The Reconstruction of Beirut: Local Responses to Globalization

Sawalha, Aseel

doi:10.1525/city.1998.10.1.133

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…The rise and decline of Beirut as a regional financial centre Before we discuss our findings, we will briefly contextualize Beirut's evolving positionality in the world-city network and how this is reflected in the production of urban space (for more comprehensive accounts on the latter, see e.g., Fawaz, 2017;Sawalha, 1998). Beirut's history is marked by a loss of financial centre functions despite a continued involvement of Lebanese professionals in regional service firm networks.…”

Section: Methodology: 'Stress Testing' Global City Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Manning circuits of value: Lebanese professionals and expatriate world-city formation in Beirut

2016

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Advanced producer services firms and the highly skilled labour they employ are important indicators for world-city formation, as their activities allegedly grant cities the capabilities to exert command and control over global accumulation processes. To ‘stress test’ this central assumption of global city theory, we apply Burawoy’s extended case method to probe world-city formation in Beirut, Lebanon. Observing a tendency in the literature to superimpose distinctions between high- and low-skilled labour and between North and South, the study marshals a more plural conceptualization of ‘professionals’ to include expatriate or transnational Lebanese service workers. The study’s key finding is that Euro-American professionals play a relatively marginal role in Beirut’s human resource base, complicating North–South distinctions. By contrast, domestic and expat Beiruti professionals are far more crucial in manning circuits of value leading to and from the city. These professionals act as intermediaries in unlocking Gulf markets for clients, contribute to institutional change in their host countries and help build command and control functions elsewhere. Relatedly, Beirut has become susceptible to processes of ‘expatriate world-city formation’, where real estate development and the attraction of bank deposits are partly the result of these APS-professionals repatriating their management fees into Beirut’s built environment and Lebanon’s domestic banking sector. Witnessing the growth of Beirut's expatriate world-city functions in absence of financial centre redevelopment, the paper proposes to be sensitive to potential disconnects between the function and location of command and control in global cities more generally.

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Section: Methodology: 'Stress Testing' Global City Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Manning circuits of value: Lebanese professionals and expatriate world-city formation in Beirut

2016

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“…3 Conflicts surrounding large-scale planning and construction projects have come to define the "formal" planning scene of post-war Beirut. The highest profile of these is Beirut's Central District, which has been undergoing reconstruction by the real estate company Solidere (Sawalha 1998). Elyssar and Linord, two unrealized grand planning projects for Beirut's southern and northern coastal suburbs respectively, have also been discussed (Rowe and Sarkis 1998;Harb 2001).…”

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confidence: 99%

Contesting Beirut's Frontiers

Akar

2012

City & Society

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On May 7, 2008, armed militias took to the streets of Beirut, Lebanon, in the worst sectarian fighting the city had seen since the end of the Lebanese civil war (1975‐1990). This paper argues that critical to the understanding of the contestations of post‐civil war Beirut are the ways in which the production of mundane geographies (such as housing, roads, and industrial zones) by religious‐political organizations have transformed Beirut's peripheral spaces into frontiers of conflict. These geographies are produced within planned and imagined geographies of local and regional wars that are “yet to come.” Based on ethnographic and archival research, this paper maps the transformation of what used to be a peripheral area into a religiously‐contested frontier zone, where spatial contestation has become less about war maneuvering and more about the production of a spatial order of political difference through land markets, building and infrastructure construction, and urban regulations and zoning. The study provides insights into how the geographies of the civil war, economic post‐war restructuring, resistance to Israel's incursions, the regional rise of Hezbollah's military power, the post‐war crisis of war militias such as the PSP, along with the skyrocketing prohibitive costs of land and housing in municipal Beirut have been articulated in new robust, shifting divide lines that configure the urban politics of Beirut's peripheries. I illustrate how the practice of urban planning in Beirut involve innovative techniques to continuously “balance” a spatiality of political difference in order to keep a war at bay while simultaneously allowing for urban growth and development profit.

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Conflicting Futures for Non-conflict Archaeology: A Lebanese Case Study

Damick

Genz

2022

Community Heritage in the Arab Region

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The Reconstruction of Beirut: Local Responses to Globalization

Cited by 8 publications

References 6 publications

Manning circuits of value: Lebanese professionals and expatriate world-city formation in Beirut

Manning circuits of value: Lebanese professionals and expatriate world-city formation in Beirut

Contesting Beirut's Frontiers

Conflicting Futures for Non-conflict Archaeology: A Lebanese Case Study

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