A Manifesto for the Just City 2021 40 // 404
URBAN INFORMALITY: IS THE INFORMAL AN ENACTMENT TO THE RIGHT TO THE CITY? PROFESSOR MONA FAWAZ
I
was asked to speak of informality in relation to planning and to reflect about what planners can do. The question of what planners can do is especially important in places like Beirut where I live, where the implicit assumption of planners that a democratic inclusive state can be the custodian of the “common good” and/or the authority from of which you can ask for more “justice” or “greener” is very remote. How do we re-imagine our place as planners, as professionals of the built environment, when one lives in such a context? I tried to frame my presentation in ways that offer pathways to think of this question in relation to informality. I begin in Beirut, where about a year ago, on August 4th, 2020, a massive explosion in the city’s port caused major damage in the city’s infrastructure, including the surrounding urban fabric and its housing. For more information, see (World Bank, 2020). As many national and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs and INGOs) began to work on the repair of what was estimated at over a hundred thousand houses affected by the port explosion, these organisations found themselves repairing layers and layers of neglect and damage that pre-dated the blast by at least five decades. In other words, the disaster unravelled years of neglect and decay that had eroded the city’s housing infrastructure, its physical fabric of life. These five decades include Lebanon’s civil war (1975-1990) and an ongoing war with Israel that included several invasions by the Israeli Army, including to Beirut in 1982. This period also covers the last three decades of so-called post-war reconstruction
which unleashed a neoliberal model of urban development. The marks of this neglect and deterioration were not just in the physical conditions of the dilapidated buildings or services. True, the poor physical conditions of multistorey apartment buildings presented a challenge for repair. The marks of neglect, however, also extended to modes of occupying space. There are lots of questions about property rights. Who owns what? There were also questions about rental contracts. Who was allowing who to stay in a particular place? How much did households pay? How did rent change? And then issues of personal entitlement Did residents have legal residency papers? Do you have the right to be here? Many of these questions are typically raised in the so-called informal sector, but they now appeared in well-established middle-class neighbourhoods. For example, NGOs and INGOs working on post-disaster recovery in Beirut expected to see this high divergence from the law in construction and contractual practices in neighbourhoods such as Karantina, a low-income neighbourhood of the city known to have housed over the past century several waves of refugees, migrant workers, and numerous vulnerable populations. This is a largely dilapidated neighbourhood, often associated with informality where many of the residents were historically refugees and/or migrant workers and low-income families. However, the same questions were being raised in Mar Mikhael, which is Beirut’s more consolidated, more “hip” and “upcoming” neighbourhood, a neighbourhood, where heritage buildings date back to the early French Mandate (1919-1943) and modern
Professor Mona Fawaz, The Century Foundation. Printed with permission.
AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF BEIRUT
