 Good evening, I'd like to welcome you to a presentation and discussion of the work of the book. I'm sure you'll all see the cover. Even though a car was a war yet to come, planning barriers frontiers. A very important book. I've had the pleasure of reading it myself. It just came out, I think, just last month, isn't it? It's very fresh. You're right here at the moment, waiting for that. All brand new. It's a very important book about an essential city. A city that's not just for Lebanon and the Middle East, but for the global south. It's a book of analyses which are really compelling and often triggered by the word logic. There are many logics in this book in various degrees of the explicit and implicit. I am... I should introduce myself. I was going to say as an anthropologist. I am a professor of anthropology and I'm also director of Mises and director of the Middle East Institute. For me as an anthropologist, I want to introduce the very original sensibility of the ethnographer, architect, urban planner, who has methods that are adapted to the perspectives and the problems of the architect and urban planner. This is an ethnography that is innovative in its own regard as an ethnography. As a student of the Sharia, of Islamic law, I note the references in this book to some very detailed analyses of certain kinds of forms that are part of the historical Sharia that are now used in urban real estate, which is really quite amazing. In the title, The War Yet to Come, we hear about challenges posed by the future and the patterns of anticipation in the present. This event is actually a collaboration between the Institute I direct, the Middle East Institute, and GSAP, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. And I want to thank also the three staff members, Simone, Lila, and Sifan, who have been instrumental in organizing this whole event. We're going to have a 20-minute, approximately, discussion or presentation by Heba, a Buakar, and then 10-minute presentations by three visiting speakers, Farank Merahter, Timothy Mitchell, who's from here, and M. Christine Boyer. I'd just like to introduce them in each one of them, a bit right at this point, so we can then flow on to them. They will speak for about 10 minutes of peace. First, to identify the author, Heba, who's an assistant professor in the Poverter Planning Program at Columbia GSAP, and she has her PhD in City and Regional Planning from the Global Metropolitan Studies in University of California, Berkeley. She has an earlier co-edited book called Marrying Beirut from its borderlines. There's a lot more to be said about her, and she will tell us about her and you will see her in action. But the first of the respondents, the 10-minute respondents will be Merahter, who is Professor of Urban Planning and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She's the author of Women's Empowerment, Participation in Shelter Strategies at the Community Level and Urban Informal Settlements, and a co-editor of Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World, and other works. Timothy Mitchell is from Columbia University, known to many of you perhaps, the Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern South Asian Studies. He came to Columbia in 2008 after a long career, actually 25 years at New York University. We knew him uptown. That was my first word with his wife. Anyway, he's the author of many important books, starting with colonizing Egypt and more recently, Carbon Democracy, Political Power in the Age of Oil. M. Christine Boyer is the Kenan Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at Princeton University School of Architecture. She's an urban historian and also has a degree from, and has taught and has had degrees from other universities. The publication for which a prize was won is Le Corbusier. This is a Princeton Architectural Press publication. And also a number of other works, including Dreaming the Rational City, The Myth of the American City Planning, 1890 to 1945, Manhattan Manors Architecture and Style, 1850 to 1900, and other works. Finally, we'll have an open discussion after the three presentations led by the Dean of the School of Architecture who doesn't need to be identified in this building, which is her project as a whole. But she has a remarkable new book, which I can't pronounce the title of. Look at, how did we say this? Work AC. Work AC, okay. Work AC after the colon that says, you'll get there when we cross the bridge. This is a 2017 book. She's also an editor of the Arab City Architecture Representation from Columbia, 2016. Anyway, thank you all for coming and we'll turn the podium over to the author, Pippa Ampoukar. Thank you so much for being here tonight. I want to start by thanking Dean Amal Andraouz, the Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, GISAB, and Professor Brink Masig, the director for the Middle East Institute for hosting this book launch. Many thanks to Laila Katilier and Simone Rothkowitz for organizing the theater of the events. I want to take this opportunity to thank Dean Andraouz for her amazing support since I started GISAB. I also want to thank GISAB faculty and staff and my colleagues in the Urban Planning Program. For welcoming me amongst them, it has been wonderful working with you all. I also want to thank Bernadette Bardser and Stephanie Chan for their help in the last phase of the project. This book has been a long, long journey. There are so many people who provided me with love and support over the years. Some were there since day one. Others, I was lucky to meet along the way. I'm especially beyond grateful to two of my dearest friends who traveled here to be here with me today, and to Gino Haid who couldn't make it. I can't thank you enough for all the love and support you've provided over the years. And to Aurelie Valladette and Jesus Velasco for providing me with a home in New York City. I'm also thankful to many, many people in Beirut and around the globe who made this book possible. I also want to thank Professor Franek Mirafatal, Professor Timothy Mitchell and Professor Christine Boyer for accepting, for generously accepting this invitation. Thank you so much. I was listening to a popular Lebanese radio show discussing the challenges currently facing Beirut. The show's host at some point said, and I quote, I think we should all start thinking about urban planning. Look around you. In this city, planning lacks planning and order. This was not the first time that I heard such a statement. During my fieldwork, I would often get the same reaction. He went all the way to the United States and came back here to study planning, thus even planning exists in Beirut. For my interlocutors who had experienced a 15-year of civil war between 1975 and 1990, planning promised a better future, a future of well-being. However, many years later, in a region rocked with violence and millions of refugees, where war always roams in the horizon, planning has yet to deliver on that promise. As someone who lived through the Lebanese civil war, these feelings were also personal. In the 1980s, my family and I experienced first-hand the geographies of war, including multiple forced displacements. Today, the fear of future wars continues to shape our everyday life, but so do promises of a better future of post-war, there's yet to come. Through this book, I chose to write about violence in a place I call home, itself the landscape of many, many lost homes, making this a quest that has been shaped by my personal history as much as it is a scholarly inquiry into geographies of conflict and its aftermath. To this end, I examine in this book the entire line of logics that make the phrase planning lacks, planning an order, a common sentiment in Beirut. I show that such a feeling develops when the specters of wars are always present, when state structures are not clear, and public projects are often outsourced and privatized. However, I argue that such conditions are neither exceptional nor restricted to the paradigm of cities in conflict like Beirut, Belfast, or Medellin. Assuming these cities are exceptional reproduces the same assumptions that this work seeks to destabilize. These assumptions are mostly rooted on how we think of the temporalities of planning and development interventions. Indeed, for so long, the intertwined fields of planning and development have been configured within an imagined future of progress. However, today, we are at a global moment in which the imagined future in most places in the world, in both the global north and the global south, is one of conflict and contestation, characterized by ecological crises, anticipated terror attacks, and unprecedented influx of refugee fugies and migrants, a horizon of what I call the warrior to come. Taking as my case study post-war Lebanon, I argue that Beirut's peripheries tell us a much different story about planning and its temporalities. And this is a very different story from what I usually told about Beirut, seen through the prism of its downtown post-war reconstruction project following the end of the war in 1990, characterized by neat colorful master plans, glittering buildings, and emptied out streets. In contrast, Beirut's fast urbanizing peripheries suddenly emerged in 2008 as frontiers of renewed sectarian conflict, where dozens were killed in an episode of violence that was a reminder of the civil war. This transformation of peripheries into frontiers could be understood through the spatial and temporal logic of the warrior to come. The warrior to come does not treat peace and war and peace as distinct categories. It doesn't approach war as a temporal aberration in an linear time of progress with a beginning and an end. Rather, it focuses on how war, violence and their anticipation have shaped Beirut's segregated geographies. The logic of the warrior to come has a temporal and spatial dimension. Temporally, the warrior to come reconfigures the temporalities of Dayetsu through which to understand geographic production. It provides a different lens of modernization which assumes a predictable future that is premised on a belief in the ability to forecast the future and manage territories towards progress, which to this day still guide most of planning and development interventions. The