Abbas Sbeity
Copyright © 2020 by Abbas Sbeity
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced —mechanically, electronically, or by any other means, including photocopying—without written permission of the publisher.
Book design by Abbas Sbeity
Master of Global Design at The Academie Libanaise Des Beaux-Arts. November 2020
Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts
École des Arts Décoratifs
Section Design
Master’s Degree in Global Design 2018–2020
Abbas Sbeity
Supervisors
Doreen Toutikian
Diala Lteif
Special thanks
Vrouyr Joubanian
ABSTRACT
Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, has been experiencing consecutive sociopolitical shocks since its independence following the French Mandate in 1948. Bad governance, lack of development, and weak public service are the natural byproducts of the political turmoil in a contested city like Beirut. Consequently, an experimental local practice of urban activism has emerged, expanding beyond the formal, modernist approach to development and city planning. The emergence of Beirut’s Urban Initiatives was a result of local political events between 2006 and 2020, leading to the formation of an alternative participatory social movement in the city tackling various systematic urban issues such as public engagement, local participation, access to public spaces, public transportation, and waste management.
Design for Urban Change is a research project that investigates
1) The emergence of Beirut’s Urban Initiatives – how did the local context catalyse urban change?
2) The role of design and the designer in the process – how did design help? How can design help?
The research project examines initiatives by dissecting their organisational models, implementation processes, and local participatory methods. The research process included interviews, participatory co-creation sessions, data analysis, and visualisations. The research project positions the designer as a sense-maker and researcher, as I disseminate and present my findings through a publication and a digital database that potentially could be used as a local resource.
Design for Urban Change came in a dire time where Lebanon went through an unprecedented series of events since the uprising in October 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Beirut blast on August 4th, 2020. The local response to these events was a testament to the cumulative efforts and initiatives investigated in this research.
Introduction About this Research Research Methodology
I. Design & the Designer
II. Global Trends in Urban Activism
III. The Case of Beirut
IV. Urban Initiatives in Beirut Directory Analysis
V. Design Interventions
On a daily trip from the southern suburb of Beirut, “Al-Dahiya,” where I live and study, I jump on a mini-bus—famously known as “van number 4”— heading toward the city center, where most of my activities take place. My eyes race through the small window as the city’s past echoes along the way. The bus’s route slices the city horizontally, tracing what was once Beirut’s “Green Line”—the civil war demarcation between East and West—and vertically, crossing through the fragmented, segregated neighborhoods of a city still grappling with its post-war reality. The journey takes me from the most marginalized quarters to the most upscale, from concrete chaos to glass facades, from the periphery to the symbolic heart of the capital.
The route begins in Al-Dahiya—Arabic for “suburb”—a stigmatising denomination for neighborhoods shaped by political and religious hegemony, marked by isolation, security measures, and frequent conflict. As the bus makes its way through the city, I observe bullet-scarred buildings, abandoned lots, and closed-off public parks like Horsh Beirut. The road finally ends in Hamra, a lively economic hub and a rare site of mixing between different social groups in Beirut.
It was this simple yet profound commute that opened my eyes to the spatial injustices and socio-political fragmentation of the city. The informal transportation system became my lens for understanding how urban life is structured and for realizing that cities are not just made of buildings, but of histories, power, and people. I began to perceive the city not only as a space I move through but as a system I am embedded in. This shaped my earliest questions about the production of urban space and my role in it.
These realizations followed me into architecture school. During one studio project, we were tasked with designing a stadium within Horsh Beirut— Beirut’s largest public park, which had been closed to the public for years. It struck me that we were being trained to design in abstraction, detached from the socio-political reality of the city. The assignment felt ethically problematic: while I was part of Nahnoo, a local organization advocating for the reopening of the park and for more inclusive public space, I was simultaneously being asked to participate in a speculative project that ignored local struggles and community needs. That moment marked a shift in my thinking about architecture, ethics, and urban responsibility. These realizations led me to engage in local and international initiatives focusing on participatory design and urban justice. Over the years, I expanded my perspective through civic projects and learning exchanges in both Lebanon and abroad, which continue to inform my design lens.
This thesis is the outcome of a 1.5-year research process shaped by personal history, global learning, and unforeseen events—including the COVID-19 pandemic and the Beirut port explosion. While the core study period does not extend to 2020, the social and political movements that emerged after the blast inevitably influenced the context in which this work was developed.
This research is not conducted by an urban planner or political scientist, but rather by a designer. My aim is to understand how urban activism functions as a process, and what role design and the designer can play in shaping, analyzing, or supporting it. I treat “design” as a way of making sense of complex systems and organizing collective action, a practice that involves questioning, reframing, and intervening. The central research question is: What is the process of urban activism, and what role does design—and the designer—play within it?
To answer this, I explore urban activism in Beirut as a case study, using design research tools. I examine how grassroots initiatives have emerged in response to political dysfunction, spatial injustice, and post-war urban policy—and how they deploy methods that overlap with the field of design.
Chapter 1 delves into design theory, tracing the evolving role of the designer in contemporary practice. Chapter 2 examines global trends in urban activism, offering a comparative lens for the local case. Chapter 3 focuses on Beirut, situating the city’s urban conditions within its political and historical context. Chapter 4 presents the core analysis—mapping urban initiatives and drawing insights from interviews, process maps, and stakeholder relationships. Chapter 5 translates these findings into proposed design interventions. The final chapter reflects on the research process and suggests directions for continued exploration.
This research aims to contribute to both design and urban discourse. It seeks to connect emerging practices of urban activism with design theory and methods, offering a grounded analysis of how design can support activism as both a mode of inquiry and a tool for transformation. Above all, this work is a personal and political journey, a way of connecting lived experience and design experimentation to reimagine the possibilities of urban life.
A Global Design thesis is an opportunity for students to explore a personally meaningful topic within the realm of design. The year-long process is guided by the core principles of the Global Design program: fourth-order design, a human-centered design process, and an understanding of design as a practice rooted in collaboration, participatory learning, organizational development, and social impact. A Global Design thesis is built around a central argument informed by observation, stakeholder interviews, literature review, and case studies of projects that engage similar strategies in other contexts. The work is documented in a final book publication.
After two years of engaging with design methodology and building on my experience in urban activism, I chose to focus my thesis on the intersection of design and social innovation. My project offers an opportunity to apply design research methods to a subject I care deeply about and to externalize and reflect on the lessons I have learned.
The goal of this research is to examine urban activism from a design perspective. I approach the topic not as an urban expert or planner, but as a designer. My aim is to connect theories and methodologies from the design discipline to urban movements and activism. I investigate and clarify key concepts from both fields, grounding them in the specific political and historical context of urban development in Beirut.
My research builds on the work of local and international scholars who have explored the emergence of grassroots initiatives addressing urban issues. The central research question guiding this thesis is: What is the process of urban activism, and what role does design—and the designer—play within it?
By “design,” I refer to the mechanisms and processes through which things work: the systems, tools, and modes of organizing that shape urban initiatives. Through an exploratory design methodology, I analyze the structures, methods, and tools employed by urban initiatives in Beirut. I also map the stakeholders involved and examine how their roles are organized and coordinated. My objective is to synthesize existing literature, data, and insights to build a critical and design-oriented understanding of urban activism. I approach design not only as a problem-solving tool, but also as a form of sensemaking, as introduced in Chapter I.
This research is qualitative and exploratory in nature. The process followed four main phases:
• Contextualizing the research
• Mapping and conducting interviews
• Analysis
• Sensemaking and documentation
The methods I used include:
• Literature review on design, urban social movements, bottom-up urbanism, and the history of urban development in Beirut
• Case study analysis
• Archival and press research to map urban initiatives
• Semi-structured interviews (online and in-person)
• Process mapping and stakeholder mapping
• Affinity mapping
• Co-creation of system maps
• Co-creation workshops
• Data visualization and synthesis
• To investigate urban initiatives in Beirut, I asked:
• What triggered the emergence of these initiatives? How does Beirut’s political and historical context shape them?
• What processes, methods, and tools do they use?
• What organizational models and ways of working do they follow?
• Who are the actors involved in each initiative?
• What challenges do urban activists face?
• How can the impact of such work be evaluated or sustained?
Data Collection and Framing
Insights gathered from interviews and secondary sources were organized according to the following parameters:
• Date of initiation and relationship to Beirut’s political timeline
• Organizational structure (e.g., NGO, private company, academic institution, unregistered group)
• Scale of initiative (individual, collective, medium, or large organization)
• Current status (active, inactive, or in transition)
• Areas of focus and types of activities conducted
• Stakeholder landscape
• Methods and tools deployed
• Design and research processes used
• Sources of funding
Following data collection and synthesis, the research transitioned into a sensemaking phase, focusing on structuring the material in a clear and accessible manner. Building on this foundation, the work took an interventionist turn, proposing a strategic framework and design interventions intended to contribute to ongoing conversations about urban activism in Beirut.
Victor Papanek (1971), renowned designer and author, famously said, “All men are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity.” His quote urges us to explore the evolving definition of Design, its modern-day connotations, and the changing roles and identities of designers.
The concept of design in the late 20th century shifted from being productfocused to a more flexible activity encompassing all aspects of our physical and virtual worlds (Buchanan, 1992; Fuad-Luke, 2015). However, this flexibility led to confusion and a lack of understanding (Buchanan, 1992), which was exacerbated by the growing recognition of design as a universally applicable approach to thinking and operation (Manzini, 2015).
In this context, it becomes clear that design, its methods, and ideas cannot be pigeonholed into a single definition or professional practice, such as graphic design or product design (Buchanan, 1992). This evolving concept has moved from designing product categories to “designing for people’s purposes” (Sanders & Stappers, 2018), shifting the focus from traditional to emerging design disciplines.
Emerging design practices prioritize people and society, incorporating diverse perspectives and expanding the scope of inquiry. This enables designers to address our contemporary world’s societal, economic, and environmental challenges (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). Consequently, this practice redefines what design is and how and who designs (Fuad-Luke, 2015).
In line with Papanek’s statement, design is performed by professional designers and non-designers engaging in basic human activity. This perspective, however, has been a point of contention, particularly among designers preferring clear boundaries between professionally and nonprofessionally produced designs. Despite these debates, scholars have emphasized the critical role of design in addressing contemporary challenges (Fuad-Luke, 2015). This thesis, therefore, embraces an understanding of emerging design produced by both designers and non-designers, as defined by Alastair Fuad-Luke (2015): “Design is the act of deliberately moving from an existing situation to a preferred one by professional designers or others applying design knowingly or unknowingly.”
Within this scope, design assumes a crucial problem-solving function in tackling contemporary challenges termed “Wicked Problems.” This concept, introduced by Horst W.J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber in their 1973 seminal paper “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” emerged during intensive scrutiny of design methodologies (Rittel & Webber, 1973). The duo characterized wicked problems as intricate social system issues characterized by their ill-definition, conflicting interests of numerous stakeholders, and puzzling systemic implications. Notoriously, wicked problems often manifest as social or cultural conundrums; their vast and intricate nature
leaves no clear indication of where to begin, and they exist within a complex web of other wicked problems. Consequently, any attempt to resolve one could unintentionally trigger another (Rittel & Webber, 1973). Global challenges, such as poverty, climate change, and sustainability, are classic examples of these problems. The authors suggest that these problems do not have value-free, true-false answers. Instead, the choice of explanation or solution for a wicked problem is often influenced by the individual’s worldview and intentions. The authors note that professionals were once seen as problem solvers who were hired to eliminate conditions that the predominant opinion judged undesirable. However, as society has evolved and become more complex, the tasks of professionals have become increasingly challenging - they are often involved in what is referred to as a political game (Rittel & Webber, 1973). The authors advocate for a decision-making process in which stakeholders must engage in dialogue, agree on problem framing, and set goals (Rittel & Webber, 1973).
