Cluster-Based Urban Conservation Design Guidelines in Mar Mikhael, Beirut

Abstract

Beirut is a modern port city whose urban landscape reflects successive phases of growth and transformation since the mid-nineteenth century. Yet its modern urban heritage remains highly vulnerable: exploitative building regulations, real estate speculation, and high-density zoning have fragmented the urban fabric and, in the absence of effective legal protection, continue to threaten its survival. Existing conservation frameworks are largely obsolete and weakly integrated with urban planning instruments, limiting their capacity to respond to these pressures.

The thesis builds on the UNESCO-commissioned study Identifying Cultural Heritage Attributes in Beirut Blast Damaged Areas (Beirut Urban Lab, 2022), which adapted UNESCO’s Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) approach to Beirut’s modern urban context. While the HUL framework offers a comprehensive perspective on urban heritage, its application in Beirut reveals methodological constraints when confronted with fragmented urban landscapes and legal gaps. In response, the thesis advances the HUL approach by revisiting the cluster-based reading proposed in the UNESCO study and introducing urban clusters as an operative unit for heritage conservation. It distinguishes between the preliminary typo-morphological clusters identified in the UNESCO study and morpho-regional clusters analytically delineated through morphological regionalization, establishing the latter as a more rigorous and transparent basis for conservation in fragmented modern urban landscapes.

To achieve this, the research critically adapts the method of morphological regionalization to Beirut. Originally developed by the historico-geographical school of urban morphology, the method delimits a hierarchy of morphological regions through analysis of the town plan, building fabric, and land use. In adapting it to Beirut, the study weighs and modifies these criteria to reflect the realities of the city’s urban landscape, while also accounting for open and green spaces and socio-spatial practices.

The study focuses on Mar Mikhael, a culturally significant neighborhood severely impacted by the 2020 port explosion. The thesis documents and analyzes the neighborhood to delimit urban heritage clusters, and as a pilot application, develops urban conservation design guidelines to preserve the character of one selected cluster.

By integrating cluster-based conservation into the HUL framework, the thesis proposes a scale-sensitive and transferable method for delimiting urban heritage clusters, and offers a response to Lebanon’s lack of comprehensive heritage conservation mechanisms.