The Beirut Built Environment Database is a platform gathering geolocalised social, environmental, and economic information on building activity in the Greater Beirut Area.

Responding to the lack of accessible raw data about the built environment in Lebanon’s capital city, the Beirut Built Environment database brings together a collection of maps, documents, and surveyed indicators about actors (e.g., builder, developer, landowner) as well as spatial (e.g., vacancy, floors, parking) and environmental characteristics (e.g., water, greenery, infrastructure lines) that can inform ongoing research, public policymaking, and advocacy about the city. Aside from providing a shared base of information for/about Beirut, the database serves as a basis for ongoing theorization of urban transformation, including the rising rates of vacancy, forced evictions, developers’ trajectories, environmental justice, and more aspects of the actually existing financialization of land and its impacts on everyday life in the city. The platform invites researchers, professionals, and activists who are interested in investigations of the city's built environment to rely on its layers as a basis for more advanced explorations of urban trends. Our aim is to provide an easy-to-share, free to download document as a strategy to generate collaborations, partnerships, and most importantly discussions about the rapid transformations of the city and their visualization.