Archives de l’auteur : Eric Verdeil

Linking Economic Change With Social Justice In Mar Mikhael

In 2016, I was honored to be the tutor of this very interesting report written by four brilliant Sciences Po students from the Masters’ Program Governing the Large Metropolis, for the account of Gaia Heritage (thanks to George Zouein) and the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs. But I never referenced it on this blog. The recent blast that delolished many buildings, businesses and places of life in the neighborhood makes it a useful resource that deserves attention.

Here is the full reference and a link to download the report:

Gerbal Lisa, Nicolas Hrycaj, Camille Lavoipierre et Marissa Potasiak. Linking Economic Change With Social Justice In Mar Mikhael, Beirut, Gaia Heritage/Sciences Po/Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs, 2016.
 
Summary:

According to multiple measures, Mar Mikhael is one of Beirut’s most distinctive neighborhoods, defined by a unique assortment of art galleries and car repair shops, a network of brightly-painted staircases and a long-abandoned train station, and a diverse mix of older, long-time residents and young newcomers. Yet on the issue of gentrification the case of Mar Mikhael is more familiar, as the neighborhood has recently seen a rapid influx of new bars and restaurants, as well as real estate investors and high-rise apartments, all of which have contributed to a neighborhood where:

▸ Housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable.

▸ Long-time residents face a risk of displacement.

▸ High-rise apartments detract from the neighborhood’s unique human scale.

▸ Shared spaces such as sidewalks, streets, and the stairs are increasingly overtaken by private actors.

▸ Creative industries remain economically vulnerable and socially disconnected.

▸ Residents have little influence over public policy impacting their neighborhood.

By analyzing these recent developments (all of which could be worsened by the implementation of the 2014 New Rent Law) in light of the more long-term, structural processes of change at work in the city – including the development of a powerful growth coalition in the mid- 1990s – this report argues that Mar Mikhael is just the most recent example of a cycle of urban change and gentrification that is transforming the city of Beirut, often in a manner that reduces housing affordability, dramatically alters the built environment, and weakens long-established communities. Therefore, this report offers numerous strategies and solutions for the alleviation of these problems in Mar Mikhael, inspired by the notions such as the right to the city, fieldwork conducted in the neighborhood, and case studies from other rapidly-gentrifying and creative cities around the world. Together these strategies offer a vision for a socially just Mar Mikhael, creating a neighborhood where:

▸ Long-time residents can afford to remain in their homes.

▸ New sources of affordable housing are accessible to both current and future residents.

▸ All residents have access to shared spaces.

▸ Formerly restricted public spaces receive a new life as parks, affordable housing, or cultural centers.

▸ The “human scale” of the built environment is retained.

▸ Arts, crafts, and design industries (ACDs) are economically resilient, and actively invested in the community.

▸ Residents can effectively work together to direct the future of their neighborhood.

Thus the strategies presented in this report center around five main issues. First, on the issue of making Mar Mikhael more affordable, these strategies include:

▸ Building upon the precedents set in Tripoli for state-led affordable housing projects, and Tyre for community-led projects.

▸ Engaging private and philanthropic actors to create non-profit affordable housing developers in Mar Mikhael.

▸ Using Waqf land as a site of affordable housing in the neighborhood. Second, to increase access to Mar Mikhael’s shared, public spaces, including the sidewalks, streets, stairs, and the train station, this report recommends:

▸ Conducting a GIS survey and walkability audit to encourage city officials to enforce existing sidewalk regulations.

▸ Using legal claims under Law 220/2000 as a means of retrofitting the neighborhood’s existing sidewalks.

▸ Closing Armenia Street to cars every Sunday morning to allow residents to walk, bike, and rollerblade freely.

▸ Listing Mar Mikhael’s still-unprotected stairs as worthy of preservation.

▸ Advocating for plans that would permanently transform the Mar Mikhael train station, while implementing short-term uses such as an open-air cinema or weekend market.

Third, on the issue of maintaining Mar Mikhael’s human scale, this report recommends:

▸ Designating Mar Mikhael as a protected zone, with regulations to limit building height.

▸ Creating incentives such as transferable development rights to encourage developers to preserve the neighborhood’s scale. Fourth, to foster a neighborhood-based creative economy in Mar Mikhael, some strategies include:

▸ Raising the awareness of the arts, crafts, and design industries (ACDs) regarding local concerns through joint cultural events and a community-based platform for communication and cooperation.

