out of seemingly unrelated attributes of the city such as the speculative intensities of development, Beirut's geography between countryside and Mediterranean, and its insatiable pursuit of "a worldly aesthetic."<br />
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Cities are the magnets for more than half the world's population. In such urban conditions, architects are increasingly called into debates about environmental and social sustainability, governance, and social inequality. Shaping Cities is an Urban Age public lecture series organised by LSE Cities that identifies the growing complexity of architectural practice in relation to the challenges of exponential urbanism.</div>
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<b>Hashim Sarkis</b> is the Aga Khan Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University.</div>
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Hashim Sarkis
25 May 2010
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2010/20100525t1830vWT.aspx
Beirut
Beirut, Beyrouth, histoire urbaine, Kassir Samir
<div><b>Abstract from the publisher : </b></div> </div> Widely praised as the definitive history of Beirut, this is the story of a city that has stood at the crossroads of Mediterranean civilization for more than four thousand years. The last major work completed by Samir Kassir before his tragic death in 2005, Beirut is a tour de force that takes the reader from the ancient to the modern world, offering a dazzling panorama of the city's Seleucid, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and French incarnations. Kassir vividly describes Beirut's spectacular growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, concentrating on its emergence after the Second World War as a cosmopolitan capital until its near destruction during the devastating Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990. Generously illustrated and eloquently written, Beirut illuminates contemporary issues of modernity and democracy while at the same time memorably recreating the atmosphere of one of the world's most picturesque, dynamic, and resilient cities.</div> </div> The late <b>Samir Kassir </b>taught at the Institut des Sciences Politiques of the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut, worked as a journalist and editorial writer for the daily An-Nahar newspaper there, and was a co-founder of the Democratic Left Movement in Lebanon.</div> </div>
Samir Kassir
University of California Press
November 2010
656
Ouvrage