Beirut’s history with displacement is long and complex. The latest Syrian influx of refugees 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 has also hosted Kurds, Palestinians and many internally displaced communities. This research explores the everyday and political life of Quarantina, a Beirut neighborhood that has hosted successive waves of refugees to Lebanon. Using Henri Lefebvre’s work on the production of space and the right to the city, I frame the role of refugees as an active participant in the making of the city. The specific case study of the Quarantina neighborhood—also known as Al Khodr part of the district of Medawar—in Beirut, Lebanon presents a particularly interesting context for these inquiries. Known as one of the first refugee camps, built under the French Mandate to host the Armenian refugees, the neighborhoods presents a unique layering of experiences of refuge when studied over time. Mixing archival research with interviews, the project aims to gather spatialized narratives of the everyday life of refugees as they claim their right to the city through appropriations of space. This specific proposal focuses on the period from the early 1960s and until the start of the Lebanese civil war, when Quarantina evolved into a space of collaboration and cohesion between the native population, the migrant laborers and the Palestinian, Armenian, and Kurdish refugees who had settled in the area. Within the same time frame, the neighborhood also fell victim to a series of disastrous events, which started with multiple fires in the 1960s (believed to have been purposely instigated) and culminated with a massacre of the Muslim population of the area in January of 1976 led by the Christian Lebanese militias. The overall goal of this project is to counter some of the dominant narratives about refugee populations, by emphasizing their role as producers and contributors to the urban fabric. I pursue this while addressing the lack of research about the neighborhood of Quarantina, a forgotten and marginalized district of Beirut’s history and present, which however offers an invaluable window into the life of refugees as real if not legal citizens—subjects of what Lefebvre called ‘the right to the city’.