In 1992, design theorist and scholar Richard Buchanan re-examined the concept of wicked problems, discussing how design thinking can be applied to address them. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the complexity and interconnectedness of problems and proposes that design thinking offers a way to approach and tackle such complex challenges.
Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.
— Time Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO
Similarly, Ezio Manzini (2015) alluded to a concept parallel to wicked problems, describing social issues as “intractable” — they defy resolution using conventional tools, policies, and economic frameworks. Instead, they require diverse stakeholders, each with unique expectations and motivations.
Drawing on the philosophies of Rittel & Webber, Manzini, and Buchanan, we can deduce that we are moving towards a new design orientation, where the design process is participatory and intended to catalyze and guide sociopolitical transformation (Fuad-Lule, 2015). Design Thinking equips the designer with the tools, or “placements,” as Buchanan (1992) referred to them, to reframe an ambiguous problem into a workable hypothesis and collate the perspectives of varied stakeholders. Consequently, the designer can then remove the “wickedness.”
The mitigation of complexity, or ‘wickedness’, requires a design approach that not only solves problems but also facilitates sensemaking. While problemsolving is a vital facet of design, it is not its sole function. Design can also play a significant role in shaping culture, language, and the creation of meaning (Manzini, 2015). Manzini (2015) has proposed an expanded definition of design that includes “making sense of things” or creating new entities with meaning. This implies an active and proactive role in the social construction of meaning, quality, values, and beauty. Both problem-solving and sensemaking coexist, interact, and mutually influence each other. Manzini portrays design as a process in two realms: the physical and biological world, where people live and everything exists, and the social world, where conversations occur, and meaning is continuously adapted. Design impacts both these worlds, resolving issues in the physical world and fostering sensemaking in the social world. Although discussions may sometimes concentrate on one of these two dimensions, a comprehensive understanding of design must encompass problem-solving and sense-making, with the balance adjusted according to the context.
In conclusion, sensemaking involves imbuing things with ‘sense’ or ‘meaning’. It is seen as design’s contribution to the social construction of meaning, quality, values, and beauty. From this perspective, design is not solely about solving practical problems (although this aspect is indeed included), but also about creating and communicating meaning, enhancing cultural quality, and participating in societal dialogues.
From the literature discussed above, we can conclude three points: Design is an evolving concept, transitioning from a traditional, object-centric approach to a more inclusive process. It welcomes contributions from both professionals and non-professionals.
Design can be a powerful tool for addressing complex contemporary challenges, also known as “Wicked Problems.” It engages diverse stakeholders, appreciates the interconnectedness of these intricate issues, and applies design thinking to navigate and mitigate these systemic problems. Design is instrumental in ‘sensemaking,’ which involves imbuing things with ‘sense’ or ‘meaning’ beyond its problem-solving role.
Over the past half-century, various evolutionary trends in design practices rooted in the communal creativity of participatory design started to emerge. Beginning in 1970, participatory design spread in Scandinavian nations. This participatory approach initially materialized within the industrial sector, where employees were crafting new systems within their work environments. The user was treated as a partner (Sanders & Stappers, 2008).
Simultaneously, between 1970 and 1980, enterprises began reevaluating their perception of customers (Fuad-Luke, 2015), prompting the rise of the usercentered methodology, which was predominantly initiated in the United States. This approach formed a bridge between designers and the prospective users of the products under design. It proved immensely successful in consumer product design and manufacture, prompting widespread adoption throughout the 1990s. Within this context, the user was the subject (Sanders & Stappers, 2008).
While the user-centered approach garnered recognition, another discourse was unfolding regarding the societal dimensions of design (Margolin & Margolin, 2002). A transformation began to take shape: design was no longer conducted for users, but alongside them, turning the customer into an active participant and a co-creator (Fuad-Luke, 2015). The user-centered method was no longer deemed adequate to tackle the complex challenges of the modern world. A connected and knowledgeable global populace comprising diverse people, communities, and cultures necessitates a fresh design perspective. Design, within this context, must transcend mere products and users (Sanders & Stappers, 2008).
This paradigm shift in design paved the way for an innovative design landscape, leading to the emergence of co-creation and co-design concepts (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). Co-design embodies a spectrum of (both historical and emerging) design methodologies that promote active involvement, such as participatory design, metadesign, inclusive/universal design, mass collaboration, slow design, and user-innovation design (Fuad-Luke, 2015).
Involve more stakeholders in creating & design
Figure 1. The shift from customers to co-creators Adapted from Sanders, E. B.-N., & Stappers, P. J. (2008). Co-creation and the new landscapes of design.
Towards increasing participation > co-design & co-creation
For the context of this research, the following design methodologies are defined:
Co-design is “designing with others” (Fuad-Luke, 2015). It embodies the collective creativity shared by designers and non-designers who participate in any stage of the design process (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). Co-design is predicated on the belief that individuals ought to have a voice in creating any artifact they intend to use, and their input significantly influences the design process (Fuad-Luke, 2015). Co-design represents a social dialogue in which all stakeholders participate in various processes marked by dynamism, creativity, and complexity (Manzini, 2015).
Participatory design seeks to democratize the design process, albeit being a top-down decisionmaking method, by allowing people to play a critical role in the design procedure. It fosters a mindset and attitude that acknowledges everyone has something valuable to contribute to the design process (Fuad-Luke, 2015).
Social design aims to improve the quality of life for citizens. It addresses issues overlooked by both the state and market sectors, as well as those that the affected population, lacking economic and political influence, cannot rectify on their own. While Social Design is considered noble and ethical, it lacks economic terms to operate with (Manzini, 2015).
Coinciding with the shift towards a broader understanding of design focused on people and society, designers have become increasingly involved in a myriad of activist initiatives across diverse fields, such as raising awareness of public spaces through the concept of Guerrilla Gardening (Manzini, 2015). Here, the designers aim to propose an alternative perspective for identifying and resolving issues, rather than providing solutions intentionally (Manzini, 2015). This entails a design activism that challenges already existing solutions and offers new ones that provoke transformation and social change (Fuad-Luke, 2015). Design teams, in this case, are comprised of volunteers and expert designers, and tend to take a stance either to be acknowledged by institutions or to conflict with them (Manzini, 2015). Design Activism is articulated in the work of Alastair Fuad-Luke (2009) as:
“Design activism is ‘design thinking, imagination, and practice applied knowingly or unknowingly to create a counter-narrative aimed at generating and balancing positive social, institutional, environmental, and/or economic change.”
Fuad-Luke further delineates two types of design activism:
Design-oriented activism: Executed by non-intentional designers who, inadvertently, employ design thinking.
Design-led activism:
Carried out by designers themselves, either independently, under commission, or within a nonprofit agency, who consciously utilize design to tackle issues.
Ezio Manzini (2015) introduces Design for Social Innovation as a contemporary approach that, he asserts, reflects current design functionality rather than a novel discipline. He contends that design can stimulate social transformation and convert it into design for social innovation. Thus, he defines design for social innovation as an approach wherein an expert designer helps “activate, sustain, and orient processes of social change toward sustainability.” These expert designers apply their design skills to co-design processes, ultimately leading to social change.
Discussing the shift to co-design necessitates expanding our focus beyond the designer to include all players in the design process—from experts in various disciplines to endusers.
By “end user,” we refer to individuals who will benefit from or utilize the products resulting from the design process. In co-designing, these individuals are regarded as experts in their own experiences. They are crucial in the process, contributing their knowledge, generating fresh ideas, and fostering concept development.
The co-designing process gives rise to a new role for researchers, who might also serve as designers. Researchers draw upon theories and background knowledge from their specific domains and transmit this information to the co-design team. They incorporate people into the design process by providing facilitation tools and fostering participation, ideation, and practical expression (Sanders & Stappers, 2008).
Incorporating new actors into the co-design process makes the designer’s role increasingly crucial and must be clearly articulated. Designers offer specialized knowledge and design skills that other stakeholders might not possess, such as visual thinking, creative process management, information mapping, and decision-making abilities (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). Designers play a leading role in creating and refining design thinking tools and methods to ensure they are accessible and functional for non-designers, enabling them to express their ideas effectively.
The designer collaborates with the researcher (sometimes the roles may overlap) in developing tools, contributing to their design skills. Current discourse still harbors some ambiguity regarding the differences between designers and researchers, as scholars debate their respective roles and capacities within the process (Sanders & Stappers, 2008).
While we have previously depicted design as an activity anyone can undertake, a distinction between designers and non-designers remains necessary. Manzini (2015) presents design along a spectrum based on the designers’ competence:
Diffuse Design: carried out by non-designers, non-experts, utilizing their innate capacity to design.
Design Experts: professionally trained designers.
Manzini (2015) posits that design experts craft environments that facilitate more diffuse design processes, enabling diverse design approaches to emerge. The designer, therefore, serves as the facilitator that supports co-design processes by applying their professional design knowledge.
Design
Figure 2. Design modality map – Design for Social Innovation
Adapted from Manzini, E. (2015). Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation. MIT Press.
This chapter introduced design, its evolving definitions, and the emerging design practices in the twenty-first century. The goal is to position design at the beginning of the research to provide a more design-oriented perspective on urban activism. Design is an inclusive process that welcomes contributions from professionals and non-professionals. It is a tool to make sense, solve complex challenges, and engage diverse stakeholders. The different concepts introduced will help position urban activism within design practices.
To understand the emergence of urban activism, it is necessary to trace the historical shifts in how cities have been planned and developed. Architecture education often begins with key figures like Le Corbusier, who saw cities as machines and systems designed for efficiency. Later, one may encounter the human-centered work of Jan Gehl, who posed a very different question: what would it mean to design cities for people? Between these two visions lies a fundamental transformation in urban thinking, one in which the concept of the “right to the city” played a pivotal role.
The first half of the 20th century was a defining period for the development of modernism as a movement in architecture and urban planning. The Athens Charter, drafted in 1933 by members of CIAM and later popularized by Le Corbusier (1943/1946), outlined a vision for the functional city based on zoning, dividing urban life into separate areas for dwelling, working, recreation, and circulation. Inspired by the aesthetics of the machine age and the rise of the automobile, Le Corbusier famously described buildings as machines à habiter (machines for living). His radical proposal, the Plan Voisin for Paris (1925), epitomized the modernist desire to erase the old city in favor of rational order, efficiency, and monumental form. Following the Great Depression, a new economic paradigm emerged in the form of Keynesianism. John Maynard Keynes’s ideas emphasized the role of government spending in stabilizing economies and promoting economic growth and employment. In response, many Western governments, particularly in the post-World War II era, embraced large-scale public investment in infrastructure, housing, and social services. The United States’ New Deal policies and postwar reconstruction efforts in Europe reflected this approach.
