Diala Lteif is a planner and urban historian of the modern Middle-East and her research explores the role of subaltern populations in the production of space and cities. She is currently a Research Fellow at Newnham’s Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies, Cambridge. Diala holds a PhD in Planning from the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. She is currently developing her first book project which considers these questions, over a century, through an urban historical study of a marginalized working-class neighbourhood in Beirut, Lebanon, known as Karantina. 

Research Project

One hundred years of refuge: Migrants and the making of Karantina, Beirut (1920-2020)

One hundred years of refuge: Migrants and the making of Karantina, Beirut (1920-2020) explores the role subaltern subjects played in a century-long making of urban life and infrastructure in Beirut. The project historicizes the co-constitutive relationship between urban space and class struggle among refugees, migrants, and marginalized labourers. Adopting a longue durée approach, this book centres the making and evolution of Karantina, a working class district in north-eastern Beirut. Over a century, this district was the host to multiple successive waves of forced and labor migrations between the end of World War I and the early 21st century. This book tells the history of Karantina from below, centering the lives and stories of the marginalized and their right to the city.