Self-Help and Mutual Aid in Tripoli’s Informal Neighborhoods
Marylin Chahine, PhD Candidate in Geography, Urban, and Environmental Studies, Concordia University
Since the end of the Lebanese Civil War, Tripoli has experienced significant levels of violent conflict and poverty, ranking among the highest in Lebanon and the surrounding. Tripoli, situated 85 kilometers north of Beirut, is Lebanon’s second-largest city, housing approximately 500,000 residents. It exhibits extremely high poverty rates within its metropolitan population relative to other regions in Lebanon. The stark inequalities within Tripoli and the extremely high rates of poverty and unemployment have led to high levels of mass mobilization in the city since the October 17th Uprising. The city that had been perceived through the lens of security threats and sectarian clashes in the past decade has turned into a major hotspot for collective mobilization and solidarity initiatives.
Inequality and dire economic conditions are not new to Tripoli. The fifteen-year-long civil war in Lebanon, which ended in 1990, and the post-war fierce neo-liberalization era, played a crucial role in the weakening of Tripoli’s industrial sector and economic role in the national economy. After the civil war, the ruling elites sought to remedy the economy by expanding the services and tourism sectors at the expense of productive and agricultural ones. This created fragile financial stability dependent on hard currency, debt, remittances, real estate, and the inflated banking sector.
Several major industries and factories upon which the city of Tripoli depended for economic continuity and sustainable employment drastically decreased or shut down. Moreover, the centralization of investments and economic activity in the capital, Beirut, and the unequal development between the center and periphery within the country, led to the marginalization of several important cities such as Tripoli. As a result, Tripoli steadily headed towards poverty, urban dysfunctionality, abandonment, and deprivation. The economic strategies adopted by the state since the end of the civil war were the stepping stone for the economic collapse that started to unfold in the last two years. Over the years, the capital of the North Governorate became a site of social tension, armed conflict, and political turmoil.
More recently, the conflict in Syria spilled over to Tripoli, igniting tension and clashes between pro-Assad Alawites in Jabal Mohsen and the neighboring anti-Assad Sunni population in Bab Al-Tabbaneh. In 2014, the government enacted a security plan for 2,000 Lebanese Army troops across the city. However, much like the state of the government’s many shallow remedies, security remains fickle in Tripoli and the further entrenchment of economic despair does not help in addressing the social and political tensions.
Since the end of the civil war in 1990, civil society institutions emerged as service providers while the state’s role became increasingly limited to contracting and funding them without proper monitoring or follow-up. The situation in Tripoli is no different. This is not to say that the state is completely absent, as present state-led programs include the Emergency National Poverty Targeting Programme, the National Social Security Fund, education-related and school food programs, and the recurrent National Poverty Targeting Program with the World Bank launched since 2011, targeting the most vulnerable families. However, these state programs are often undermined by non-state civil society institutions and their interference with operations. For example, the Ministry of Social Affairs often contracts and funds institutions subordinate to party and sectarian leaders, making them important actors on the ground within society.
As the state’s economic provisions are not always sufficient, residents of poor neighborhoods, the majority of the city’s population, have often given up on state institutions and NGOs, resorting more directly to alternatives available in the city. First, Tripolitanian politicians have created institutions and associations to strengthen their networks of clientelism to serve their political interests. They have also occasionally invested in the city, but usually to serve their own businesses, especially through the medical sector. Moreover, they make promises of aid that they do not always intend to keep, often to the poorest areas in the city to reinforce clientelism and dependency. More recently, with the compounded crisis, both the trust in and the capabilities of these clientelist networks have gone down, whereas the needs of the city’s residents have increased.
The repercussions of Lebanon’s disparate development and Tripoli’s political marginalization are most evident in the city’s informal settlements. These neighborhoods are not incidental; they are spatial manifestations of decades of neglect, displacement, and exclusion. Hay al-Tanak is distinguished as both a manifestation and a representation of these structural conditions. Understanding the development and everyday life of Hay al-Tanak requires tracing its historical trajectory alongside the broader shifts in governance that have systematically pushed the urban poor to the periphery. The following explores how this neighborhood emerged, who its residents are, and what it means to build and live under conditions of informality and abandonment.
Al Hara Al Jadida is the oldest informal neighborhood in Tripoli and El Mina. Its area is approximately 37,000 square meters, but it does not appear at all on official maps. The history of its residence dates to the First World War, when it was inhabited by Hajj Ahmed bin Ahmed Hassan al-Mir al-Ayyubi in 1914. The current site of Al-Hara was previously agricultural land consisting of orchards with a house in each orchard. Serfs worked on it for the large families who owned these lands. In the 1930s, Hajj Ahmed bin Ahmed Hassan al-Mir al-Ayyubi built the mosque of the new neighborhood, and in the year 1932, Hajj Tawfiq Muhammad al-Jamous built the third house in this suburb to live in.
Over time, serfs built houses for themselves and their children on the lands when the owners were absent from them. The first road was built in the neighborhood in the early 1960s, coinciding with the issuance of the decree establishing the International Exhibition. The neighborhood became a small city, with various industries spreading since 1970, including pumice and tile factories, as a natural extension of the industry in El Mina.
