levantCarta/Beirut

LevantCarta Beirut is an interactive digital platform built on advanced mapping and GIS tools to document and analyze the urban evolution of Beirut across its entire recorded history, spanning from 2500 BC to the present. The platform integrates four categories of primary source data: historical maps, archaeological records, aerial photographs, and urban planning data. Each source is located in time and space, with its associated visual and geographic data integrated across multiple databases, producing a temporally accurate and spatially structured record of the city's development across more than 4,500 years.

The platform's analytical framework is organized around the intersection of urban form and social geography. Users can trace the evolution of Beirut's buildings, neighborhoods, and communities through successive periods, examining how the city's spatial organization has reflected and responded to its social, cultural, and religious diversity over time. The layering of cartographic, archaeological, and planning data within a single temporal interface allows patterns of continuity and transformation to be identified across scales, from individual structures to the broader urban fabric.

LevantCarta Beirut serves both as a research tool and a public resource. For historians, researchers, and urban planners, it provides a spatially and temporally rigorous basis for studying the city's long-term development. For broader audiences, it makes the complexity of Beirut's layered history navigable and accessible, situating the city within its role as a cultural and historical crossroads of the eastern Mediterranean.