From street clean-ups to revived buildings, protests spur city innovation.

At dawn, 16-year-old Michel sweeps Beirut’s pavements of discarded bottles and cigarette butts from a protest the night before, Reuters reports.

The secondary school student has joined mass demonstrations that have swept Lebanon for more than a week, railing against a political elite accused of plundering state resources in a nation already in deep economic crisis.

But Michel wants to fix more than just the country’s politics: he is one of what activists say are rising numbers of young people harnessing the protests to crowdsource improvements to the capital city.

Street clean-ups, pro bono legal clinics, open-air raves in car parks and the revival of abandoned buildings are all signs of a push to change the face of Beirut as well as its leaders, according to researchers and activists.

The city’s residents are “realising that they need to take care of the space they live in,” said Mona Fawaz, a professor of urban studies and planning at the American University of Beirut.

“When you’re politically engaged and mobilised you’re redefining your role as… an engaged citizen,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“No one’s going to clean (the streets) for you; you have to clean it.”

For protesters like Michel, “it’s not like we just come here, party, revolt, and leave our trash behind.”

“I’m just trying to show that although we’re doing a revolution, the Lebanese people are still civilised and clean,” he said.

What started with a handful of volunteers roaming the streets with garbage bags and brushes, morphed into an organised force offering their own trucks and warehouses to support local NGOs helping the clean-up effort.

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Written by MEMO
Image: Lebtivity (Outskirts of Beirut/Highway scene)
Publication date: October 26, 2019

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