Urbanization and Immigrants’ Claim to The City: Climate Change, Cultural Resistance, And The Environmental Justice Movement In Beirut

Keywords: Climate change, environmental justice, immigrants, urban spatialization of culture, war, displacement, Beirut
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 28

Abstract

The globalization of the crisis of capitalism has never ended the mass migration to the cosmopolitan cities. As a result, the fluxes of ethnically displaced immigrants inevitably find themselves preserving their culture not only through the resistance against the established urban cultural hegemony but also in proceeding to claim their right to the city. Such a dialectical struggle could relatively shape a diverse range of social movements as a synthesis of resistance versus integration, highly affected by the causes of displacement, including war, climate change, racial and ethnic cleansings, dispossession of the land through economic development policies, and forced poverty to the indigenous societies.

While studying the process of spatial reproduction of immigrants’ religious culture through rural to urban migration in South Beirut, I was exposed to the data that vividly showed the impact of climate change intensified by post-war neoliberal economic policies in Lebanon. Thus, I examined how the process of war displacement has transformed the social movements led by the immigrants towards seeking environmental justice as a part of the immigrants’ spatialization of culture and claiming their rights to the city. Applying the relational approach by using landscape images, I studied the process of the reproduction of rural environmental preservation in South Beirut. The results showed that the spatialization of immigrants’ culture in urban spaces is done by reproducing the culture of environment preservation and is regarded as a radical struggle against their dispossession of land.