future of the warrior to come instead is uncertain and volatile and this affects how geographies and their futures are being shaped, contested and negotiated. This war is not a war of tanks, cannons and rifles but is fundamentally a geopolitical territorial conflict where the fear of domination of one group by another is fought over land and apartment sales through zoning, planning and infrastructure projects. The outcomes are planned spaces that are low income, have overlapping industrial and residential zones where highways are never finished and playgrounds are never built. These are what I call the geographies of the warrior to come. In Lebanon, it is the form of civil war militias who are key to shaping these geographies. Since the end of the war these militias have become major religious political organizations and actually are the primary special and development actors who challenge our understanding of geographic production because they operate simultaneously inside the state and outside it. In the book the four actors I focus on are the Shia Hezbollah the Sydney Future Movement the Druze Progressive Socialist Party and for those who are unfamiliar with the Druze, they are a minority religious group and the Maronite Christian Church which is not itself a militia but they are militias associated with it. These four groups were the most present on the ground in the southern peripheral areas where I conducted most of the fieldwork for this book. In Lebanon, how planning is actually practiced on the ground I conducted an ethnography of special practices which I would be happy to talk more about during Q&A in three southern peripheries of Beirut namely Haimadi Ma'am Khayyil, Sahra Shwayfid, and Dahid Airamur. As you can see on the map these areas are peripheries of not only municipal Beirut but also of the southern suburbs of Beirut commonly known as the Dahye considered to be the stronghold of the Shia Hezbollah in the city which is long been at stake in this contestation. From my research in these sites three spatial and temporal lenses of growth emerged mostly doubleness, namely doubleness, less work and ballooning. Conceptually, these three processes reveal how planning and space-paking in post-complexities mold space and time in reverent thin ways in contrast to the teleological assumptions about growth characterized by for example the concentric model of urban growth that assigns degrees of urbanization starting with the dense center and moving outwards to a less dense periphery. In Ma'am Khayyil, the neighborhood closest to Beirut and the Dahye was a predominantly Christian neighborhood before the Civil War. Its forced conflict geography can be understood through what I call the doubleness of ruins. In 2004 when I first visited the streets were buzzing with life children were playing elderly were congregating amidst sounds coming from the busy light industries in the area. The neighborhood's worst guard buildings bombed and abandoned during the Civil War had been transformed into makeshift homes for families that were displaced in 1975 from South Lebanon. So as you can see on the slide people actually made homes inside these bombed out buildings. Many families who I spoke to had been living in the area for 30 years and they were awaiting the governmental compensation in order to leave. When I returned in 2009 the area felt like a ghost town. World displaced families had been evicted ruins stood empty new fancy yet empty buildings dotted the landscape with apartments selling upwards of $350,000. It was a checkered geography of ruins and construction. When I asked about why some buildings were still in ruins while many others were replaced, I learned that the church had actually stopped the sale and development of these ruins. An investigation into this checkered geography of ruins and construction shows how the area have become one of the major contested frontiers in times of peace where the Christians and Shi'as are struggling over land and they did through the Maronite Church on the Christian side and Hezbollah affiliated real estate developers on the Shi'a side. If the ruins stayed intact the church, if it was replaced the land is being developed by Shi'a Liwal. On the local level this territorial war is conducted through challenging real estate markets changing land policies and modifying building and zoning laws. Internationally, it unfolds through global networks of finance fundraising and religious allegiances. For example church affiliates are trying to change the preemption law in land sales to expand the right of first refusal to the Christian community writ large. Shi'a developers are traveling to DC Sydney and Sao Paulo to buy land in Haimadi from landowners who immigrated during the war and never returned. The church is trying to overturn these real estate transactions. Public officials are changing the zoning and building laws to make investment for Shi'a developers unprofitable and local municipalities are prohibiting land sales between Christians and Muslims. In this contested geography civil war ruins are the ruins of a contested past as much as they are ruins in contested presence and futures. Left over ruins are indicators of an ongoing territorial war that's actually not very different from the civil war. This critical excavation exercise of ruins shows the contradictions and crises that lie in the constructed boundaries between war and peace future and past progress and violence construction and destruction even home and displacement, segregation and coexistence. The world displaced families in Haimadi eventually moved to Sahra Shwayfid after receiving monetary compensation. Sahra Shwayfid is located next to the Beirut International Airport and is the second tiered periphery of Beirut and Iddahi. During the civil war the area was an agricultural land heavily guarded by its Druze landowners. The two main walling factions here today are the Shia Hezbollah and the Druze Affiliated PSP. That of the war with pressure of urbanization from Iddahi massive low-cost housing project started mushrooming in the area which eventually housed many of the Shia war displaced families. They were mostly Hezbollah supporters. The real estate developers were also Hezbollah affiliates who were financially supported and provide low-cost housing in the area. These massive developments started alarming the municipality which was affiliated with the PSP. In order to stop the urbanization of the area as the Shia territory the PSP through its different positions inside and outside the government worked towards zoning the area as industrial. At the same time Hezbollah worked to zone it as residential. As political alliances between these two groups apt and flowed zoning and building laws kept changing. For example between 1996 and 2008 the master plan and zoning of Sahra Shwayfair changed 8 times in 12 years which you can see in the slide here that is industrial green residential how it changed between 1996 and 2002. In Sahra Shwayfair and I quote industrial zone is a synonym for Druze territory and residential zone is a synonym for Shia territory as one planner told me. Between the industrial and residential Sahra Shwayfair is now a patchwork of apartment buildings in the vicinity of industries and an active urban agriculture area. Every winter the area witnesses an environmental disaster when rate motor gets mixed with industrial waste and soil fills the residential streets causing new phases of displacement. In 2008 as sectarian battles in the streets of Sahra Shwayfair another battle took place over another rezoning iteration. The PSP passed the master plan that re-escribes the area as middle income to slow its urbanization. For example you could see how the 2004 low allowed hollow concrete and tin sheets i.e. low income. However the 2008 low imposed expensive stone cladding and red tile roofing and decreased allowed apartments per floor making the area less affordable. This rezoning is not only related to these actors positioning in local wars but also regional ones. Sahra Shwayfair was bombed in the July 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon and was targeted by an ISIS affiliated suicide bomber in 2014 inserting Beirut peripheries as a node in the Arab Israeli and Sunni Shia regional conflicts in the Middle East. Therefore military geographies are also key to these rezoning schemes since both actors function as paramilitaries with expected roles in local and regional wars yet to come. Therefore paramilitary urban strategies like domination of hilltops and access to weapons are key to these planned geographies. For example the contestation of an industrial residential zoning had also to do with the ability to connect to the airport. Also PSP's rezoning of hilltops as villa zones aimed to stop urbanization on militarily strategic hills. So you see here how the zoning changed from D which is a regular residential to V which is a villa area. These planning practices have now created a lacework of urbanization that folds areas for housing into industrial and agricultural zones mixed areas controlled by Shiaz and one with controlled by Druze and delineates new contours of sectarian violence and engagement. Not very far from Zahra Shuaifid the furthest of the three sides from Meirut and Addahi. Its urban development is characterized by a mixture of lavishness and extreme poverty of spectacular views of the Mediterranean Sea and of garbage fillings its river streams. This was a result of how the area ballooned over time without much regulation to a dense periphery primarily for Sunni families and gentrification from the post war reconstruction of downtown Beirut. The Sunni future movement which controlled the government after the Civil War actually supported this transformation by investing in large scale capital projects funded by international aid and loans to upgrade the area through highways and infrastructure. They also plan to channel development monies to the area through the Lebanese national physical master plan approved in 2009 Meanwhile excluding the nearby pool and mostly Shia Zahra Shuaifid So you can see here this is the area that Dahu-e-Aramu dominated by the red line and this is Zahra Shuaifid where the development target area was eliminated. Later