For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers

Hiba Bou Akar in conversation with Faranak Miraftab and Amale Andraos

Stanford University Press’ For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers is the first book by Assistant Professor of Urban Planning Hiba Bou Akar.

Beirut is a city divided. 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. Akar argues these neighborhoods are arranged, 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.

Free and open to the public. Books available for sale.
Organized by Columbia GSAPP in collaboration with the Middle East Institute, Columbia University.