Highways of Collective Action

A lecture by Hiba Bou Akar about the improvised protest spaces that shaped Lebanon’s October 17 uprising. This talk will examine Lebanon’s October 17 uprising through two charged infrastructures: Beirut’s Ring Road and the Khalde Triangle. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and archival research, Hiba Bou Akar shows how protesters transformed roads, overpasses, and roundabouts into spaces of gathering, debate, care, mourning, and political refusal. The talk asks what these improvised protest spaces reveal about public life in cities shaped by sectarian fragmentation, privatized space, and unequal infrastructures. This event is presented by Revolutionary Disappointment and Recalibration, a 2026–2027 Neubauer Collegium research project organized in partnership with the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT). ABOUT THE SPEAKER Hiba Bou Akar is an Associate Professor in the Urban Planning program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, and leads Columbia’s Post-Conflict Cities Lab. Her research focuses on planning in conflict and post-conflict cities, the question of urban violence, and the role of religious political organizations in the making of cities. Bou Akar is the author of the award-winning book For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers (2018), and she is currently working on a book manuscript entitled The Afterlives of Dead Futures. Bou Akar also worked as an architect and planner and as a research consultant with local NGOs and international UN organizations in the Middle East.