BETWEEN A REFUGE AND A BATTLEGROUND: BEIRUT'S DISCREPANT COSMOPOLITANISMS*

Beirut has experienced cosmopolitanism and its opposite. It is a site of multicultural encounters and communal entrenchment: a refuge and a battleground. How and where does Beirut's cosmopolitan project turn into violence? The notion of “discrepant cosmopolitanism” provides two answers, blurring accepted distinctions between multicultural openness and communitarian entrenchment. First, openness and closure are not opposed but part of discrepant cosmopolitanisms immanent in urban space. Second, these discrepant cosmopolitanisms originate in Lebanon's encounter with colonial modernity. The making of the Lebanese nation‐state has revolved around the sectarian spatiality of the ta'ifa (religious community), which produced contested but coexisting discourses and practices of rivalry and harmony. The rise of Beirut's international hotels in the 1960s, their destruction, and their role in contemporary urban redevelopment are treated here as embodiments of discrepant cosmopolitanisms. Within Beirut's recurrent tensions, a renegotiation of its cosmopolitan project could stem from a different relationship between the urban and national policies.     

Beirut and the creation of the rent gap

This article investigates how rent gaps are created in Beirut, Lebanon, and makes a two-fold argument. First, it argues that rent gaps are created by state-legitimized power and agents of capital through the legal framework, and that the role of location in determining differences between potential ground rents, so salient in Beirut, demonstrates the complementarity of neoclassical land rent theory and rent gap theory. Second, it argues that beyond the legal framework, rent gaps in Beirut are formed through informal, illegal and exceptionalist practices as well as civil, sectarian conflict and forced displacement. This extends the range of forces to consider when thinking about what creates and shapes rent gaps. The paper emphasizes the necessity of a critical perspective on the ways in which value in urban space is created in the interests of the state and agents of capital, while attuning rent gap theory to a more global perspective.