Lebanon, where 1 in 4 individuals is a refugee, has featured prominently in news headlines since 2011 as the biggest host per capita of Syrian refugees. The latest Syrian influx only comes as a continuation of many waves of displacement Lebanon has witnessed in the 20th century. Starting with the Armenians after World War I, Beirut in particular has also hosted Kurds, Palestinians and many internally displaced communities. The refugee literature in Lebanon has mostly focused on studying these groups in isolation from their host context, with a large focus on refugee camps. My research steps away from the dominant approaches by studying a non-encampment situation, where several groups of refugees have lived side by side with a local native community, and focuses on the role of displacement in the production of space in Beirut. In this paper, I explore the everyday and political life of Quarantina—also known as Al Khodr or Maslakh part of the district of Medawar—a Beirut neighborhood that has hosted successive waves of refugees to Lebanon and has been largely unstudied by scholars. More specifically, I focus on a 15-year period, from 1960 until the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. During that time, the neighborhood evolved into a space of collaboration and cohesion between the native population, the migrant laborers and the Palestinian, Armenian, and Kurdish refugees who settled in the area. In this specific time and place, a new proletariat identity began to form within the marginalized community of Quarantina. In this case study, the distinction between citizen and refugee is blurred. I consider, more specifically, the shared struggle of the community when faced with multiple and consecutive fires in the area and view their different mobilizations and appropriations of space as their claim to their right to the city, a new form of invented citizenship. I contrast these experiences of class struggle in their everyday life with the perceived identity imagined by aid agencies and the public opinion through an analysis of newspaper and archival materials. Based on 16 months of fieldwork, including oral histories, archival research and participant observations, I highlight the intricate intersection between class struggle and refugee identity, while grounding the current debate on displacement in its historical context.