The right to the village? Concept and history in a village of South Lebanon'

Abstract

Lefebvre’s Right to the City has sparked debate about urban space and raised questions concerning public space, social exclusion, citizenship, housing, and governance. In this paper, we ask whether rural claims to rights could be fruitfully conceived as expressing a kind of ‘Right to the Village’, in the spirit of Lefebvre’s ‘Right to the City’. We carried out a microanalysis in the village of Sinay – located in Jabal ‘Amil, South Lebanon – of cases of people’s claims for a right to housing and a right to cultivation. The methodology is based on ethno-sociological fieldwork in combination with geographical, agricultural and landscape analyses. Our study shows the limits of applying the ‘Right to the City’ framework in the rural context, and proposes modifications to that. The case study reveals the partial success of a claim for rights, and the difficulty for actors of translating particular rights into global and lasting claims to a ‘Right to the Village’.

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