Tourism, creative destruction, and the political economy of urban transformation in Beirut

This paper combines Schumpeter’s creative destruction concept with Harvey’s urban capital circulation theory to investigate the influence of political-economic structures and crisis settings on the development cycles of urban tourism destinations. Using Beirut, Lebanon as a case study, the analysis shows how Beirut’s post-civil war trajectory triggered waves of creative destruction, driven by real estate, tourism, and creative industries, that unfolded in sub-waves across Beirut’s neighbourhoods, reshaping the urban tourism landscape. The relocation of tourism hubs acted as spatial fixes fuelled by cycles of post-crisis capital influx and by tensions between creativity and destruction by overaccumulation. Despite variations in the sources and motivations behind capital injections, their impact on the urban destination’s social and spatial fabric collectively led to creative destruction. The analysis reveals the path-dependent and temporally sensitive nature of urban tourism development patterns, which in the case of Beirut was structurally entangled with broader capital dynamics. Tourism plays a dual role as both a mechanism for advancing capital interests and a source of disruption within capitalist urban transformation processes.