Reframing Resilience in a Contested Landscape
Balsam El Ariss, Architect and Independent Researcher, Geneva, Switzerland and Beirut
Maria Gabriella Trovato, Department of Landscape Architecture, Faculty of Landscape and Society, Norwegian University of Life Sciences
Introduction
Lebanon, a country marked by enduring economic collapse, sectarian fragmentation, and a long history of displacement, remains suspended in a state of structural fragility. Nowhere is this more visible than in its capital, Beirut, where the accumulated weight of crises—political, financial, and military—constantly reshapes daily life. The recent conflict instigated by Israel in October 2023 is just the latest in a series of shocks that have catalysed new spatial and social responses. In this evolving context, the very notion of resilience, once evoked as a hopeful return to stability, must be re-examined.
This paper explores Beirut as a city where resilience is not an aftermath, but an ongoing process of adaptation. It introduces the concept of layered resilience, a framework that understands resilience as cumulative and context-specific, manifested not through singular heroic acts but through the accumulation of habitual, improvised, and inherited practices. Based on observational research and informal conversations with residents, urban practitioners, family, and friends, we interrogate how individuals and communities cope with ongoing instability and uncertainty. We ask: what does it mean to adapt when normality itself is no longer a viable horizon? And how do these everyday spatial, emotional, and material responses redefine the urban landscape?
Resilience Reconfigured
Resilience has become a central trope in policy, design, and development discourse, often invoked in relation to ecological, economic, or social recovery. Yet dominant interpretations remain heavily influenced by Global North paradigms, which tend to privilege institutional preparedness, technical infrastructure, and measurable outcomes. In Lebanon, and across much of the Global South, resilience cannot be disentangled from histories of colonisation, protracted displacement, and fragmented governance. Here, resilience is not a blueprint for bouncing back, but a situated way of being, forged through legacies of survival and resistance.
In this context, we propose a rethinking of resilience through the lens of layered resilience, a concept that foregrounds the overlapping forms of agency, adaptation, and endurance that accumulate over time and across generations. This perspective distinguishes the current state of war from the broader continuum of crises that began in 2019, and acknowledges how resilience is stratified by sectarian, classed, generational, and gendered experiences.
At its core, layered resilience is situated in the everyday spaces of Beirut—those sites where basic needs are negotiated, identities are reconfigured, and relationships with the city are rewritten. In these interstitial spaces, global crises become local, lived realities. As daily routines are disrupted, they are also reinvented: homes, neighbourhoods, and public spaces become arenas of both vulnerability and adaptation. Cities like Beirut, simultaneously fractured and fertile, function as laboratories of experimentation, where residents continuously recalibrate their ways of living, resisting, and surviving. In these moments, resilience becomes not just reactive but generative: an act of collective and individual world-making in the midst of instability.
Layered Resilience in Beirut
In Beirut, resilience is more than a policy framework; it is a lived condition shaped by habit, memory, necessity, and constraint. As we listened to and observed city residents navigating their daily environments, it became clear that resilience materialises through a range of overlapping and sometimes contradictory responses. Some draw on inherited behaviours, passed down from older generations who endured the Civil War and earlier conflicts. These protective strategies, such as hoarding essentials or modifying home layouts for safety, are etched into family routines, transmitted through memory and practice.
Others rely on direct, lived experience—lessons learned from navigating more recent disasters, like the 2019 financial collapse, the 2020 port explosion, or the collapse of basic services. These experiences form a repertoire of adaptive knowledge that informs everything from economic survival strategies to social networks of care.
Still others act out of necessity in real time. This is what some described as “de facto resilience”, a term that captures the spontaneous, often improvised responses to emerging threats when institutional systems are either absent or complicit. In the words of Matar (2025), de facto resilience is “the only option available to navigate the crisis in the absence of state support.”
Together, these forms of resilience rarely exist in isolation. They intersect, contradict, and reinforce each other. In some cases, they manifest as deeply personal decisions, changing one’s commute, avoiding crowds, or modifying home life. In others, they take the shape of communal action, reclaiming public space, supporting displaced families, and creating informal economies. This accumulation of strategies creates a palimpsest of survival tactics: layered, uneven, and constantly evolving.
