RGP Cycle Three Grantees and Projects

Hiba Bou Akar: Narrating Beirut from its Inner City Neighborhoods

This is a multi-disciplinary participatory project that aims to study the impacts of market-driven developments and policies on residential rights in Beirut. These policies have caused social and spatial injustices, resulting in the displacement of many low and middle-income families. The main focus of this project is the ongoing attempt to evict residents living in the city under rent control, whether by a newly issued, yet legally contested rent law, or by de-facto market procedures.
We aim to use neighborhood-based training workshops targeted at the youth, to carry out a collaborative research on space in several neighborhoods in Beirut whose residents live under the old rent law. These investigations are meant to broaden our understanding of the link between policy making and private interests in the formation of the built environment, to bring forth a historically rooted narrative about neighborhoods under rent control that has been over-shadowed by market led dominant models, and to propose counter alternatives to urban regeneration.
Through this place-specific investigation we hope to facilitate critical public engagement with spatial issues that we consider essential for the formation of the notion of the right to the city. It will also inform a “Right to Housing Law” being articulated and drafted by a group of activists from various fields that came together to advocate for a comprehensive housing vision that uses law and legal tools as its strategic action.

Hiba Bou Akar is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Middle Eastern Studies at Hampshire College. For 2014-2015, Bou Akar is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. Bou Akar received her Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning with a designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the American University of Beirut (AUB) and Master in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She has published on the geographies of planning and war; the question of urban security and violence; and on the role of religious political organizations in the making of the city. She is the co-editor of “Narrating Beirut from its Borderlines” (2011) and the special issue “Security in/of the City” in the journal City & Society (2012). She is finalizing her book manuscript titled “For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Peripheries.” Bou Akar is the co-editor of Jadaliyya Cities, an online electronic journal on urban issues in the Middle East. She has also worked as an architect and planner, and as a research consultant with local NGOs and international UN organizations in the Middle East.