Building Beirut: an Account of Post-War Homes, their Builders, and a Transforming City

Abstract

This is a thesis about housing in Beirut: It inquires specifically about the characteristics of the housing stock produced in Municipal Beirut during the post-civil war era, and how these characteristics were influenced by public policies. It focuses further on high-end development, reflecting on their impact on the city and the developers who have driven this form of production. The thesis argues that market enabling policies set in place in post war Lebanon resulted in the production of a housing stock that increasingly serves as an asset to developers and property owners, rather than responding to the increasing demand for affordable housing. This thesis further shows the significant role of the high-end segment in driving residential development trends: an increased production of luxurious, large, and empty apartments coveted as exchangeable assets the distribution of which has contributed to spatial division in the city. The findings finally suggest that the housing production sector is concentrated in the hands of a group of well-established development moguls who leverage social and political networks, and consequently financial networks to push their activities and maximize their profit.

This research falls with the Beirut Urban Lab’s larger body of work, specifically the Beirut Built Environment Database (BBED), and it articulates its description of the built environment – and its production – based on the data collected and analyzed as part of this project. As such, the thesis contributes in improving knowledge about Beirut’s ongoing transformation, mapping how housing production in the 1996-2018 period has impacted the city. It further contributes to the development of methodologies of studying urban transformations in cities of the Global South where data is scarce.