In the nineteenth century, an "obsession" with strict order and a desire to preserve the city’s cleanliness and maintain its aesthetic facade became prevalent among the middle classes in European and colonial nation-states. Urban space was allocated and sorted in such a way as to ensure that urban errors and “deficiencies” did not threaten the new, well-arranged, and well-ordered system [2]. With the advent of modernity, planners conceived of the physical space as a literal embodiment of the colonial nationstate’s fantasy of physical order and consistent political stability [3], which was to be established through urbanization. The result was that their building laws and urban plans led to the violent segregation of the city and the perpetual reproduction of the different social classes within it.

In France, during the years of the Second Empire, Haussmann's process of planning Paris (by demolishing and restructuring complete neighborhoods) was not only a direct act of counter-revolution, but also represented a symbolic act of detaching the streets of Paris from their revolutionary history, thereby giving impetus to real estate speculation [4]. As similar policies represent its modus operandi, the practice of urban planning has been an integral part of the “modernist project” since its inception [5]. “Planning” was institutionalized in collusion with the prevailing ideology of the ruling class and became a tool for controlling the formation of urban space, such that it is always in line with the concepts and values ​​of  the powerful, ruling and elite classes themselves. This was especially possible due to the unprecedented process of development and urbanization occurring as a direct result of capital’s expansion and market dominance in colonial nation-states. While various outdated forms of knowledge within societies were bypassed, “expert” knowledge was heavily relied on to enable the state to shape the built environment, and the idea that urban planning was a means to achieve the “common good” prevailed, both amongst planners themselves and in society at large.

In the local context, and with the violent advent of the capitalist mode of production into the Levant region, the city of Beirut transformed into the sole interior link between the coast and the highlands, particularly during the nineteenth century. As a result, the city’s borders rapidly narrowed in size and Beirut became the only land crossing to the Syrian interior for the import and export of European products, especially in light of the expansion and modernization of the port in 1894  (Reference: Fawaz Traboulsi). These changes were simultaneously accompanied by sweeping transformations in how the land was conceptualized, understood, and thereby managed.

Historically, the concept of land in Lebanon and its organization on the basis of individual ownership began to radically transform in the nineteenth century. At the onset of the aforementioned century under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, most agricultural lands in Lebanon were classified as "Mirei", that is, officially owned by the state exchequer, which also entitled peasants to a number of inalienable rights as long as they paid their taxes. In 1839, however, the new Sultan issued what was known as " Tanzimat," or a system of reforms that promised to repeal a number of rights that prohibited the land’s commercial exploitation and use. In this sense, the reform program announced in 1839 promised to open up and advance the proliferation of European capital in the region (Reference: Shakir 2015). As such, beginning in the last decades of Ottoman rule, and through the establishment of a modern real estate registry in Lebanon and Syria, the abolition of communal lands (Ghorayyeb, 2000) and the authorization of survey teams to enter and update all ownership certificates (title deeds) within villages in rural areas, people's relations with property began to really change (Reference: Mundi 2007).

During the French Mandate, these land modernizing practices permeated daily life with the advent of the French version of urban planning (ref: Ghorayyeb, 2000; Verdel, 2010), especially when the land registry, known as the “Régie du Cadastre,” was established in Lebanon and Syria in 1921.

As a result, deep differences emerged in concepts such as the notion of the “common,” as what it may or may not connote both discursively and practically was interpreted differently in the French and the Ottoman contexts. Strikingly, under Ottoman rule the concept of what constituted the “common” was not understood in a framework contrary to the concept of “private,” despite the Ottoman Tanzimat announcing the privatization of lands, which was reconsidered as collateral used to secure financial profit. This was also due to the fact that the privatization of land was only fully implemented under the auspices of the land registry, and the commons were never fully abandoned in the Ottoman context. As such, the penetration of modernization into daily life came as a result of the deliberate discretion of the French colonial administration, which aimed at radically transforming social relations and producing a new type of understanding on the management of urban spaces. (Reference: Gharib 2000).