▸ Highlighting the link between creative activity and the larger urban environment through regular urban tours of Mar Mikhael.

▸ Developing systematic, consistent opportunities for training and assistance for the ACDs through workshops and conferences. Finally, creating a neighborhood council for Mar Mikhael represents this report’s fifth solution, which necessitates:

▸ Broadly defining neighborhood council membership and authority.

▸ Finding a political ally who can give it the institutional legitimacy necessary to successfully influence government policy.

▸ Employing Beirut-based universities, foundations, and private parties as sources of funding and administrative support.

Explosions et reconstruction à Beyrouth : éclairages

Le cratère d’explosion (au premier plan) et le silo à grains du port de Beyrouth (à l’extrême gauche de la photo) après la catastrophe.
Mehr News Agency CC BY 4.0

Pour mémoire, dans ce post, la liste des interventions, entretiens et contributions à des débats au sujet des explosions à Beyrouth et de leurs suites du point de la reconstruction de la ville et des réformes politiques dans le pays.

Combien de temps et d’argent faudra-t-il pour reconstruire Beyrouth ? Lire l’entretien (abonnés) Entretien avec Eric Verdeil, par Wladimir Garcin-Berson, Le Figaro, 5 août (à retrouver ici)

Après les explosions à Beyrouth, « l’approvisionnement alimentaire du pays est menacé » Lire l’entretien Entretien avec Eric Verdeil, par Emilie Garcia, Le Parisien, 5 août

Après la destruction de port de Beyrouth, le Liban craint une pénurie alimentaire Lire l’article Contribution d’Eric Verdeil
Elise Delève, franceinfo, 6 août

Le port de Beyrouth, coeur économique du Liban Lire l’article (abonnés) Contribution d’Eric Verdeil
Antoine d’Abbundo, La Croix, 6 août

Lebanon in desperate need of reform after Beirut explosion Lire l’article Contribution d’Eric Verdeil
Guy Davies et Ibtissem Guenfoud, ABC News, 10 août

Macron à Beyrouth : le retour du grand frère ? Ecouter le débat Débat avec Eric Verdeil, Sibylle Rizk et Ziad Majed, par Florian Delorme, France Culture, 24 août

Beyrouth, histoire d’une ville – Après la guerre civile, reconstruire Ecouter le débat Débat avec Eric Verdeil et Sophie Brones, par Xavier Mauduit, France Culture, 26 août

Comment le Liban peut il se réformer et sortir de la crise ? Ecouter le débat Débat avec Eric Verdeil, Jean-Pierre Milelli et Mounir Corm, par William de Lesseux, RFI, 31 août

5 questions pour comprendre la situation au Liban Lire l’entretien
Entretien avec Sandra Elouarghi et Maïna Marjany pour Emile, lettre d’information de Sciences Po Alunmi

Collaboration à la réalisation de la carte intitulée “Beyrouth: destructions, reconstructions et spéculations“, Le Monde, 6-7 septembre 2020, réalisée par Mathilde Costil, Sylvie Gittus-Pourrias, Victor Simonnet

Le Liban. Entretien avec Vlad sur Radio Escapades, le 6/10/2020.

Clara Gabillet, Le Liban tout entier est plongé dans une crise économique et politique qui rend très difficile la reconstruction du port et de la ville de Beyrouth. Entretien avec Eric Verdeil, Ziad Majed et Agnès Levallois, RCF, le 16/12/2020

Urbanisation et mobilité : réflexions sur les logiques spatiales du COVID-19

[Note rédigée dimanche 28 mars, publiée ici le 2 avril, publiée sous le titre : La métropolisation, coupable idéale de la pandémie et quelques modifications mineures sur The Conversation le 9 avril 2020.]