as people started moving from the over populated Addahi towards Dahu-e-Aramu Shia developers used market tactics to build apartment buildings that were mostly sold to Shia families. People coexisted peacefully in 2008 as the future movement and Hezbollah fought battles the area emerged as a battle ground where people were killed and others were displaced. The chapter traces the top of war and rumors of militarization that have accompanied the construction frenzy of Dahu-e-Aramu and illustrates how minority religious groups like the Druze have actually become brokers in a war fought not only locally but regionally. Together, these case studies show that the failure of planning Ebeirut's new peripheral development to provide residents with safe environment is actually not about the failure of planning or the ways such spaces may defy the logic of planning. In fact, these peripheries are intricately planned. The oiling of the present as we saw it instead is produced by several contested planning exercises over different imagined futures rendering planning as a tool of conflict as much as that of peace and order. In such context, planning practices involve innovative techniques to continuously balance a speciality of political difference in order to keep a war at bay when possible while simultaneously allowing for urban growth and development profit as planning is evacuated of its development ideals globally and locally planners have increasingly become the technicians of the spatial logic of the warrior to come. However despite how outlandish these practices may sound hardly make Ebeirut an anomaly. Urban futures of all cities are being contested as these futures are increasingly seen as reflective of a violence yet to come leading to a global restructuring of geographies with widespread calls to erect walls both literally and figuratively to shut out unwanted populations. Does not the everyday anticipation of violence, terror, war, climate change and police and gang violence affect all of our daily lives as we walk through militarized urban spaces retreat to our gated communities travel through airports build prisons and border walls hope remains however in the prospect that hope remains however in the prospect that these logics of fear and exclusion will be widely contested and that these contestations will give rise to movement that bring on new spatial and political imaginaries for more equitable cities and better futures while reminding us that the future is yet to be written. Thank you. Wonderful presentations and also some of them also being reminded of who my name is Arana, I want to thank Niva for inviting me and thank leaders and other staff for making their visit possible before I go into my comments I wish to extend a special thanks to Niva for writing this very difficult book it has happened in between wars and under the threat of war and it's not an easy book to research or to write and you've done it or she's done it I should say third person she's done it with such grace and she'll display the depth of her working of political and cultural aspects of the context and also the intellectual caliber to be able to make sense of it all but I'm particularly grateful to Niva for writing this book because she has opened a window to a part of the world that we sell them a year about or see the everyday working of everyday life other outside the purview of the war journalism embedded in the imperial agenda of US in the region so for that I'm grateful for having the book okay I organized my comments around two aspects of the book that are for me are two contributions of the book to critical planning so my comments are going to focus on how from the perspective of planning the scholarship critical planning scholarship what is the contributions of for the war year to come and I focus on two interrelated dimensions of it, the theoretical contribution and the methodological approach of the book theoretically the book challenges that taken for granted Eurocentric theories in urban planning are exposing the dark side of the plan which we heard in the last 20 minutes in making of Beirut and briefly methodologically using relational approach through multi-sided ethnography of city building the book is able to move beyond convenient boundaries of formal informal state non-state actors etc and showing the co-constitutive relations and frictions that shape urban space and spatial practices of a range of actors both at local and local state so with this brief overview I now go into expanding a little bit firstly, I need to remind you I guess it is who haven't read the book yet that the title of the book for the war year to come is a play with the title of Abdul Malik Simon's book which is a fundraising conversation where the book was called for the city yet to come that was a very influential volume published in the late 1990s which took to task the Eurocentrism of planning theories and planning scholarship which kind of assumes that what happens outside the western models of planning is not planned so we focused on four cities everyday making spatial practices of people and showing that these theories are surviving and while they don't fit into the model of western planning we cannot assume that there is no planning going on but by expanding the notion of planning to include the everyday practices of regular people that make the city and make their communities and neighborhoods work so he is taking the global north theories of planning in that book I think this is an interplay with what Hiba is doing in her book which she is focusing on a dark side of planning as something that again in the northern and the planning theories rooted in the western liberal democratic notions of planning is kind of often not talked about or not seen so with that the kind of practices that the kind of dark side of planning that Hiba just described and shared with us here and is in the book is something that doesn't appear in the radar of planning scholarship in the opening key note of World Congress of Planning Schools which I did two years ago in Brazil I talked about something that I call it planning schizophrenia to describe precisely what I believe Hiba school contributes to the challenge. Planning schizophrenia is that the way in which in planning theories we want to think about planning as something that is for public good the purpose of the profession is to serve the good the shared interests of the public. But when we look at the actual underground practices of planning profession we see these dark sides that some of which was shared with us. So in that opening remark I basically shared some of the examples of how we see the schizophrenia of planning laying bare when for example the public housing project in Chicago was demolished and with the promise that we will replace them with mixed-use housing and having more inclusive cities and residential areas it ended up really getting replaced by very expensive condominiums that are now today rented at $1,000 per month those sites of displacement of what used to be the Chicago projects. The schizophrenia of planning is also when we see many examples but for example the case that I would briefly mention is the Mumbai transportation plan which has kind of justified their multi-billion project with building this 33 kilometers of under the water and bridges and overpass through the ocean to connect the bay as a way of creating more connected and inclusive and accessible city while in reality what it does it upsets the ecology of the coastal area and displaces much of the fishing communities in the area and these kind of examples of how the narrative of planning is that we are doing inclusive or planning for public good actually on the reality displaces and has been accomplished in this position good could go on and on so in those opening remarks and much of what my own writing has to say is the case for rethinking planning and its Eurocentric theorization which at its best reflects a brief moment historical moment in the European and American or western societies even in the Euro-American experience even in the democratic societies this presentation that planning could be the mediating force between the people and the state that is willing to give has only existed for a brief moment on the strong welfare state but today even in the west this schizophrenia is completely is laid there so what the HEWA's work does and is making it forceful contribution and lending the voice to this conversation by showing the dark side by exposing the dark side of planning profession and precisely by doing it in a context where the assumption is there is no planning the opening of the book and throughout we see that not only the people but only planners themselves have bought into that we are not doing a really so in one conversation with HEWA later on in the book the professional utility planner says why are you here this is not really planning planning is what happens in western societies which is really what is how it is the common sense of planning has spread out even to societies in so to speak the world itself so what is beautiful and effective about the book is that she takes one of such spaces that the assumption is there is no planning happening here and professional planners have nothing to do with this and yet in that context she is able to expose that planning professional planning has been thoroughly involved in production and reproduction of these spaces of war and second separation I turn now to my second point so the second point is regarding the methodological contribution of the book she makes an important methodological intervention by using a relational approach that is created through doing careful multi-sided ethnography of several neighborhood suburbs or frontiers as she called them by doing such careful relational analysis she is able to rise above convenient boundaries of formal informal state and non-state authorities local and global actors and book achieves this by engaging analytically with religious sectarian differences the very differences that have been often used to offer binary of urban divides so she takes the sectarian divides which is often very easily lending itself to saying well we have Shia Sony we have this that right and even in