Housing production at a moment of financialization, a case study from the suburbs of Beirut

Abstract

Over the past decades, the Lebanese Capital city witnessed heavy investments in its land and housing market. These investments occurred through the array of policies that reviewed building and property laws, revised zoning regulations, and introduced loans and incentives to facilitate the penetration of capital into the housing sector, leading to the “Financialization” of the housing market.

This research is a case study of Doha Aramoun, one of Beirut's southwestern suburbs. It adopts an approach that works through the profiling and trajectories of developers and their activities, as main actors driving the production process of the city and its suburbs, remaking urban districts and their shifting urban borders.

This study shows that the place of the suburb has changed over time to act as an overflow of the city. This role is directly linked to a specific materialization of financialization in Greater Beirut where the suburbs serve as a secondary affordable destination for lower and middle-income classes. The thesis presents three main findings: first, developers are main agents in the production of space of the studied geography. Second, developers also intervene in the reorganization of urban territories, negotiating and filtering who can penetrate, where, and how. Hence, they are building, reshaping, and reproducing geographies that they navigate. Third, the thesis showed that all developers heavily relied on their social capital, which they cultivate and extend as an integral part of their business strategy.

The study is part of the Beirut Built Environment Database (BBED) project conducted at the Beirut Urban Lab which is expanding its work in the Greater Beirut area to cover additional neighborhoods of the city’s urbanization. It builds on the earlier findings of the research team that have profiled development practices of housing agents and explored their materialization in-depth in specific neighborhoods of the city.