Looking for the Liberal in the Neo-Liberal City [Alternative Public Spaces from Lebanon]

Abstract

This essay examines the characteristics of three cases of urban engagement that have emerged on sites located at the margins of the city of Beirut and highlights the creative ways in which they were appropriated. The research investigates the notions of freedom and equal access to these spaces based on social contracts, in contrast with the excessive norms and regulations and the visible mechanisms of security that are usually deployed in the formal public spaces of the city. The study draws on the produced nature of space rather than on the abstractness of it, which involves a political and socio-economic analysis of the surveyed sites and an engagement with the people and the processes that are producing the place. The chapter provides a synthetic comparison between the analysed spaces with the aim of defining the similarities and the contradictions that emerge from the research. It demonstrates that these alternative public spaces liberate themselves from dominant public space typologies by conforming to different paradigms of collective social contracts, negotiations, conflicts, resolutions and shifting boundaries. This experiment also notes that these spaces have a unique and non-replicable character, which is symptomatic of the absence of any normative state initiative related to the provision of accessible and free spaces in the present neo-liberal city.