La diffusion très rapide du coronavirus à partir de Wuhan par les connexions aériennes intercontinentales, en Asie, en Europe, en Amérique du Nord, illustre l’idée que la mondialisation facilite cette pandémie. D’autres réflexions cherchent à relier cette diffusion à l’urbanisation planétaire et à ses différentes formes. Les foules denses de lieux typiquement urbains comme les marchés ou les transports en commun semblent avoir joué un rôle essentiel dans la diffusion initiale de l’épidémie. A l’inverse, les images de villes vides et à l’arrêt qui ont fait le tour du monde illustre une suspension extraordinaire de l’urbanité et de ses logiques. La ville serait-elle alors doublement victime du COVID-19, d’abord touchée par ses habitants puis dans ses logiques de fonctionnement ? Certains désignent la métropolisation, cette concentration toujours accrue de richesses et d’habitants dans les plus grandes villes, comme l’une des causes de la pandémie. Un graphique du Financial Times représentant ce qui ressemble à une course des grandes régions urbaines derrière, semble conforter cette idée. Toutefois, au-delà des apparences souvent amplifiées par les lunettes grossissantes de la médiatisation, cette articulation métropoles-COVID-19 est-elle si évidente ? Voici quelques réflexions préliminaires à ce sujet. Continuer la lecture

Questions about the development of open access journals which charge authors

Two colleagues from British and German universities have recently invited me to become associate editor for a newly created section of Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, the academic journal they are involved in as scientific editors. I am greatly honoured of this invitation to contribute to the development of a subfield of research in which I have been involved for several years. I trust and respect greatly these colleagues and I have no doubt their work is a guarantee of high scientific standards and integrity in the peer reviewing process .

I know the European Union, as well as the French scientific funding agencies such as the French Agence nationale de la recherche or the CNRS, support the publication in open access journals. This policy, known as Plan S, was launched in 2018. Personally, I am also convinced that open access journals bring huge visibility and easier access to research. Nevertheless, I think that the Article Processing Charges (APC) mechanism1 raises several ethical and political issues. Therefore, I am uncomfortable to encourage publication in APC-led journals, and I fear I have to, at least temporarily, decline my two colleagues’ invitation.

I wrote this text in order to highlight this new trend and stir a collective discussion among my scientific community at Sciences Po, among the French academia and beyond (which is why I wrote it in English).

A system that increases inequalities

Obviously, the system creates a barrier for young researchers who do not hold stable or tenured positions and who do not have access to substantial research funds. I conduct my research in France, where academic precarity is widespread, and I know that APC would indeed exclude those young and promising researchers. Tenured researchers without (or with limited) research funding are actually also at risk of being excluded by the development of Author Processing Charges. APC journals come at a moment when the research units that are part of the universities (the so-called ‘laboratories‘) undergo increasing financial pressure and lose the small autonomy they had managed to keep. Consider for example a research unit where every year, around 100 articles, assuming 50% of them would be published in APC journals; publication fees would amount 50.000 € if we assume the APCs correspond to those billed by Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, which are not the highest, by far. These sums would have to be distracted from research, fieldtrips, conferences, salary or from library funding, who cannot stop their subscriptions to journals.

For me, encouraging APC would mean being part of a system that increases inequalities between established and aspiring researchers, between well-funded and not funded ones, and reinforce the hierarchy inside the academic world. With research funding characterized by a very high selection rate, and in substantial proportion determined by trendy topics and pre-existing researchers’ reputations, in the end, the probability that non-mainstream topics are ignored is high.  

A system that encourages the ‘Publish or Perish’ race

A second issue relates to current trends in academic publishing is the race to publish, the well-known “Publish or Perish” (PoP) dynamic. PoP is the result of the convergence of multiple factors, among others: researchers’ careers based on quantitative metrics; the funding of projects based on competition between researchers and between institutions; and the increasingly lower technological cost of publishing digitally. One of the consequences of the PoP “rule” is the increased pressure to submit articles to a limited number of well-established and highly recognized journals. As a result, the selection process has become very competitive, excluding a large number of good articles only because there is no room in these top-journals, and because editorial board members, reviewers and copy editors don’t have enough time to review, follow-up and edit so many articles. The development of digital platforms for academic publishing such as Frontiers fits in this general landscape. APC platforms and journals surf on this scarcity in academic journals, with demand increasing faster than offer. The recent shift of research funding agencies such as the UE (H2020, ERC) or national agencies towards open access publications, in the name of open science, has only stimulated this trend and increased market opportunities for APC journals. My accepting the invitation in this journal and proposing theme issues as suggested, would only feed these dynamics. Obviously, as a researcher and leader of collective research projects who needs to deliver research outputs in academic journals, possibly as theme issues, I feel that I could take advantage of this APC system. But I am also wary of fueling a move in a direction that I feel is insane.