Modernist planners and architects played a crucial role in shaping these state-led urban development projects. Their visions of functional zoning, standardization, and mass housing aligned with the goals of the welfare state, contributing to the production of modernist urban landscapes defined by infrastructure megaprojects, social housing estates, and highway systems. By the 1970s and 1980s, however, a profound shift occurred with the rise of neoliberalism. The role of the state was restructured from a provider of welfare to a facilitator of markets. Political leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan championed deregulation, privatization, and reduced state intervention in favor of market-driven growth. As David Harvey (2005) argues, neoliberal urbanism emphasized entrepreneurialism, property-led development, and the commodification of urban space.
In practice, this meant a growing reliance on the private sector to drive urban development, often through public-private partnerships and real estate speculation. Cities became sites of financial investment and profit extraction, producing spatial inequality, rising housing costs, and privatized enclaves. Urban planning was increasingly shaped by market value rather than public need, resulting in what Harvey describes as “accumulation by dispossession” (2003), where urban space is reorganized to serve capital rather than collective life.
In response to the rise of profit-oriented urban development, a call for a more human-centered and democratic approach began to emerge within architectural and urban planning discourses. This shift challenged conventional professional practices—such as closed competitions, top-down commissioning, and technocratic design processes—and gave rise to experimental and participatory alternatives (Rosa & Weiland, 2013). A wave of small-scale initiatives began to contest the institutionalized process of city-making, embracing principles of self-organization, grassroots participation, and collective agency. These practices, often situated at the intersection of urban design, social theory, and political art, are what Kee and Miazzo (2014) describe as emblematic of a broader bottom-up movement.
This bottom-up approach to urban development centers people as co-creators of their environments. Rather than treating residents as passive end-users, these initiatives position them as co-decision-makers and co-managers throughout the design and planning process. Projects are often grounded in locally defined needs, in contrast to top-down models where political agendas or market imperatives shape urban space with minimal community input.
The roots of these community-led and collaborative practices can be traced back to the late 1960s. In the wake of political unrest and the global unrest of 1968, new forms of experimental and collective action emerged across Europe and North America. It was within this context that Henri Lefebvre published Le Droit à la Ville (The Right to the City, 1968), a manifesto against technocratic urbanism and a call for reclaiming the city as a space of collective life. While not the first to emphasize public participation, Lefebvre was among the first to theorize the urban itself as a political and social construct, shaped by the daily lives of its inhabitants.
“The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources; it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.” — Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit à la Ville (1968)
Lefebvre’s ideas laid the groundwork for critical urban scholarship that would follow in the 1970s and 1980s. David Harvey expanded on Lefebvre’s work through a Marxist analysis of urban political economy and the spatial dynamics of capital accumulation. At the same time, Manuel Castells theorized urban social movements as key agents of structural transformation. In The City and the Grassroots (1983), Castells defined urban social movements as:
“Collective mobilizations around demands for collective consumption, cultural identity, and political self-determination that influence structural social change and transform the urban meaning.”
— Castells, 1983
Castells argued that these movements could achieve systemic change when supported by organized responses to underlying social and economic inequalities. Following this, Pruijt (2007) defined urban social movements more broadly as “citizens’ attempts to gain control over their urban environment,” encompassing the built environment, social relations, and local political processes.
More recently, Domaradzka (2018) has examined how urban movements respond to top-down development designed to serve elite interests. These movements seek social recognition and establish local democratic platforms to articulate demands for the right to the city. Their activities range from advocacy and protest to institutional engagement and participatory problemsolving at the neighborhood level.
The “right to the city” has thus come to symbolize both access to urban resources and the collective capacity to influence urban transformation. Lefebvre framed it as both a “cry and a demand”—a slogan of protest and a framework for imagining alternative futures. As Domaradzka (2018) notes, while the concept initially appealed to marginalized groups resisting exclusion, it increasingly mobilized middle-class actors as well—particularly as urban movements professionalized and institutionalized during the 2000s. This professionalization marked a transition from radical, outsider politics to more organized, often semi-institutionalized activism. As global networks and alliances took shape, urban movements began addressing a wider range of issues—from housing and transport to environmental justice and civic participation—under the broader banners of social equity and urban wellbeing. While protests often emerged in response to specific policies or development agendas, grassroots actors increasingly turned to participatory tools to assert influence over formal planning processes (Domaradzka, 2018).
Although many scholars argue that participatory planning has remained mainly in the realm of theory (Rosa & Weiland, 2013), I contend that actual observations, practices, and experiences shaped these theories:
• The events of 1968, including widespread protests and political unrest across Europe and the U.S., inspired Henri Lefebvre’s articulation of the right to the city. His ideas were grounded in a critique of technocratic planning and called for a more democratic, collective process of urban production.
• The concept of urban acupuncture—an approach to strategic, smallscale interventions in the urban fabric—was developed in practice by Jaime Lerner during his time as mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, in the late 1970s. Although the term was theorized later by others, Lerner’s interventions laid the groundwork for this tactical approach to urbanism.
• In North America, the writings and activism of Jane Jacobs, notably The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), played a foundational role in shifting urban discourse. Her critique of top-down renewal projects helped halt destructive developments and defend the integrity of local, mixed-use neighborhoods. Jacobs’ work blurred the boundaries between activism and theory and remains a cornerstone of participatory urbanism.
A different but related trajectory emerged in the work of Jan Gehl, a Danish architect and urban designer. Influenced by Jacobs’ human-scale approach, Gehl’s methodology—summarized in Cities for People (2010)—emphasizes the importance of sensory experiences, everyday behaviors, and empirical observations in shaping livable cities. His practice, Gehl Architects, collaborates closely with municipalities and communities, using tools such as public life studies, walkability audits, and observational research to develop people-centered urban strategies. Gehl’s process exemplifies participatory design by involving end-users and stakeholders throughout the planning and implementation phases.
These examples reflect a broader pattern: the urban social movements of the late 20th century, initially emerging as forms of protest inspired by the right to the city, have since evolved into grassroots initiatives and professional practices that institutionalize participatory mechanisms. This continuum connects early activism with today’s urban consultancies and co-design studios, which prioritize inclusive and community-led development.
In the next part of this research, I focus on the grassroots initiatives and practices that have emerged in response to local challenges. Drawing on comparative studies and recent publications, I aim to define these practices and examine the terminology that shapes this discourse.
These initiatives represent an experiential response to failed urban governance and unsustainable development. They are typically small-scale, locally initiated, and community-driven, addressing everyday urban problems through social innovation (Rosa & Weiland, 2013). For instance, in Cairo, grassroots projects emerged as a response to the government’s failure to provide reliable services or protect the city’s architectural heritage (Cluster, 2019).
The innovation represented in these initiatives does not seek fixed outcomes. Instead, it is grounded in open-ended, iterative processes that test new models of spatial production and governance. By challenging the dominance of technocratic planning and top-down architecture, these initiatives open up a space for learning, adaptation, and creativity (Rosa & Weiland, 2013).
In this context, a new culture of participation requires planning processes that facilitate genuine stakeholder involvement, including community groups, municipal agencies, developers, and professionals. Yet, formal institutions often struggle to enact these processes due to bureaucratic inertia, rigid procedures, and institutional control.
My interviews and research suggest that the literature and discourse surrounding bottom-up and grassroots urban initiatives remain underdeveloped and undertheorized. Nonetheless, such initiatives are gaining visibility and traction in both academic and professional contexts. The growing interest in “intervening in the urban realm”—whether social, political, cultural, commercial, or artistic— is giving rise to a vocabulary that frames these efforts in new terms:
Urban activism refers to collective actions that aim to influence the structures and processes shaping urban life. Unlike activism that primarily takes place in cities, urban activism targets issues such as spatial justice, public access, housing rights, and urban policy.
Bottom-up urbanism encompasses a range of decentralized, citizen-led practices, including DIY urbanism, tactical interventions, and collaborative placemaking. It aims to democratize city-making by positioning citizens as agents of urban transformation. As attention to these practices has grown, formal institutions have increasingly adopted or coopted them, bringing them closer to the mainstream.
Tactical urbanism involves short-term, low-cost interventions, such as parklets, temporary bike lanes, or pop-up events, that respond quickly to community needs or test ideas before long-term implementation. Initiatives can be led by citizens, nonprofits, or local governments, and often serve as prototypes for more permanent change. Its strength lies in being adaptable, inclusive, and fast-moving in contrast to conventional planning processes.
Popularized by Project for Public Spaces in the 1990s, placemaking is rooted in earlier ideas from Jacobs and William H. Whyte. It is about designing public spaces and creating places with meaning through collaborative processes that reflect local culture, needs, and social life. Placemaking emphasizes the social, sensory, and symbolic dimensions of space.
DIY urbanism refers to informal, often unauthorized interventions in public space. It includes actions like guerrilla gardening, painting crosswalks, or building temporary street furniture. While it shares methods with tactical urbanism, DIY approaches do not always aim for long-term change or official recognition. They are often expressions of agency, frustration, or creativity in the face of bureaucratic inaction.
In this section, I present three case studies of publications from the last decade that investigated and documented emerging bottom-up and community-led practices and actions in the urban development field: Handmade Urbanism (2013), We Own the City (2014), and Grounded Urban Practices (2019). These three publications serve as a database of projects, aiming to contribute, through analysis and contextualization, to a broader discussion on emerging urban practices.
Handmade Urbanism: From Community Initiatives to Participatory Models, edited by Marcos L. Rosa and Ute E. Weiland, emerged from the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award. The book compiles grassroots initiatives from five cities: Mumbai, São Paulo, Istanbul, Mexico City, and Cape Town, focusing on how communities develop innovative responses to everyday urban challenges.
The publication aims to demystify the mechanisms, strategies, and tools employed by these initiatives. Through project profiles and interviews with local actors, the editors present a user-driven perspective on urban problems and highlight the importance of local knowledge and self-organization. The authors seek to frame a new “grammar” for urban practice that legitimizes alternative forms of urban production outside the institutional mainstream.
They identify several features of these initiatives:
• Ordinary residents are capable of designing practical and innovative solutions based on their lived experiences.
• Collaboration is central, with participatory approaches connecting various stakeholders.
• These efforts are grounded in principles of collectivity and placebased action.
• Solutions often target micro-level challenges through tactical and direct interventions.
Despite varying contexts, the case studies show that many grassroots efforts share a common logic of resourcefulness, adaptability, and spatial creativity. The book emphasizes the role of design as a transformative force in a collaborative medium. The authors argue that design should be viewed as essential as sanitation, education, or nutrition, particularly in communities that have been historically excluded from formal planning processes.
We Own the City (2014), edited by Francesca Miazzo and Tris Kee, builds on a research initiative launched by CITIES Foundation in collaboration with ARCAM (Amsterdam Center for Architecture), and later with the University of Hong Kong. The book examines the emergence of bottom-up development in five cities: Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Moscow, New York, and Taipei, contexts typically characterized by top-down governance and formal planning institutions.
The authors argue that we are witnessing “an era of newly collaborative urban development,” where citizens are taking on roles as implementers, decision-makers, and beneficiaries of local redevelopment projects. These efforts often emerge from grassroots organizing but increasingly intersect with public institutions, architects, and developers.
Through narrative case studies, interviews, and analysis, the book explores how top-down actors can engage with community-led initiatives to learn from their processes. However, the editors also emphasize that most institutions are still ill-prepared to accommodate this shift. Bureaucratic inertia, legal constraints, and professional hierarchies often limit the potential of bottomup innovation.
