ABSTRACT
Before the Lebanese civil war, Beirut was Lebanon's center of banking, commerce, and tourism whose laissez-faire economy encouraged the florescence of educational and cultural institutions, a thriving publishing industry, and an effervescent nightlife. The insecurity and violence experienced by families did not abate with the end of the war in 1991, despite the determination of the postwar "government of national unity" to heal the wounds and return Lebanon to normality. War-displaced residents of the center and surrounding neighborhoods were offered modest compensation packages, administered through a government program, to relocate. The war-displaced of Beirut are similarly without a legitimate place in the existing postwar hierarchies but live "betwixt and between". The implementation of urban planning laws and regulations to "upgrade" and "order" space was high on the developers and investors' agenda. This implied making space available to new users while depriving marginal and powerless groups, specifically the war-displaced, of their urban foothold.
