Reading Urban Territories Through Socio-Spatial Interfaces

Analytical categories traditionally used to describe urban complexity—boundaries, fragmentation, segregation, enclaves—tend to portray spatial divisions as stable entities, privileging discontinuity over the relational processes through which it is produced. This limitation is particularly evident in cities marked by prolonged political instability, overlapping governance, or accelerated transformation. This article proposes the socio-spatial interface as a relational analytical framework that reframes rather than replaces the notion of boundary, understood as a configuration through which spatial forms, everyday practices, institutional arrangements, power relations, and historical conditions interact. Drawing on Lefebvre, Massey, de Certeau, and Bourdieu, and adopting a situated epistemology informed by Wittgenstein and Rancière, the article develops a four-dimensional methodological framework—institutional arrangements, material configurations, everyday practices and mobilities, and representations/memories/affects—derived from a doctoral fieldwork combining institutional documents, observation, a mobility questionnaire, in-depth interviews, and mental mapping. The framework is applied to an emblematic corridor of Beirut, traversed by the former demarcation line and encompassing three survey sectors—Furn el-Chebbak, Ghobeiry, and Tarik el-Jdidé—showing how the framework reveals markedly different configurations of separation, hybridity, and negotiated proximity across the three interfaces. The article contributes a situated approach to territorial analysis capable of informing architectural and urban design without reducing urban complexity to fixed spatial classifications.