Over the last decade, Lebanon has witnessed the burgeoning of an urban social movement. This paper explores the growing influence of discourses focused on ‘the right to the city’, liveability and wellbeing within contemporary activist circles in Lebanon. I argue that for many activists operating in the aftermath of Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005, and the easing of restrictions on public socio-political critique that accompanied it, a turning away from discursively challenging Lebanon’s sectarian-political system, towards a pragmatic focus on the ongoing damage to livability caused by post-civil war development, has come to be seen as a more promising strategy for social change. This shift, I argue, aims to create the conditions for a transcendence of sectarian dispositions by redirecting debate, spinning an extra-sectarian narrative of nationally legible, shared suffering. The initiatives that embody this shift don’t seem primarily concerned with confronting contentious memories, beliefs or ways of being, but with facilitating a conversation about issues that, ostensibly, all citizens and residents of Lebanon are or can be invested in – the hope being that down this alternative discursive road, a new kind of citizen and denizen will emerge and the utility of sectarianism as a mode of meaning making and identity formation will be organically undermined. Drawing on fieldwork in Lebanon amongst two prominent public space-focused advocacy groups, I will narrate attempts at nurturing empathic bonds across sectarian, economic, racialized and gendered boundaries by drawing attention to uncontroversial, solvable public issues that are causes in themselves and a means for exposing governmental corruption and neglect for the majority of Lebanon’s citizens and denizens. These strategies are grounded in knowledge production, gaining trust through expertise, the deployment of facts to cast doubt on the establishment, and the use of in-depth research to understand not just what doesn’t work in Lebanon, but how the things that do work function so that activists can manipulate existing frameworks like the legal system to facilitate incremental change. I argue for understanding this form of urban activism as a move away from the transgressive politics of the traditional Lebanese left, towards a valuing of law and order – recourse to the law and the demand that it be applied fairly become subversive. I will discuss how urban activists are re-articulating what it means to be politically militant, making political what was never thought of as politics, moving beyond deadlocks of class and sect, secularism and religion.