COMMUNITY RESPONSES TO post‐civil war reconstruction efforts articulate the local and the global in Beirut, Lebanon. This paper discusses the nature of, and discourse surrounding, large‐scale redevelopment of the central business district and the ways in which community groups respond to it. Despite the fact that local residents positively identify with international aspects of pre‐civil war life, they object to new forms of global investments. Constructions of local heritage produced by residents are largely responses to the exclusionary practices of the new investors. [Global‐local, urban space, post‐war reconstruction, Beirut, Lebanon]
Aspects of space and place shape daily life, social structures, politics, and intimate relations among people. In the late 1980s and 1990s, anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists—influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre on the meaning of social space—started to highlight the spatial in their analysis of social phenomena. These scholars focused on the production of urban space and asserted that space is dynamic and often shaped by the needs of its users as well as by those who design it. With the exception of Setha Low's work on Latin America, these writings were mostly centered on the United States.
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