that scenario which doesn't come easy across common sense so to speak then she shows that these are not really binaries and the reality of urban urbanism and urban life doesn't fit into these clean categories of state non-state civil society citizens here state here by showing a range of what she calls states like actors who fall in and out of realm of the state in kind of international actions they do so this is very important in what she accomplishes by taking a case that seems to be out of seems to be not easily possible to argue in his channel their binary constructions and yet she is able to show that. Following the footsteps of anthropologist Anna Singh I could see she seeks to show the frictions the non-binary interrelatedness that is not smooth but full of contradictions and tensions frictions that shape the southern urbanism cannot fit into clean containers as I said such as the state citizens in the non-state society she reveals the complex politics of belonging where divides are not simply given they are produced reinforced and contested by citizens and authorities of different kinds citizens and the combination of formal and informal and authorities resist the borders between these urban divides shaped through relational dynamics in this process we see both hardening and permeability of boundaries which she refers to them as frontiers so to wrap up basically for the war yet to come by overcoming the analytical limitations of binary thinking and explaining urban divides co-constitutively and relationally challenges the convenient conventional western models of planning yet through its methodological approach my own work using relational multi-sided ethnography which a couple of days ago I shared with the students and some faculty here draws on flexibility of showing the phenomena from multiple locations and points in order to really see what is going on in my case I took I went around from Togo to Mexico to be able to see how the lace work of care performed around the world with a big body and sew together for web workers in the lucrative industry of the U.S. hospital and he does a beauty to show how the urban divide is facilitated and reinforced through lace work of zoning it is only through a care formulation an approach that we can reveal the complexities, frictions and assemblages of urban space and urban divide in cities for the more yet to come I'm still here but I wish to also again thank you for writing a book for my students now and for my students yet to come thank you to everyone in particular for the opportunity to be here and to discuss her book which I have taken enormous not just pleasure from reading but also have learned an enormous amount really one main idea that has helped me think through which I can introduce by mentioning an event some of you will remember from 2011 when the comedian Stephen Colbert announced on his TV show and I owe this anecdote to my colleague Bob Vitellis that he was setting up a fundraising organization a super pack that he was going to call Americans for a better tomorrow tomorrow it's slogan he announced was going to be we'll be making a better tomorrow tomorrow today why not donate he said to his new super pack that way you can ensure that your voice is heard if my voice you mean money and by her you mean positive he was of course satirizing the political fundraising in the US in particular that was in the wake of the citizens united decision but I think there was also something more to learn from that slogan a better tomorrow tomorrow today I think it captures something more about the way we live in relation to the future I think that's something that is captured so expertly in this book of course there's no more prevalent way in which we organize and conceive our relationship to the future perhaps then through modes of development and of development planning an entire world of writing and thinking about modernization it is of course it has been throughout the last century or more an invitation to live one's life in terms of a better tomorrow tomorrow today in other words it's the deployment of a future promise as a mode of organizing in the present it's a mode of regulation through deferment I think of it as a mode of making the future enter government enter the way we are governed a means of governing people through what they lack through what they cannot have today we're of course told again and again the development as an inert as a political project has largely failed it never properly worked the planning failed again and again and of course we've lived in the last generation through an entire political project organized around the apparent problem of failure of planning neoliberalism it's called the plan to end planning the market is an alternative device for producing the future the future the device which itself has failed now if one thinks this way of our sort of condition as one of being governed by a particular mode of producing the future a promise today of tomorrow I can think of three questions that follow um what happens when that promise future doesn't arrive second are there other kinds of future than those of development that can be deployed futures that are not futures of improvement futures that are not based on the logic of of growth and human betterment and how do they work more specifically indeed how does this deployment of the future work is it just something fictitious the set of promises that fill the imagination and then somehow take control of our minds continually fool us and mislead us with promises or is it built in other ways with more solid material and technical apparatus I encourage you to have this book as an answer to all three of those questions um I think there are many other reasons to read it I think you get this wonderful uh ethnography of Beirut Beirut in which you feel very much our own presence, our own family involvement in um trying to understand the world of her um interlocutors and um I wish I could say more about that aspect of the book um I wish I knew Beirut in the way that even in a tenth or a percent of the way in which she does the one city in the region that I've got to know a little bit is Cairo and I completely um failed to appreciate with the kind of depth she had Beirut I've been a few times and I did actually once um was fortunate enough to be invited by AUB and to spend three months living in um in that part of Beirut I never saw the southern suburbs in those three months I'm afraid to say um I never saw the eastern suburbs I never saw the eastern suburbs uh I was finishing a book Carver Democracy benefited from that wonderful place and that wonderful environment the apartment that AUB gave me for those three months and the one particular street outside with the wonderful restaurants I was told actually that my legs atrophied in those three months I still feel and one of the pleasures of reading the book was to be taken by Cairo to be back to the parts of the city that I really failed to experience and I would encourage you to read it for all those reasons as well um but while it is a wonderful um uh account of a history and a current experience of Beirut it's not just an exploration of a case um and it is as I've suggested the conceptual tools that um she has given us that make it such a rich book um there's the one in the title that I'm going to come up to come back to but there are several others each chapter is organized around a concept um lacework for looming and so on um she has uh she argues for a concept of planning without development that we have to think about seriously um she talks about the idea of the frontier the way in which Beirut cannot be grasped in terms of center and periphery the formal versus the informal a core and an expanding frontier and in each of those terms she takes us through a different way of conceiving of the kinds of things that have usually been organized um kinds of rubrics but it is this yet to come um that seems to me the most original and the most um important aspect of the book I think um to grasp its importance you have to remember how um handicap we are by the sort of historicism that envelops our way of thinking about the future our historical mode of thinking in which time is something largely linear the present is what is real the past is what is over but that exists for us in fragments in ruins that are explored in very interesting ways in the book um that may survive into the present that allow us to rebuild it but the future no the future is unread um if it has an effect it is only going to be through our imagination we build it in our heads that is not what you get from reading this book um the future is something being built in concrete the future is something being built in material ways through systems of of debt and real estate financing through the durability of iron and steel um the ruin in Heather's account is not just something recovered and still standing from the past but it also works to mark the future in a particular way as a place of abandonment and the present as a place which has no way forward and no way back because of the way the ruin locks a neighbourhood sectarian order I don't want to over set my time but I could talk more about this concept of lacework that she deploys in another chapter the negotiated fabric of openings and closures constructed through a planning process I didn't quite find it as dark I was just too excited by it um it's certainly not um it's not light but um but there is something quite redeeming in a way about the ways in which as you call it planning without development is shown to be a mode of operation um I also found really useful um the discussion of the way in which the notion of something being under study under review is used term but also a way of thinking about a whole mode of politics um you know for our thinking our normal thinking the future is something imagined it's something in Marx's writing that was fictitious capital derived from the future for Marx was fictitious capital but that's not how the future works in this book the yet to come is not a promised future it's not an imaginary future rather as she said it's a particular horizon shaping the present and present in the present it's a set of future possibilities and potentials for violence, for