Tag Archives: Lebanon

The contestations of Beirut’s Sunday market

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A few years ago, I co-authored an article about one of the few markets in Beirut: the Souk al Ahad weekend market. This is a lively and busy outdoors market located on the eastern edge of Beirut, near its heavily polluted river. As it turned out, the land that the market is sitting on is heavily contested between different two different public actors, and the very existence of the market itself is threatened by this conflict. Continue reading →

Turning money into stone

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In my professional life, I’ve been lucky enough to have had the opportunity to research and engage with a number of fascinating topics related to how humans build cities. Coming to Beirut as a graduate student in 2007, the rapid transformation of the urban environment captured my attention and resulted in a master’s thesis that tried to understand how the Lebanese state facilitated real estate developers through changes in the legal and institutional framework. The results of the thesis were published in a journal article written with my fantastic supervisor Prof. Mona Fawaz. Continue reading →

New article published: Beirut and the creation of the rent gap

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I’m excited to announce the publication of my journal article in Urban Geography, titled “Beirut and the creation of the rent gap.” In this article, I think deeply about how land and building values are created and influenced by the legal framework, but also factors less discussed in the literature such as civil conflict, informality, illegality, and war. You can download the article here! Below is the abstract. Continue reading →