Recovering Beirut: Urban Design and Post-War Reconstruction

by Samir Khalaf (Editor)

This volume is an outcome of a workshop on 'Lebanon's post-war reconstruction' held at MIT (Fall of 1991) to explore the role of urban planning in the rehabilitation of the country's devastated institutions and infrastructure. All chapters converge on an overriding prescriptive how to rearrange common and public spaces in order to create conditions germane for peaceful and creative coexistence among groups embittered by years of protracted hostility.
The original and path-breaking contributions will deepen and enrich our understanding of the impact of protracted strife on redrawing the country's social geography and in the redevelopment of its spatial pattern and infrastructure.
Topics covered - ranging from the nature of incipient territorial identities, housing crisis, reconstituting the Lebanese economy, to hopes and visions of architects and entrepreneurs - should also inform issues of post-war development in other fragmented plural societies.

297 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1993

About the author

Samir Khalaf is a Lebanese sociologist. He was born in Beirut on October 14, 1933. He has written extensively on the Arab world and on Lebanon in particular. The majority of themes in his work include sexuality in the Arab world, the Lebanese Civil War, Urbanization, and the role of the Protestant missionaries in the Levant. He is currently a professor of sociology at the American University of Beirut, and has also been a director of the Centre for Behavioural Research there since 1994.

Khalaf received his bachelor's degree in Economics from the American University of Beirut in 1955, and later his MA in Sociology in 1957. Furthermore, he obtained an MA in Economics and Sociology in 1959, and PhD in Sociology in 1964 from Princeton University.