profit and a very important theme of the book for survival that operate and is mobilized in the present as a temporal regime um let me end by suggesting also when you read the book that um yes it's important to think about how concepts of planning are thinking about planning um expand to include places outside the Euro-American world um and the book indeed suggests that this example of Beirut can be taken as a much broader example of um how things might work in many parts of the global south um but isn't it equally relevant for thinking about the north um in in two ways that come immediately to mind um so this is the war yet to come but it's also about a book about the yet to come and the yet to come might be configured in one cases war in other cases other kinds of calamity or or even normalcy of course since October of 2001 since the US launched its war on terror the US has been continuing to act war um not a war to come but a war that has become a permanent condition of US society of the form of its cities and um its political life as you know Afghanistan is now the longest war in US history um the US is currently involved in bombing or other kinds of directly or supporting other kinds of um warfare at least half a dozen countries in the Middle East and broader military operations in 75 countries around the world that is up to 400 every 10 countries in the world so um the way in which uh war and the the kinds of futures that a permanent state of not war not peace that Hipper is writing about in Beirut shape our political condition seems to me not just a lesson for how do we study the global south but it seems a lesson for how we think about our uh condition when we are based in the north and of course let me end by reminding us that we live with another future in the present another yet to come um that we still haven't developed the proper tools perhaps for thinking about um uh politically and that would be the the yet to come that is not just an imagined future of climate change and ecological collapse um one that is of course with us in the present but is configured as a yet to come configures our present in terms of the yet to come uh here and equally of course in Beirut we're now famous that the third our present that great arc of land passing up the coast of of the eastern Mediterranean and across to Iraq the third our present is finished the rivers will dry up on our present political course um the uh and and in many respects that is already happening if you look at what is happening to agriculture in Iraq or in Syria the drought that is the worst that is currently still ongoing that is the worst drought in 800 years and is a major cause of the war in Syria in terms of the issue of Syrian refugees in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon um I think in this book one can find as I say in this concept of the yet to come ways to think about the very impoverished terms we've got for making sense of um how the future uh uh governs or fails to govern our lives um it's depressing but thanks to this book hope remains comments and I must say this is really an incredible group that's gathered to celebrate your incredibly fantastic book which you already have been I hope intrigued enough to know how detailed it is how each one of us is going to look at it differently talk about it differently um and I wonder why I was invited to speak and unfortunately I have been honored that I just met but this afternoon or this evening so you know I said yes because it's not very far away from my home to come up to Columbia to speak I very seldom am here and I thought maybe this is a good opportunity um but you cannot imagine the pleasure and I will say pleasure I had in reading this book over the weekend it is a detailed book it is um it is so far above what anybody can summarize that it requires you to read it now why am I here is it because I have friends from Bayroom, Miriam Saeed is here, he's a good friend um yes Amal is from Bayroom I think we colleagues are from you also sent readings from Marwa Ongando from the University of Iowa he's a good colleague and friend maybe maybe somehow he came across why am I here because you've written a story about the peripheries of Beirut and how they had been transformed into sectarian frontiers of a warrior to come I think you've heard enough about that and she asked in a contested city such as Beirut how is land use zoning building permits laissez-faire real estate markets used as tools of this war yet to come and what I want to emphasize is all of you who are studying planning don't go away thinking planning is the dark side of planning it has a dark side but it's the tools of planning that are misused by various groups that your book absolutely covers and perhaps you are perplexed by the interviews of professional planners because she says what happened to the normative view of planners as agents of a better future promoters of a city that is spatially ordered being socially responsible experts on the side of social justice equity progress how do they get sideline and their tools which are for a future yet to come to be a better future get misused by different groups and these questions she answers in the context of three different periods of time and development planning of the 1950s and 60s then planning as development in the 60s and 70s and then a shift again to the 1990s to planning without development so development is part of this book but only part of the book so on a quest for trying to figure out why I was provided and because I too have been asking what happened to the social responsibility of architects and planners since the 1970s and we might think of 50 years ago here in Ustins, Avery Hall and the Jim Crow Muscoe that rye out across the campus and alternative architecture groups such as Home Front and Arch that were set up and in general why is the gap between physical planning and architecture remains so large since the 1970s which it has so I've been struggling this afternoon in particular with editing and essay entitled planning the rumination of the Gaza Strip and I don't have the language skills that Eva has and I don't have the opportunity to be on the ground to interview people as you have so fantastically done so I'm struggling with this Israel and the international community have never had plans for the Gaza Strip to keep the land and the people in a perpetually precarious situation seems to be the plan but without a planning framework there's been little to direct foreign humanitarian aid toward anything but short term projects there are no land use plans to guide the physical development of Gaza cities and refugee camps hence most of its constructions are informal with inadequate infrastructure and service for business and how can any planning system turn the temporarious guide let alone control the development of its towns and cities or protect its agricultural lands and fishing areas so maybe that is somehow in the air that you knew about but it hasn't been printed yet I'm still working on it I'm still trying to struggle through how planning as tools have been misused and kept Gaza Strip in a state of ruination but I have also written a series of essays on New Orleans and the Katrina effect and one of them in particular is titled The Ruination of New Orleans and the Planners of Injustice and my questions there are did the recovery plans increase the ruination of the citizens of New Orleans did the very process of the city planning of citizens participation of the reliance on outside planning consultants who could dream up big plans and bypass the local politics and pragmatic approach of the city planning commission did all of these accumulate to a prolonged period of recovery planning that resulted in a slow motion release of recovery funds for the neighborhoods that were most in need with one of the largest catastrophes to hit an American city to the scale of the disaster impede the development of rational schemes by planners who by nature are pro-growth the managers of physical development rather than experts who could bring New Orleans back from ruination the federal authorities wanted to know where and on what recovery aid would be spent they required a recovery plan in place before any funds could be released in spite of the fact that the federal aid their own contract to private corporations for debris removal for temporary housing for security and delivery would make it impossible for them to come up with a plan of how and where they were spending the money so my argument goes that the very active recovery with a slow almost stalled process of planning was the cause of a continued ruination of New Orleans well I have also looked a little bit into development planning in the 1950s and I think this is where actually the invitation comes from but I'll be very brief about this this is a little work on this it's well known the containment theory the domino effect of communism in the 1950s and so doxialis and his adventures to Baghdad as I call them in the mid 1950s has been written about quite a bit but my take is a little bit different than that I ask two different questions and that is why was the pledging architectural office of doxialis invited to develop a national housing plan for Iraq in 1955 and secondly why did the Ford Foundation fund doxialis to the grand accumulation of five million dollars going back to those times not our times of five million dollars in 1955 and a few years later invite him to volunteer a master program for the entire city of Baghdad I don't know what I was trying to say but anyway why did they give him so much money the answer to these questions as I elaborate in my talk on doxialis has everything to do with a need for information and as the world well knows information about the Middle East in Washington DC in the 50s and 60s at the height of the Cold War and up to and including the 21st century opens over a gaping void and this no doubt in my mind the Constantinos doxialis and the Athens center of Cystics was intent on databases in the world and I will leave that point to a later elaboration but information collecting seemed to be why the U.S. government the Ford Foundation were very happy to have the place around the Middle East gathering as much information on serifos, on