In this guest post, Ms Joana Dabaj describes the ideas behind Urban collapse, care, and climate: Women’s narratives of polycrises in Tripoli, Lebanon, an Urban Urgencies project funded by the Urban Studies Foundation.
When a building collapses, the news often reports the number of casualties, the damage, or the cost of reconstruction. Much less visible are the everyday decisions that people make afterwards: where to sleep, how to care for family members, which routes feel safe, and how to imagine a future in a city where crisis has become part of daily life.
Our project, Urban collapse, care, and climate: Women’s narratives of polycrises in Tripoli, Lebanon, is funded through the Urban Studies Foundation’s Urban Urgencies grant scheme. It begins from a simple but important question: What can we learn about urban collapse by listening to the women who navigate it every day?
The project will bring together women living in three neighbourhoods of Tripoli—Qobbe, Jabal Mohsen, and Bab al-Tabbaneh—to explore how multiple crises intersect in everyday life. Lebanon’s ongoing economic collapse, deteriorating housing, climate-related risks, displacement, and political uncertainty are often discussed as separate challenges. For many residents, however, these crises are inseparable. They shape daily decisions about care, mobility, safety, housing, and the future.
The project builds on several years of participatory urban research and placemaking undertaken by CatalyticAction in Tripoli, including collaborations with local communities, women’s groups, municipalities, and civil society organisations. This sustained engagement provides a strong foundation for deepening existing relationships through collaborative research and ensuring that the knowledge generated responds to locally identified priorities.
Rather than viewing women as passive recipients of assistance, the project seeks to recognise them as key urban actors and knowledge holders. Their experiences reveal not only the impacts of prolonged crises but also the everyday practices of care, adaptation, and solidarity that sustain families, neighbourhoods, and communities under extraordinary pressure.
The project brings together an interdisciplinary partnership between Politecnico di Torino, CatalyticAction, and Ruwwad Al Tanmeya, combining academic research with long-term community engagement. Alongside participatory workshops and narrative interviews, we are collaborating with a Lebanon-based sound recordist and audio producer Tania Kammoun to co-create a series of audio stories. These recordings will preserve participants’ voices in their own words and contribute to a publicly accessible digital archive, alongside a temporary research-led spatial installation and public exhibition in Tripoli.
We hope the project will contribute to ongoing debates in urban studies around care, feminist urbanism, climate adaptation, and urban justice, while also producing resources that are meaningful beyond academia. Alongside peer-reviewed publications, we will develop a policy brief, a public exhibition and stakeholder dialogue, and audio stories that can inform practitioners, municipalities, community organisations, and researchers working in cities experiencing overlapping crises.
In the months ahead, we look forward to beginning the project’s participatory activities in Tripoli, working closely with our partners and participants to co-produce the research. As the project unfolds, we will share stories from the research process, introduce our collaborators and participants, and reflect on what Tripoli can teach us about care, urban resilience, and imagining more just futures in cities facing overlapping crises.
We are grateful to the Urban Studies Foundation for supporting this work through its Urban Urgencies grant scheme, and we look forward to sharing the project’s journey over the coming months.
Relevant links:
https://www.polito.it/personale?p=027675
Women-Led Placemaking for Peacebuilding project: https://catalyticaction.org/placemaking-tripoli/
https://catalyticaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/CatalyticAction-Impact-Report-2025-2.pdf