Popular Housing and Urban Land Tenure in the Middle East

Abstract

Abstract This book aims at describing two major transformations that have been observed in the Middle East during the last thirty years: first, the accelerated changes in public policies toward neighborhoods characterized as irregular or illegal, and second, the claim that this form of housing in urban areas constitutes the ordinary condition. The precise description of interactions and routines sheds light on the way in which ‘bits and pieces’ of cities, or neighborhoods are reproduced and transform. In the context of the daily practices and legal documents negotiated by inhabitants, we observe a crossing of institutionalized borders, which are in turn blurred and remade with the cooperation of state agents. The first part deals with the study of ordinary forms and methods used to build and compose buildings in the shape of streets and neighborhoods. The second part looks at the normative conditions of daily practices related to land and tenure mobilization and thus of housing, transactions, and conflict resolution in the urban context, thereby offering a new reading of government action in and on cities through case studies. We seek to describe grammars of normativity, whether legal, when practices articulate formal rules and their local enforcement, or conventional, when negotiation and compromise allow neighbors to adjust and adapt to one another. This collective work, based on a praxeological method, aims at taking into consideration the forms of urban production, the practices which underlie them, and the norms which constrain them, in universal terms that can be understood well beyond the borders of the Middle East.

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