The book draws on interviews with major architecture firms, such as OMA, MVRDV, and NEXT Architects, to demonstrate how professional practices are starting to open up space for public input and co-creation. Ultimately, the authors advocate for an urban development process that prioritizes collaborative methods over finished products, redefining parks, housing, and public spaces as outcomes of inclusive, creative, and iterative engagement, rather than end goals.
Grounded Urban Practices (2019) is a research project by CLUSTER (Cairo) and Non-fiction (Amsterdam) that explores spatial initiatives emerging at the intersection of urban activism, design practice, and civic engagement. The authors introduce the term Grounded Urban Practices (GUPs) to describe a new kind of practice that resists binary divisions between formal/informal, institutional/activist, or technical/ advocacy-based approaches.
Drawing on case studies from Cairo, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam, the publication outlines four defining features of GUPs:
• They use space as a key agent of social, political, or economic change.
• They are rooted in place—embedded within specific communities, neighborhoods, or social movements.
• They navigate between radical idealism and institutional pragmatism, occupying a flexible position between advocacy and mainstream urbanism.
• They are inherently experiential, experimenting with legal, financial, and organizational models, while deploying innovative tools and strategies.
The project situates these practices within political and economic contexts, such as the post-2011 revolution in Cairo or the financial crisis in the Netherlands. It argues that GUPs often emerge from systemic failures when institutions are unable to meet basic needs or respond to complex urban challenges.
Crucially, GUPs are framed as both reactive and generative, creating new knowledge, frameworks, and infrastructures for inclusive urban production. Positioned between the creative industries and urban social movements, these practices offer alternative logics for how cities can be built, managed, and imagined.
After tracing the historical shifts in urban planning from modernist visions to participatory movements and exploring key terms and global case studies of grassroots urban initiatives, a clear pattern emerges: the process matters more than the product. Whether through tactical urbanism, placemaking, or grounded practices, these initiatives emphasize collaboration, adaptability, and community involvement as cocreators of urban space. What emerges across all examples is the importance of participatory frameworks—and the tools needed to support them. Yet, a significant gap remains between the ambitions of participatory urbanism and the practical methods available to carry them out effectively.
This is where design enters the conversation. As discussed in the first chapter, design is not limited to aesthetics or objects—it is a way of thinking, structuring, and navigating complexity. It offers tools and methods for facilitating processes, prototyping interventions, and engaging diverse stakeholders in co-creating urban futures.
Beirut 1960 – a tram crosses Martyrs’ Square downtown on its way to Ras Beirut, passing through large markets, busy streets full of people, and large squares throughout the city. Between nostalgia and reality, daily photos of old Beirut circulate on various social media pages and groups, showcasing archival images of Beirut that highlight different urban planning practices not seen in today’s Beirut.
Beirut 2020 – a large queue of cars spreads across large highways and roads crossing various neighborhoods marked by flags, posters, and roadblocks— congestion, busy streets, shrinking public spaces, and sidewalks as spaces for gathering.
Between these two dates lies a story of a contested city in a complex geopolitical context that dates back to the 16th century, when Beirut was still under Ottoman rule. With that complex and rich history, Beirut has witnessed a never-ending sequence of regular political unrest, crises, and war. Its name has become associated with violence, chaos, and war (Bou Akar, 2018).
Beirut’s downtown is built on a site that dates back more than 5,000 years, but its contemporary development began in the 19th century when its port became an important trade hub in the region. Only then did planning gain more interest and become a topic of competition between religious-political organizations, recurring governments, and developers (Bou Akar, 2018). Planning evolved into a top-down operation managed by several public institutions, with little to no participation from the population (Harb, 2019).
If you live in Beirut or its suburbs but your family origins are from another town or city, you will be voting for all elections (municipal and parliamentary) in those villages. Thus, as a citizen of Beirut, one cannot contribute to the local governance of your city. And since Beirut is the capital, and due to waves of internal displacement due to previous episodes of war, there is a big chance that a significant number of residents in Beirut are not initially from there. Thus, they don’t have a say.
The goal of this operation on a national level is to reproduce sectarianism bound to territorial boundaries and maintain a body of voters in each locality. In the case of Beirut, territorial boundaries materialize sectarianism with a clear reflection in a political electoral map that assures electoral outcomes. Beirut’s urbanization is then shaped by sectarianism, where competing political groups control the population without providing sufficient services within the city (Fawaz, 2019).
The absence of participatory processes led to the establishment of an exclusive process of urban planning executed by a specific body of public institutions (The Directorate General of Urbanism (DGU), The Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR), and local municipalities). In the following diagram, Public Works Studio maps the decision-making process for urban planning in Lebanon (Public Works Studio, 2020).
Land use is regulated through master plans
Commissioning a consultancy Prepared by the General Directorate of Urban Planning by request from the General Directorate of Urban Planning
Initiated by the municipality
Provide their opinion within one month. If this period expires without response, it is considered approved by default.
or or or or
Modifies it and/or provides its opinion within one month. If this period expires without response, it is considered approved by default.
approves it and issues a through presented to
The Higher Council for Urban Planning
Based on the proposal of Ministry of Public Works and Transport
Calls for a meeting with It is presented to
The Council of Ministers District commissioner Governor
reviews it in whole or in part
Relevant municipal councils Representatives from the concerned departments
Figure 4. Public Works Studio’s diagram mapping the decision-making process in urban planning in Lebanon. Originally published in Arabic and translated to English. Produced as part of the project “Urbanism in Lebanon: Master Plans and Their Impact on Daily Life” (2017–2018), and published in the booklet “The Production of Inequality in Lebanese Land Use Planning.”
Due to this exclusive and centralized structure, we can observe dysfunctional urban policies and a lack of public services in the city, including affordable housing, basic service provision, mobility, and public space. This has a significant impact on people’s relationship with the city, especially young people who are marginalized from their neighborhoods (Harb, 2019).
Although people’s daily lives are affected by the dysfunction of public services in the city, ranging from housing to public transportation, they have not been engaged in a debate about urban issues. This debate was not even present in media discourse or the agenda of NGOs and activists until recent years. More urban issues began to gain attention gradually as people started mobilizing in reaction to the mismanagement of urban policies.
In the following, I focus on the significant historical moments and events that shaped the current debate around urban issues in Beirut and the emergence of an urban activism network.
13 April 1975 marks the starting date of the long Lebanese civil war that lasted until 1990 across the entire Lebanese territory. Beirut was the epicenter of this war, marked by a division between East and West. The violence and the sectarian cleansing led to mass internal displacement, where people sought refuge in neighborhoods that corresponded to their sectarian identity (Bou Akar, 2018). The mass displacement eventually led to the urbanization of the exponentially growing suburbs. The war turned the “mixed” neighborhoods of Beirut into homogeneous “sectarian frontiers” where sectarian, religious, and political affiliations match (Bou Akar, 2018). Consequently, the civil war led to massive destruction of Beirut Downtown. The aftermath of this war was the start of the city’s contemporary story.
After the war was over, Rafic Hariri, a multi-billionaire businessman, set foot in Lebanon and became the prime minister a year later, leading the post-war reconstruction of Beirut. Under his rule, the parliament voted to inaugurate Solidere, a real estate company established under exceptional laws with special privileges (Harb, 2019).
Following a neoliberal approach – where urban policies and projects are deployed to serve the rich at the expense of neglecting the public good – Solidere transformed the urban fabric of the city center into an extravagant capital, with a vision to position Beirut on a global level. International planners and architects developed planning proposals, which ultimately transformed Beirut’s squares and neighborhoods (Harb, 2019). This has led to the increased privatization of public spaces and exclusive ownership of properties and land by a few (Fawaz, 2019).
The creation of Solidere catalyzed the emergence of urban activism in Beirut. Urban planners and scholars started to engage in protests, conferences, academic endeavors, and lobbying activities to protect the public good and protect the city (Harb, 2019).
The summer of 2006 witnessed an intense war waged by Israel over Lebanon and, specifically, on Hezbollah positions in the South of Lebanon and Beirut (Stead, 2018). The 34-day conflict led to massive destruction of infrastructure and residential areas.
Mona Harb, a Professor of urban studies and Politics at the American University of Beirut (AUB), states that urban activism began to emerge after the 2006 war, when professors and students at AUB voluntarily engaged in projects related to the post-war reconstruction of Haret Hreik and South Lebanon. Many current urban activists, Harb claims, were part of this group as students, assistant professors, and professors forming a cross-generational network. Harb believes that this network, after 15 years of work, led to the creation of Beirut Madinati, the first independent candidates’ list that ran for the Beirut Municipality election in 2016.
In the summer of 2015, Beirut witnessed one of its largest protests. The story began when the 20-year contract of the waste management company Sukleen was set to expire, and the government decided not to renew it due to a conflict between political parties over sectarian and regional quotas. Waste was not collected for weeks and was disposed of all over the city streets.
On August 29, one hundred thousand people took to the streets of Beirut Downtown, ignoring sectarian sensitivities (Harb, 2019). The protests were known as “You Stink” (Tul’it Rihitkum) as a reference to the most well-known group of protesters. Other coalitions of young people, residents from affected neighborhoods, NGOs, and activists were leading this “issue-based claim” movement, demanding an ecological waste management plan first and holding the Minister of Environment accountable. Eventually, the protests included more considerable demands, such as a new election law. Other urban issues emerged as the protests grew, notably concerns over public spaces and the coastline (Harb, 2019).
One can confidently say that Beirut Madinati (Beirut, My City) was the outcome of the 2015 protests (Fawaz, 2019). The protests offered an opportunity to mobilize and form activist networks (Harb, 2019). Together, they formed a campaign for the 2016 municipal elections in Beirut. Beirut Madinati presented itself as a people-centered campaign targeting the daily lives of citizens. It touched upon the daily experience of people in the city, from congestion to housing to sanitation services (Fawaz, 2019).
The campaign’s candidates came from diverse backgrounds, including architects, city planners, engineers, doctors, artists, lawyers, and a fisherman. Collectively, they brought a comprehensive program of urban change (Fawaz, 2019).
Beirut Madinati’s approach was built on community organizing (Fawaz, 2019) and public participation through neighborhood-level debates (Harb, 2019).
Although the campaign was able to host various debates across different neighborhoods, it was still challenging to access certain ones where ruling political parties are based (Fawaz, 2019). Beirut Madinati did not win the elections, gathering 32% of the votes (Harb, 2019).
Beirut Madinati’s early supporters were middle-class citizens concerned with urban conditions. After the elections, Beirut Madinati began engaging with people through neighborhood groups. Two neighborhood groups were established to provide a grassroots presence within districts (Fawaz, 2019).
In October 2019, major protests erupted across Lebanon, including the capital, Beirut. Hundreds of thousands of people marched, calling for radical change with a variety of demands, all originating from the economic challenges, the failure of the recurring governments, and the struggle with the sectarian system. Many considered this a turning point in the country’s history, which struggles with long-term collective trauma from its past (Kassir, 2019). The revolution was a genuine call against the entire political establishment.
The “17th of October Revolution” highlighted urban issues. The photography collected during the protests reveals the urban nature of the protests. People were reclaiming and activating spaces and squares across all cities.
Riad El Solh Square and Martyr’s Square were central gathering spaces in Beirut. Activist groups hosted debates, built tents, and organized communal kitchens. Protesters, mainly the young, explored the hidden spots in their city. Hundreds of photos circulated online showing how people climbed the famous “Egg” structure in Downtown and activated it through graffiti work and by hosting debates and movie screenings. People also entered Le Grand Theatre, a landmark that had been abandoned since the Civil War.
