Locating Right to the City in the Global South

Tony Samara, Shenjing He, Guo Chen, Tony Roshan Samara

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138108103
• eBook ISBN: 9781136201851
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Despite the fact that virtually all urban growth is occurring, and will continue to occur, in the cities of the Global South, the conceptual tools used to study cities are distilled disproportionately from research on the highly developed cities of the Global North. With urban inequality widely recognized as central to many of the most pressing challenges facing the world, there is a need for a deeper understanding of cities of the South on their own terms.

Locating Right to the City in the Global South marks an innovative and far reaching effort to document and make sense of urban transformations across a range of cities, as well as the conflicts and struggles for social justice these are generating. The volume contains empirically rich, theoretically informed case studies focused on the social, spatial, and political dimensions of urban inequality in the Global South. Drawing from scholars with extensive fieldwork experience, this volume covers sixteen cities in fourteen countries across a belt stretching from Latin America, to Africa and the Middle East, and into Asia. Central to what binds these cities are deeply rooted, complex, and dynamic processes of social and spatial division that are being actively reproduced. These cities are not so much fracturing as they are being divided by governance practices informed by local histories and political contestation, and refracted through or infused by market based approaches to urban development. Through a close examination of these practices and resistance to them, this volume provides perspectives on neoliberalism and right to the city that advance our understanding of urbanism in the Global South.

In mapping the relationships between space, politics and populations, the volume draws attention to variations shaped by local circumstances, while simultaneously elaborating a distinctive transnational Southern urbanism. It provides indepth research on a range of practical and policy oriented issues, from housing and slum redevelopment to building democratic cities that include participation by lower income and other marginal groups. It will be of interest to students and practitioners alike studying Urban Studies, Globalization, and Development.

Part I

A city divided against itself

1 Towards the right to the city in informal settlements

Mona Fawaz

Throughout the months of April and May 2011, a surge of illegal constructions occupied the limelight of Lebanese politics, and news coverage reported daily confrontations between police forces, sometimes backed by the national army, and self-help builders. In multiple instances, violence was uncontrolled on both ends: police cars were torched and several civilians were severely wounded, others killed. A common thread in the public responses of policymakers and the news coverage was the criminalization of those who had built in violation of property, building and/or urban regulations. Most official responses stemmed from the Ministry of Interior and adopted the security discourse of law enforcement and curtailing illegality. These materialized in actual military strategies, such as the deployment of army tanks to bulldoze recently built structures.

Neither public officials nor the media drew connections between this short-lived building boom and national housing and land policies. One is hard pressed, however, to ignore the housing dimension in this illegal construction saga. It is first evidenced in the narratives of those who have engaged in processes of illegal construction: families sold jewelry, cars and other personal valuables when the opportunity to add a floor or even a room to their existing shelter was provided. The unmet housing demand is also poignantly revealed by skyrocketing property values, triggered over the past two decades by development policies that conceptualize of real estate investments as a main source of national economic growth. Since the 1990s, incentives have been deployed to encourage national and foreign capital into this the real estate sector¹ and property values have risen severalfold, rendering the smallest apartment in Beirut unaffordable to the vast majority of the country's population.

One can read in this short narrative the same old song of neoliberal urbanization as it has materialized in many contexts: an ever more exclusive city where the efforts of low-income dwellers to circumvent difficulties are often criminalized and met with militarized reactions (Wacquant 2008; Samara 2010). Zooming in on details, one can also identify many of the ingredients associated with this form of urbanization: property values pegged to global (regional and diaspora) interests and demands (Harvey 2007; Sassen 2000; Smith 2002; Shatkin 2004), urban regulations and taxations organized to facilitate foreign investments and high-end commercial and residential development and, conversely, dwindling tenure security for low-income dwellers whose presence in the city becomes even more superfluous as their once needed labor is replaced by cheaper goods and/or labor imported from nearby and faraway locations, and numerous population displacements caused by highway and other so-called development projects (Deboulet and Fawaz 2011).

