The Case of Beirut: From Urban Reconstruction to ... - SCUPAD

Beirut, Twenty Years Later: Could Post-War
Reconstruction Result in New Conflicts?
Bruno Marot, PhD Candidate, McGill University/Sciences Po Paris

“Beirut in times of peace has been
more disfigured and destroyed than in times of war”
✓ Beirut has still to manage complex urban policy-making issues
related to local recovery, modernization, and civil reconciliation
✓ The impact of the private-led megaproject of downtown
regeneration over Beirut’s urban development and reconstruction
✓ The impact of the megaproject over peacebuilding and conflict
exacerbation in Metropolitan Beirut

1- The 1990s Reconstruction Strategy:
A Market-Oriented Megaproject of Downtown Redevelopment

Single public decision to privatize the
reconstruction as the onset of a
planning-related causal chain
Official objective of reconstruction is
primarily economic
Political and economic vision rooted in
the early 1990s neoliberal turn of
Western urban narrative
Channelling of foreign and diasporic
capital through the reconstruction of
the built environment

The most salient planning rationale
for this political and economic model:
✓ An exclusionary approach
developing an “Island of Modernity
and Prosperity”
✓ A tabula rasa strategy with the
radical transformation of urban
space
✓ A profit-oriented masterplan

No comprehensive vision or masterplan to provide a legal and
planning framework for the reconstruction of the entire Beirut
metropolitan area
Assessing the short-term impacts of this redevelopment process
and envisioning its medium and long-term consequences
A planning-related causal chain that could jeopardize the fragile
political stability in Lebanon

2. The Spread of The Practices of Downtown’s Market-Led
Reconstruction Over Adjacent Neighborhoods

Solidere would be the starting point of a powerful gentrification
process
Gentrification: the socio-economic and political process by which
low-income communities are displaced from an area and replaced
by middle- or upper-class households
Specific conflict-related consequences in post-war cities

2.1 The socioeconomic mechanism
of gentrification in neighborhoods
adjacent to Solidere
A process of speculative building
practices, based on unplanned projects of
demolition/reconstruction
Major differences with downtown’s context
The strategy of real estate developers
towards owners
A change in housing supply generating a
substantial inflation of prices on housing and
land markets

2.2 A Creeping Politization of the
Production of Urban Space?
Gentrification seems to be
tolerated by political groups
Encounter between market-led
urban production and political
takeover on specific neighborhoods
Would political groups benefit
from gentrification?

3. The Potential Outcomes of Gentrification
Low-income households may experience a forced
residential mobility from CBD’s peripheral
neighbourhoods
A class-based discrimination contributing to
building pockets of poverty and segregation in
Beirut’s metropolitan areas
Increase in horizontal inequality between
Municipal Beirut (Solidere and its adjacent
neighbourhoods) and its periphery

Key findings
Certain kinds of reconstruction could
exacerbate violence and tension in
post-war cities
Gentrification may generate political
conflict through the reinforcement
of inequality
Could market-led practices of
reconstruction bring post-war cities to
a more radical and territorialized
stage of contention?

Thanks for your attention!
Contact:
Bruno Marot
PhD Candidate - McGill University
Associate Researcher - Sciences Po Paris
bruno.marot@mail.mcgill.ca

References
Pictures: www.ironews.com; www.worldviewcities.org; Reuters/C. Karam; Ragab, 2010; Solidere; www.executivemagazine.com
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