The Vital City



The Vital City explores the complex entanglements in space and time of displacements, crisis and city future focusing on the actual vitality of cities in Lebanon. It looks into infrastructure and services; infrastructure scarcity, overlapping claims over spaces and accesses to services in the context of a crisis laden, latent conflicts, and the actual complexity in the governance of local areas. This theme also takes into consideration the local context in which diverse communities, NGOs and individuals interact as agents in the reproduction of space, in order to understand how to make more resilient and better-quality living environments. More specifically, the Vital City will (A) Explore how displacement and its dynamics can work together to construct a public realm, with public goods and services that work for all, starting from the micro-daily scale of social engagement. This is in the hopes of helping to reduce emergent socio-spatial conflicts through urban design, and (B) examine how displacement can factor into the design of more resilient and better quality living environments in contexts of resource constraint in Lebanon.