But what about the informal settlements of these cities, the areas that traditionally housed the working classes of most, if not all, Third World cities? While much of the literature listed above concurs on an assessment of “forgotten” and “neglected” places (Davis 2007; Shatkin 2004), I argue that the contemporary moment betrays a neoliberal policy vis-à-vis informal settlements, one that goes beyond the traditional laissez faire and the notorious reluctance of Lebanese policymakers to initiate regularization policies (Fawaz and Peillen 2002) in order to work actively towards the erasure of these neighborhoods in what I will show is a dual strategy of criminalization and de facto integration in the citywide housing market. It is, in fact, in this convergence of direct and indirect strategies to reinforce market-type relations in these neighborhoods that one sees best the effects of neoliberalism, defined throughout this chapter as an active set of interventions aimed at delegating to market institutions areas of social and political life that are regulated by other institutions (Dikeç 2006; Brenner and Theodore 2002). Neoliberalism, hence, is not mere laissez faire. It requires policymakers to work actively towards facilitating the expansion of the market. This chapter argues that such an active neoliberal policy is at work in Beirut. It materializes, on the one hand, with the marketization of the process of housing and service provision in informal settlements, and on the other hand by deploying the necessary policing to protect market operations.

To what extent is the Lebanese case reflective of other contexts and what, then, should be advocated for those who still find in informal settlements a reasonable form or shelter provision in increasingly exclusive cities? Based on a comparative analysis of the Lebanese context and other cases documented in the literature, I argue that it is possible to outline common patterns across geographic contexts that converge towards the delegation of processes of housing provision and exchange to market forces. In order to respond to current conditions, I further argue that it will be important to reframe the current context of public policymaking vis-à-vis informal settlements in political rather than market terms. I offer the concept of the “right to the city” as a powerful approach in which reframing can be articulated. Recognizing, however, that neoliberalism has materialized differently across regional and national contexts (Robinson 2002), I zoom in on the Lebanese case to outline its specificity and reflect on the formulation of the “right to the city” that should be articulated for this context.

This chapter is based on over a decade of engagement in informal settlements in Lebanon. I began looking at the historical production of informal settlements in Lebanon back in 1999, when I started my dissertation work (Fawaz 2004). Since then, I have conducted numerous projects that have sought, through a variety of qualitative research approaches, to reconstruct the history of spatial production in Beirut's informal settlements and understand how the position of these neighborhoods has changed over time vis-à-vis the urbanization of the city. Although I didn't conduct any fieldwork specifically for this chapter, I was able to access interviews conducted with dwellers in Tyre (South Lebanon) through a joint initiative by the American University of Beirut's Center for Civil Engagement and UN-Habitat in June 2011. I also build on an extensive and long-term engagement and draw on several earlier researches (Fawaz and Peillen 2002; Fawaz 2009) as well as detailed literature and newspaper reviews reporting on recent changes in Lebanon and the region.

In the next section, I outline the materialization of neoliberal policies on informal settlements, beginning by documenting the Lebanese case and moving to a more general review of the literature. In the second part of the chapter, I move to a discussion of the right to the city and argue for the necessity to activate concepts such as this in order to repoliticize the discourse on housing policy.

Informal settlements: then and now, here and there

Beirut's informal settlements and the advent of neoliberalism

A small city of some 180,000 inhabitants under the French Mandate (1919–42), Beirut rapidly grew after Lebanon gained its independence in 1942, establishing itself as a main regional tourist and commercial center. Between 1950 and 1975, the capital city of the newly established State of Lebanon witnessed a real population explosion, going from 300,000 inhabitants to some 1.2 million inhabitants. By 1975 it housed about half of Lebanon's population (Kassir 2003). Most images that circulate of this period flaunt the beautiful sea-front resorts, illustrating well the widely celebrated liberal lifestyle, as well as experimentations in architecture that placed Beirut at the forefront of regional explorations of modernity. Efforts at nation-building and the elaboration of a social and economic infrastructure that would support the development of the young nation state lagged behind, however, creating eventually a huge gap between, the wealthy neighborhoods of the city on the one hand, and impoverished rural areas on the other (Traboulsi 2007). It is therefore not surprising that much of the population growth described above was fueled by rural-to-urban migration, rural areas suffering from the notorious disinterest of national planners. It was also fueled by an influx of foreign workers (mostly Syrians and Egyptians) as well as refugees coming from nearby countries (particularly Palestinians in 1948).

