Sustainable Land Development and Management in Rural Areas: The Case of Kafra, South Lebanon

Abstract

Land represents an essential natural resource for humanity and its survival. While land conservation is essential, increasing pressure on land resources may result from an over-emphasis on land’s role as an asset to store wealth, which reduces the ability of communities to use land for shared and communal functions, including agriculture.

In Lebanon, the social values of land and the possibility of managing and using land as a collective resource is threatened for decades by such trends. Indeed, many challenges face the productive use of land, such as the economic model favoring land as an asset subject to market exchange and discouraging the use of land for agriculture. Furthermore, numerous well-meaning planning strategies have undermined agriculture, such as the development of roads leading to sprawl along, the reliance on informal licenses for construction, and a national master plan allowing for construction anywhere within a village/ town with no zoning. In addition, recent processes of land surveys that were adopted to protect public land have often led to its loss due to corrupt practices.

This thesis investigates how planners can intervene to protect and enhance the social value of rural land. The thesis begins by documenting the breakdown of the social value of rural lands in the village of Kafra. The thesis argues that the management of rural land, as organized through land surveys, road development, and land use planning, as well as the national approach to land as a real-estate asset, have undermined the social value of rural land. The model of management has further led to the illegal privatization of public land through irregularities in the survey, in addition to the abandonment of agricultural land, at the expense of the role that agriculture can play to support communal subsistence needs. The thesis concludes by providing recommendations to mitigate these challenges.