In addition to the actions manifested in urban spaces, urban claims were the top priorities demanded by protesters. Issues such as access to public space, heritage preservation, the privatization of the coastline, and public transportation had their protests and groups. During one of the protests,
protestors gathered and organized a picnic at Zaitunay Bay – a private high-end waterfront destination. This act marked the privatization of the coastline and restricted working-class access to public spaces in Beirut.
The protests also revived many of the narratives described above. It showcased the “sectarian frontiers” of the fragmented city. Clashes between protesters and pro-regime groups occurred at “the ring,” one of the main protest sites in the city. The ring is situated at the intersection between East and West Beirut. At different moments, tensions brought back memories and fears among people of old narratives originating from the civil war.
On another note, as violence erupted in downtown, specifically around Beirut Souks, clashes started between protestors and security forces. Many shops and street furniture were destroyed or vandalized. During that night, former Prime Minister Saad Hariri revived the post-war narrative as he tweeted, demanding the protection of “Rafic al Hariri’s dream” – referring to the capital. This is a mere reflection of how political leaders perceive the capital – a place of political power and aspirations that often overlooks the needs of its people. A more in-depth reflection can be conducted on the October 17th protests and the actions that took place.
2020: Economic crisis, COVID-19, and
2020 has not been an easy year worldwide. Especially not for Lebanon, which has been facing an economic crisis due to inflation and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown. Urban issues were again prevalent during this time, as residents in Beirut were threatened with evictions, highlighting the absence of proper housing policies in the city. Public Works Studio, a multidisciplinary research and design studio, drew attention to housing issues through media campaigns, launched the Housing Monitor’s Reporting Line, mapped evictions, and conducted field assessments.
On August 4th, Beirut was shocked by an atrociously massive blast at its port. The massive explosion sent shock waves across the entire city, causing damage in all surrounding neighborhoods. At least 200 people were killed and 6,500 were injured. The blast was attributed to the storage of ammonium nitrate in Hangar 12 at the port for six years, which, according to public records and documents, had been known to many Lebanese officials since November 2013. Following the explosion, Beirut transformed into a shattered ghost town; buildings were evacuated, windows were shattered, residents had fled, and stores and shops were closed (Fawaz, 2020). Above all, the blast had a massive impact on the collective mental state of people.
While the aftermath of the blast is outside the scope of this research, it is worth noting that dozens of collective actions and grassroots initiatives were mobilized and organized in ad hoc efforts to address the consequences of the blast. Efforts focused on relief, reconstruction, and collecting donations for affected families, who were already struggling with the economic crisis. New social media pages were created, as the blast gained international attention, to collect donations and direct donors to reliable resources. Different websites were also created as databases for other initiatives, such as the Beirut Recovery Resource Guide, LebHelp, and Support People in Lebanon, among many others.
Below is a preliminary visual mapping of approximately 22 initiatives established within two weeks after the blast:
After narrating the various moments in the history of Beirut, we can understand and contextualize the broader roots behind the emergence of urban movements and activism in Beirut. Mona Harb identifies four conditions that led to the emergence of an urban social movement in Beirut:
1. A critical urban discourse is activated by a network of first-generation urban activists and scholars (Harb, 2016). Here we refer to the activists who mobilized against Solidere. They focused on heritage preservation. Their impact was on the younger audience who listened to them and got inspired by their work (Harb, 2019).
2. Urban studies programs in universities and the rise of a second generation of urban activists (Harb, 2016). The impact of the first generation of activists reached universities. Students started to learn more about urban topics related to housing, service provision, and public space. They also learned about urban research and how to conduct fieldwork, ethnography, and mapping (Harb, 2019). Among the second generation, Mona Harb mentions three practitioners, among others, who continue to play a role in today’s urban discourse in Lebanon. Ismail Sheikh Hassan led the reconstruction project for the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp that was destroyed during a conflict with the Lebanese Army in 2009. He later co-founded the “Lil Madina” Initiative in Saida. Abir Saksouk and Nadine Bekdache co-founded Public Works Studio, but their urban activism began before that. Abir Saksouk started Dictaphone – an art collective focusing on public space– while Nadine Bekdache was leading The Coalition for the Right to Housing in Lebanon.
3. The presence of urban issues at the core of coalitions and campaigns (Harb, 2016). Activists and groups working on similar or related problems would form coalitions. Some of these are the Lebanese Coast Coalition, comprising groups and individuals dedicated to protecting the Lebanese coast as a natural, environmental, and cultural asset. The Waste Management Coalition, environmental organizations, groups, and individuals have collaborated on efforts addressing the waste management crisis. In addition, both protests in 2015 and 2019 manifested that condition, as urban issues were at the core of the demands, as discussed earlier.
4. The sectarian political sharing game and the absence of public action (Harb, 2016). The organizing efforts following the 4th of August blast can highlight the governmental gap and the lack of action by authorities, leading people to volunteer and organize to address the situation actively. In addition, the waste management crisis of 2015 was a result of the sectarian political power-sharing game, which led to a crisis and protests.
According to Mona Harb (2019), the second generation of activists in Lebanon adopted innovative approaches in their actions and operations. Some tools utilized by the activists are listed here: action research, ethnography, historical research methods, request of legal knowledge, mapping, visual surveys, workshops, debates, networking with experts, documentation, production of reports, submission of proposals, lobbying, negotiation, media campaigns (including social media), protests, legal tools, performances, installations, and competitions. The priority of the activists was to be inclusive and implement participatory processes when making decisions or implementing projects. Even their organizational models were far from the traditional hierarchical forms of governance and management. They followed more fluid and horizontal modes of operations (Harb, 2019).
Within this discourse, we can say that the role of urban activists, those who come from an academic or a professional background, is leaning more towards contributing to the mechanisms of urban activism. Their contribution through research and knowledge dissemination affects activism as a whole as they feed back into the work of other activists (those who are directly mobilizing on the ground) and into a public critical debate around urban issues (Harb, 2019).
We can conclude that urban activists, through their research-based, participatory, and creative interventions, actively shape the strategies and spaces of activism itself, making them, in effect, designers of urban change.
Through a combination of archival research and lived experiences, initiatives across Beirut were identified, analyzed, and documented. The directory functioned as both a method and an outcome of the research process. This directory serves as a database of urban initiatives that were mapped and investigated as part of the project. The following entries present a selection of these studied initiatives.
Established in 2007, the AUB Neighborhood Initiative facilitated the American University of Beirut’s engagement with its surrounding neighborhood in Ras Beirut. It promoted collaboration between faculty, students, staff, residents, and public officials, focusing on issues such as urban environment, community well-being, and social diversity. The Initiative responded to local priorities through research, advocacy, and outreach projects that addressed the lived realities of a socially and economically diverse neighborhood.
Launched in 2010 on World Environment Day, the Beirut Green Project emerged as a response to the rapid expansion of cement in the city and the resulting loss of green space. It advocated for the public’s right to accessible green areas and called for more sustainable urban planning models. Through creative interventions and awareness campaigns, the initiative highlighted the environmental and social importance of green public spaces in Beirut.
Beirut Urban Tours introduced political tourism as a means to engage with Lebanon’s urban and historical development critically. The walking tour in downtown Beirut shed light on the post-war reconstruction process, addressing its legal, political, social, and archaeological dimensions. Through the lens of urban transformation, the initiative explored broader themes, including memory, governance, and the politics of public space.
Initiated in 2012 by Waraq, Beit Waraq functioned as a community space dedicated to illustration, animation, design, and printmaking. Located in the Mazraa district of Beirut, the space offered various studio setups under a co-working model, enabling artists to rent rooms tailored to their craft. Beit Waraq provided spaces for creative production and collaboration through accessible infrastructure and artistic programming.
The Beirut Urban Lab is a collaborative, interdisciplinary research platform that investigates urban transformation in Lebanon and the region. Situated within the context of the Global South, it documented spatial practices and environmental shifts through engaged research. The Lab contributed to academic debates and policy discussions while envisioning more just, inclusive, and viable urban futures.
This grassroots coalition emerged in 2013 to preserve Beirut’s Dalieh coastline as a public, accessible space. It brought together individuals and organizations committed to protecting the ecological, cultural, and social significance of the site. Through legal advocacy and community mobilization, the campaign resisted privatization and emphasized the need for shared urban commons.
Bus Map Project created the first grassroots map of Lebanon’s informal and formal public transport system. It aimed to make existing networks visible and usable, encouraging citizens to engage with available mobility options. Over time, it evolved into Riders’ Rights, a civil society organization that advocates for mobility justice and inclusive public transportation infrastructure across Lebanon.
Catalytic Action, founded in 2014, functioned as both a design studio and a charity. It supported vulnerable communities— particularly refugees—by improving educational and public spaces. Through participatory spatial interventions across the MENA region and Europe, the initiative aimed to address inequalities and promote social and environmental justice in the built environment.
Concept 2092, initiated by Haven for Artists, supported underground art scenes and creative collaborations in Lebanon and the Middle East. Operating as a non-governmental organization, it provided resources, residency programs, and platforms for artists. The initiative promoted artistic experimentation and social engagement through exhibitions, workshops, and community events.
District D was a Beirut-based collective comprising urbanists, designers, and architects dedicated to tactical urbanism. The group designed and implemented small-scale interventions in public spaces to activate underutilized areas and inspire community interaction. It combines work and design thinking with grassroots strategies to address urban livability.
The Design Impact Laboratory (DI-LAB) at AUB served as a platform for applied research and community-based design. It engaged students and faculty in developing architectural and engineering responses to environmental, heritage, and post-conflict challenges. DI-LAB emphasized participatory processes to ensure that its interventions reflected local needs and fostered sustainable development.
Legal Agenda was a nonprofit research and advocacy organization founded in 2009 to promote critical approaches to law and justice in Arab countries. With offices in Lebanon and Tunisia, it addressed political, social, and economic rights through legal research, public discourse, and reform campaigns. The organization engaged legal professionals, scholars, and activists in shaping inclusive legal systems.
Nahnoo is a youth-led NGO working to promote good governance, cultural heritage, and inclusive public spaces in Lebanon. Through grassroots campaigns, research, and policy advocacy, it created platforms for civic engagement and youth participation. The organization mobilized volunteers and professionals nationwide to co-shape urban and social development.
RPPL was an initiative launched by young architects and urbanists aimed at activating public spaces through creative design. Started by graduates from ALBA, the collective engaged artists and designers in projects that enhanced accessibility and interaction in public areas across Lebanon. It functioned as a collaborative platform for youth-led spatial interventions.
Founded in 2012, Public Works Studio was a research-based initiative focused on spatial justice and urban inequality. It developed multi-disciplinary projects that challenged dominant planning paradigms and supported the right to the city. The studio combined field research, legal advocacy, and participatory design to engage with the root causes of spatial marginalization.
The Chain Effect promoted cycling as a sustainable mobility solution in Beirut. Through design, public art, and advocacy, it worked to shift perceptions of urban transportation and create a more bikefriendly city. The organisation implemented creative street interventions, workshops, and community events to encourage active mobility and improve public infrastructure.
theOtherDada is an architecture practice focused on ecological design and social engagement. It adopted a biomimetic approach to spatial interventions, placing nature and community at the center of its work. The studio combined architectural experimentation with sustainability strategies to address urban and environmental challenges.
