Other gentrifications

This special feature focuses on contemporary processes of urban transformation in Beirut, examining the interplay of speculative investment, legal instruments and political-economic networks in shaping a city that remains striated by lines of sectarian power and patronage. The collected papers bring together ‘macro’ approaches that analyse the role of legal frameworks, transnational capital flows and elite networks in the re-making of Beirut, with more ‘micro’ approaches to processes of change in specific urban contexts, highlighting the variable forms in which spatial restructuring and effects of gentrification take shape in different parts of the same city. In these ways, the papers cut across perspectives from urban political economy, legal geography, planning and built environment studies, and the qualitative analysis of urban neighborhoods, narratives and mobilities. They seek to make connections to conceptual frameworks developed across transnational urban settings, as well as drawing out the important specificities of the Beirut case.¹

The collection builds on a set of critical debates and analyses that have taken place in the pages of City concerning forms of urban change, restructuring and resistance in ‘non-western’ urban contexts—with a particular focus on the Middle East and Mediterranean regions—and addressing the relevance of theoretical concepts and analytical frameworks developed largely in North America and Western Europe to such processes and such settings. These contributions include, among others, special features on ‘Assembling Istanbul: buildings and bodies in a world city’ (City 18/6, 2014) and on ‘Learning from Jerusalem’ (City 20/3, 2016); a round-table on the Arabian peninsula (also in City 18/6, 2014); critical individual contributions on Istanbul and the Turkish context (Kuymulu 2013; C̨avuşoğlu and Strutz 2014; Abbas and Yigit 2015); the series of debates sparked by Allen J. Scott’s (2011) piece on ‘emerging cities of the third wave’ (see also City 17/3 and 17/5, 2013); and the exchange on gentrification in ‘much of the world’ between Asher Ghertner and Ernesto López-Morales in City 19/4 (Ghertner 2015; López-Morales 2015; see also Harker 2011). The collection also resonates with City’s work on post-conflict and divided cities, including a feature on post-conflict Belfast (City 17/4, 2013), an extended special feature on Northern Ireland and the production of shared space (City 18/4-5, 2014), and the review piece by Haim Yacobi on Jerusalem as ‘neo-apartheid city’ (Yacobi 2015; see also Martin 2014; Zaban 2016).

The papers in this feature bring together authors working across the disciplines of critical urban studies, planning, architecture and design, conflict and development studies. Together, they outline current processes of urban development in Beirut, highlighting the interconnections between capital, law, politics and elite power, and how these become legible in the re-making of the city’s built and social environment. In contrast to the well-established literature on gentrification in North American and European cities, and an increasing focus on development and dispossession logics in cities in developing regions in Latin America, South and East Asia, research on urban restructuring in cities in the Middle East remains an emerging field. The papers situate the socio-spatial restructuring of Beirut in terms of a comparative urbanism which is alert to both the specific features of this context and the way they resonate with aspects of urban change elsewhere—highlighting the particularities of this case, placing it in the analysis of regional and international capital flows and real estate development, and exploring the relevance of established frameworks in critical urban studies to such a setting.

Work on dynamics of gentrification in cities of the global south has underlined both the primacy of state-led gentrification and the role of corporate investment in re-shaping these urban contexts (see Lees, Shin, and López-Morales 2015, 2016). Beirut offers a telling site in which to think about these intersections of state and corporate power, in a city which resists easy typification in developmental terms. Problems of state incapacity—indeed, attributions of state failure—do not negate the fact that state elites and political strategies have been crucial to the speculative transformation of this urban environment: through permissive or enabling legislation in the fields of taxation, construction, property or rent; and via the interlinkages of real estate, financial and political interests. Bruno Marot’s paper in this collection seeks to make sense of the persistent valorization of Beirut’s real estate sector in a situation of ongoing political and economic instability. While there is nothing especially surprising about money going into property in post-conflict cities, the accumulation of value and intensification of development in Beirut appears particularly impervious to the persistent risks of political and financial volatility. Marot examines the institutional construction of Lebanon as a ‘property state’ in which Beirut’s accelerated development is central to the reproduction of a rentier economy in which the banking and construction sectors are tightly linked through patterns of investment and borrowing as well as via corporate interlocks and elite ties. Rather than appearing simply as an arena of capital unbound, or a symptom of state incapacity, the extensive financialization of property in Beirut emerges as a complex political and institutional project.

Such a concern with state practices in steering speculative property development also runs through Hisham Ashkar’s paper on the role of law and regulation in shaping processes of gentrification in Beirut. Ashkar’s work suggests that legal frameworks might provide a key site for understanding the specific forms that logics of gentrification take in different urban and national settings. His focus is on the legal and regulatory mechanisms that—in governing construction, rent and built heritage in the city—underpin and promote dominant patterns of urban development. The discussion returns to a seminal concept in critical studies of gentrification, that of the rent gap, in order to address this as a legal construct; in Beirut, deepening rent gaps have been produced to a significant degree through rental laws. Moreover, the framing of law produces very different legal subjects in the city, as unequal rights, prerogatives and protections are afforded to certain actors, notably developers, in respect of certain others, such as small owners and renters.

The distribution of property rights in the city is central to the account developed by Mona Fawaz, Marieke Krijnen and Daria El Samad. Focusing on the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Mar Mikhael, the authors consider how the city comes to be ordered and governed as a system of property ownership. They argue that the reorganization of property, and the normalization of a standard ‘ownership model’, is core to processes of commercial and residential gentrification in this locality and in the city more generally. The clarification of land and property titles in contexts where claims may be uncertain, ownership is often collective, tenure rights are ambiguous and occupation is longstanding, serves developer interests not only in facilitating acquisition in a formal sense, but in individualizing the counter-claims of existing owners and tenants. The capacity of local actors to resist processes of gentrification is severely constrained as their rights come to be defined within a private property framework; such that their potential individual gains are limited, and claims for any broader rights to the city become unsayable.

In focusing on how the reorganization of property makes possible these local patterns of redevelopment, Fawaz, Krijnen and El Samad draw together an emphasis on legal regimes and political economies with the long-established concern in gentrification studies for processes of neighborhood change. Such an engagement with the neighborhood scale is central to Mona Khechen’s piece on the remaking of Ras Beirut. Tracing the socio-spatial transformation of this part of the city through site observations, informant interviews and local histories, Khechen seeks to capture the local stories of would-be property entrepreneurs, insecure tenants and vulnerable smallholders. But she also aims to explore how these accounts speak to larger and more complex issues of power, precarity and division in the Lebanese context. The features of Ras Beirut’s re-making—the land acquisitions and assembly, the dispossessions and capitalizations, the speculative developments and safe-deposit box housing investments, the signature high-rises and condo designs—are recognizable as patterns of gentrification across many cities internationally. While attentive to these resemblances, however, Khechen marks the limits of gentrification in helping us to understand the way vulnerabilities are produced and inequalities entrenched in this context. The kinds of displacement that the physical re-making of Ras Beirut entails, she suggests, cannot easily be disentangled from other displacements which have shaped and scarred the neighborhood, and the city, over time: from the lingering social and spatial legacy of war-time displacement, to the forced economic migration of the young, to long-term and more recent refugee movements. In such a way, these local stories speak to the longer histories—of power, dispossession and division—of the unmaking and re-making of a city such as Beirut.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fran Tonkiss

Fran Tonkiss is in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Notes

1 This special feature originated in the March 2015 City Debates conference on ‘Other gentrifications: urban change beyond the core’, held at the American University of Beirut (AUB). They bring together authors working across the disciplines of urban sociology, planning, architecture and design, conflict and development studies, and early career as well as more established scholars in the field.