informal settlements on anything that might possibly tip toward the Cold War but I want to close as everybody else has on focusing on the title the war yet to come focusing on the phrase the city yet to come developed by Abdul Malik Simone as Eba has acknowledged this is a hopeful concept of entrepreneurial activity of self-help and sharing into relationships among people of local involvement and resistance in African and Indonesian cities Eba takes this and inverts this hopeful concept into the dystopian development for the war yet to come in the planning of Beirut for riverities and in contested cities perhaps the dystopian plans are what we've heard called the dystopian planning the dystopian plans for wars yet to come are dominant factors overriding any hope of resistance but maybe maybe there's another way to theorize what is to come and what Abdul Malik Simone calls the capacity to deliver the same melody in a different way he reports on the lives of many in Africa and Indonesia city and he notes the potential for the precariousness to refuse discrimination imposed on their lives by the capitalist market economy Simone writes that endurance for large numbers of urban residents is predicated on indifference to an act of detachment from prevailing modes of urban power he explains that the property regime here's a long quote from is replete with scams and shortcuts and cross-cutting measures broken agreements, messed up contracts plans gone wrong bikes within and between municipal and state ministries architecture firms, consultancies contractors, property developers construction firms, infrastructure regime planners, local and prospective residents all of them are players in your fantastic book so in these voids and these interstitges of power between the specifics experimentation of the informal thrives on this indifference instead of seeing this insufficiency as subtraction exclusion or segregation Simone suggests that we envision urban space and infrastructure in a different manner rather than seeing them as connectors and communicators he suggests to keep things out of any analytical connection and think the potential of the marginal, the useless and the anachronistic in new ways and consequently precarity holds doom, yes, the dark side the misuse of public planning but also thank you I wrote a lot of this I have to know where to start but I thought I'd start also quite personally with this especially lately or let's say in a couple of years I was born in February but I didn't be rough there yet whenever I go I realize if one understands this moment we are in and I think about there is a feeling when one is being both incredibly alive and possibly dead or something but it's very hard to tangled in the realities of every moment it's been a very powerful feeling that almost doesn't allow distancing or consuming out to end up and I think there's an incredible tension in the book where you're as Christine said super detailed and so you think it's impossible to theorize anything I have a colleague architect who wrote a book by an athlete called Local Heroes with a complete resistance to getting slightly off of the ground it never wants to get off of the ground and yet you managed to get off the ground constantly moving in and out and I think some of the concepts that Tim mentioned were frontier planning and under study and I thought eternal present or something rather than the future and the past are actually the beginning of concepts that we can turn back how we turn towards the north or towards any city or towards any place and so I want to start there which is I think it was mentioned obviously it's not about going to the local south and learning about it but rather turning things on their heads and finding in these places there seemingly a mess but a tool actually to understand and theorize and gain distance in the city we are in this moment because time plays a a great part I think in the book and I think that you don't think about those aspects of planning so maybe I will start here by giving you a chance to respond to some of the comments and readings of Gogan in that sense Thank you so much everyone was thank you for being so generous we appreciate it for the warrior to come warrior to come is actually although it's very much the whole theorization of that book tried to de-center urban theory and planning theory which is what I teach from the global north and from what we learn and the things that actually most of these theories talk about what ought to happen but not actually what happens on the ground and so when I started to get it interesting and having lived this life I was interested on how do we know what's happening on the ground so we can theorize that we need to plan for the future or forecast this or use this data or this map but how do we actually know what's going on the ground and there are very few studies of how planning is actually actually functions how do people eventually take these planning tools and what do they do with them in their everyday life and so this is where I started an ethnography of spatial practice which is I started seeing these maps and trying to analyze them and I started following their production talking to residents who live in these neighborhoods but then going up to the officials and trying to see how they're thinking about it and then I started learning a lot about what is actually planning on the ground and it's not one thing, it's not one theory the way we teach it, it's multiple tools that people are trying to make sense of how they live in their everyday life as people but also the officials or the planners themselves how they can act within the constraints or within such a political geography so this is a relationship where it's trying to understand how planning actually functions on the ground as one example of trying to talk back or speak back or speak with the planning theory and like how scholars theorize about planning but also this is one thing that's on the ground but then also rethinking about the temporalities of planning so for the longest time we've been thinking about as I said this future that's always like that somehow guys everything we study we teach that it's going to definitely be bright it's going to always be good but I mean if you live in a place if you take this case to the extreme which is an extreme of war environments if people live under displacement under the fear of war then you can actually see how the future is not always like what we study in charts and diagrams and linear progress time that is actually mostly for the dominant groups but it's more cyclical time for the others gender for the people for the refugees for the climate refugees for the war refugees so it's this incentive of trying to bring the two perspectives together where I wrote this book you know one thing that's interesting and I think Tim you sort of highlighted that is that it's a different mode if there's no hope it doesn't mean that it's dark somehow and you see that in almost conversations people have they're just enjoying each other's company and it's not about just living in the present it's something different and I wanted to hear maybe more about because it is beyond light and dark right what is this other mode of planning or of meaning that refugees necessarily project you know better somehow so as Pippa was just mentioning one of the distinctive things about the book and you mentioned this in your comments at the beginning as well is this ethnography of the planners themselves as they are embedded in this world that they are planning and I think that's part of the reason we don't get just a sense of despair because they are actually people who come across in the book as people who believe in what they do and even if they develop a certain very specific sense of what under these circumstances planning can be what you refer to as planning without development but with this income they are these interest in planning, planners of course were the great social engineers but I want to be here that you know that sense of what a social engineer can be in a situation that would to an outsider see one of such despair is I think because they do work with it in your account from the negative point of view they're doing this thing called planning without development but they are actually working with a certain theory if you like of the kind of society Beirut or these particular suburbs of Beirut could be the planner or social theorist seem to me and what kind of social theorist the planner himself or herself becomes in these kinds of circumstances that is just one example to me of how this is not either despair on the one hand or pain on the other but people trying to make a world of work even under these conditions yeah I mean I totally this is also my tip because when I talk about I mean if people are totally segregated they are just in the war and they separate each other actually the fact that there is a lace work and by doing it actually provides these opportunities for continuous engagement despite sometimes the fight and so this is where also while it's dark it provides spaces for engagement yeah lace work was a way to actually talk from one of your plans so that was your English translation for a particular term that he was using again the planner or social theorist and they all use the same tools right I mean it doesn't matter whether you're his dad or your future roommate or you're all using kind of you know they all use the master plan the real estate I mean the thing is about this actor is that they are the government they are the entities that people go and vote for in the box so they constitute the state but they also operate all these things outside the state and so sometimes depending on what they need they either mobilize their ability to be outside the state and sometimes they mobilize what's outside the state and this is actually what challenges some of the urban and planning theory which usually assumes an easy binary between a private actor or like what is private and what's public and it's usually like clear this is public this is private but these actors challenge this binary and then becomes it becomes a question of how to understand geographic production when these actors are both the state and outside