Insane capitalistic accumulation at the expense of public money

A third issue relates to the political economy of the science publishing industry. For years, researchers have complained about the concentration of this industry and the enormous profits oligarchic corporations are ripping, due to their commercial practices with libraries, with oversold bouquets of journals and hardly justified price hikes. The move towards open access publication and the rise of the APC model (with article processing charges reaching up to 5000 € in some journals, and currently about 1000 € in the case of Frontiers in Sustainable Cities) is a new strategy those corporations are implementing in order to alleviate the risk that the open-access policy represents for them. APC are becoming a new source of profit for the publishing industry. This needs to be discussed in relation to two questions: are the prices of APCs fair? How does this new business model impact scientific integrity?

A few surveys have tried to estimate the sums spent on APC at the European level, for instance the OPENAPC project by Bielefeld University. Similar initiatives regarding the cost of publishing are scarce because the industry keeps doors closed in the face of outsiders. Such a survey was undertaken in France however. It shows that the median cost par page of Social Sciences and Humanities published article’s page stands at 66 €. For an average 10 pages article it makes around 660€, to be compared to the 970€ charged as APC in the journal I was invited to2. Is the difference the Frontiers’ profit margin? If so, then it’s a lot. Things are worse if you consider that APCs amount to 3800€ in the top-ranked journals, and up to 5000€ in some case (not SSH)3. Data from the OPENAPC project show an average APC at 1976€, and up to 7400€. According to my correspondent at Frontiers, “ we use our Market Intelligence team to ensure that our APCs are competitively priced’’. At the launching of the journal, APC may be ‘’competitive’’. But they may increase later. So APCs are not based on just taking into account the real cost plus a margin that is already big. They vary based on the dynamics of offer and demand across and within academic subfields in order to generate more profit. This means that APC journals are in fact speculating on their reputation to extract more profit from public money and researchers’ work without contributing themselves to adding value beyond the service of providing access and copy-editing.

Another way to increase the revenues of such journals is to publish as much articles as possible. This is their direct interest. Some APC journals (at least those labelled predatory journals or publishers according by Beall in 2012) have repeatedly been suspected of lowering the review process standards, since their business is based on publishing as much as possible . A clear and neat separation is needed between scientific editors and commercial management. I don’t say it’s the case of Frontiers, despite some rumours and individual claims found on internet. I trust my colleagues for not allowing this for the new section they are launching. To be fair, one must recognize the development of journals operating on this market also meets the interests of scholars throughout the world. To alleviate the risks associated with this double pressure, from some publishers and some authors, editorial boards have to implement a very strict monitoring of the review process, for instance regarding the not so rare practice of requesting that authors propose a few names of potential reviewers.

The development of such journal contributes to increase the shameful process by which an enormous amount of public money (profit rates are typically between 20-30%) ends up in their pocket while many universities and above all researchers, junior or senior, have their own pockets depleted, because of job policies in the academia and the increasing concentration of research funding.

Being part of the APC model means working for free for the profit of this industry: as an author, as an editor, and as a reviewer. The only reward is a bit of academic glory and the opportunity to have articles or theme issues published. One can object that this new world is not better, economically and financially speaking, than the existing world of journals run by the scientific publishing oligarchy. In my view, the advantage of the latter is at least that everyone can submit and publish an article with having to pay the APC. Clearly, we need other solutions.

Other solutions are available 

As I have mentioned above, I fully recognize that there is a serious need of new journals, in particular for emerging scientific fields, in order to ease the pressure on existing journals. However, there are many different editorial models and the APC “gold path” is not the only one. France is probably particularly lucky because the early mobilisation of researchers from social sciences and humanities, and the support of the CNRS and of several universities have allowed the rise of a publishing ecosystem making full use of digital technologies to support open-access journals. Hence most journals either remain under a classical subscriber system (but less expensive than in the anglophone publishing industry), or under a system, in which the cost of editorial staff and system maintenance is borne by the universities and the CNRS (the OpenEdition platform is a case in point, but there are other instances). Similar solutions, even if not as widespread as in France, also exist in other European countries and in South America . In my field of research, I think of ACME, a journal of critical geographies, and of Geographica Helvetica, where the cost are supported by several Swiss academic institutions, or the Italian journal of political sociology Partizipatione e Conflitto (PACO), just to name a few. These solutions rely on the strong involvement of academic communities and the support of the national and local academic institutions. Apparently, this kind of solutions are not as developed in the anglophone academic world. I wonder if this can be explained by the fact that researchers are more pressured to invest their time and energy to gain research contracts through competition, and are less available for community led journal projects, which require cooperative practices. It is true that researchers are not editors, publishers nor IT specialists and they should not waste time when efficient publishing solutions exist. However, the drive towards the APC journals bear with it many shortcomings. Collective, cooperative and at least more prudent attitudes are needed to avoid to spring in without further reflection.

