Tools for tactical neighborhood planning and design : lessons from user-led small scale physical interventions in municipal Beirut open spaces -

Abstract

How can cities satisfy the needs and reflect the imagination of their inhabitants? At a first glance, contemporary Beirut does not seem to offer much in this regard. Since I started walking around the city in 2010, an initial feeling of exhaustion by overwhelming physical obstacles and blind corners evolved into an enthusiasm for the solutions adopted by inhabitants to rest, trespass, bypass, and enjoy open spaces in the city. Extensive exploration led me to discover various tactical interventions—escamotages by which city users interpret, devise and adapt their urban environment, across the public private divide and along negotiable lines of agency and entitlement. In the light of various critiques of neo-liberal governmentality, and of the way this is shaping contemporary cities both globally and in the region, this thesis investigates the agency of city users in shaping the urban environment, together with—or notwithstanding—State’s and market’s regulations and interventions. Building on Lefevbre’s triadic definition of space and de Certeau’s wanderings on the invention of everyday life, I argue that user’s agency is vital to preserve a creative and inclusive practice of the public, and resist the exclusionary standardization imposed by neo-liberal rule.