The remaking of Ras Beirut

This paper explores Ras Beirut’s current socio-spatial transformations from the perspective of its ‘original’ population, particularly small landowners vulnerable to urban renewal pressures. With reference to their accounts, it illustrates how certain aspects of neighbourhood change intersect with Lebanon’s complexities of power, wealth, insecurity and division. While cognizant of the class aspect of urban change, the paper contends that Beirut’s urban restructuring is entrenched in deeper social justices and inequalities than might fit under the rubric of ‘gentrification’. Considering that gentrification, war displacement, and forced migration are one and the same phenomenon for many Lebanese—all captured by the term tahjir (the Arabic term for ‘displacement’)—the paper concludes by questioning the country's neoliberal model of development. In hindsight, it conceptualizes displacement as a by-product of the ‘manufacture of vulnerability’ in Lebanon.