191002 - For the War Yet to Come. Planning Beirut's Frontiers

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Seminar Cities are back in town "For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontier" (Hiba Bou Akar, Stanford University Press, 2018)

Wednesday 2 October 2019, 5 - 7 pm, Sciences Po, LIEPP’s Conference Room, 254, boulevard Saint-Germain, 75007 Paris

Hiba Bou Akar presents her recently published book For the war yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontier. Beirut is a divided city. Following the Green Line of the civil war, dividing the Christian east and the Muslim west, today hundreds of such lines dissect the city. For the residents of Beirut, urban planning could hold promise: a new spatial order could bring a peaceful future. But, with unclear state structures and outsourced public processes, urban planning has instead become a contest between religious-political organizations and profit-seeking developers. Neighborhoods reproduce poverty, displacement and urban violence. For the War Yet to Come examines urban planning in three neighborhoods of Beirut’s southeastern peripheries, revealing how these areas have been developed into frontiers of a continuing sectarian order. Hiba Bou Akar argues these neighborhoods are arranges, not in the expectation of a bright future, but according to the logic of the « war yet to come ». Urban planning plays on fears and differences, rumors of war, and paramilitary strategies to organize everyday life. As she shows, war in times of peace is not fought with tanks, artillery and rifles, but involves a more mundane territorial contest for land and apartment sales, zoning and planning regulations, and infrastructure projects.

Speaker: Hiba Bou Akar, Assistant Professor, Columbia University, GSAPP

Hiba Bou Akaris is leading the Post-Conflict Cities Lab at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation. Her research focuses on planning in conflict and post-conflict cities, the question of urban security and violence, and the role of religious political organizations in the making of cities. She has previously co-edited Narrating Beirut from its borderlines. She is the co-editor of Jadaliyya Cities, an online journal addressing urban issues in the Middle-East region.

Discussant: Laurent Gayer, Research Fellow, Sciences Po, CERI, CNRS

Contact: citiesarebackintown@sciencespo.fr

Compulsory registration - For the external people to Sciences Po: You will have to arrive 10 minutes before the beginning of the seminar and to provide you with your identity papers)