From Beirut’s Districts and Neighborhoods …
Since the Civil War, Beirut’s urban fabric has been marked by division, militarisation, and exclusion. Checkpoints, sectarian boundaries, and fragmented governance have produced a cityscape that is spatially and socially stratified. The recent displacement of thousands of Lebanese from Southern Lebanon has intensified these dynamics, transforming public and private space alike.
Residents we spoke to described an overwhelming sense of estrangement and anxiety. Lina, a senior resident of Ras Beirut, shared her shock at witnessing the sudden influx of people: “endless faces, triple lanes of cars parked in the streets, garbage overflowing, traffic around the hour … the demographics of the city had changed overnight.” Others observed the spread of temporary domestic life into public areas, such as the corniche, where tents and informal structures began to dot the seafront.
These transformations recalled past episodes of internal displacement, especially the mass movements triggered by Israeli invasions in the 1980s. Reem, an artist in Hamra, described the resulting tensions between urban and rural daily practices as both culturally rich and socially dissonant. Maha, an urban planner, noted how sectarian symbols quickly reappeared in these altered landscapes, such as the emergence of party flags across contested streets, redrawing Beirut’s socio-political map.
This reconfiguration of urban space speaks to the layered nature of resilience: how crisis reorganises the city and how residents re-inhabit it with both agency and ambivalence. Fouad, a business owner, described the “persistent disquiet” of walking through familiar streets that now felt unrecognisable. The fear of aerial attacks, the presence of unfamiliar militia forces, and the absence of reliable state protection have all reshaped everyday movement. Rania, a finance professional, adjusted her routes to avoid schools, militia groups, and crowded areas. She avoided entering her own building if unfamiliar faces were nearby. Fouad, meanwhile, began walking instead of driving: “It’s easier to run and hide than get stuck in traffic.”
… to the Private Domain
Within the home, resilience took more intimate and material forms. People created comfort zones, altering spaces to reduce noise from bombing, installing solar panels and batteries, and stockpiling food and medicine. These acts were not simply about preparedness; they were forms of emotional and sensory insulation, echoing past survival strategies. “We learned from the crises of 2019,” Lina explained. “We rearranged our living room to avoid hearing the background sounds of bombing.”
At the same time, a shift toward individualism emerged. Rania, reflecting on her daily adaptations, noted, “Even helping out and providing for the displaced has become an individual act.” Reem, too, described her desire to declutter and give away belongings, not just to help, but to emotionally detach from her surroundings. This push and pull between care and withdrawal, solidarity and solitude, points to the paradoxes at the heart of layered resilience.
The Lebanese social fabric—woven from networks of care, generosity, and improvisation—now coexists with survivalist pragmatism. What emerges is a patchwork of resilience efforts: fragmented, yet deeply anchored in historical memory and spatial experience.
Discussion
As Munira Khayyat (2022) argues, war should not be viewed as a singular event, but as an enduring ecological condition that shapes every facet of life. In Lebanon, this condition manifests in spatial, emotional, and psychological ways, producing unique patterns of adaptation. Resilience here is palimpsestic: written, erased, and rewritten across bodies, buildings, and landscapes.
In contrast to international frameworks that render resilience technical or programmatic, Beirut reveals a more grounded, constructionist approach. It is local, improvised, and relational. It is not merely about rebuilding, but about reorienting—making sense of new realities, even when stability remains out of reach.
As Maha observed, resilience has become an overused term—so frequently invoked that it risks erasing suffering. To reclaim its meaning, we must decolonise it. This means recognising the ways in which ordinary acts—changing a route, erecting a tent, rearranging a room—carry the weight of resistance. As Mbembe (2002) describes, these are ecologies of uncertainty in which identities are shaped. In Beirut, resilience is not a universal model. It is a lived practice, rooted in place, history, and struggle.
This article is part of a series of articles commissioned under the ‘Resilience and Inclusive Politics in the Arab Region’, generously funded by the Carnegie Corporation.