the state they are established together the sovereignty of the state i.e. like the formal president army but at the same time they are the paramilitary groups when wars get full we are full so they are both and what does that mean for geographic production but yes they all use the real estate they all use zoning, building permits and they're not always fighting because if you know the politics of Lebanon these alliances are always shifting some of these people are on this side together then they like split and they're on the other side sometimes they're cooperating on these zones and sometimes they're like making different other plans and fighting with each other so it keeps changing and this is where I question this sectarianism or this especially journalistic accounts and this simple or simplistic let's say portrayal of the Middle East as like sectarian and this is a sectarian neighborhood and rethinking from an ethnographic point of view from thinking about how things are done on the ground how actually real estate transactions are produced how they are produced temporally and spatially for example some of the real estate transactions that I learned about in 2004 were considered normal real estate transactions like developer bought a land from a landowner and they just built housing shared some apartments to pay back some of the cost of the land these same real estate transactions when I was doing fieldwork in 2011 they were cast in a completely different light as like Islamization of the Middle East as like against the minorities these same land transactions so the attempt of this book also to debunk these kind of sectarian assumptions and to see how it's produced over time and the hope isn't that it will change I want to maintain the hope I want to add to what was just said about if you consider what is happening within the broader planning literature if we call it a movement of theorizing from the perspective of global south it doesn't mean first of all I believe that this audience would know that we are not talking about global south as a geographic so the messiness of planning exist in the US the south of Chicago all those communities that are so coordinated if you call them global south of the world different places of the world then how could planning theories and theorization reflect that messiness that exist in south Chicago exist in New Orleans as you were saying exist in Lebanon right but in the problem is that the canon of the scholarship the literature the planning theories doesn't want to deal with the messiness of planning that in the way is not that clean cut whatever it doesn't fit into that clean cut then it's almost labeled as not being planning being developers work but where do you decide that this is developers work this is planners work and then gasses activists that are building the houses or occupying land or making life shaping the communities that is in planning or in the auto planning so there is really time now that is the movement that if you call it global south urbanism and theorizing from that perspective is to acknowledge and dark side doesn't mean that auto planning is bad or all of that but acknowledging the messiness of it which is much more easier and visible to see in the global south and that doesn't mean only Lebanon it also means south of Chicago if you visit you see how people are themselves patching and this kind of creative energy that makes the planning happen so I think that is the contribution of the book for me was that the ethnography of the profession so if Simone focused on how people on everyday basis are making the space what he was worthy that she didn't only focus on everyday actors but she brought those professional planners who don't themselves want to accept that they are part of this mess brought them into the conversation that how it goes back and forth between them and it's very hard to make those lines and say this is professional planning that is developers this is activists political activists and they all lead into each other so maybe it is time for us in terms of planning theorization to recognize the messiness of planning and you know the canon to towards that so that's what and I think it's really helpful but I think you also do help with actually bridging the gap that Christine you were mentioning between architecture and planning because it's the same thing with architecture I mean I kept feeling reading these same parallels and through the messiness of kind of engaging in the reality of the day to practice this you know you realize it that gap is one that was created in academia and not so much in practice I don't know Christine how do you feel about the gap today well I does this work I think the gap still exists but I probably air on the side of speaking with architects rather than with planners so I'm not sure that I am a good representative of saying where planning is at this point however the tools of zoning New York City we don't have to go far away to Chicago I mean we should know all these much as I'd like to but we can just go to the south Bronx and look at Saint Jerome Avenue which the city has been fighting to upzone and it's urban design it's more architecture to build higher and better and taller buildings at higher runs and so forth yes they do have to have zoning be agreed by the city planning commission but there's also the community that's very very involved and we could go over to Williamsport and look at what's happened with the Gold Coast of high rise that Bloomberg pushed through and yes inclusionary zoning is part of it I don't think of that as planning so much as I think it's a physical development whether real estate people are handling whether architects are pushing for whether it happens to be in the purview of the city planning department and so on it's what is happening to the physical development of cities and I think you know some of the fantastic stories that are in your book are for instance we saw the photograph of the Maronite church with a bound out building that's next to it that church can manipulate all the tools without thinking about what's planning and what's architecture and so forth but manipulate those tools so it can keep that building empty so that the enemy the other cannot buy it and even change the code so that you could only sell to a Maronite even though the Maronites have the parishioners have moved away from the district the book is filled with these details about how zoning is manipulated by one group or another to get their end which is to make their territory ready for war and war against the other and I would say we just don't use the same vocabulary when we come to think about physical development of our cities in the north and the global north but they certainly exist and that's what I think is really useful in your book it is not just about Beirut it really is about the way these tools are being manipulated for very competitive reasons and it helps to think about there's nothing short of a conflict over land use that's what development is one group wants it the other doesn't one group is going to be pushed out the other isn't and we all have to take part of it to manipulate the tools that's what you have sort of reflected in our photography here what I think is really quite a riff the discussion is that neither of a planning or an architect but the sensibilities of both and the working is an ethnography it's the classic ethnography of the street corner and the balcony and the real estate transaction at the local level it's also zoning at the higher level the planning offices and the maps and ethnography is seldom that sort of multi level and interesting and I think you take a beautiful distance and you bring the richness of that detail of those human experiences on the street corners at the shop or looking out the window and then you also quote the architects and the planners and this is what ethnography can be and it's very best and I think that's an amazing thing to accomplish thank you thank you questions maybe we open it up for a couple of questions from the audience there's a hand political scientist and don't know much about architecture except the New York real estate thank you but I have a lot of friends who are living down there with the Israeli army I just didn't hear any words here about politics but what's the story now with did you have any beyond the influence of the political situation as Balan, the Maronites and Iran this is all very wonderful on the level of planning and intellectual or whatever also you guys never mentioned the word money it's unbelievable but we need to be at a level there's a lot of money and I wish I had the answer for your question I mean they themselves whatever word they're doing I mean definitely these are not only local words these are very connected to what's going on but even themselves like the war lords turned politicians don't really understand sometimes they do, sometimes they're not but they're always in the smoke it doesn't matter whether this war is going to come or not that's not what it is it's actually this horizon of war and its inspiration what is the war by the way I mean I need to be stupid but I came here to say for the war yet to come what is the war for I know I walked enough so I can totally relate to that communication both for war and for dashes and I can see that in different vegetarian cities however I assume that the situation of my youth is unique because the different political and religious powers have great political powers and economic power so I have three questions one sorry sorry it seems in your subtext that you assume it is a really good planning a really active active planning of the different rules for their own community like developing their own neighborhoods is it right is it like a different party party leaders working to develop this and my second question is regarding the like coming from the Palestinian Israeli reality I was wondering about the possibility of mass displacement in our modern times we see it happening in different parts of the world and especially in Beirut is it like possible in this modern era you're asking about whether mass displacement is possible changing like the reality of moving masses from one place to another maybe it's not possible