by dailystar.com.lb -- BEIRUT: When Hamza Shamas first moved to Beirut, he was overwhelmed. The constant bustle of the city’s busy Downtown was a far cry from the quiet village of Boudai, where he grew up. In his village, Shamas’ identity revolved around his tribe, but in Beirut he felt adrift.He settled in Hay al-Sellom, a low-income neighborhood in the southern suburbs made up almost entirely of residents from rural Lebanon, and soon discovered that despite the noise and crowding, his community in Beirut was really a microcosm of village life. More and more people originally from Lebanon’s rural population are finding themselves in cities. The United Nations Human Settlements Program (U.N.-Habitat) estimates that by 2020, 88.6 percent of Lebanon’s population will live in urban areas, the fourth-highest in the Arab world after Gulf states Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain.

The vast majority of this urban shift is focused on Beirut. A 1996 survey by the Social Affairs Ministry and the United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA, found that 20 percent of Lebanese living in the Beirut governorate were born elsewhere, along with 31 percent in the Mount Lebanon governorate, which encompasses Beirut’s dense suburbs. This greatly exceeds the proportion in other governorates, at 8 percent in the north and 2 percent in the south. In the intervening two decades, the proportion of Lebanese migrants to the Beirut area has only increased, said Suzanne Menhem, a sociology professor at the Lebanese University. She is in the midst of a yearlong study of Lebanon’s internal migration, a woefully understudied phenomenon, she told The Daily Star. “We have no statistics,” she said. “We base it on the study and by estimation.” Lebanon’s last official census was in 1932. Since then there have only been scattered studies of the country’s demography. Menhem is still in the initial stages of her project, but she already knows that the trend of rural-to-urban migration is a strong one. “I’m sure that this phenomenon is increasing with time,” she said.

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