It was during this period, particularly in the mid-1960s, that despite a laissez faire attitude and staunch aversion to any form of development constraints, urban and building regulations were adopted, imposing restrictions on building practices, especially in Beirut and its suburbs. The natural result of these regulations is that while some neighborhoods indeed benefited from improvements in their physical infrastructure, a sizable portion of the urbanization occurred informally, that is in violation of property, urban and/or building regulations. This was how low-income dwellers could carve spaces for themselves in the form of pockets in the city and mostly in its fringes, accessing land outside prime areas, at times purchased in installments and at other times squatted, and building and servicing homes incrementally. Since most of their practices did not abide by public regulations, they were rapidly tagged as “illegal” and judged “undesirable”. On the eve of the Lebanese civil war (1975), scholars echoed the dismay of the local press by decrying the “misery cordon” on the peripheries of the city (Bourgey and Phares 1972). It was also possible, however, to see in many of these settlements neighborhoods in the making, areas which – following the widely repeated dictum at the time – reflected dwellers’ capacities to take charge of their own access to shelter and incrementally improve their living conditions as resources became available to them (Turner 1972). Indeed, in many of these neighborhoods, dwellers had consolidated their housing with permanent materials, installed self-help sewer systems, and obtained, through political mobilization and/or clientelism, connection to water and electricity networks.

The process of illegal land occupation and building was further facilitated by the outbreak of the civil war in 1975. Throughout the years of civil war (1975–90), a large section of the city's urbanization occurred illegally, within and outside informal settlements, as squatting and violations of various regulations became largely the norm (Fawaz and Peillen 2002). By 1990, informal settlements had gained considerable importance in the city, particularly in its southern suburbs where vast tracts of land were occupied and buildings exceeded severalfold the allowable exploitation ratios. Their dwellers were organized in neighborhood committees where processes of building and exchanging housing relied on social and political forms of organizations and were regulated by a set of informal rules that often did not abide by state laws (Fawaz 2008; Clerc-Huybrechts 2008).

Since 1990, and despite various moments of heightened violence, Lebanon has entered a so-called period of post-war reconstruction. During this phase, the country has renewed its commitment to liberal policymaking and has strived to reaffirm the position of its capital city as the service and tourist hub of the Middle East. Over the past two decades, policies were adopted in order to attract capitals and investors from the region and beyond, creating a framework of facilities and incentives akin to the neoliberal reforms witnessed in the region and elsewhere (Makdisi 1996). Sizable public investments were also placed in large-scale infrastructure projects, particularly the development of a new international airport with a capacity of six million visitors per year, the renovation and enlargement of the city's harbor and the implementation of a network of highways superposed on the fabric of the historic city to facilitate circulation, particularly across strategic points such as the redeveloped historic core and the international airport. To date, these policies have not materialized in the projected economic growth but they have caused widening social inequalities and translated spatially into pockets of exclusive consumption and luxurious residence amidst an impoverished city.

Throughout the modern and contemporary histories, planning agencies failed to recognize informal housing as a form of housing acquisition. Not only have there been no regularization policies of the type observed in many other contexts (Fernandes and Varley 1998), but most policymakers continue to describe neighborhoods that existed decades prior to the civil war as “war-generated, temporary settlements” that should be dismantled once war-displaced populations “return” to their areas of origin. In some instances, services were extended to these areas – mostly as a pragmatic decision from the water and electricity agencies, which had to insure the financial sustainability of their operations (Fawaz 2004) – but these have never been accompanied with an acknowledgment of this form of housing as a legitimate or at least permanent form of city-making. Housing agencies have also played a very limited role, mostly confined to the provision of housing loans, but they have consistently failed to recognize informal housing as part of their jurisdictions.

It is in this backdrop that the current policies of marketization and securitization should be read. Earlier investigations of their implications in the informal settlements of Greater Beirut indicated that these neighborhoods had witnessed a rapid deterioration of living conditions, with increasing density, poor environmental conditions and deficient services (Fawaz 2009; Deboulet and Fawaz 2011). One of the most important changes in informal settlements, however, is the fact that land in these neighborhoods has become attractive to developers working in the formal sector because of skyrocketing land prices everywhere in the city. Through the operations of these developers, processes of housing production and exchange in informal settlements have been further integrated in the citywide housing market, rendering housing production in informal settlements closer in form and process to other segments of the market. This role is facilitated by an array of public interventions that have facilitated the provision of lump-sum capital to be used as a down payment for acquiring housing, often disbursed as indemnities for those displaced by the development projects of the post-war reconstruction (Bou Akar 2005). Thus, what is accessed or exchanged in today's informal settlements of Beirut is mostly a finished apartment within a multistory apartment building, much like the rest of the city market, and not a plot of land on which one ca...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Routledge studies in human geography
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Locating Right to the City in the Global South
• Part I A city divided against itself
• Part II Governance and cosmopolitanism Escaping the South
• Part III Governance and counter- governance The shape of urban conflict and the urban future
• Index