Today, the land is distributed between private and public property, which is confirmed by the annexation and division that were approved in 1979, with complete disregard for the lived reality and the needs of the people. The purpose of this project was to “organize the area to reduce randomness and eliminate communalism and encroachment,” according to Abdel Qader Alam El Din, the former mayor of El Mina, but its implementation failed due to the inability to evacuate the residents.
Hay al-Tanak is a newer part of the neighborhood, which branches out from Al Hara Al Jadida towards the sea. This neighborhood arose with the beginning of the Civil War, and the first residence was built in 1980. In the year 1982, several families were displaced outside Tripoli. Some of them settled in the Hay al-Tanak neighborhood, either to escape the battles or because of their inability to pay rent in other neighborhoods of the city.
In the mid-1990s, the number of houses in the neighborhood reached 300, and the neighborhood expanded greatly during this period. The newly arrived residents built houses with tin roofs, which, after their arrival, became segregated real estate with specific private ownership, some of which were allocated as roads and a public garden belonging to the municipality of El Mina. Today, the neighborhood is inhabited by 1,300 families. They are a mixture of people who originate from Al-Mina, Akkar, and Al-Danniyeh, in addition to Palestinians who were displaced during the battles of Nahr Al-Bared Camp in 2007, and Syrian refugees who settled there in 2011 when the wave of Syrian displacement doubled.
Most of the residents work as porters in the port, plastic collectors from waste containers, and coffee sellers, while a large percentage remain unemployed. The education rate is almost non-existent among children and there are no public spaces, such as gardens or playgrounds, for them to spend their time in.
The residents live in deteriorating housing and health conditions that worsen during the winter, amid the municipality’s prevention of them acquiring building materials to rehabilitate and maintain their homes. Residents of Hay al-Tanak are forbidden to build cement roofs, while the municipality refuses to secure sewage supplies and waste management in the neighborhood. Civil society organizations were also prevented from working in the neighborhood, under the pretext of the neighborhood’s informal status.
Lack of state infrastructure, no running water, sanitation, electricity, or road networks, has not translated into inertia. Conversely, residents have participated in what Asef Bayat describes as quiet encroachment of the ordinary: gradual, often unnoticed practices through which marginalized populations claim space and resources in the absence of formal entitlements. In Hay al-Tanak, this encroachment materializes through auto-construction, the installation of informal mutual aid networks, and negotiating aid. These acts are not classified as political in the traditional sense, but they are important modes of urban citizenship and spatial claim-making.
These dynamics are made clear in the daily patterns of survival. Community members like Fatima, who engage with NGOs, describe the persistent labor required to maintain visibility in systems that were built to exclude them. “We had to constantly remind them that we exist,” she explained, emphasizing how access to aid itself transforms into a site of negotiation and struggle. These encounters exemplify what James Scott refers to as infrapolitics: subtle, often informal forms of resistance that operate below the threshold of public protest yet possess significant political significance. Residents navigate governmental systems and utilize personal networks to fight erasure without explicitly challenging the state.
Parallel to these individual strategies are emergent collective formations that reflect a more organized, though still informal, political agency. One notable example is the Haret al-Jdideh Youth Association, a community-driven initiative established by young individuals from Hay al-Tanak. The organization offers social programs, including mental health workshops and literacy sessions, in addition to material assistance like food and donation campaigns. The association also mobilizes local resources to respond to emergencies, offer basic services, and negotiate with external actors on behalf of the community through neighborhood-based crowdfunding activities. Members like Chawki, who pointed out “We cannot rely on others to solve our problems. We have to be responsible for our own fate,” upheld the principle of independence and dignity that motivates these activities. In this way, the organization serves as a political actor as well as a provider, redefining the neighborhood’s relationship with the government and civil society and serving as an example of alternative forms of governance.
These kinds of structures stand in contrast with the long-standing dependence on sectarian leaders, whose inconsistent interventions are typically transactional and rooted in clientelism. Although some residents still rely on these networks, many expressed increasing mistrust, especially in view of the combined crises of the past decade. “We want dignity; we do not want handouts,” said young community leader Ahmed. This rejection marks a change toward a kind of collective consciousness aimed at transcending sectarian reliance toward more independent and horizontal types of solidarity.
This everyday resistance is also evident in the physical transformation of space. The infrastructure of the neighborhood, constructed by residents through auto-construction and informal engineering, embodies a material expression of resistance. Although these practices involve legal and safety risks, they frequently represent the sole option for ensuring basic living conditions. As Scott argues, the accumulation of such small acts, even when driven by necessity rather than overt political intent, can yield significant political effects. In Hay al-Tanak, these practices produce and maintain a community that perseveres in spite of the state, not because of it.
Taken together, these dynamics reveal a complex interplay of survival and resistance within the urban peripheries of Lebanon. Hay al-Tanak is not only a space of deprivation, but a site of social innovation, mutual aid, and political experimentation. Residents employ informal negotiations, collective organizing, and spatial encroachment to express alternative models of citizenship that contest dominant paradigms of governance. In doing so, they establish a presence that is simultaneously vulnerable and defiant, highlighting the consequences of state neglect while also revealing the possibilities of grassroots resilience.