Circulation, modernity, and urban space in 1960s Beirut

In this essay, I explore the role of circulation in Beirut’s urban space and society in the early 1960s. Drawing primarily from the Lebanese francophone newspaper L’Orient, I show how the rise of automobility in postcolonial Beirut brought with it the imposition of certain kinds of moral and civic geographies that prescribed how citizens should use and move through the city. I argue that the newspaper’s narratives about matters of infrastructure and traffic law abidance reveal concerns with not just how people moved through the city, but with the everyday configuration of a rational, modern, biopolitical order.