BEIRUT, Lebanon — Mohamed Haidar watches yellow machines chew smashed kitchen appliances like hungry beasts, crumpling the stoves and refrigerators, compressing them into tight-packed wads. Neighbors in the bomb-wrecked streets are glad to scavenge the mangled guts of domesticity; they buy the balls of metal cheap.

“It’s deformed and weak. People take it and remold it,” Mr. Haidar says. “They should recycle the whole city.”

To stroll through the Dahiyeh, the predominantly Shiite slums of southern Beirut, is to take a tour through the ruins of Hezbollah’s past — and prospects for its future. Six months after Israeli airstrikes laid waste to these streets, teams of Hezbollah designers are drawing up grand plans for its rebirth.

This is more than terra sancta for the powerful Shiite political party and militia. In a real sense, the Dahiyeh and its people are Hezbollah: a district and a movement defined by each other.

Thousands of chronicles of displacement, hope, and fighting crisscross the streets of the Dahiyeh. It was in these slums that Hezbollah first began to use the deprivation of Lebanon’s Shiites as an instrument of defiance, and to turn neglect into political capital.

In spite of, and in part because of, the destruction of its de facto capital and southern heartland, Hezbollah emerged from last summer’s war with heavy political ambitions. No longer willing to remain largely independent of state power, Hezbollah called massive street demonstrations to demand a larger share in the government.

“The Dahiyeh is the history of the Shiites, the transformation from quietism to activism,” the editor of Hezbollah’s newspaper and a Dahiyeh native, Ibrahim Moussawi, said.

The Dahiyeh was still a swath of sleepy seaside villages and fruit orchards when droves of Palestinian Arabs arrived at makeshift camps here after 1948. For decades after, the neighborhoods kept on growing. At the eve of last summer’s war, nearly half a million people were packed into its maze of apartment houses — almost an eighth of Lebanon’s total population. They lived in perpetual neglect.

The neighborhoods here are improvised as if the chaotic lives of war refugees had hardened into a tangle of concrete, dented cars, and electrical wires. There have never been enough bridges, traffic circles, or tunnels. The electricity would shudder to a stop for hours at a time. There was nowhere to park the car, no place for children to play, no fresh air to breathe.

“The people were left to their fate,” Mr. Moussawi said. “They started to look after themselves.”

From its 1982 foundation, Hezbollah’s message to the Shiites was revolutionary: Forget the discrimination and neglect you have faced. Never mind the government. We can take care of ourselves.

“With the arrival of Hezbollah, there was the creation of Shiite territory,” a professor of urban planning at the American University of Beirut, Mona Fawaz, said. The Dahiyeh, she said, “became sanctified.” And then it was destroyed. The bombs that crashed down on the Dahiyeh left behind a bewildering, postmodern wilderness of shattered buildings. In 34 agonizing days, thousands of residential apartments were lost.

“The government did not help us at all. The government did not even ask us what we needed,” a 33-year-old grocer and father of two children who lost his home and his shop in the bombing, Mohammed el Zein, said. “Where is the state? They haven’t done anything.”

Many people believe the government is starving the southern suburbs of aid, he said, in hopes that desperation will sour sentiment toward Hezbollah. But instead, he said, the reverse is happening. The Shiite party didn’t bother with promises or bureaucracy. It just showed up with stacks of cash.