UN-Habitat Lebanon operated as part of the UN’s global mission to promote sustainable urban development. In the absence of a coherent national urban policy, the country program focused on inclusive development, improved planning systems, and crisis response. Its interventions addressed housing, mobility, resilience, and governance in both stable and crisis-affected areas.
Founded in 2015, Train/Train advocated for the rehabilitation of Lebanon’s railway system and the preservation of its industrial heritage. Built on years of research and civic engagement, the initiative aimed to reactivate the rail network as a public good and stimulate national discussions about sustainable mobility and infrastructure preservation.
The Zokak El-Blat Neighborhood Initiative emerged following the 2016 Beirut Madinati campaign. Focused on the Zokak El-Blat area, it sought to revitalize the neighborhood through participatory planning and community engagement. The initiative encouraged residents to become active in shaping urban policies and reclaiming decision-making power over their shared environment.
After conducting interviews, I entered an analysis phase guided by exploratory design research. I began with affinity mapping to organize and cluster insights across several key dimensions.
To understand the structure and scale of urban initiatives, I clustered them into seven distinct categories:
1. Grassroots Initiatives and Collectives: These are informal, often unregistered, and self-organized groups. Typically emerging from recent graduates or young professionals, they experiment with alternative modes of action and lack formal infrastructure. For example, the Dalieh Campaign consisted of experts but remained a collective without registering as such.
2. Small to Medium Organizations: These are registered entities that operate with small teams and limited resources, often focused on a specific thematic area. Several case studies in this category examine mobility from various perspectives.
3. Large Organizations: These institutionalized actors shape urban change through scaled operations and access to resources. UNHabitat, while not a grassroots initiative per se, plays an enabling role in participatory urban planning. Nahnoo, the American University of Beirut (AUB) Neighborhood Initiative, and the Beirut Urban Lab also fall into this category, leveraging their institutional affiliations to amplify their influence.
4. Design/Architecture Practices: These are professional entities led by architects or designers operating as social enterprises. They emphasize critical engagement and socially responsive design, distinguishing themselves from conventional commissioned work.
5. Community & Cultural Spaces: Located within residential neighborhoods, these spaces promote art and culture with an emphasis on community building and program sustainability.
6. Academic Initiatives: Often student-led or emerging from academic studios, these initiatives blend grassroots energy with institutional backing. Both studied cases are tied to AUB and occupy a hybrid position between collective action and professionalization.
7. Enablers: These actors, such as legal experts or media platforms, do not initiate activism directly but support the ecosystem through expertise, visibility, and advocacy.
GRASSROOTS INITIATIVE & COLLECTIVES
Civil Campaign to Protect the Dalieh of Raouche
Zokak El-Blat Neighborhood Initiative
Beirut Urban Tours
RPPL Initiative
SMALL TO MEDIUM ORGANIZATIONS
Bus Map Project
The Chain Effect
LARGE ORGANIZATIONS
AUB Neighborhood Initiative
UN-Habitat Lebanon
DESIGN/ARCHITECTURE
Catalytic Action
Beirut Green Project
Train/Train Lebanon
Beirut Urban Lab
Nahnoo
TheOtherDada
COMMUNITY & CULTURAL SPACES
CONCEPT 2092 – Haven for Artists
ACADEMIC INITIATIVES ENABLERS
DI-LAB Studio DISTRICT D
Legal Agenda
Public Works Studio
Beit Waraq
Across the studied cases, founding motivations can be traced back to specific triggers ranging from personal frustration to broader political shifts. Two overlapping but distinct patterns appear: initiatives that are expert-led and those triggered by direct urban lived experience.
1. Urban Experience:
Many initiatives began as responses to daily frustrations with the urban environment. The absence of green space (Beirut Green Project), the invisibility of informal transportation (Bus Map Project), or the lack of access to inclusive cultural spaces (Beit Waraq, Haven for Artists) prompted individuals and small collectives to take action. Political events, such as the 2015 “You Stink” protests, were formative moments for initiatives like Beirut Urban Tours, which aimed to document and respond to the political spatial consequences of these events.
2. Expert-Led:
Other initiatives emerged within formal settings, often led by academics, professionals, or NGOs with defined mandates. The Beirut Urban Lab and the AUB Neighborhood Initiative are examples of academic institutions expanding their scope to engage directly with the city. Public Works Studio, Catalytic Action, and theOtherDada emerged from professional design practices seeking to challenge conventional planning approaches and propose alternatives. The trigger is disciplinary, aiming to test new models, frameworks, or research-to-practice. Other initiatives began as informal collectives formed by students or recent graduates eager to apply their skills while exploring civic responsibility (e.g., RPPL, DI-LAB).
The initiatives’ founding dates often align with critical political or urban events in Lebanon. These moments shaped the motivations behind each initiative and influenced the themes they chose to work on. In the following timeline, initiatives are mapped according to their founding dates, in parallel with important events outlined in Chapter 3, mirroring how urban activism in Beirut developed in tandem with the country’s shifting politics.
2006 war
UN-Habitat Lebanon
AUB Neighborhood Initiative
Nahnoo
Legal Agenda
Beirut Green Project
Train/Train
Haven for Artists
Beit Waraq
You Stink Movement
Madinati
Figure 7. Timeline of the establishment of 20 studied urban initiatives in Beirut.
Public Works Studio
The Dalieh Campaign
The Chain Effect
theOtherDada
Catalytic Action
Bus Map Project
Di-Lab
Beirut Urban Tours
District D
Zokak Blat Initiative
Rppl Initiative
Beirut Urb. Lab
While the reasons for emergence vary, every initiative is deeply grounded in Beirut’s urban realities. Their work is shaped by the city’s spatial politics and social fabric. Despite working in different ways, most initiatives address overlapping themes that reflect shared challenges in the city.
These themes include:
• Public space and community engagement: Many projects address the lack of or inaccessibility to green, cultural, or social public spaces. The Beirut Green Project, Beit Waraq, Nahnoo, and the Dalieh Campaign all explore how shared spaces are utilized, lost, or reclaimed.
• Mobility: The city’s fragmented transit systems have triggered projects like the Bus Map Project and Train/Train, which work to document, map, and advocate for more just and accessible mobility.
• Environment: From informal dumps to river degradation, initiatives like theOtherDada and Beirut Green Project link urban issues with ecological damage, often using design as a tool for repair.
• Urban policy and governance: Initiatives like Public Works Studio and Beirut Urban Tours focus on policy, access, and rights, challenging topdown planning and exposing how urban decisions are tied to politics.
• Housing and infrastructure: Some initiatives adopt a rights-based approach to housing, infrastructure, and post-war reconstruction, as exemplified by Public Works Studio’s advocacy or Catalytic Action’s focus on child-friendly spaces.
• Legal and rights-based issues: Projects like the Dalieh Campaign and Nahnoo use legal tools and research to challenge privatization and reclaim public access.
• Art and culture: Beit Waraq, Haven for Artists, and others use creative practice to activate space, share narratives, and support underrepresented communities—particularly women and queer artists.
• Media and advocacy: From public exhibitions to social media, some initiatives use storytelling and visibility to shift public perception, raise awareness, and influence behavior.
• Education: Initiatives like AUB Neighborhood Initiative and DI-LAB work closely with students, framing the neighborhood as a classroom and real-life lab for civic learning and action.
To address their focus areas, the initiatives implemented a wide range of activities shaped by their context, resources, and goals. The list below outlines selected activities grouped into key categories based on shared approaches and methods.
• Community-led design for public spaces
• City as living lab for student-led interventions
• Public furniture and street infrastructure
• Playground design in underserved areas
• Bicycle infrastructure and mobility hubs
• Sidewalk revitalization with greenery and drainage
• Urban afforestation and mini-forest planting
• Public space reclamation through temporary actions
• Low-cost construction using recycled materials
• Rooftop gardens and “urban hive” experiments
• Design of digital tools for mobility
• Public policy proposals
• Legal action and policy advocacy for urban accountability
• Town halls and debates
• Lawsuit filing and decree contestation around land use
• Demands for transparency and access to planning data
• Coalition-building and public awareness campaigns
• Advocacy for inclusive mobility, housing, and green access
• Media engagement to influence policy and perception
• Mapping of bus routes, parks, green spaces, and playgrounds
• Construction and design training for youth and students
• Workshops in planning, photography, storytelling, and cycling
• Technical and artistic skill support for creative practitioners
• Skills transfer through collaborative design processes.
• Resident education in waste, mobility, and urban agriculture
• Project development mentorship and funding support
• Organizational development
• Field research on mobility, housing, and urban transformation
• Participatory research
• Eviction tracking and tenant condition mapping (Housing Monitor)
• Oral history and site memory documentation
• Environmental monitoring (e.g., noise, pollution levels)
• SWOT analyses of neighborhoods and urban sites
• User behavior mapping in public and shared spaces
• Visual data tools and interactive mapping platforms
• Public events (festivals, exhibitions, etc.)
• Walking tours, bus route explorations, and river tours
• One-on-one engagement with residents and shopkeepers
• Intergenerational and neighborhood gatherings
• Resident-led design and construction workshops
• School and institutional activation through cultural programs
• Community-based art
• Visual storytelling to translate urban research and critique
• Shared production spaces for artists and designers
• Exhibitions, performances, and public art linked to urban themes
• Artist residencies
• Street art campaigns promoting cycling and green mobility
The funding opportunities depend on the organization’s model and scale. The initiatives examined employ a diverse range of funding models, which can be categorized into six overlapping categories:
• Self-Funded and Volunteer-Based: Many initiatives began with selffunding and volunteer labor. In these cases, founders contributed personal time, resources, and energy, often out of necessity or a commitment to autonomy. Projects like Beirut Urban Tours, Beirut Green Project, Train/ Train, and theOtherDada relied on unpaid work and minimal budgets during their initial years. While this approach offered independence and flexibility, it also risked burnout and limited growth over time. Some of these initiatives later shifted toward formal fundraising as their ambitions or activities expanded.
• Grant-Funded and Donor-Supported: Others pursued more structured grant-based models. AUB Neighborhood Initiative received long-term support from the Ford Foundation. Catalytic Action and theOtherDada secured project-specific grants from UN agencies like UNICEF. The Chain Effect received funding from embassies and partnered NGOs, while Bus Map Project, Public Works Studio, and Nahnoo relied on donor support for both operations and targeted campaigns. However, reliance on international donors is not universally embraced. Some initiatives, such as Public Works Studio and Beit Waraq, are critical of donor-driven agendas and actively avoid or are highly selective about accepting external funding.
• Social Business and Hybrid Revenue Models: A third category followed hybrid or social business models, blending earned income with missiondriven work. Beit Waraq reinvested profits from its creative studio into its programming. RPPL Initiative charged participation fees for workshops and secured support from local businesses. theOtherDada and Public Works Studio both operate as for-profit entities offering design and research services while pursuing social and environmental aims.
• Crowdfunding and Community Contributions: Several initiatives turned to crowdfunding and community contributions to support their work. The Dalieh Campaign raised over $10,000 to fund its international design competition. Nahnoo, Bus Map Project, and theOtherDada also used crowdfunding or individual donations to finance specific projects.
• Institutional Hosting and Embedded Funding: For others, sustainability came through institutional hosting. For example, AUB Neighborhood Initiative’s core costs are covered by the university. Catalytic Action registered as a charity in the UK to gain legal clarity and access to pro bono support, while Train/Train operated under government patronage for events.
