Exploring urban co-presence and migrant integration on Beirut’s seafront

Abstract

This article focuses on investigating how uses and users of Beirut’s seafront spaces reflect city demographics and how these may offer specific affordances to migrant communities. The article documents co-presence and experiences of recreation and interactions to explore whether these can be meaningfully described as integrated leisure spaces. Beirut is a post-conflict, high migration city, and the country of Lebanon hosts the highest number of Syrian refugees per capita globally. The fieldwork and data capture took a multi-scalar approach linking spatial, temporal, and social qualities of using these public spaces through empirical work including a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, both conducted on site. The triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods supported a fuller understanding of integration both in terms of physical co-presence and the experiential qualities of spaces used by diverse communities. Our findings demonstrate that though each of the four seafront spaces was used by people from a range of national backgrounds, there were important differences. Income level and gender were important intersecting factors. Time of day and week also shaped who was present in each space. The qualitative data informed better understandings of the experience of the seafront spaces by visitors from migrant backgrounds, finding that time by the sea was highly valued by many, but was not necessarily an escape from some of the prejudices and social inequalities found in Lebanon.