Since the 1940s, the neighborhood of Nab‘ah has developed in the immediate vicinities of Beirut’s oldest standing refugee settlement (Bourj Hammoud), at the edge of the city’s administrative boundaries. The neighborhood has played the role of a laboratory of city-making where negotiations around access to the city produced unique configurations of actors (e.g. realtors, builders, residents, policemen), rule systems (both legal and informal), buildings (e.g. incremental, legal/illegal), and forms of urban organization at the critical time of nation-building, when modern zoning and building laws were being articulated and state institutions were being formed. Decades later, and in the context of forced population displacements triggered particularly by the Lebanese civil war and its aftermath, the movements of actors and the transfers of know-how from this neighborhood continue to mark the city’s production. Despite a central role in the making of the city, processes of spatial production in this and other peripheries of Beirut remain invisible to dominant urban historiographies, too often focused on the city’s core and its small elite of merchants, bankers, and the planners and architects that they hired. By relocating Nab‘ah within Beirut’s larger history, my aim in this presentation is not only to give higher visibility to the struggles and achievements of the urban majorities. It is also to contest the dominant depiction of urban peripheries as subdued or commanded by a powerful center, showing peripheries instead as sites of active economic, social, and political operations conducted in dialogue and negotiation with the city’s center, transformed by, yet also transformative of the rules, actors, capitals, and practices of this center. The presentation is part of a larger research project that seeks to disrupt the dominant historiography of Beirut by shedding light on narratives of city-making taken from the city’s peripheries. Focusing on the formative period 1950-1975, this project outlines an alternative history of the production of Beirut, rather than a history of its peripheries. It also proposes critical reflections on the methods of urban historiography that have dominated writings about Beirut’s modern history. The paper builds on a wide range of primary material collected from key informants, government archives such as building permits and property records, newspaper and magazine records, maps, and aerial photography as well as personal testimonies and oral histories.