• In-Kind Support and Sponsorships: Many projects relied on in-kind support or sponsorships from local actors. The RPPL Initiative received logistical support from neighborhood businesses; the Beirut Green Project benefited from material donations; The Chain Effect covered mural costs through restaurant partners; and theOtherDada collaborated with municipalities, which contributed labor and equipment.
A less common but more experimental route involved funding through innovation competitions, incubators, or hackathons, an approach used by tech-oriented initiatives like the Bus Map Project.
Across all models, long-term financial sustainability remains a key challenge. Several initiatives noted the strain of unpaid work, the difficulty of securing consistent support, and the limitations of working without core funding. At the same time, many prioritized values such as independence, transparency, and community trust over rapid institutionalization. As a result, hybrid strategies that combine earned income, grants, and grassroots support appear to be the most resilient, striking a balance between growth and accountability, and enabling these initiatives to adapt in uncertain environments.
The urban initiatives studied in this research reveal a consistent commitment to participatory and bottom-up approaches. Participation is treated as a practice applied across research, design, implementation, and maintenance. The following are the participatory principles observed:
Needs-based Identification:
Projects begin with real-life frustrations or shared challenges, often identified through everyday observation, informal conversation, or direct engagement.
Collaborative Research:
Initiatives use participatory action research, mapping, and interviews to gather data and involve people in shaping the narrative and solutions.
Co-Creation and Co-Design: Workshops, design sessions, and community-led competitions ensure ideas are shaped together with those who will use or be affected by the outcome.
Implementation and Learning:
Community members actively participate in building, renovating, and creating physical interventions, gaining skills while developing shared spaces.
Shared Maintenance and Ownership:
Long-term sustainability is often tied to how well a community appropriates an intervention, with some projects even supporting locals to take over maintenance and planning for future activities.
Public Dialogue and Awareness: Conversations take place through events, visual interventions, street art, or guided tours that draw attention to issues and invite reflection.
Crowdsourcing and Resource Sharing:
From funding to labor, many initiatives involve the community in resourcing projects through crowdfunding, in-kind contributions, or volunteerism.
Coalitions and Collaborations:
Most initiatives establish networks with universities, NGOs, municipalities, or informal groups to enhance legitimacy, pool resources, and expand their reach.
To apply participatory principles, initiatives rely on a diverse range of multidisciplinary tools and methods.
Dialogue & Listening
Community walkthroughs
Informal street conversations
Interviews and focus groups
Door-to-door outreach
Public surveys
Community-led mapping
Historical documentation
Action research frameworks
Data collection
Visioning workshops
Co-design sessions
Competitions
Collaborative prototyping
Pop-ups and exhibitions
Public installations
Performances and festivals
Public lectures
Urban tours
Town halls and civic forums
Social media engagement
Open-source data platforms
Visual storytelling and documentation
Online campaigns
Construction workshops
Hands-on learning with local contractors or artisans
Youth skill-building programs
Collaborative maintenance and care
& Mobilization
Crowdfunding campaigns
In-kind contributions
Volunteer mobilization
Sponsor-driven event models
Resident-led maintenance
Local ambassadors and mobilizers
Shared decision-making structures
Handover frameworks
By mapping processes together with initiative leaders, a clear picture of the typical steps their projects go through can be created. Comparing these journeys revealed shared patterns across such as the iterative nature of the work, the centrality of research, and the importance of sharing knowledge. The following synthesis presents a proposal of the process based on the recurring phases that emerged across initiatives.
FOLLOW-UP & CARE
ACTIVATION & STORYTELLING
DELIVERY
GROWNDWORK
COALITION BUILDING
SCOPING & PILOT
GROWNDWORK
SCOPING & PILOT
COALITION BUILDING
DELIVERY
ACTIVATION & STORYTELLING
FOLLOW-UP & CARE
A moment of personal or collective frustration sets the process in motion. This initial spark often aligns with the drivers outlined in Section B, “Reasons for Emergence and Motivation.” For instance, the Beirut Green Project began when three friends started counting green patches on Google Earth, disturbed by the lack of accessible public space. Similarly, the Bus Map Project was born out of one commuter’s repeated struggle to navigate the city’s informal bus network.
Founders gather first-hand evidence to identify the problem. For example, AUB Neighborhood Initiative students knocked on doors in Ras Beirut to map solid waste habits. Dalieh Campaign volunteers traced cadastral records and oral histories to build a compelling case.
Insights are distilled into a small, manageable pilot, the kind of first act that can demonstrate value, build trust, and attract future collaborators. Beirut Green Project laid down 0.8 m² of grass on sidewalk corners.
Momentum from the pilot is traded for partnerships, permits, and funding. theOtherDada aligned with the Sin el Fil Municipality to plant urban forests.
Physical or programmatic work is carried out, usually with volunteer labor and public visibility. RPPL Initiative ran design-build camps in Badaro. Haven for Artists renovated a house through open work sessions.
Completed interventions are activated and shared with broader audiences. Beirut Urban Tours transformed downtown into a walking lecture. Public Works Studio shared eviction heatmaps on TV talk shows.
Only a handful of initiatives plan for this stage, yet its absence often undermines long-term impact. Catalytic Action revisits each playground annually and re-trains local contractors.
9. Visualization of mapped processes from selected initiatives: AUB Neighborhood Initiative, Beirut Green Project, Beit Waraq, Bus Map Project, Catalytic Action, and the Dalieh Campaign.
Urban initiatives in Beirut operate within a shifting web of relationships. Stakeholder mapping exercises with initiative leaders helped identify the recurring actors that shape these projects over time, as well as the nature of those relationships. While each initiative’s ecosystem is different, specific patterns emerge.
The first group of stakeholders includes community members, residents, and informal users of space. These are the people most often directly involved throughout the process from the early stage of problem identification to design input, implementation, and, in some cases, long-term maintenance.
A second cluster comprises civil society organizations, activist networks, and academic institutions. These groups frequently act as collaborators, advisors, or hosting bodies offering infrastructure, networks, or legal standing.
Municipalities, ministries, and governors represent another category of stakeholders, with whom relationships are often slow, bureaucratic, or unclear. While some initiatives (like theOtherDada’s forest work) successfully establish cooperative relations with local authorities, others spend years negotiating permits, permissions, or even legal registration. The Ministry of Transportation refused to share transit data with the Bus Map Project and denied their NGO registration, forcing them to find support elsewhere.
Funders and donors, including international organizations, foundations, and embassies, are central to the viability of most projects. However, their influence is complex. Some initiatives build funding strategies through services, social enterprise, or community donations to maintain independence and reduce reliance on project-based grants.
Media, public opinion, and digital platforms also shape the stakeholder environment. Several initiatives actively use storytelling and visual documentation to shift narratives or expand their reach.
The initiatives have varied capacities to navigate these stakeholder relationships as part of the process. Many projects transition between formal and informal modes, adjusting their stakeholder relationships in response to the context. Stakeholders are not static, but they shift from beneficiaries to collaborators to critics, depending on the issue at hand.
The municipality is a critical and complicated actor in the stakeholders map of Beirut’s urban initiatives. Its role ranges from gatekeeper to potential partner, but it rarely functions as a neutral or reliable collaborator. For many initiatives, navigating municipal systems is less about formal procedure and more about political alignment and personal connections.
Permits and approvals are a near-universal requirement for projects that intervene in public space, whether it’s a walking tour, a parklet, or a mural. The process is widely described as slow and relationship-dependent. Beirut Urban Tours, for example, received a permit thanks to the founder’s connection to the governor. The AUB Neighborhood Initiative similarly relies on institutional channels and longstanding relationships to access ministries and officials. Others, with no formal affiliation, often find themselves at a standstill. Initiatives are repeatedly passed from office to office or encounter silence altogether.
Cooperation levels vary. Some municipalities, such as Sin el Fil or Batroun, are described as open and responsive, even eager to provide logistical support. theOtherDada’s work on urban forests, for instance, was greenlit immediately in Sin el Fil, with municipal workers dispatched to help on-site. In contrast, the Beirut Municipality is widely seen as unaccountable and dismissive of community initiatives. Activists characterize it as captured by personal interests and geared toward large-scale, politically connected projects. The mayor’s office stonewalled the Dalieh Campaign despite widespread support, and Nahnoo faced political resistance in Tarik Jdide, where partisan tensions between the governor and mayor stalled project implementations.
Political affiliations often take precedence over technical or community value. The Bus Map Project faced outright rejection from Hadath Municipality, in part due to the presence of Syrian drivers on the team. Even securing recognition as a legal entity, essential for working with authorities, can take years. Haven for Artists, The Chain Effect, and the Bus Map Project each spent multiple years battling opaque registration processes just to qualify for basic partnership or funding opportunities.
Faced with these barriers, many initiatives present their work as pilot projects: smallscale, self-funded experiments designed to demonstrate proof of concept. This strategy is not only pragmatic but political: it provides authorities with a low-risk model to adopt or scale without having initiated the work. The AUB Neighborhood Initiative and the Beirut Green Project both employ this tactic to frame their contributions as public services that municipalities can claim or expand. Yet post-implementation support remains rare. Once a bench is installed or a sidewalk is painted, maintenance is often forgotten. The RPPL Initiative team in Badaro secured a long-term permit but struggled to get the space cleaned or protected from vandalism. In some cases, local authorities indirectly undermined interventions they had previously endorsed.
Data access further complicates relationships. Several initiatives described being unable to access basic city infrastructure maps, public land records, or transportation
plans. Requests are often ignored unless routed through unofficial channels. Despite this, some initiative leaders still believe that municipal actors can be swayed by a visible pilot, a strong media presence, or public backing, which can sometimes nudge authorities to engage, if only to claim credit. In this sense, initiatives operate both in collaboration with and in critique of the state. They step into gaps left by municipal inaction while simultaneously pushing institutions to fulfill their role.
In summary, the municipality can play multiple roles:
Facilitator (Permits and Access): This is the most common and often unavoidable role. Initiatives need municipal permission to operate in public space, whether for temporary installations, street events, or longer-term interventions.
Gatekeeper (Bureaucratic and Political Barrier): Municipalities can also pose significant obstacles, denying permits, withholding data, or blocking projects due to political reasons or a lack of interest.
Passive Beneficiary (Indirectly Benefiting without Supporting): Municipalities often benefit from initiatives without contributing directly. Projects are framed as “pilots” and publicly praised, but no long-term commitment or maintenance is offered.
Advocacy Target (Pressure Point): Some initiatives engage municipalities through advocacy, utilizing their projects to promote systemic change, transparency, or policy reform.
Collaborator or Funder: In rare cases, municipalities act as true partners or partial funders offering materials, workers, or formal recognition.
The municipality plays multiple, sometimes contradictory roles in Beirut’s urban initiatives. While formal support is rare, navigating municipal relationships is a strategic necessity. Success often depends on the initiative’s ability to frame its work in ways that align with municipal interests or bypass them when that fails.
In addition to the stakeholder analysis developed through interviews, a participatory workshop was held with initiative leaders to co-create a system map of urban practices in Beirut. This visual map helped clarify who the key actors are and also how initiatives perceive and interact with them. By using colored dots to represent the quality of relationships—yellow for supportive, blue for neutral or unestablished, and red for tense or conflicting—the map revealed deeper insights into the urban ecosystem in which these initiatives operate.
