ABSTRACT
This paper tries to bring the notion of the Right to the City (RTTC) to the Lebanese context by attempting to study it differently in Beirut. Beirut is usually represented through images of war, state absence, and urban dysfunctionality, where informal practices are always described as symptoms of the failure of the urban. Born in western contexts, the RTTC was introduced as a concept by Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) to present a radical new paradigm that challenged the emerging social and political structures of capitalism, in the aim of reaching the Urban where inhabitants manage the space themselves, the practice that is referred to as “Urban Auto-Gestion”. The RTTC has been recurrent in urban social movements trying to foster participation and agency of urban population. The paper presents Informal public transport practices in Beirut, as an experimentation to study the RTTC differently, that might be bringing us back to its very radical nature. If we examine well the political dimension of the concept, could we try to think of daily practices that happen informally as a way to claim the RTTC? And the question here arises: could this be leading to a different form of RTTC, and by that transform the way we study the RTTC? The paper is a result of a thesis research project in the aim of obtaining a master of urban studies. The practice in Beirut presents intriguing results concerning the opening up of new spatial boundaries for people but moreover in relation to the dimension of Auto-Gestion of the activity.