Producting Locality: Architecture, nationalism and globalization in Palestine (1995-2002) (original) (raw)
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Introduction: The Transformation of Urban Mix in Palestine/Israel in the Modern Era
Mixed Towns, Trapped Communities: …, 2007
Introduction of Mixed Towns, Trapped Communities. Ashgate 2007. http://www.ashgate.com/pdf/SamplePages/Mixed\_Towns\_Trapped\_Communities\_Intro.pdf http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754647324 Mixed Towns, Trapped Communities: Historical Narratives, Spatial Dynamics, Gender Relations and Cultural Encounters in Palestinian-Israeli Towns Edited by Daniel Monterescu, Central European University, Hungary and Dan Rabinowitz, Tel-Aviv University, Israel Series: Re-materialising Cultural Geography Modern urban spaces are, by definition, mixed socio-spatial configurations. In many ways, their enduring success and vitality lie in the richness of their ethnic texture and ongoing exchange of economic goods, cultural practices, political ideas and social movements. This mixture, however, is rarely harmonious and has often led to violent conflict over land and identity. Focusing on mixed towns in Israel/Palestine, this insightful volume theorizes the relationship between modernity and nationalism and the social dynamics which engender and characterize the growth of urban spaces and the emergence therein of inter-communal relations. For more than a century, Arabs and Jews have been interacting in the workplaces, residential areas, commercial enterprises, cultural arenas and political theatres of mixed towns. Defying prevailing Manichean oppositions, these towns both exemplify and resist the forces of nationalist segregation. In this interdisciplinary volume, a new generation of Israeli and Palestinian scholars come together to explore ways in which these towns have been perceived as utopian or dystopian and whether they are best conceptualized as divided, dual or colonial. Identifying ethnically mixed towns as a historically specific analytic category, this volume calls for further research, comparison and debate. Contents: Preface; Introduction: the transformation of urban mix in Palestine/Israel in the modern era, Dan Rabinowitz and Daniel Monterescu; Part 1 History, Representation and Collective Memory: Bourgeois nostalgia and the abandoned city, Salim Tamari; 'The Arabs just left': othering and the construction of self amongst Jews in Haifa before and after 1948, Dan Rabinowitz; 'We were living in a different country': Palestinian nostalgia and the future past, Jasmin Habib; Cross-national collective action in Palestine's mixed towns: the 1946 civil servants strike, David de Vries; How is a mixed town to be administered? Haifa's municipal council, 1940–1947, Tamir Goren. Part 2 Spatial Dynamics: Ethnic Urban Mix and its Contradictions: Planning, control and spatial protest: the case of the Jewish-Arab town od Lydd/Lod, Haim Yacobi; Heteronomy: the cultural logic of urban space and sociality in Jaffa, Daniel Monterescu; A nixed, not mixed, city: mapping obstacles to democracy in the Nazareth/Nazerat Illit conurbation, Laurie King-Irani; Exit from the scene: reflections on the public space of the Palestinians in Israel, Raef Zreik. Part 3 Gendered Perspectives on Mixed Spaces: Contested contact: proximity and social control in pre-1948 Jaffa and Tel-Aviv, Deborah S. Bernstein; Mixed cities as a place of choice: the Palestinian women's perspective, Hanna Herzog. Part 4 Cultural Encounters and Civil Society: ECooperation and conflict in the zone of civil society: Arab-Jewish activism in Jaffa, Amalia Sa'ar; Nationalism, religion and urban politics in Israel: struggles over modernity and identity in 'global' Jaffa, Mark LeVine; Mixed as in pidgin: the vanishing Arabic of a 'bilingual' city, Anton Shammas; Index. About the Editor: Dr Daniel Monterescu, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, Budapest. Dan Rabinowitz is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel-Aviv University. Reviews: ‘This excellent volume opens up an entirely new angle of vision on relations among Jews and Palestinians in Israel. By exploring the connections between urban space, nationhood, and modernity, it treats so-called “mixed towns” as both a metaphor for and an expression of the tensile sociology of the country at large. Essential reading for anyone interested in the Middle East, past and present.’ John Comaroff, University of Chicago, USA 'The authors…have drawn on a wide range of theories in order to provide a comprehensive explanation of the everyday life in mixed towns…This is an important contribution to the qualitative methods now being used in social research, the importance of which has only recently been widely acknowledged.' Geography Research Forum '…the book compels the reader to rethink paradigms that have come to characterize Israel/Palestine studies and to consider what is at stake for the future, given what the mixed town simultaneously erases and embraces.' Journal of Palestine Studies
Urban Development and Planning in the Occupied Palestinian Territories: Impacts on Urban Form
Urban development and planning practice and experience in Palestine which stemmed back to mid 19th Century had passed through various changes and developments in terms of characteristics, policies, principles, and management. In addition, the urban planning system in Palestine seems to be unique in its composition and context. This uniqueness is related to the fact that planning practice was controlled and experienced by external forces (or foreigners) and not by native bodies (the Palestinians themselves). This, of course, is due to the long period of mandate and occupation for the Palestinian land by several nations. The current interim and temporary stage that the Palestinian society in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) (West Bank and Gaza Strip) passes through, particularly after signing the Oslo Agreement in 1994 and the followed Israeli partial withdraws from the OPT, despite the continuous land confiscation for building Israeli settlements and by-pass roads as well as the reoccupation of most of the Palestinian cities and villages since the beginning of Alaqsa Intifata (second uprising) in 2000, and the resulted destruction of houses and infrastructure besides the construction of the Separation Wall along the West Bank have imposed a new situation and put various challenges in front of the Palestinian planning institutions (specially on the local level) and prevented the possibility of providing and implementing the attained physical planning. The limited available land, the rapidly growing population of Palestine, the misuse of urban development, and the decisions of policy makers and all planning issues associated with the political situation and the long period of occupation with its policies and implications played a major role in the formulation of urban form, in addition to the spread of uncontrolled urban developments in the cities, and to the diffusion of urban sprawls within the landscapes and around the cities.