so I'd like to take you back to that hopeful moment which you ended with I know that you worked with in Beirut a number of groups and movements thinking of groups like Public Works and Legal Agenda and folks at AUB who are very much engaged with issues of master planning with issues of creating a discourse around public space and public good how do you see what is tell us more about the hope and how you see your research connecting to some of these movements on the ground so actually the hope is mostly rather than thinking of using urban planning as this idea to forecast the future that actually no one can control or know what has been happening in the ground and that is something that I'm part of is using urban planning tools as a medium of negotiation, of engagement to imagine different horizons so it's not like that you will do this you forecast something and then you put it in a plan and that's what's going to happen in the future but then can you use discussions over public spaces can you bring together community engagement to open up a horizon across sectarian divides with locals and officials and civil groups and urban professionals to imagine a different kind of space so rather than just using these tools to imagine that you can actually shape the future which is probably yes, probably no actually use it as a way in which to open conversations and create a different kind of dialogue than this topic for closed future or bleak future and try to think of a different kind of engagement using architecture and urban planning as tools for that engagement and this is the project I'm part of, definitely with all these groups You want to sing something about what your next research is? Yeah, my next project is working on in general conflict, post-conflict urban research but partnering with AB partnering with Public Works partnering with other civil groups to try to think about how to expand this notion of how to think of planning, first how to do research in conflict this is actually a big question like how do you do ethnographic field on the ground work in cities of conflict we don't really have very good answers for that in my book I try to engage in one way and I'm sure other people are trying to do so to extend this kind of work with people who are doing work on the group to start an urban lab at AB that bring people from all sorts of in collaboration with Columbia to bring all sorts of people who work on the urban question not only planners and designers but also activists residents et cetera to think about a different kind of horizon than the audience and to engage the region too So this is the protagonist mainly the sectarian group I wonder whether refugee religious groups are also a protagonist either established ones like Underbock the UN refugee organization for parliament and their influence on the urban planning if any or more recent statements by the senior population either as a protagonist themselves groups of that population or as an excuse used by others as part of future in the war The current project that's part of the project I was talking about in response to Claire is also related one layer that I'm exploring is the layer of the refugees that are currently living especially in the peripheries that I discuss and there are many things I can say in response to this question but I want to highlight two things there's this shift in the discussion from Sunni Shi'a to Syrian Lebanese that is happening in which many of the people think right now of the Syrian refugee as the new threat on the local level so this is one way and at the same time there are many institutions that are involved in supporting the everyday life of the Syrian refugees so this is both happening first it changes the kind of debate vis-a-vis who is the other with the arrival of the Syrian refugees at the same time the same time engagement of mosques and UNHCR and all sorts of agents in trying to make the life of the refugees especially in poor peripheries manageable the other thing is actually how in the most recent fights there's always episodes of sectarian violence going on for example in Dahit Aramun not very long time ago like 6-7 months ago there was another violence and another episode of violence and it was a little bit divided like the refugees had to choose one side in order to continue securing some kind of like water and access to certain kind of food and stuff so they ended up being plugged into that violence between what was happening between the groups affiliated to Hezbollah and group affiliated to the Syrian future and there are also other stories but these are two examples so I this might be also a silly question but I see that sect and sectarian mapping is a big part of your book but I was also wondering about class education and I'm from Lebanon I was just a group of 3-1 so what struck me the most is how probably around the one middle east under the liberal age it's like these construction of space is really the combat class and these kinds of private projects that are kind of pushing even though the boundaries so I was interested in that I don't know the idea of class education process and then also not only refugees but also minor communities in Lebanon which we're seeing more and more of African communities, Sri Lankan communities but you know people who are coming to engage in either domestic or other forms of labor or not Palestinian or Syrian or Arab so those two things Let's take one last question and then please speak for Sigran for wine Yes More questions around wine Thank you so much I just want to ask one question about you are writing about the frontier like you are calling it the frontier what's the relationship between this frontier and what's over there like when I was doing my children a long time ago in the automatic area everybody was talking about the compensations were given to these displaced people and they would go to the dahi and that's what you are doing that when they go to the dahi this is what's happening like it's a jungle of cement and when they were receiving their compensations people who were basically rebuilding the downtown bay and all of its groups they wanted just to get rid of those unwanted people coming to the frontier and they didn't care and when I interviewed them they were saying oh they could go back to the orange no one could go to the orange they could go to the dahi so what's the connection between the frontier and the center there and another comment it's about the global south and is it possible to do that I'm really not sure if that's even possible when I was interviewing the airplane planner one airplane planner in Beirut I walked into his office and there was a huge map of Boston and he is rebuilding downtown Beirut and because with this global elite the cosmopolitan elite in all Arab cities they are being educated in the west here at MIT in those places and they go back like planning in Beirut you aren't bringing the global north to the heart of the global south or your heart from the global south it's really a predicament it's really nice to have the south there for the global south but the global north is making the global south now which is I hope they will answer I'm going to try to answer part of the assist question and your question so definitely I'm doing my research or I'm trying to understand Beirut from its peripheries and it's definitely related to the gentrification that happened from the solidare the post war reconstruction project where many were displaced and your work is the best account we have about that the people who were squatting in downtown Beirut and then they were displaced or they had to be evicted during the post war reconstruction project many of them eventually moved to at Dahid and then at the same time even the late prime minister at the time he also had a big vision of Beirut to be like Dubai or to be more than Dubai so many of the Sunni families were being gentrified they couldn't afford even the areas around downtown so Dahid Aramun for those of you from Lebanon would know it's called the new Tariq Shedid which is the new Sunni low income area and so here basically what the research I'm doing is about mostly low middle and low income people fighting over space the rich people are not part of this this is where the frontiers are the frontiers of people who are territorial domination by these religious groups of mostly people who cannot afford to live in the city where the apartment is in the half million and more when I first started doing research in Sahra Shwayfid the apartment was $18,000 and most of the developers that started developing at the time were subsidized in some way or another by Hezbollah and Hareket Amal and so it didn't create they didn't give housing to the people so that's not charity that I'm talking about here but I'm talking about the way in which these actors were subsidized to provide low cost housing and then you can keep seeing new phases of displacement with every episode of violence these people have to pack and live and they are actually mostly the middle and low income people so these are the populations that are being affected and it's very much related to the layers and layers of gentrification that have been happening in Beirut for a long time starting with Solidarity itself and then I said yes most of the planners I was interviewing started like what are you doing here why are you studying this and then they would offer plans of other areas like Miss Yara which is this beautiful town with red tie roofs look at Miss Yara you can do concentric circles models here forget about dirty planning and Sahra Shwayfid why is a woman studying that so definitely they were pulling on me the whole Boston Montreal but to go back to Tim's point they're still trying to do something with what they have and try to imagine like so one of the planners for Sahra Shwayfid kept telling me how he was trying over and over time to separate the industries from the insentions by green belts but that the religious political organizations were not listening to him and then in the end he had to abort his vision for the area so despite everything they were trying to still bring their own professional ideals to these spaces and then that's how you end up with the base work thank you very much