TY  - BOOK
AU  - Sawalha,Aseel
TI  - Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City 
T2  - Jamal and Rania Daniel Series in Contemporary History, Politics, Culture, and Religion of the Levant
SN  - 9780292792838
U1  - 307.3/40956925 
PY  - 2021///]
CY  - Austin : 
PB  - University of Texas Press, 
KW  - City planning
KW  - Lebanon
KW  - Beirut
KW  - History
KW  - 20th century
KW  - Urban renewal
KW  - SOCIAL SCIENCE / General
KW  - bisacsh
N1  - Frontmatter --; Contents --; A Note on Language --; Acknowledgments --; Introduction --; Chapter 1. Beirut: A City in Transition --; Chapter 2. Downtown in “the Ancient City of the Future” --; Chapter 3.ʿAyn el-Mreisse: T he Global Market and the Apartment Unit --; Chapter 4. “Beirut Is Ours, Not Theirs”: Neighborhood Sites and Struggles in ʿAyn el-Mreisse --; Chapter 5. Cafés, Funerals, and the Future of Coffee Sp aces --; Chapter 6. Placing the War-Displaced --; Afterword. Reclaiming Downtown Again --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index; restricted access
N2  - Once the cosmopolitan center of the Middle East, Beirut was devastated by the civil war that ran from 1975 to 1991, which dislocated many residents, disrupted normal municipal functions, and destroyed the vibrant downtown district. The aftermath of the war was an unstable situation Sawalha considers "a postwar state of emergency," even as the state strove to restore normalcy. This ethnography centers on various groups' responses to Beirut's large, privatized urban-renewal project that unfolded during this turbulent moment. At the core of the study is the theme of remembering space. The official process of rebuilding the city as a node in the global economy collided with local day-to-day concerns, and all arguments invariably inspired narratives of what happened before and during the war. Sawalha explains how Beirutis invoked their past experiences of specific sites to vie for the power to shape those sites in the future. Rather than focus on a single site, the ethnography crosses multiple urban sites and social groups, to survey varied groups with interests in particular spaces. The book contextualizes these spatial conflicts within the discourses of the city's historical accounts and the much-debated concept of heritage, voiced in academic writing, politics, and journalism. In the afterword, Sawalha links these conflicts to the social and political crises of early twenty-first-century Beirut
UR  - https://doi.org/10.7560/721876
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780292792838
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780292792838/original
ER  -