The intricacies of popular housing in the Middle East Mona Fawaz Reviewed: Myriam Ababsa, Baudouin Dupret, and Éric Denis (eds.). 2012. Popular Housing and Urban Land Tenure in the Middle East, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Popular housing is a common trait of Middle-Eastern cities inhabited by migrants and refugees. A recent publication examines how these inhabitants negotiate their presence and manage to build their dwellings through complex and uncertain arrangements at the limit of informality. It has become customary to claim that the debate on informal land and housing production and exchange is exhausted: the number of publications and dissertations that have addressed this topic has dropped steadily over the past two decades. One might also note the alarmist tone that has often been employed when debating low-income neighborhoods, common to international organizations and the popular press, as well as some academic works (e.g. Mike Davis) in ways that neither do justice to the efforts of city-dwellers nor reflect the multiplicity of conditions that often converge in discussions of working-class neighborhoods. By contrast, this collection of essays revives a tradition of housing research that invites us to think of “popular housing” (commonly referred to in the English-language literature as “informal housing”) as a rich, dynamic, and changing mode of city-making. The book adopts a methodological focus on the processes that sustain the production of irregular or illegal housing through detailed descriptions of interactions, routines, ordinary day-to-day practices, and everyday mechanisms. A total of thirteen case studies selected from Syria (Damascus and Aleppo), Lebanon (Beirut), Egypt (Cairo), Turkey (Istanbul), and Jordan (Amman) each detail specific moments of this production. Their authors have all spent considerable time in the field, reflecting a grounded approach to developing theory on the basis of rich and specific on-site observations. We find some of the themes that preoccupied scholars throughout the 1990s, with the revival of institutional economics and interest in transaction security reflected in insightful descriptions of property exchanges, particularly in Damascus, Aleppo, and Cairo (Dupret and Ferrier, Ghazzal, and Sejourne). We also find echoes of the earliest concerns with tenure security, dwellers’ strategies to acquire legal standing, and the relations between property ownership, tenure security, and entrepreneurialism (Perouse, Denis, Deboulet). Standards, norms, habits, and laws that shape the making of these neighborhoods are also investigated in several contexts, with insightful reflections on the making of the rules and their spatialization, in particular with regard to architectural forms. Several chapters also take up themes that have been poorly covered in the academic literature, especially those pertaining to the architecture of informal housing, its building technologies, materials, and forms, and how such technologies differentiate but also connect various quarters of the city (Lena, Laue). Others look at public policies vis-à-vis informal settlements in various national contexts and their transformations over the past two decades in relation to local, national, and international factors and policy trends (Ababsa, Deboulet, Denis, Perouse, Clerc). Most of the 1