A particular challenge to undertaking the mapping slums in Beirut
is the absence of a unified understanding of the city. Indeed, during
the years of the civil war (1975-1990), the city was divided into
two sections, each run by one or several antagonistic groups. The
developments of the city during this phase followed somewhat different
trajectories, and studies conducted at the time generally concentrated
on specific sections or neighbourhoods (eg Charafeddine 1985, 1991,
Halabi 1988). Furthermore, and prior to 1975, most slums were located
near the industrial suburbs of Beirut, essentially its north-eastern
suburbs and almost all studies of slums and poverty looked at living
conditions in this area. At the time, the southern suburbs did not
attract the same scale of industrial development, notably because
the development of large-scale public works (eg the Gulf Club, the
Sports Stadiums, Beirut International Airport) and high-income beaches
led to land speculation and made access more costly. However, shortly
after 1975, most of the residents of the north-eastern suburban
slums of Beirut were evicted from their houses and many started
squatting in various areas of the southern suburbs, in expensive
sea-front beach resorts, empty green lots, or institutional buildings.
Their numbers, compounded by an extensive rural to urban migration
fuelled by the two Israeli invasions (1978 and 1982) and the Israeli
occupation of South Lebanon (1978-2000), led to the transformation
of most of the open spaces of the southern suburbs of Beirut into
large slums. Today, it is the southern suburbs of Beirut that carry
the label of “illegal settlements” in most people’s
minds, while the eastern suburb slums, now relatively limited in
scale, are more or less invisible for the research community and
others.
Another difficulty in mapping slums is the mobility
of many of their dwellers, whether Lebanese or not, without any
tangible means for quantification, before, during, and after the
war. Rather than a period of stability, the post-war scene has been
a phase of important population changes in all the slums in Beirut.
Indeed, policies to reverse the population exchanges that occurred
during the war as well many reconstruction projects, whether the
rehabilitation of downtown, the southern suburbs, or infrastructure
projects, are all generating important patterns of displacement.
The impacts of these projects are either in displacements to make
way for developments, or in attracting labour to work for the projects.
Quantifications are available for important moments of the war,
such as the estimated 200,000 individuals who navigated from the
eastern to the southern suburbs of Beirut between 1975 and 1976,
or the 700,000 to 900,000 displaced at least once over the 15 years
of the war ( Virely 2000). Prior to the war, reports on slums also
often mention Arab workers (especially Syrian), and the transformation
of some of the slums over time with changes in their dwellers, especially
Qarantina.
Finally, a major hindrance to the mapping of slums
is the scarcity of information on the topic, especially on current
conditions. We often had to rely on limited fieldwork and interviews
with public officials conducted personally for our information.
Despite the difficulties faced in creating a reliable typology,
the analysis we propose below attempts a first unified understanding
of the slums of Beirut that we think is useful for initiating a
discussion of the slums in the city.
This summary
has been extracted from:
UN-Habitat (2003) Global Report on Human Settlements 2003, The Challenge
of Slums, Earthscan, London; Part IV: 'Summary of City Case Studies',
pp195-228.