The Insecure City: Space, Power, and Mobility in Beirut by Kristin V. Monroe (review)

Traffic might be the single most important daily concern of people in Beirut. The city's congestion and accompanying discourses of chaos are practically inescapable and they are likely to infiltrate any conversation. On a typical day in the Hamra neighborhood of Beirut, for example, it could take 15 minutes to traverse by car a distance of 100 feet. It is common to find cars double parked, taxis slowing to pick up or drop off people at random, and private cars zig-zagging through traffic. Compounding the issue of traffic is the always impending political violence and the accompanying securitization of the city. This means that mobility is confronted with all types of barriers, including military checkpoints, barricades, and blocked roads. But how are traffic, mobility, and security experienced differently across class and status? How do Beirutis come to terms with these issues in their daily lives? These important questions, and more, are at the root of Kristin V. Monroe's book, The Insecure City, where she articulates some of these difficult and complex intersections with great ethnographic description and captures some of the class dimensions of mobility.

The book's strength lies in the way it unpacks and deconstructs prevailing discourses about space and mobility in Lebanon by engaging a variety of sources from United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) reports, to local researchers and NGOs, to the author's interlocutors. Monroe is indebted to Lefebvre's idea of the city as a site of encounter, and suggests that mobility is central to this encounter. She also relies on Aretxaga's argument of the "staying power of the state" that informs her analysis of the state's encounter with mobility in the city (142). Her main contribution rests with applying these theories to the context of Lebanon.

In Chapter 1, Monroe discusses the unplanned and informal development of Beirut's physical environment and the city's transportation infrastructure. Borrowing from Massey, she considers the city to be shaped through power geometries, the first being a kind of neoliberal urban development and the second being political sectarian conflict (21). These geometries of power are taken up in later chapters—especially in Chapter 3, where she unpacks political sectarian conflict, and Chapter 5, which deals with chaos in the city. Her historical discussion is rooted in interviews with architects and planners, and the ethnographic descriptions she provides, here and elsewhere, are nuanced and give a sense of being there, though at times brief. One learns of the rise and hegemony of the automobile, as well as about the importance and intimacy of the balcony as a social space. For some residents of Beirut, Monroe's observation of the balcony will lead to a nostalgic moment since many balconies have now been transformed into closed spaces with the advent of glass curtains.

Chapter 2 brings the reader to the present and sets the context of the postwar period of reconstruction, where Monroe then relates how people have interpreted urban space in light of postwar changes. In the process, she produces a refreshingly complex discussion of the roots of Lebanon's war and how it was fought. She complicates the old trope of sectarian fighting to describe conflict in Lebanon, explaining that the war was not between communities "but between militias and armies" (42). The chapter continues with descriptions of how the war years were lived during the worst fighting. Monroe also captures some moments of how people remember past "ghosts," as one of her interlocutors calls them, through their traversals in the city. The discussion of reconstruction was useful, though it could have benefited from a focus on other parts of the city besides the downtown area, on which most literature on Beirut often concentrates.

While the war cannot be reduced to a sectarian conflict, political sectarianism—a sectarianism that governs how the state and the political class function—plays a key role in socio-political processes in Lebanon. In Chapter 3, Monroe...