A necessary debate inside scientific communities

At least, before accepting the invitation to become part of this editorial board, I wanted to share these arguments and raise a debate within the scientific community, at the level of my research unit and more broadly in the French academia and, why not, the European academia which is directly impacted by APC journals. and committed to take a stand. If we want to collectively keep the rein of our academic life and make the most efficient use of precious but scarce public funds, instead of moving individually to this new system without questioning it, I believe alternatives should be explored and, at least, that the choice of APCs should be collectively discussed4.

Frontiers‘ answers

Answer from the person in charge of recruiting Associate editors at Frontiers to my message stating I was going to decline their invitation, where I sketched the arguments further developed in this blog post.

The OA model introduces a gap between funded and non-funded researchers
We do charge Article Processing Charges (APCs), however this is the only sole source of revenue for us, all of which is reinvested back into our platform and open science services to allow more communities to benefit from high-quality open access. They also enable open access to all of our content, whereby all articles published are freely and permanently available for anyone to video, download and disseminate (under the CC-BY licence, where authors retain the copyright for articles). We also are passionate about providing assistance to authors who are unable to pay the article processing charges. A portion of the income we generate is distributed to our fee support programme, which you can find more information here.  We also have an institutional memberships programme where we work with universities, funding agencies and research consortia to find ways to remove some or all of the responsibility for APCs from individual authors. You can find out more information on this here. When we launch new journals, we use our Market Intelligence team to ensure that our APCs are competitively priced and are usually less than half the price of subscription publishers. 
 
Trend toward APC funded journals encourages the Publish or Perish race, and journals pushing for quantity rather than quality
At Frontiers, it is the active researchers from our editorial boards who make the content decisions. We do not set acceptance rates, instead, our acceptance and rejection criteria are clearly defined in our editorial guidelines and it is the responsibility of the editors and reviewers to ensure the highest quality research passes through peer review. Their names are published on the final article as a public endorsement of this. Our philosophy is to empower researchers in the publishing process and ensure editorial independence. Therefore, editorial decisions about the acceptance or rejection of articles within the peer review process are taken by our editorial board of subject-specific experts, whom we empower with cutting edge-technology and editorial support to make these decisions efficiently. We completely understand that academics will invest time into the reviewers and editors role, which is why we ensure they have plenty of support from our side from our dedicated peer review team and our internal checks team.
Notes _____________________
  1. this is a fee to be paid by authors once their manuscript has been review, revised and accepted. APC are the main revenue of those journals. In certain cases, there are waivers for these APC, when a scientific societies, or a university compensate for it, which allows the members of the society or the faculty of the university to be exempted from the fee []
  2. Contat, Odile, and Anne-Solweig Gremillet. 2015. ‘Publier : à quel prix ? Étude sur la structuration des coûts de publication pour les revues françaises en SHS’. Revue française des sciences de l’information et de la communication, no. 7 (July). https://doi.org/10.4000/rfsic.1716 []
  3. see a recent French survey by Leduc, Michèle, and Antoinette Molinié. 2020. « Les publications à l’heure de la science ouverte ». Paris: Comité d’éthique du CNRS []
  4. I would like to thank Tommaso Vitale and Miriam Perrier for their feedback and suggestions, as well as Pierre Mounier and Marin Dacos for pointing to surveys and resources documenting publishing practices []

Transformations énergétiques collectives : présentation à la librairie Volume, Paris

La revue multitudes a le plaisir de vous inviter le 25 mars 2020 à 19 heures à la rencontre organisée autour des Transformations énergétiques collectives avec les auteurs Alain Nadai, Grégoire Wallenborn, Éric Verdeil et Fréderic Brun, Anne Querrien, Gaëtane Lamarche-Vadel de multitudes
Librairie VOLUME
47, rue de Nazareth
75003 Paris

Télécharger le prospectus de présentation de ce numéro (PDF).

