Baladi Map Logs Lebanon Infrastructure Complaints in Public Civic Record
The National reported that Roy Bou Nassif built Baladi Map after a crumbling wall in Ardeh highlighted how local infrastructure complaints can remain unresolved for years.
Baladi Map is turning neighbourhood complaints in Lebanon into a public infrastructure record, The National reported, after a 50-metre wall in Ardeh became the case that pushed engineer Roy Bou Nassif to build a civic reporting app.
The platform lets residents photograph a problem, add a description and location, and publish the entry on a map.
A free website and mobile app then leaves the relevant authority publicly attached to the complaint rather than keeping the issue inside private calls or informal municipal requests.
The first trigger was local and physical.
The wall along Ardeh's main road in northern Lebanon's Zgharta district had deteriorated for a decade while hundreds of vehicles passed it each day, and residents had already raised the danger with local authorities without getting a repair.
Bou Nassif, 28, trained as a mechanical and industrial engineer and spent more than a decade living in Australia while continuing to visit Lebanon.
The tool grew from his comparison with Australia's more transparent handling of public issues, the 2019 uprising and his father's advice that national repair had to begin at neighbourhood level.
Baladi Map is not designed only as a complaints box.
The civic workflow has three steps: residents publish a documented fault, other users signal whether it affects them, and municipalities can acknowledge the issue, mark work as under way or explain why a repair is beyond their control or budget.
Complaints already listed on the platform include non-functional municipal lights in Ghazir, waste accumulation at Haret El Mir Zouk Mkayel, a hole in the middle of a street in Qlaiaat and street holes between Beirut's municipality and Ghobeiry's jurisdiction.
The voting layer turns scattered reports into a visible priority list.
One early entry has already moved from red to green.
In Byblos, a traffic-light request at a busy intersection was marked resolved after three weeks, and Bou Nassif later confirmed that lights had been installed while avoiding a direct claim that the platform caused the work.
The operating test now sits with municipalities as much as residents.
Baladi Map can become a public record of what communities need, what local authorities can fix and what blocks them, but its value depends on whether officials engage with the online record instead of leaving the map as a catalogue of unresolved potholes, lights and walls.
