Abstract
Violently divided cities are incubators of ethnic conflicts. Under the auspices of postwar reconstruction, these cities are supposedly disciplined into peace through the regeneration of the city centre, including privatization, commercial adaptation and gentrification strategies. Such dynamics render city centre space amnesiac, with no reference to the history of sectarian violence, and exclusivist by limiting public access. Rather than foster peacebuilding, city centre regeneration exposes the dangerous weakness of the neoliberal peace built on accommodating ethnic and socioeconomic divisions. This paper connects Lefebvre's right-to-the-city to non-sectarian social movements’ struggle to forge participatory democracy in Beirut's city centre. A key aspect of these movements’ activities is to reprogramme memory—cosmopolitan and inclusivist—into the city centre, a project supporting peacebuilding.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 149-168 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | Antipode |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 17 Jul 2016 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jan 2017 |
Keywords
- divided cities
- Beirut
- right-to-the-city
- memory
- peacebuilding
Access to Document
- Nagle_AAM
This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Nagle, J. (2017) Ghosts, Memory, and the Right to the Divided City: Resisting Amnesia in Beirut City Centre. Antipode, 49: 149–168., which has been published in final form at DOI: 10.1111/anti.12263. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.