Résumé

L’idée d’une « transition » énergétique, processus pilotable dans un monde relativement stable et anticipable, semble arriver à son terme. Même le GIEC en appelle désormais à des « transformations » énergétiques rapides et radicales. Toutefois, malgré la prise de conscience de l’urgence climatique et de la perte dramatique de biodiversité, qui s’actualise notamment dans une série de manifestations et de luttes, la question du climat est trop rarement articulée à la question de l’énergie. Dans cette Majeure, nous explorons ce que pourraient vouloir dire ces transformations énergétiques et partons à la recherche des bonnes échelles pour agir et des récits pertinents pour inspirer les collectifs.

Articles de la majeure

Résumé de notre article

Cet article propose d’élargir le débat sur la transition énergétique au-delà du contexte occidental. Partant d’études de cas situées dans deux métropoles des Suds, la réflexion invite à nuancer les scénarios normatifs et supposés universels de transformation des systèmes énergétiques pour confronter les transitions aux singularités des sociétés et des territoires dans lesquels elles prennent forme. Ainsi s’aperçoit-on que les discours sur le changement climatique global ont bien moins d’effets d’entraînement sur les trajectoires énergétiques d’Istanbul et du Cap que l’impact de crises écologiques plus locales ou que l’évolution de compromis socio-politiques, toujours fragiles et dépendants d’héritages historiques nationaux.

Le Liban, entre révolution et effondrement

J’ai participé, le 6 février 2020, à une table-ronde organisée par l’INALCO, intitulée Le Liban, entre révolution et effondrement, animée par Chantal Verdeil (INALCO), avec Jihane Sfeir (Université libre de Bruxelles).

La vidéo de la conférence est en ligne. Mon intervention, plus spécifiquement consacrée à l’analyse de la crise économique et financière avec un retour sur le modèle mis en place à la reconstruction, commence à 23’25”.

Publication : L’émergence des études urbaines au Liban. Engagements critiques locaux et mondialisation des pratiques académiques

Séance de travail au département d’urbanisme de l’Université Libanaise (2017)

Je suis heureux d’annoncer la parution de ce working paper sur les études urbaines au Liban, réalisé dans le cadre de la recherche collective “Le Liban au miroir des sciences sociales”, dirigée par Candice Raymond, Myriam Catusse et Sari Hanafi. Le livre concluant cette recherche est en cours de préparation et comportera une version plus courte de ce document. Je remercie sincèrement ces collègues pour leurs remarques et suggestions durant la rédaction de ces deux textes. Je remercie également les collègues interrogés dans le cadre de ce travail.

Résumé : L’émergence et la structuration des études urbaines constituent des modifications parmi les plus frappantes au sein des sciences sociales au Liban depuis la fin de la guerre civile. Cela renvoie à la fois à une actualité sociale et politique, celle de la reconstruction et de la modernisation des villes dans les trente dernières années. Mais cela est également lié à des mutations du milieu universitaire lui-même et en particulier aux formes de son insertion internationale. En ce sens, la montée des études urbaines au Liban est intéressante à étudier dans une perspective comparée, prenant en compte les spécificités des études urbaines, notamment la tension entre structuration académique et lien avec l’action publique, et les renouvellements à l’échelle globale, liés à la montée des problématiques des villes du Sud. Ce texte pose d’abord un cadre d’analyse des études urbaines pour un pays du Sud, avant de développer trois grands résultats: l’histoire de l’émergence des études urbaines au Liban accompagne des mobilisations d’intellectuel.le.s et d’universitaires contre les politiques publiques de reconstruction et d’aménagement urbain. Les études urbaines se structurent dans un espace académique qui est celui de l’urbanisme, étroitement liée au Liban aux facultés d’architecture. Ces foyers des études urbaines sont inégalement dotés pour prendre place dans l’espace académique international. L’Université Américaine de Beyrouth se distingue sur ce plan. L’État et les acteurs publics locaux jouent un rôle mineur dans la structuration des études urbaines mais des formes de co-production de données et de savoirs pratiques associant universitaires, consultants et administrations sont néanmoins observables. Enfin, le développement des études urbaines est indissociable du militantisme urbain qui conduit à l’adoption de nouvelles pratiques de coproduction de savoirs avec les habitants et de nouvelles formes de diffusion, qu’il est loisible de comprendre comme des pratiques de traduction entre différents publics, comme l’ont proposé à propos de l’Afrique du Sud Susan Parnell et Edgar Pieterse.

