Abstract
The destruction of Beirut’s port and large areas of the inner city following the August 2020 explosion occurred amid (and has exacerbated) an unprecedented national economic and social crisis portending another potential phase of urban “reconstruction” and a national political revolution. Critical scholars have highlighted the shortcomings of urban planning and governance in the city after the Lebanese civil war, particularly in terms of housing, infrastructure, and social inequalities, especially between the urban core and periphery. Beirut’s post-war reconstruction(s), guided by blended-scale governance (i.e., public/private, confessional/political, national/local) and a real estate-oriented growth model have neither managed to completely restore nor efface the city’s erstwhile status as an entrepôt of regional and international economic, cultural, and political importance but have instigated processes of rapid urbanisation and uneven development. These processes, historical trajectories, political and socio-economic dialectics, and shifts in urban political economy render Beirut relevant to the nascent empirical category of “relational cities,” i.e., cities whose geographical-historical profiles position them as urban nodes connecting regional-global-national systems of flows under globalised capitalism. This article positions Beirut in the context of the debate on relational urbanisation for empirical exploration, and also points to the evental possibilities for alternative geographies that flow from the October 2019 protests.
Highlights
This is the trouble with the Lebanese
The mass exodus of Beirut resi‐ dents during the civil war from the inner city to the sub‐ urbs intensified after the war ended, when the politi‐ cal economy of the country turned towards financialisa‐ tion of real estate the mode and role of urban planning shifted to become purely a facilitator for private development
Beirut is an example of a relational city by virtue of its urban constitu‐ tion as a connector of systems of flows between regional, national, and global scales
Summary
The recent urban history of Lebanon and its primate capital city, Beirut, is punctuated by both endoge‐ nous and exogenous events overlaying an unrelenting shift in the control of processes of urbanisation and urban planning from public to private hands. The mass exodus of Beirut resi‐ dents during the civil war from the inner city to the sub‐ urbs intensified after the war ended, when the politi‐ cal economy of the country turned towards financialisa‐ tion of real estate the mode and role of urban planning shifted to become purely a facilitator for private development. This article argues that this moment of strange resilience, in preparation for national elections in May 2022, is more usefully regarded in Gramscian terms as an organic crisis of the Lebanese state, permitting the protests which started in October 2019 to be tenta‐ tively regarded as having an evental wake (Badiou, 2007) capable of producing a rupture with the present gov‐ ernance paradigm, producing terrain for reflection on possible alternatives. Beirut will be considered conceptually as a “rela‐ tional city,” and the relevant aspects of the relational urbanisation attendant to such a description will be iden‐ tified as areas for future empirical study
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