Urban crisis as infrastructure, not event: A view from Beirut

Beirut is routinely labelled a ‘crisis zone’. Yet calling Beirut ‘in crisis’ risks misrecognising its urban condition. Crisis here is not an exception; it is the everyday grammar through which the city is governed, inhabited and imagined. I advance three claims: (i) Beirut exemplifies permacrisis – a structurally reproduced, open-ended condition rather than an episodic shock; (ii) permacrisis generates a politics of waiting and ‘stuckedness’ that organises urban life, labour, and decision-making; (iii) in the context of a hollowed-out state, market actors, nonprofits and solidarity networks co-govern vital infrastructures, producing uneven ecologies and aggravating social fault lines. Beirut's ‘permacrisis governance’ exposes variations in how capital, race/sect, and geopolitical alignments tune hybrid and fragmented assemblages of sectarian patrons, diasporic actors, donor-led financing platforms and NGOs – further hollowing out state institutions. The question shifts from ‘when the crisis will end’ to how crisis economies, temporalities, externalities, and resistant ecologies continuously remake the city – and what it would take to redirect them toward more just futures. The goal is not to celebrate agency for its own sake but to expose how improvisation can both alleviate suffering and entrench neoliberal abandonment. Crisis, then, is neither a temporary deviation nor merely a discursive trope; it is the scaffolding upon which Beirut – and perhaps the contemporary city more broadly – continues to be built, inhabited, contested and imagined.