The system mapping workshop brought together representatives from six urban initiatives in Beirut, each with varying scales, scopes, and approaches. Held outdoors in one of the newly established guerrilla parks that emerged after the August 4th Blast and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the workshop offered a rare in-person moment of shared reflection. Using a structured system mapping method, participants engaged in a series of steps: identifying key actors, clustering them by domain (e.g., public institutions, civil society, private sector), using directional arrows to draw the relationships and flows between them, and assessing the quality of their relationships through color-coded markers. Group discussions and collective sense-making enriched this hands-on mapping process.
A few patterns stand out. First, the most established and positive relationships tend to be horizontal, centered around grassroots actors such as tenants, refugees, youth groups, and neighborhood-based civil society organizations. These ties suggest that initiatives prioritize proximity and trust, often relying on direct engagement with communities rather than top-down partnerships.
In contrast, several influential stakeholders remain distant or disengaged. Entities such as religious institutions, private sector actors, real estate developers, and financial institutions are marked by neutral blue dots, indicating either a lack of existing contact or a relationship that has yet to be tested.
Meanwhile, conflictual relationships—shown in red—concentrate around institutions that hold formal authority over urban space, including municipalities, syndicates, and ministries. These are the actors that control permits, access to public land, and planning data. Many initiatives report slow procedures, selective cooperation, and politicized decision-making when interacting with them. At the same time, red dots don’t always signal avoidance. In several cases, initiatives continue to engage these actors despite the tension and negotiate to advance or protect their work.
Overall, the map reveals a fragmented urban practice field, where collaborative energy is strong at the grassroots level but faces significant barriers at the institutional level. While some initiatives have managed to build bridges with authorities, the broader system remains shaped by asymmetries of power and political interference.
Digital tools are key enablers for urban initiatives, enhancing visibility, awareness, and knowledge dissemination. The following breakdown outlines the main types of digital tools used and the roles they serve across different initiatives.
Social media: Projects like the Beirut Green Project and the Bus Map Project utilized platforms such as Facebook and Instagram to build an audience and generate debate. For Nahnoo and The Chain Effect, social media is a frontline tool for protest visibility and community mobilization. Other groups, such as Beit Waraq, Train/ Train, and the AUB Neighborhood Initiative, utilize social media to make their ongoing work visible, highlight stories, and recruit participants.
Websites and online platforms act as repositories for research, campaigns, and public engagement. Dalieh Campaign built a site to reframe legal and ecological claims into public-friendly formats and to recruit participants for their open design call. Public Works Studio utilizes online tools, such as the Housing Monitor, to track eviction data and make it actionable. The Bus Map Project transitioned from informal tracking to a structured web-based archive of routes and maps, while Train/Train published its national rail master plan online for public use.
Digital mapping and GIS tools support much of the initiatives’ research and analysis. Mapping is used to identify patterns or visualize informal systems. The Bus Map Project built a system map from scratch using Google Maps. The AUB Neighborhood Initiative and Public Works Studio have produced thematic and site-specific maps, often collaborating with students and residents to gather data for their projects.
Podcasts, blogs, and other digital publishing formats are increasingly used to circulate projects’ outcomes in accessible ways. Public Works Studio, for example, produces podcast episodes to explore the connections between planning and inequality, utilizing storytelling to engage new audiences.
The initiatives mapped in Beirut respond to urban challenges and actively construct alternative ways of shaping and inhabiting the city. While they differ in form, scale, and structure, their practices converge around a shared orientation toward design as a way of working with urban conditions and relationships. The design methodologies they employ are clearly legible in their actions: investigating problems, prototyping solutions, building coalitions, testing ideas in public, and communicating narratives that reframe the urban questions.
Three strategic postures emerge from this landscape. Many initiatives move fluidly between them depending on context, resources, or timing. Yet taken together, they outline a methodology of urban activism grounded in design.
These initiatives organize around advocacy. Their primary focus is to shift discourse, influence policy, and open up space for civic demands. The Dalieh Campaign, for example, challenged private development along Beirut’s coast by framing the site as a public right. Nahnoo ran long-term campaigns for access to Horsh Beirut and other public spaces, combining legal research with community engagement and protest. What defines this strategic posture is its political clarity. Campaigners identify a threat or injustice, articulate a position, and mobilize networks to push for change. Their design work involves tools of visibility: petitions, maps, exhibitions, videos, and public statements.
This group works through research, data collection, and knowledge sharing. Their interventions are primarily epistemic—they aim to make hidden systems visible and legible. Public Works Studio is an example. Through platforms like the Housing Monitor, they document evictions, map informal settlements, and produce analysis that informs public debate and legal action. The Bus Map Project similarly began by generating user-centered data on Beirut’s informal transit system, using open-source tools and community engagement. They design formats, reports, maps, podcasts, workshops, that invite others into the inquiry.
These initiatives engage directly with the urban fabric. They design and build, temporarily or permanently, with the aim of transforming space. Catalytic Action constructs playgrounds and public furniture in underserved neighborhoods, involving residents in co-design and construction. theOtherDada plants urban forests as ecological infrastructure and social intervention. Haven for Artists renovated an abandoned building into a cultural space through collaborative work. Interventionists lead by prototyping and piloting in the city.
These strategies often overlap as initiatives may begin as a campaign, develop into or includes a research project, and end with a built intervention—or reverse the sequence. These three postures provide a framework for understanding how design methodologies can support urban activism and initiatives.
After mapping and analyzing Beirut’s urban initiatives through a design lens, the next step was to ask: How can this knowledge be made useful?
More specifically:
• How might design contribute to the practices of urban activism?
• What might new or emerging urban practitioners gain from the patterns revealed in this research?
• What tools, resources, or frameworks could support their efforts?
These questions shaped the ideation phase of the project and set the foundation for the co-creation process that followed.
To explore the potential outcomes of this research in a more grounded and participatory way, a second co-creation workshop was held. This time, the session brought together a group of emerging urban practitioners—architects, urban designers, planners, and researchers— who were not part of the original mapping process. Their outsider perspective offered a fresh and forward-looking contribution.
The workshop focused on the methodologies, competencies, and resources needed to carry out urban interventions, drawing on the phases identified in the mapping chapter. Participants were invited to respond to a key prompt: What tools, knowledge, and expertise would you need to implement each phase of a community-led urban intervention? What other phases would you add?
Using a system mapping approach, participants visualized each step in a typical intervention process—from research and permits to design, implementation, and follow-up.
The workshop, conducted with a group of early-career urban practitioners (architects, designers, planners), aimed to unpack what tools, knowledge, and resources are needed to implement each phase of a project cycle. A few critical themes emerged:
1. While most participants valued participatory engagement, they pointed out that meaningful participation requires more than goodwill. It requires skills and strategy in facilitation tools and methods: the ability to reach and motivate local stakeholders, and awareness of ethics and power relations in communities.
2. Participants expressed substantial uncertainty around legal, bureaucratic, and contracting knowledge. This includes how to write or interpret contracts, permits, and legal requirements, and navigate relationships with municipalities.
3. Many inputs revolved around finding the right people as project delivery is constrained by access to local ecosystems. This include access to trusted contractors and suppliers and building relationships with key community figures.
4. Knowledge production needs to be practical and oriented towards accessibility and public awareness. Participants highlighted the value of data collection, reporting, documentation, and media visibility.
Several possible outcomes emerged from this design phase. Each builds on a specific insight from the research and addresses a gap voiced by practitioners. Together, they form an intervention strategy to continue this work.
a) The Directory: A living database and archive of initiatives and actors that would include basic profiles, publications, tools, and project documentation. The directory would act as a resource hub for researchers, students, and activists, and grow through public contributions.
b) Toolkit Development: Participants expressed a lack of access to clear methods, tools, and guidance for implementing projects. While many design toolkits already exist, they are often disconnected from the urban questions. The proposal here is to develop a curated collection of tools and methods, including both existing open-source resources and locally adapted content.
c) Consultancy and Facilitation Support: While some urban initiatives are initiated by design experts, many are not. Workshop participants emphasized the need for facilitation, strategic design thinking, and process guidance, particularly in navigating complex systems, stakeholder relationships, or participatory engagement. One proposed outcome is a consultancy offering, where a design practitioner can support urban groups, civil society actors, or municipalities in shaping and guiding their projects.
d) Learning Experiences and Educational Programs: The project also draws on earlier experiences such as Ideas for the City, where learning programs and design sprints were tested. These formats can be reimagined as urban residencies, fellowships, hackathons, or shortterm courses, especially for young people interested in shaping their city but unsure where to start.
This research aimed to examine how design can inform the understanding and practice of urban activism. The presentation began with a literature review of the evolving definition of design practices, followed by a historical overview of urban activism, and an analysis of the historical and political context of urban development in Beirut. The research was based on mapping urban initiatives in Beirut from 2006 to 2020, followed by an in-depth analysis of key dimensions, including motivations, working themes, funding models, and participatory practices. Process mapping and stakeholder analysis provided a deeper insight into how these initiatives operate, the tools they utilize, and the relationships they navigate.
The analysis laid the foundation for identifying three strategic roles that initiatives tend to adopt. Campaigners, who mobilize around rights and visibility; Knowledge Producers, who conduct research and communicate findings; and Interventionists, who engage the city through spatial and physical interventions. These roles highlight different and complementary ways of enacting change through designinformed practices.
Building on these insights, the research proposed several design interventions. The project itself becomes a design outcome to support the documentation and archiving of these initiatives as a movement in contemporary Beirut. The proposed outputs include an evolving directory, a curated toolkit, consultancy support, and learning formats that draw from and build on the practices studied.
Post-research reflections point to broader questions and areas for continued inquiry:
1. The Growing Centrality of Digital Tools: Digitalization was not the initial focus of this research, but it quickly became unavoidable. Across nearly all initiatives, digital platforms— primarily social media—played a central role in mobilizing people, sharing information, documenting work, and sustaining visibility. This became even more pronounced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, when in-person engagement was restricted and online presence became important. Globally, the intersection between urban change and digital tools is now a growing research area.
2. Class and Activism: A second reflection concerns the question of who gets to participate in urban activism. Many of the expertled initiatives studied in this research emerged from relatively privileged spaces—private universities like AUB, or individuals with the time, resources, and networks to dedicate themselves to unpaid or underfunded work. While this doesn’t negate the value of their contributions, it raises important questions about representation and equity. The ability to act in urban space often depends on invisible safety nets that not all residents have.
3. Measuring Impact: Finally, the question of impact was raised. Many of the initiatives aim to be pilots, models, or provocations, rather than permanent solutions. Their strength lies in their ability to raise awareness or shift public conversations. Therefore, many would question the real impact they make on the city’s development. While conventional impact measurement frameworks may not be readily applicable in this context, this does not mean that measurement is irrelevant. Instead, it calls for reconsideration of what is considered impact based on the initial goals of each initiative. One approach is to examine these initiatives through a systems lens to trace their influence over time.
This project is a continuation of a longer trajectory, shaped by lived engagement with urban activism and co-design. The research did not begin in isolation, but it was grounded in my experience and will continue to evolve beyond its formal presentation. The year spent developing this work coincided with one of the most challenging periods in Lebanon’s recent history. That reality inevitably shaped the research process, timelines, and emotional weight of the work.
This remains a work in progress.
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