Papers by Youssef Askar
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In the current growing mobile world, the need to cover greater distances and access to more motor... more In the current growing mobile world, the need to cover greater distances and access to more motorized means of transportation are increasingly essential for reaching to different services and facilities. In this paper, I try to put forward an integrated conceptualization of car-oriented urban development disadvantages, based on a different article reviews and illustrate it through a case study from the middle east, in addition to some of my own suggestions and thoughts.
With nowadays’ dominance of car-based mobility in developed societies, we can draft a typology of different forms of car-related transport disadvantages, which allows us to present how access and transport problems differ considerably in relation to car ownership and use. And by understanding and studying the relationships between transport disadvantages, urban structure and the built environment, we can interpret the spatial dimension of all forms of car-related transport problems and try to find solutions to relieve these issues.
The urban and mobility principles on which most highways were based are today unacceptable with their negative effects on urban development, land value, public health, life quality and pedestrian accessibility which have become internationally recognized. Fouad Boutros Highway scheme is outdated, it was designed back in the 1960s at the time when highways crossing the city were considered a mobility solution, and population and geographic spread of Beirut was less than half what is it now. During the last fifty years, our understanding of transportation as urban planners has been radically transformed. Implementing the highway project now is political nonsense. Apart from disrupting an entire neighborhood and decreasing the neighboring property value, it will not solve traffic problems, instead, it will redirect the traffic and bring in more cars to the city center and choke Ashrafieh with extra traffic, and more air and noise pollution.
Highway-oriented development as congestion relief is nowadays inappropriate, as it measures and aims to solve current congestion rather than focusing on future congestion. Finding alternatives to automobile planning will be increasingly important. Highways should not be built inside urbanized areas, instead, they should go around cities.
Highway-oriented development does not only favor cars, but also punishes any other mode of travel. Increasing public transports will decrease the number of cars and make traffic go smoother, and therefore help Beirut to be more green and less polluted, because “a developed coun¬try is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use pub¬lic transport.”
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Travel and tourism was and still one of the largest and most important business sectors in the wo... more Travel and tourism was and still one of the largest and most important business sectors in the world, and maybe one the main tools in foreign exchange. Tourism is one of the fastest growing industries worldwide. However, later it was noticed that all of this growth and success was not without costs and side effects. There has been increasing awareness of the cultural, social and economic impacts, in addition to, environmental impacts of tourism. All of these impacts, especially the environmental ones, started to become subjects of study and research.
Natural resources have always been consumed by human plans and used up for money without any consideration of how the resources consumption affects nature and species living there and their lifestyles. Scientific studies of environmental changes have proved that tourism can have bad effects on nature as a result of human actions.
Tourism has turned out to have impact on water, air, soil, in addition to, creating noise pollution and affecting species behaviors. Also there is environmental harm from the infrastructure and facilities that serve touristic destinations, such as, highways, runways and accommodations which need large expanses of land, in addition to the increasing use of planes, ships, buses and cars which clearly have bad environmental effects. Sometimes touristic destinations are also directly affected by tourists.
All sorts of touristic developments and using of resources continues to harm the environment. Changes in nature caused by human activities have led to reevaluating and rethinking of positions towards nature and environmental ethics, and reconsidering tourism negative environmental impacts. Governments and organizations used tourism planning as a tool to control the negative impacts and side effects of tourism developments. But in my opinion there is also a hidden propose which is protecting the exact same resources which support and reinforce the whole tourism industry and its profitability. The boundaries of violation towards the environment should be redefined, and the human position towards it must be reevaluated. Tourism can help in drawing attention to the value of nature to humans, and take a role in protecting the environment with all of its element.
Environmental ethics doesn’t only deal with the human interactions and relationships, but also plays an important role in defining the human-nature relationship. These ethics help in finding a formula of how humans behave towards the natural environment, and applying these formulas in long-term sustainable development plans, which can bring significant economic benefits for investments, and more importantly, protect natural resources for future generations.
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Encouraging intersections between reflection and intervention, via a better understanding of how ... more Encouraging intersections between reflection and intervention, via a better understanding of how different kinds of public spaces and spatial practices can provide possibilities and opportunities for collective action. Such procedure is particularly challenging in the case of cities like Beirut where spatial practices are largely restricted by regulations and practices prioritizing private property rights, at the expense of a substantive understanding of the commons. Interest groups dominating the neoliberal spatial production process in the Lebanese capital may well rapidly shut down potentials for mobilization and collective action within procedural spaces and by civil society initiatives.
