The Urban Recovery of Affordable Housing in Post-Blast Karantina (Beirut)

Abstract

After the August 4, 2020 explosion devastated the Karantina area adjacent to the port, throngs of volunteers and NGOs poured in to help with relief efforts, including reconstruction of damaged housing stock. With the absence of significant involvement from the state, long-term urban recovery has proven elusive. This experience is in keeping with previous reconstruction cycles that Beirut has lived through, as in the case of post-Civil War redevelopment and in the aftermath of the July 2006 war. In these earlier cases, the state delegated its role to non-state actors and became a facilitator of activity instead. This trend has also been apparent in the post-disaster reconstruction of Karantina. As a consequence, housing stock has been affected by declining affordability and accessibility, rising rental prices, increased levels of vacancy, and continued lack of facilities and services. To confront these problems, this thesis argues that urban recovery should supersede reconstruction. In this study, urban recovery is conceived as an open-ended “holistic and multi-layered process,” one that moves past “physical and the humanitarian” interventions and instead proposes an inclusive approach that is “locally informed and socially anchored” (Al-Harithy, 2021).

This thesis approaches urban recovery through the lens of housing and begins by documenting historic housing conditions and developments to identify pre-disaster advantages and disadvantages. Historical explorations suggest that Karantina has always been a place of refuge and affordable housing in the city of all those who seek it. Moving on to post-disaster experience, the thesis identifies several threats. These may be described as follows. The disruptive actions by landlords after the port blast, such as evictions, rent hikes, and the conversion of residential units into commercial spaces, are a result of a post-disaster reality, absence of a coherent social and urban policy by the authorities as well as the ongoing economic crisis. Therefore, there is a threat of losing the social diversity and the housing affordability in Karantina that has always hosted diverse low-income groups who sought living and working in proximity to the city center. Tension between different nationalities, as well as different sectarian groups, threatens the diversity of Karantina’s housing occupancy. Additionally, there is a threat of large scale development and gentrification, which might affect the scale of low income housing stock, especially since Karantina was not protected under the building freeze imposed after the blast. Finally, the thesis makes several planning recommendations at both the neighborhood and city scale that will lead towards the urban recovery of affordable housing in post-blast Karantina.