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This paper reflects on the application and adaptation of the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) approach in Beirut, Lebanon, in post-disaster conditions. Adopted by UNESCO in 2005, the HUL approach marked a shift in addressing urban heritage, echoing an evolution in theory. However, contextualizing the HUL approach to address distinct local, geographic, and cultural conditions and reframing its scale and scope of operation remains a challenge. This paper uses a case-study-based methodology as it reflects on the application of the Historic Urban Landscape approach in the post-blast context of Beirut. Commissioned by UNESCO, an interdisciplinary team at the Beirut Urban Lab used the HUL approach to identify modern heritage in Beirut after adapting it to the post-colonial and Mediterranean context of the city. This study contextualized modern heritage definitions, proposed a periodization of modern built and landscape heritage, and designated modern heritage based on its formal/spatial, urban/landscape, socio-cultural, and environmental values. This paper argues that the study contributes to the advancement of the Historic Urban Landscape approach by operationalizing it into an applicable heritage framework, employing a transdisciplinary model that involves local people at the institutional and community levels, and serving as a basis for generating conservation strategies responsive to place and culture. This study also pioneered a comprehensive, integrative, and transdisciplinary reading of modern heritage in Beirut, breaking the professional silos between disciplines and bringing landscape into the identification of heritage in Lebanon.

This paper explores urban recovery as a participatory bottom-up process that highlights the importance and social significance of spaces of shared memories in reconstituting the built as well as the sociocultural fabrics of a place. It examines the multiple modes of engaging local communities in the process of recovering and rehabilitating shared public spaces, including organizing workshops to identify a space of common social significance, co-designing and co-producing a spatial intervention, and maintaining the intervention over the long term. The paper focuses on Karantina, a neighborhood in Beirut that became the site of post-disaster recovery in the aftermath of the Beirut Port blast in August 2020, and the spatial intervention that the urban recovery team at the Beirut Urban Lab implemented in the sub-neighborhood of Al-Khodor. In doing so, the paper contributes experiences from recent work on participatory modes of engaging the local community groups in Al-Khodor. It highlights the importance of community participation in researching, designing, implementing, and maintaining spatial interventions in the near absence of an active government in a country such as Lebanon.

Abstract This article investigates the impact of the Syrian displacement on the economic and urban transformation in Ouzaii, a major informal settlement in the southern suburbs of Beirut that is characterised by a complex socio-political structure. It explores the potential of “entrepreneurial systems” that emerge when Syrian refugees become part of the host community and its economy. These systems include Syrian refugees as either part of the lower labour force, business owners, or entrepreneurs. The article locates these entrepreneurial systems within the spatial networks and investigates how Syrian refugees create opportunities for themselves and the host community given the specificity of the market that is subject to legal setups and mediated by the political party of Hezbollah. It uses the construct of “mixed embeddedness” by Kloosterman et al. and the notion of “quiet encroachment” by Asef Bayat to understand how the Syrian refugees were able to infiltrate into Ouzaii’s economy and become part of the “entrepreneurial systems” that stimulate the economic cycle and revitalise the urban space.

After the cease-fire, I visited villages and towns in South Lebanon that suffered terrible destruction during the July 2006 war and that were facing the challenge of reconstruction. When I arrived to the border town of Bint Jbeil, I saw bulldozers demolishing beautiful, old stone structures. I stopped to inquire why; who authorized such actions and on what bases? With these questions, I approached the workers, the Council of the South (the government agency in charge of damage assessment and rubble removal), local residents, and the municipality. The answers varied: the structures were too damaged to save, we needed to widen the street, to build a better building, to erase the scars of war, to get full compensation, and so forth.

Among his many studies of Mawsilī metal work, D.S. Rice focuses on a group of five objects produced by a single workshop, that of Ahmad al-Dhakī al-Mawsilī, between 620/1223 and 640/1242. Among them the Cleveland ewer (620/1223) and the Louvre basin made for the Ayyūbid Sultān al-‘Ādil II (636–8/1238–40). One object, only briefly described by Rice and not studied in detail, for Rice did not have access to it at that time, is the ewer of Ibn Jaldak, the subject of this article. The aim of this paper is to revisit the question of origin of the Mawsilī School of metalwork through the close examination of this single object—the Maxsilī ewer now in the Metropolitan Museum (no. 91.1.586) made by Ibn Jaldak in 623/1226. The ewer represents a turning point in the development of Mawsilī metalwork and a key piece to the puzzle. By tracing its origin the article attempts to shed light on the larger question of the origin of the Mawsilī School and its metalworkers.