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Urbanization is considered one of the most important factors of the ongoing economic and industri... more Urbanization is considered one of the most important factors of the ongoing economic and industrial development in China during the last thirty years of the modern history. Studies shows that 20% of China’s population in 1980 lived in urban areas, compared to nearly half of the population in 2010.
Urbanization is the transformation of rural areas into urban ones as a consequence of the economical and industrial development. Internal migration of population from rural to urban regions has played the main role in serving this urbanization. Official statistics indicates that China’s urban population has nearly doubled the last 35 years, and about half of this increase is a result of the internal migration which considered the largest in history. Rural-urban migration has played over the last 30 years and still playing an important role in shaping the demographic atmosphere as well as the economic development of Chinese cities.
The household registration system, better known as the Hukou system, has played an important role in organizing the population movements over the country. It was the government’s main tool in controlling and pursuing the state’s economic and social plans.
This paper provides a brief review of the history of the internal migrations in China over the last thirty years. In addition to a detailed defining of the relationship between the Hukou system and the rural-urban migration, and the effect of it over the migration process. The paper also studies the main reasons for migration and the effects of rural-urban migration on the rural and urban areas.
“...some Chinese official reports even announced that China's urban population proportion reached 46 percent in 1987. By their definition, nearly half of the Chinese people are urban now! This seeming "great leap forward" is accounted a fact and highly praised by some western scholars ... But, ... it can’t fool the Chinese peasants themselves. In their eyes, the Hukou is the real standard by which to measure their actual status, benefits, and the progress of urbanization.” (Cheng, 1991, p. 292-93)
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In this paper, we outline some general definitions concerning space as a physical and a political... more In this paper, we outline some general definitions concerning space as a physical and a political ground, e.g. "Civic Space" and "Democratic Space". We then refer our research to two theoretical definitions of the word "Space". The first is by the French Sociologist and Philosopher "Henri Lefebvre" who justifies space as a social product. The second definition is by the British Geographer and Author "David Harvey" who came up with the concept of how space is not just a rigid form, but rather can be either relational, relative or absolute.
We have taken the 2013 protests in Taksim Square, Turkey to be our case study, and looked closer at the events or incidents that occurred within this square. Through analyzing the spatial conflicts, i.e. the sit-ins, barricades, marches and police-citizens clash, our aim was to look at Taksim Square from a different perspective by synthesizing its different events with our literature and theoretical reviews, as well as Historical approaches. These include: Fragmentation of space in Taksim Square after the 1977 protests, Semi-privatization by the government, Commercialized Globalism vs. Global Social Movement, and the role of Social Media as a globalizing agent
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Publications by Youssef Askar
Journal of Contemporary Urban Affairs, 2024
Beirut's policies in the last decade or more contributed to the creation of a highly car-dependen... more Beirut's policies in the last decade or more contributed to the creation of a highly car-dependent city with almost 2 million vehicles dominating the streets and causing high traffic congestion. Yet, Beirut's informal street markets carry the potential for the enhancement of a liveable sustainable city, which previous studies have overlooked. To approach this problem, urban planners need to rethink and restructure the existing street network in Beirut to decrease the distances between the suburbs and the centre of the city. The aim of this research is to formulate a rational system that assigns markets and pedestrian areas to certain streets where cars can have no or limited access. This system adopts a parametric tool based on fuzzy logic which analyzes the current street network and filters out streets that fulfil certain criteria such as parking availability and proximity to public transportation, hence decreasing centrality in the city. This method is applied to both fixed and temporary food markets that are characterized by highly dynamic pedestrian movement. The final results show a series of maps of Beirut with different scenarios identifying streets that fulfil the defined criteria as potential street markets, which can be the blueprint for further analysis of street and transportation planning creating more liveable and sustainable places.
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Papers by Youssef Askar
With nowadays’ dominance of car-based mobility in developed societies, we can draft a typology of different forms of car-related transport disadvantages, which allows us to present how access and transport problems differ considerably in relation to car ownership and use. And by understanding and studying the relationships between transport disadvantages, urban structure and the built environment, we can interpret the spatial dimension of all forms of car-related transport problems and try to find solutions to relieve these issues.
The urban and mobility principles on which most highways were based are today unacceptable with their negative effects on urban development, land value, public health, life quality and pedestrian accessibility which have become internationally recognized. Fouad Boutros Highway scheme is outdated, it was designed back in the 1960s at the time when highways crossing the city were considered a mobility solution, and population and geographic spread of Beirut was less than half what is it now. During the last fifty years, our understanding of transportation as urban planners has been radically transformed. Implementing the highway project now is political nonsense. Apart from disrupting an entire neighborhood and decreasing the neighboring property value, it will not solve traffic problems, instead, it will redirect the traffic and bring in more cars to the city center and choke Ashrafieh with extra traffic, and more air and noise pollution.
