Other gentrifications: Law, capital and spatial politics in Beirut

摘要

This special feature focuses on contemporary processes of urban transformation in Beirut, examining the interplay of speculative investment, legal instruments and political-economic networks in shaping a city that remains striated by lines of sectarian power and patronage. The collected papers bring together 'macro' approaches that analyse the role of legal frameworks, transnational capital flows and elite networks in the re-making of Beirut, with more 'micro' approaches to processes of change in specific urban contexts, highlighting the variable forms in which spatial restructuring and effects of gentrification take shape in different parts of the same city. In these ways, the papers cut across perspectives from urban political economy, legal geography, planning and built environment studies, and the qualitative analysis of urban neighborhoods, narratives and mobilities. They seek to make connections to conceptual frameworks developed across transnational urban settings, as well as drawing out the important specificities of the Beirut case.