This paper focuses on two informal property spaces in Borj Hammoud, Sanjak and Arakadz, in order to examine the ways in which various political actors have secured informal housing and property for certain publics as a means of maintaining particular notions of “community” and political territorializations in the context of wartime and post-war Beirut. Here, I examine how approaches to informality have shifted in the context of rising land values and rampant speculation in the greater Beirut area. As informal spaces where residency has been upheld and maintained for nearly 80 years, these recent threats to tenure must be contextualized within the shifting economic and political landscape of contemporary Beirut. As an area first urbanized through the joint efforts of Armenian town associations and French Mandate Officials in order to permanently house Armenian refugees fleeing the genocide of 1915-1919, Borj Hammoud is an important part of a larger history of migration and displacement that helped to create contemporary Beirut as we know it today. Sanjak, the last remaining Armenian refugee camp in Borj Hammoud, was named for the former Sanjak of Alexandretta from which Armenians were displaced after it was ceded to Turkey in the 1930s. Arakadz, on the other hand, was built over a former cemetery on land that was given to the municipality. In recent years, Sanjak has been slowly demolished in order to build a mixed-use residential and shopping area. Arakadz is likely to be next. In prior years, Armenian social and political organizations built alternative housing for camp residents displaced when camps were torn down. Today, however, such plans have failed to materialize. This paper takes up the contestations over the destruction of informal spaces and the lack of organized efforts to create low-income housing alternatives in order to examine the broader shift in housing policies across greater Beirut. While these forms of informality were, in prior years, mobilized as a form of producing or reproducing sectarian territorialities, what are the political, social and economic forces that are challenging these spaces today? How might we understand the threat to informality in the context of neoliberal discourses of “self-help” and “self-management” whereby market forces are regarded as somehow rehabilitative for camp residents?

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.

This paper explores the neighborhood of Naba’a ethnographically through Syrian male migrant men, focusing on 2008-2013. The analysis centers on how this district became known as a Syrian/Kurdish/migrant neighborhood through notions of place making, and the strategies and tactics used by these men in the larger area of Borj Hammoud before the Syrian Crisis. Given that Naba’a was one node for receiving Beirut’s continual Syrian labor, part of this analysis centers on their living situations. Of particular interest are the networks through which they procured housing, as well as the processes of negotiation rent, and dealing with landlords in a neighborhood that is imbricated in the context of Lebanese sectarian politics. Also central to this inquiry were how/when/where these men were mobile in the larger municipality - especially during a time of sporadic events of street fights/violence (most often between (Syrian) Kurds & (Lebanese) Armenian). What ensued were increasing security: bike police patrols to coordinated sweeps “under the bridge,” an emergent border that divided the neighborhood in the late 90s, to coordinated army sweeps in the streets of Naba’a at night. Many of these men were newer immigrants since 2000, due to an intensifying drought in NE Syria. Thus, it was not just the larger threat of the Syrian male body (common in Lebanon), but also the category of the “Kurd” that emerged in the larger Borj Hammoud municipality. How Kurdish men understood their own identity during this time becomes linked to an analysis of this neighborhood where a huge population of them found footing, community, and entry to Beirut. This analysis also considers the specificity of this location, a neighborhood part of Borj Hammoud, but in many ways bounded by the confines of a bridge, a freeway, and the wall of a river.

This paper examines a particular moment of intersection between Armenian and Lebanese nation-building: the involvement of Lebanese Armenians in the 1958 Lebanese Civil War and their sustained infighting in the neighborhoods of Borj Hammoud and Mar Mikhael in Greater Beirut. Despite a nationally brokered peace agreement that was honored by all other involved parties at the time, Armenians continued to fight one another and in so doing, reformulated the urban geographies of these neighborhoods of Greater Beirut. The 1958 civil conflict was the result of the growing popular frustration with the bellicose Camille Chamoun presidency and his announcement that he would extend his presidential term. While largely ignored by Lebanese historiography, Lebanese Armenian political parties participated in this violence, either joining or opposing other Lebanese political parties based on their position on the presidential extension. Yet when a national truce halted the fighting, Armenian political parties continued to battle one other, accusing each another of disloyalty towards the Armenian nation and the Lebanese nation-state. Armenians in Lebanon used the 1958 national conflict to participate in simultaneous--yet often mutually exclusive--Lebanese and Armenian nation building, and did so through acts of violence in the Mar Mikhael and Borj Hammoud neighborhoods. These battles persisted for another four months until the implementation of an additional peace agreement that specifically placated the Armenian factions. This Armenian involvement challenges the historiography of this time period, which conventionally described the 1958 civil conflict as an internal, Lebanese, and a non-Armenian issue. Yet Armenians, in continuing to fight and snubbing “national” pacts, participated in struggles for power that reconfigured not only the constructions of “Lebanese” and “Armenian” identifications, but also the urban space of Greater Beirut. By analyzing the Armenian and Arabic language press coverage of the Armenian infighting in Borj Hammoud and Mar Mikhael, this paper will explore how Armenians as a recognized minority in Lebanon manifested and consolidated authority vis-à-vis their own community members while engaging as Lebanese in support for or against the Lebanese President. On the basis of a close examination of the press coverage during this particularly vulnerable moment for the Lebanese state, this paper considers how the violence in Borj Hammoud and Mar Mikhael and its associated media coverage illustrate a variety of contracting and expanding local attachments, expanding our understanding of the Armenian minority amidst active production in Lebanese society.