Highway-oriented development as congestion relief is nowadays inappropriate, as it measures and aims to solve current congestion rather than focusing on future congestion. Finding alternatives to automobile planning will be increasingly important. Highways should not be built inside urbanized areas, instead, they should go around cities.
Highway-oriented development does not only favor cars, but also punishes any other mode of travel. Increasing public transports will decrease the number of cars and make traffic go smoother, and therefore help Beirut to be more green and less polluted, because “a developed coun¬try is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use pub¬lic transport.”
Natural resources have always been consumed by human plans and used up for money without any consideration of how the resources consumption affects nature and species living there and their lifestyles. Scientific studies of environmental changes have proved that tourism can have bad effects on nature as a result of human actions.
Tourism has turned out to have impact on water, air, soil, in addition to, creating noise pollution and affecting species behaviors. Also there is environmental harm from the infrastructure and facilities that serve touristic destinations, such as, highways, runways and accommodations which need large expanses of land, in addition to the increasing use of planes, ships, buses and cars which clearly have bad environmental effects. Sometimes touristic destinations are also directly affected by tourists.
All sorts of touristic developments and using of resources continues to harm the environment. Changes in nature caused by human activities have led to reevaluating and rethinking of positions towards nature and environmental ethics, and reconsidering tourism negative environmental impacts. Governments and organizations used tourism planning as a tool to control the negative impacts and side effects of tourism developments. But in my opinion there is also a hidden propose which is protecting the exact same resources which support and reinforce the whole tourism industry and its profitability. The boundaries of violation towards the environment should be redefined, and the human position towards it must be reevaluated. Tourism can help in drawing attention to the value of nature to humans, and take a role in protecting the environment with all of its element.
Environmental ethics doesn’t only deal with the human interactions and relationships, but also plays an important role in defining the human-nature relationship. These ethics help in finding a formula of how humans behave towards the natural environment, and applying these formulas in long-term sustainable development plans, which can bring significant economic benefits for investments, and more importantly, protect natural resources for future generations.
Urbanization is the transformation of rural areas into urban ones as a consequence of the economical and industrial development. Internal migration of population from rural to urban regions has played the main role in serving this urbanization. Official statistics indicates that China’s urban population has nearly doubled the last 35 years, and about half of this increase is a result of the internal migration which considered the largest in history. Rural-urban migration has played over the last 30 years and still playing an important role in shaping the demographic atmosphere as well as the economic development of Chinese cities.
The household registration system, better known as the Hukou system, has played an important role in organizing the population movements over the country. It was the government’s main tool in controlling and pursuing the state’s economic and social plans.
This paper provides a brief review of the history of the internal migrations in China over the last thirty years. In addition to a detailed defining of the relationship between the Hukou system and the rural-urban migration, and the effect of it over the migration process. The paper also studies the main reasons for migration and the effects of rural-urban migration on the rural and urban areas.
“...some Chinese official reports even announced that China's urban population proportion reached 46 percent in 1987. By their definition, nearly half of the Chinese people are urban now! This seeming "great leap forward" is accounted a fact and highly praised by some western scholars ... But, ... it can’t fool the Chinese peasants themselves. In their eyes, the Hukou is the real standard by which to measure their actual status, benefits, and the progress of urbanization.” (Cheng, 1991, p. 292-93)
We have taken the 2013 protests in Taksim Square, Turkey to be our case study, and looked closer at the events or incidents that occurred within this square. Through analyzing the spatial conflicts, i.e. the sit-ins, barricades, marches and police-citizens clash, our aim was to look at Taksim Square from a different perspective by synthesizing its different events with our literature and theoretical reviews, as well as Historical approaches. These include: Fragmentation of space in Taksim Square after the 1977 protests, Semi-privatization by the government, Commercialized Globalism vs. Global Social Movement, and the role of Social Media as a globalizing agent
Publications by Youssef Askar
With nowadays’ dominance of car-based mobility in developed societies, we can draft a typology of different forms of car-related transport disadvantages, which allows us to present how access and transport problems differ considerably in relation to car ownership and use. And by understanding and studying the relationships between transport disadvantages, urban structure and the built environment, we can interpret the spatial dimension of all forms of car-related transport problems and try to find solutions to relieve these issues.
