The right to the city is one of the concepts that has no clear dimensions and the papers written about it are mostly in the field of architecture, urban planning, and social sciences. This concept is ambiguous even in the legal texts of Western countries, and jurists have not been able to express a clear opinion about its dimensions. Accordingly, this study seeks to answer the question that what is the concept, nature, and examples of the right to the city in Islamic jurisprudence.
The nature of this right is a mixture of the rights of the first to the fourth generation and accordingly, it contains numerous and sometimes conflicting examples. It is noteworthy that this right has been considered in international documents, but because other rights do not have the support and guarantee of legal implementation, and as a result, it is included in the list of rights that are known as positive rights and seeks to impose duties and obligations on governments that Naturally, it has not been welcomed by them either. Ambiguity in the concept, content, and examples of this right along with the lack of guarantee of proper implementation shows that simply proposing multiple rights cannot help humanity to achieve its rights and as a result, mankind is still struggling in the abyss of chaos and injustice.
This ambiguity in the laws of Western countries and the ambiguity of its concept in the laws of Iran makes it mandatory to refer to jurisprudential sources to understand its concept. We can see that this right has no background in classical and modern jurisprudence texts by referring to Imami jurisprudence. So, to understand its meaning, you should look for dictionaries. By checking the dictionaries, three words Misr, Medina, and Balad can be considered synonyms of Farsi city. Based on this, to justify the right to the city from among different methods, the method of lawful expression (the language of reason) was taken into consideration and these three words were searched in the Holy Quran and hadiths and in total several verses such as verses 61 and 126 of Al-Baqarah, 35 of Ibrahim, 2 Balad and 87 Yunus and several narrations were found in this context, all of which in some ways have been able to prove the legitimacy of the right to the city and some of its examples, such as the possession of material and spiritual facilities and the existence of social life in the city. Regarding other examples of this right, one can also refer to the general or special custom and obtain numerous examples of it.
