NPF Cycle One Fellows and Projects
Nadine Bekdache: Evicting Sovereignty: Old Housing Tenants from Citizens to Obstacles
Abstract: The paper reads the social spatiality of rent control in Beirut, Lebanon, by looking into historical shifts in the exercised forms of both state and popular sovereignty. It reinterprets the self-proclaimed ‘weak state’ in new terms: as layered, selective and shifting, increasingly blurring the intersecting practices of state and non-state actors, providing them both with impunity to perform an authority grounded in violence, eviction, and informalization. Below, I will explore three phases to read the transformation of the national sovereign and its implication in redefining resistant forms of popular sovereignty to changes in rent control: (1) Post independence, when in the 1940s-70s the state assured rent control as part of a generated welfare apparatuses that established certain kinds of spatial and socialgovernance sovereignty while social groups mobilized through the state to maintain the social pact. (2) Post Civil War, when in the 1980s-1990s the state carried out a neoliberal agenda, it began to portray city dwellers as a threat to privatized sovereignty, and the non-wealthy became obstacles to the new ideal of both development and private-sector dominion or sovereignty (exemplified in the reconstruction of downtown and the eviction of dwellers there). (3) Post 2000, after recurrent failures to cancel rent control, a new kind of “evicting sovereignty” began to be deployed by the semi-privatized authority of a state – a state portrayed continuously, if deceptively, as “weak.” The gradual emptying of the city from old tenants, who have played an integral role in the history of urbanization and who challenge the mapping of the city by sect and class, has not occurred, paradoxically, through a change in the legal contract, but through a reconfiguration of sovereignty. This “evicting sovereignty” has generated a new form of rule outside the realm of the political and is increasingly able to revoke entitlement to rent and confiscate ways of life at the mundane level of the everyday.
Nadine Bekdache is a practicing designer and an urbanist. Her research focuses on socio-spatial phenomena through multidisciplinary methods. She has employed mapping as a process of investigation and representation in several research and design projects. Those include mapping security in Beirut, mapping land ownership along Beirut’s coast, and producing advocacy maps. She is currently researching the implications of rent control on urban change in Beirut. As part of this research she is working on a documentary film that explores notions of representation, the legal framework of the old rent law, and the politics of eviction. She is also a graphic design instructor at the Lebanese University.
