Micro, Meso, Macro

Multi-Scalar Reappropriation of Abandoned Railways in Beirut, Paris and Queens (New York)

Abstract

Abandoned and disused urban spaces have increasingly been examined as sites where everyday practices, informal interventions, and contested planning agendas converge. A growing body of scholarship has focused on how community-led and participatory appropriations can challenge top-down redevelopment and planning logics. Abandoned railway corridors occupy a distinctive position within this broader discourse. Their linear morphology cuts across neighborhoods and jurisdictions, and their material remnants retain the imprints of former transport networks. Their legal status is complicated by layered ownership, easements, and rights-of-way that entangle public and private interests. These conditions generate recurring patterns of use and dispute that unfold at multiple scales: micro appropriations by adjacent residents and informal occupants, meso-level initiatives such as cleanups, gardens, and organized walks, and macro projections that frame the corridor as future transport, heritage infrastructure, or linear parkland.

This article analyzes how multi-scalar informal and semi-formal reappropriations take shape across three decommissioned rail corridors: the Beirut–Bekaa line, Paris’s Petite Ceinture, and the Rockaway Beach Branch in Queens, New York. Grounded in multi-sited qualitative fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2025, the study combines repeated walking-based observation with interviews and document analysis. It traces how practices accumulate, stabilize, and sometimes conflict across scales. Across the three cases, the analysis shows that abandoned railways persist as socio-material assemblages in a condition of active suspension: neither vacant nor fully redeveloped but continuously redefined through competing practices and future-oriented claims. Rather than asking what these infrastructures will become, the article examines how actors attempt to stabilize particular trajectories by translating local practices into broader imaginaries and governance frameworks.