The urban and mobility principles on which most highways were based are today unacceptable with their negative effects on urban development, land value, public health, life quality and pedestrian accessibility which have become internationally recognized. Fouad Boutros Highway scheme is outdated, it was designed back in the 1960s at the time when highways crossing the city were considered a mobility solution, and population and geographic spread of Beirut was less than half what is it now. During the last fifty years, our understanding of transportation as urban planners has been radically transformed. Implementing the highway project now is political nonsense. Apart from disrupting an entire neighborhood and decreasing the neighboring property value, it will not solve traffic problems, instead, it will redirect the traffic and bring in more cars to the city center and choke Ashrafieh with extra traffic, and more air and noise pollution.
Highway-oriented development as congestion relief is nowadays inappropriate, as it measures and aims to solve current congestion rather than focusing on future congestion. Finding alternatives to automobile planning will be increasingly important. Highways should not be built inside urbanized areas, instead, they should go around cities.
Highway-oriented development does not only favor cars, but also punishes any other mode of travel. Increasing public transports will decrease the number of cars and make traffic go smoother, and therefore help Beirut to be more green and less polluted, because “a developed coun¬try is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use pub¬lic transport.”
Natural resources have always been consumed by human plans and used up for money without any consideration of how the resources consumption affects nature and species living there and their lifestyles. Scientific studies of environmental changes have proved that tourism can have bad effects on nature as a result of human actions.
Tourism has turned out to have impact on water, air, soil, in addition to, creating noise pollution and affecting species behaviors. Also there is environmental harm from the infrastructure and facilities that serve touristic destinations, such as, highways, runways and accommodations which need large expanses of land, in addition to the increasing use of planes, ships, buses and cars which clearly have bad environmental effects. Sometimes touristic destinations are also directly affected by tourists.
All sorts of touristic developments and using of resources continues to harm the environment. Changes in nature caused by human activities have led to reevaluating and rethinking of positions towards nature and environmental ethics, and reconsidering tourism negative environmental impacts. Governments and organizations used tourism planning as a tool to control the negative impacts and side effects of tourism developments. But in my opinion there is also a hidden propose which is protecting the exact same resources which support and reinforce the whole tourism industry and its profitability. The boundaries of violation towards the environment should be redefined, and the human position towards it must be reevaluated. Tourism can help in drawing attention to the value of nature to humans, and take a role in protecting the environment with all of its element.
Environmental ethics doesn’t only deal with the human interactions and relationships, but also plays an important role in defining the human-nature relationship. These ethics help in finding a formula of how humans behave towards the natural environment, and applying these formulas in long-term sustainable development plans, which can bring significant economic benefits for investments, and more importantly, protect natural resources for future generations.
Urbanization is the transformation of rural areas into urban ones as a consequence of the economical and industrial development. Internal migration of population from rural to urban regions has played the main role in serving this urbanization. Official statistics indicates that China’s urban population has nearly doubled the last 35 years, and about half of this increase is a result of the internal migration which considered the largest in history. Rural-urban migration has played over the last 30 years and still playing an important role in shaping the demographic atmosphere as well as the economic development of Chinese cities.
The household registration system, better known as the Hukou system, has played an important role in organizing the population movements over the country. It was the government’s main tool in controlling and pursuing the state’s economic and social plans.
This paper provides a brief review of the history of the internal migrations in China over the last thirty years. In addition to a detailed defining of the relationship between the Hukou system and the rural-urban migration, and the effect of it over the migration process. The paper also studies the main reasons for migration and the effects of rural-urban migration on the rural and urban areas.
“...some Chinese official reports even announced that China's urban population proportion reached 46 percent in 1987. By their definition, nearly half of the Chinese people are urban now! This seeming "great leap forward" is accounted a fact and highly praised by some western scholars ... But, ... it can’t fool the Chinese peasants themselves. In their eyes, the Hukou is the real standard by which to measure their actual status, benefits, and the progress of urbanization.” (Cheng, 1991, p. 292-93)
We have taken the 2013 protests in Taksim Square, Turkey to be our case study, and looked closer at the events or incidents that occurred within this square. Through analyzing the spatial conflicts, i.e. the sit-ins, barricades, marches and police-citizens clash, our aim was to look at Taksim Square from a different perspective by synthesizing its different events with our literature and theoretical reviews, as well as Historical approaches. These include: Fragmentation of space in Taksim Square after the 1977 protests, Semi-privatization by the government, Commercialized Globalism vs. Global Social Movement, and the role of Social Media as a globalizing agent