It’s been 53 years since Beirut’s master planner, Michel Ecochard, made an urgent call for a proper city-wide urban planning, saying, “Beirut can still be saved, but action must be taken immediately.” He called for organizing Beirut to facilitate transportation while maintaining public spaces for the average citizen to use. But today, Beirutis are finding it hard to catch a breath in an ever-growing concrete jungle. The municipality’s latest project, a controversial $70 million highway that would destroy historic precincts, is yet another clear example of a severe lack of urban planning.

Beirut has only 0.8 square meters (8.6 square feet) of green space per capita compared to the minimum of 9 square meters (97 square feet) per capita recommended by the World Health Organization. Its largest park, Horsh Beirut, comprising on its own 75% of all of the city’s green spaces, is closed to the public. One of the city’s last remaining public coastlines, the Daliyeh, is being sealed off at the behest of private businesses. According to a report by Nahnoo, a youth-led Lebanese nongovernmental organization, approximately 25% of the city's area is taken up by “an overly complex and massive road network.”

While Beirut’s ailing infrastructure can be traced back to the civil war, its current challenges are exacerbated by poorly managed infrastructure renovation that has been underway in the 24 years since the conflict ended. The municipality’s latest project is a good example of the lack of adequate planning. The proposed highway, dubbed "Fouad Boutros" after a prominent Lebanese diplomat, is intended to ease traffic in the severely congested inner district of Achrafieh. Despite intense opposition by experts in the field, the municipality has yet to abandon the project.

The main opposition is a grass-roots movement called the Civil Coalition Against the Highway Project Hekmeh-Turk Axis — a group of NGOs, professionals, academics in diverse fields related to the urban environment and residents of the affected areas — which has described the project as a “vestige of old plans” and is calling on the government to “immediately cancel the project because it is destructive and obsolete from a variety of perspectives.”