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.

While many factors drive people into the city, it often comes down to economics. This was the main driver for Lychaa Lychaa, who came to Beirut in 2012 to work in a hospital. He graduated with a medical degree from a university near his village in the north governorate, but left home in search of work. Although his village is much closer to Tripoli than it is to Beirut, he was driven to the capital by Lebanon’s highly centralized organization. “The transportation system, the important hospitals, the banking center, public administration and public services – all of them are focused on Beirut,” he told The Daily Star. “Also, there are more work opportunities, and the salaries are higher,” he said. Lychaa escapes the pressures of city life by living in a quiet eastern suburb and visiting his village on the weekends. But not all who migrate are so lucky. Many poorer migrants end up in crowded slums, where they struggle to make ends meet and find themselves stuck in a cycle of poverty. Shamas originally came to Beirut to study at LU. While he hoped his degree would only take a couple of years, the high cost of urban living, even in his relatively low-income neighborhood, forced him to take fewer classes and pick up odd jobs instead. He ultimately spent seven years as a student, during which he worked in security, retail, multiple restaurants and a paper factory.

To move through university, he was forced to join one of the local political parties that control many aspects of life in Beirut’s poorer suburbs. The neighborhoods are starkly divided along party lines, as well as sectarian and tribal ones, recreating an insular village culture amid lopsided high rises. Gesturing at a series of alleys, Shamas rattled off from memory which streets belonged to which families. When he came to Beirut to study, his parents and sisters came with him. He said that was typical of those who moved to the capital. Not all migrants see city life as so provincial. Yousef Nasser is originally from Haddatha, a village in the south, but has been living in Beirut most of his life. He owns a print shop on the outskirts of Hay al-Sellom, but lives in the more upscale neighborhood of Ras Beirut. He lauded the openness of the city compared with his village, even boasting about the prevalence of atheism and intersect marriage, although he admitted that around 90-95 percent of the people he knew disapproved of it. Above all, though, he praised the city’s public services like electricity and water, which are not so reliable in his village. “Beirut is the best place to live in Lebanon,” he told The Daily Star. Hasan Farhad owns the small restaurant across the street in Hay al-Sellom, and from his perspective the cosmopolitan image of Beirut is an illusion. “We don’t mix,” he told The Daily Star, and commented that 99 percent of his world was Shiite like him, despite the fact that he lives in a traditionally Christian area. While his restaurant keeps him tied to the city, he still longs for his rural home. “If there were work, and if it were safe, I would prefer to live in my village,” he said. Farhad is a second-generation migrant. He was born in Africa, where his parents fled during the 1975-90 Civil War. They moved back to Lebanon after the conflict’s end, but were unable to return home due to the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, so they came to Beirut. Their village’s proximity to Israel has made Farhad wary of returning.

The UNDP has estimated that more than 450,000 people were forcibly displaced at the end of the Civil War. About 20 percent of them, like Farhad’s family, became established where they migrated. Menhem stressed that even though most migration today was economic, the forcibly displaced still made up a significant proportion of urban migrants. While some internally displaced have successfully integrated into urban society, others maintain a separate culture and identity to this day. “We have to measure this internal migration, and to see the percentage of cultural integration into the host society,” she said. Despite the prevalence of village culture in Hay al-Sellom, residents observe that some things are beginning to change. While Farhad and Nasser agreed that sectarian mixing was uncommon, they both pointed out that within their Shiite community, divisions between migrants from the south and from the Bekaa Valley that were prevalent 10 years ago were now hardly recognizable. Shamas, who has become obsessed with bridging the urban-rural divide, is starting a library and cultural center in his village to prepare rural youth for integration into city life. But for many, the social fabric of life in Beirut still differs little from their villages of origin. And as economic hardship draws more and more people to the capital, the poorly understood phenomenon of internal migration will only become more prevalent. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on August 15, 2019, on page 3.