No one could deny that the Lebanese inhabit a land after which many would-be military conquerors but also political expansionists and economic investors lust. There is ample evidence that this stretch of land on the Mediterranean coast must have been as highly attractive to the proverbial Roman legionnaires that have trodden here as to the deluded crusaders traversing it en route to what they saw as sacrificial conquest for the greater glory of Christendom.
Pioneering geneticists have found it fascinating to map the assemblage of the ancestries and identities of people who live today on this roughly 400 kilometers long stretch of Mediterranean lands spanning ancient Phoenician, Canaanite, and Philistine settlement areas.
Genetic logic would posit this historically hotly contested stretch of coast adorned by early urban cultures and city kingdoms as a habitat of coexistence, a collective model project of united nationalities and interactive economies. Instead, the Eastern Mediterranean coast has recently been once again brutally fragmented and claimed by multiple competing powers. In consequence, this densely populated, highly urbanized, war ravaged land with urban settlements whose living roots are among the deepest in the world, could become a route of tombs of urbanity.
Since two years, increasing numbers of scholars, media reports, activists and legal advocates have been describing the actions committed by Israel in the Gaza territory as “domicide” (domus: Latin for house), which is the deliberate and systemic destruction of homes. But I find myself having to wonder if another neo-Latin scholarly term from the late 20th century will become a byword for what is happening in Beirut: that term is urbicide (urbs: Latin for city).
A redefinition of urbicide – widened from a deliberate destruction of cities in conflicts – in light of Lebanese urban governance—could be adapted to describe a process of creeping dysfunctionality of the city as social and economic sphere.
The functional death of the city could arise from the congestive failure of urban productivity, or be caused by collapse of vital infrastructure such as water supply and drainage networks, or by organizational breakdown of informal and formal human social contracts on health, housing, education, etcetera.
Unrestrained Anthropocene is the term I resort to for describing the insane period mankind brought upon itself since the mid-20th century that is currently shaping up into arenas of overlapping existential threats of “poly crises and perma crises” (see comment piece here).
Post-blast Beirut as a case study
This month, early in year five ABB (after the Beirut Blast), it is instructive (see story here and photo reportage here) to explore neighborhoods in port districts from Karantina to Gemmaizeh, Achrafieh, and the downtown (Beirut Central District or BCD). Karantina, as fated by old urban highway planning sins, exists in spatial isolation from the city and is the most insular and downtrodden quarter in the path of the Beirut Port Explosion.
While a much poorer quarter than others, the neighborhood also is a habitat of multi-communal diversity. Aside of street art, eye-catching murals installed post-blast on desolate walls, one of the things to see in the streets of Karantina are plaques in recognition of foreign donors that funded specific small urban rebuilding projects in the district. They adorn lamp poles, redesigned playgrounds, a new community center, and even a restored police station.
At the same time, however, Karantina shows next to no signs of vibrant economic activity of a sustainable nature (if one doesn’t count warehouses, parked trucks and speeding delivery scooters as sustainable). There is definitely no visible trace of a national strategy for urban recovery and no indication of state initiatives in terms of social housing or provision of spatial livelihood development incentives.
In the first-impression, the neighborhood looks incomparably better than in 2021 and also better that it did in the mid 2010s, with many improvements of public spaces owed to local initiatives with foreign funding. Yet one cannot overlook the dirt and garbage thrown carelessly into vacant lots, on curbs and around buildings. Accentuated by roadside presence of broken or abandoned cars, the economic fabric is one of narrow streets with interrupted sidewalks and broken pavement, where people tend to be sitting idle in front of sad looking stores of mostly marginal and informal economic activity.
Essential concerns derived from a small quarter
Well-intended micro-improvements of previously broken and dysfunctional spaces in Karantina cannot conceal that larger economic and social barriers – such as the lack of pedestrian access to adjacent parts of Beirut – are still the same as a decade ago. The five-years-ABB impression of a very sad district in this macro-social and neighborhood-business regard is just as limited, stressed and unexciting as five years BBB (before Beirut Blast).
Beirut’s fate lies in two paradigms of globalized capitalist civilization: the paradigm of urban productivity and the paradigm of the right to dignified housing. The paradigm of urban productivity affirms that economic growth happens in human agglomerations and collective productivity environments more organically than anywhere else. The right to dignified housing leaves no doubt that adequate dwelling is key to securing livelihoods in sustainable habitats under conditions of agglomeration.
Satisfying both needs for a Lebanese community requires public intervention in the property sector as well as a well-funded housing strategy implemented by the state. Care of urban development cannot be allocated solely to civil society actors that are financially and ideologically supported by foreign development initiatives.
In an uncomfortable lesson from humble Karantina, self-inflicted urbicide is a danger that no nice ideas and donor-funded micro-projects will avert if Beirut continues down its current path. That is, if it continues to be a city where the powerful can achieve their interests without equitably contributing to the city’s productivity while the bulk of its economic body, the labor force and their families, gradually suffocates.
Why it matters
The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal #11 (SDG11) is to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.” It affirms housing and sustainable urbanity not only as a human right but also as a goal on which the community of nations has agreed.
However, the non-achievement of SDG11 by the target line of 2030 is 99.9 percent certain, judging by the latest SDG “progress” report of June 2025. This, and the protracted failure (seemingly over 80 percent probability) of realizing the sustainable development goals and the ever-more pressing climate goals by 2050, are humongous moral failures. With the non-achievement of SDGs also comes an economic debt to the future, a debt whose severity is further exacerbated by climate debt.
In these past fifty years, the urban value-added has driven the global development story, solidifying in formation of more and more megacities on all populated continents. In the long history of the city, there can be no doubt of the construction of social walls that accompanied the societal wins of urban safety and freedom. The formation of slums for the precariat and of privileged ghettos for the very rich are part and parcel of the human experience of urban agglomeration.
Skills clustering, creation of new urban productivity, and belonging to a city of whose output, identity, and inclusiveness its people can be justifiably proud, is the upside of urban freedom. Smart belonging and urban freedom can even provide an antidote to the city’s anonymity and alienation – if there is prudent urban governance. This means today that a transparent process and communal consensus on housing strategies are socioeconomic imperatives in engineering the spatial aspects of the globally emerging digital society.
The size of the urban pie
Demographic transitioning means the flattening of population curves, with impossible-to-predict nuances. Capitalism, with its essence of relentless mutation, is sure to change under the influence of human behaviors. What seems safe to anticipate for the remainder of this century is that more people than in any previous century will live on this planet and that urbanization is not going to radically reverse.
Enhanced urban productivity requires departure from exclusionary models of behavior and, hopefully, thinking. Practical regression of language barriers and geographic distance barriers to remote work will persist and become prominent, which means that more people have to work with more people who are not kin, not clan, and not national peers. Such a world cannot afford to remain steeped in racial phobias of the other.
When compared with the insane evil of deliberate domicide of the feared other, self-inflicted functional urbicide will never be as brutal, dehumanizing, and total. But even in a city with such deep, living heritage roots as Beirut, regression into a state of an economic backwater and zombie enterprise is a risk if no common-good orientation, mutuality of rights and obligations, or respect and sense of belonging show themselves. And practically, if no consensual taxation and submission of partisan financial interests to the common good is achieved, never mind the writing of another fanciful but not organically funded national housing strategy.