Citation : Eric Verdeil, L’émergence des études urbaines au Liban Engagements critiques locaux et mondialisation des pratiques académiques, Working Paper, 2/2019, Sciences Po, Cities are Back in Town. En ligne : http://blogs.sciences-po.fr/recherche-villes/files/2020/01/WP-02_2019-Verdeil.pdf

Publication : Solid Waste Management in Lebanon: Lessons for Decentralisation

I am happy to share the recent publication of this report summarizing the findings of a research undertaken with my colleague Jihad Farah and his students from the Lebanese University, thanks to the funding of the Lebanese-French CEDRE programme.

The full quote is as following: Jihad Farah, Rasha Ghaddar, Elie Nasr, Rita Nasr, Hanan Wehbe, and Eric Verdeil, 2019, Solid Waste Management in Lebanon: Lessons for Decentralisation. Beirut: Democracy Reporting International, 40 p. Available online.

Abstract : Despite the growing attention gained among local and international observers since the 2015 “waste crisis”, the issue of solid waste management (SWM) in Lebanon has exacerbated, particularly after the closure of one of the country’s largest landfills in Naameh and the abrupt halt in waste collection led to rubbish piling up in the streets of Beirut and Mount-Lebanon. This situation triggered a series of protests, clashes and heated debates around the need to re-arrange the sector since 2015. This study sheds light on two key concepts “decentralisation” and “bottom-up cooperation” that will help Lebanon in improving SWM. While providing an overview of the different municipal experiences in sorting, recycling, landfilling, composting and, most recently, the interest in waste-to-energy,1 this study treats closely the question of how these technologies can be adapted to local contexts. Securing funding, negotiating contracts, constructing facilities, involving citizens in the process and institutionalising best practices are new experiences for most municipal authorities. The report aims to close the existing knowledge gap by documenting local efforts to manage solid waste, analysing the limitations of the strategies pursued, and presenting conclusions that can inform integrated and decentralised SWM policies in Lebanon. The report identifies two key dynamics underpinning local management of solid waste in Lebanon. The first is the emergence of a “new waste capitalism” different from what has been observed in the 1990s. During that time, a so-called “waste capitalism” existed, which outsourced waste collection and landfilling to politically connected businesses ignoring local needs and demands. Since 2015, complex technologies and treatment methods have been favoured that include recycling, composting and waste-to-energy. But due to their complexity, local authorities are unable to design, monitor and regulate the terms of the contracts awarded to private companies. Some local authorities have conducted public campaigns on issues such as sorting-at- source and recycling, but are still unable to mainstream and institutionalise citizen participation in an inclusive SWM system. Based on 22 semi-structured interviews with municipal officials and executives, representatives of facilities, donor agencies, NGOs, and a database on the distribution of SWM facilities across Lebanon, the study draws lessons and policy recommendations from four case studies of local authorities that have dealt with SWM.

Soirée-débat autour des espaces publics au Liban et du film Enfants de Beyrouth

Je participerai à un débat sur les espaces publics au Liban, vendredi 10 janvier 2020. C’est ouvert à tous.

Espace Jean Dame
17 rue Léopold Bellan, 75002 Paris

20 h – 22 h 30

A l’initiative d’un groupe informel de citoyennes et de citoyens libanais*, est organisée une soirée film-débat  le 10 janvier à l’espace Jean Dame, avec Sarah Srage réalisatrice, Éric Verdeil, professeur à Sciences Po, Nadim Houry, directeur du programme terrorisme et lutte anti-terrorisme à Human Rights Watch et Jana Nakhal chercheuse et urbaniste, pour discuter des espaces publics au Liban, leur appropriation, leur protection et plus largement des pratiques urbanistiques et de leurs conséquences.

Programme provisoire

20 h – 20 h 10 Présentation de la soirée et contextualisation du film : فوج الشرشف, Sarah Srage

20 h 10 – 21 h 10 : Projection du film Enfants de Beyrouth de Sarah Srage

21 h 10 – 21 h 20 : Présentation par Marie Atallah, élue écologiste, modératrice

21 h 20 – 21 h 35 : Éric Verdeil :  Le littoral libanais au miroir de l’urbanisme

21 h 35 : 21 h 50 : Jana Nakhal : État des lieux actuel en matière d’espaces publics

21 h 50 – 22 h 05 : Nadim Houry : La question des espaces publics sur le plan légal et au delà

22 h 05 – 22 h 30 : Questions/réponses

Pot de la révolution

*Groupe informel de libanais concernés par l’avenir du Liban dans le contexte actuel