ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the edited volume, presents its content, and positions it in relation to the literature. The edited volume was initiated in the wake of City Debates 2019, an international conference on contemporary urban issues that was organized by the editor in April 2019 at the American University of Beirut. It is intended as an invitation to re-conceptualize urban recovery by investigating how reconstruction and displacement intersect across volatile contexts in the Global South. It is an in-depth exploration of spatial, social, artistic, virtual, and political modalities that promote the process of urban recovery. It is at the same time an interrogation of the strategies, methods, and discourses surrounding recovery, reconstruction, and displacement. These explorations and interrogations are directed towards understanding how violence, conflict, war, and protracted displacement impact urban practices. Posing urban recovery as a complex process challenges existing conventions, tackles displacement as urban agency, and engages reconstruction as being equally occupied with the intangible.
The introductory chapter reviews different conceptualizations of urban recovery and identifies the main shifts that have taken place in the literature before positioning the book and its thematic tracks in relation to such trajectory. It recognizes that the definition of the term recovery varies widely in the literature as different scholars across the disciplines and through multiple lenses interpret it. The literature presents wide-ranging differences in definitions and conceptualizations of urban recovery. But, urban recovery has certainly evolved over the past two decades from a term synonymous with reconstruction to a process that is intertwined with development, reconstruction, and resilience, and then emerged as a holistic participatory process that is locally anchored and socially occupied.
The book aims to advance the discourse by asking how recovery is re-conceptualized in the age of mass and protracted displacement.