Palestine-Israel Journal, 17 (1-2), 2010
Between 1948 and 1967 Jerusalem, like pre-1990 Berlin, was a divided city, crossed by an inter-state border — the Green Line — separating Israel and Jordan. In 1967, the Six-Day War and the Israeli conquest of the West Bank put an end to 20 years of division with the annexation of East Jerusalem and its incorporation into the Israeli municipality. Israel’s policy in Jerusalem, however, has created a deeply contested and polarized city and coexistence between Jews and Palestinians has been progressively deteriorating. Jerusalem has been defined as “torn,” “polarized,” “ethnocratic,” “contested”— a city where “intimate enemies” live “together separately” or “separated and unequal,” to cite the titles of some of the academic contributions dealing with the urban dimension of the conflict.1 The rising tension in the city has cast a shadow over the status quo of reunification: On the one hand Israeli governments have created a number of physical and legal infrastructures in order to separate the various parts of the city; on the other hand, with the inception of the Oslo process, a growing international consensus has developed regarding a division of the city between Israel and a future Palestinian state. In this paper I will examine the history of “Metropolitan Jerusalem,” that is the area including both the city and its hinterland, composed of various Jewish and Palestinian communities. I suggest that the evolutions that have occurred in the metropolitan area of the city are today the main obstacle to the solution of the conflict and that the deepening of the separation between Jews and Palestinians in the city does not prefigure any return to the past — that is, to the division of the city during the two decades between 1948 and 1967 — but instead a development in continuity with the history of the contested, polarized city that has emerged after 1967.
Spatial Changes in Palestine: from Colonial Project to an Apartheid System
African and Asian Studies, 2009
Th is paper addresses the socio-spatial impact of the Zionists' colonial project in Palestine, including the replacement of the indigenous Palestinian people by Jewish immigrants. At present, the Palestinians, displaced or living in the remaining part of Palestinian lands number approximately ten million. Th e continuous Israeli occupation has failed to bring stability or prosperity to either the region or the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. Projections indicate that demographic changes will transform the current situation into an apartheid system, where the majority Palestinians will be ruled by an Israeli minority. Th e objective of this paper is to suggest a just solution for the Palestinian-Israeli impasse in advocating the establishment a one-state solution, a proposition which appears to be gaining increasing support.
Urban & Spatial Development in Glocal Palestine: The Case of Rawabi
The different settlement strategies of the late century and the violence of the ongoing conflicts are reflected on urban and rural landscapes, leading to situations where any previous identity of place seems to have been lost. This covers only the surface of territorial conformations: underneath the current urban sprawl lye ancient structures of the deeprooted history of Palestine, lines of force for the present landscape. Even today the urban pattern mostly follows the ancient corridors of connection, today fragmented by several cuts. While, in about one century, no new towns were founded, during the last decades, with the significant population growth, more than five hundred small villages have spread spontaneously, but often without any primary services, while hundreds of new Israeli settlements, favouring the emergence of new global practices, further worsened the conditions of urban services and infrastructure networks. Since 1967 the absence of any Palestinian local plan highlighted the unbalanced planning with the Israeli side, a globalized context with a long urbanization process. Some existing crowded cities underwent uncontrolled expansion and urban sprawl, compromising the cultural heritage sites and the agricultural sector, strategic not only economically, but even for the identity and the cultural roots of the country. Over the last years, under the PNA government, housing and infrastructure projects witnessed major developments, focusing both on existing cities -for increasing the functional vocation of each one and the density within built-up areas -as well as on new towns. Rawabi, the first city planned under the Palestinian Authority, is an example where to investigate the hybrid character of "glocal" in today's Palestine, where the traditional relations of the village of origin, the strongest element of identity, merge together with a new sense of urban identity.By considering some cases of spatial and urban transformations, this paper would try to investigate the cultural impact of social and economic globalization on the Palestinian landscape, as well as the relation between local culture and a modern character that, framed in global urban dimensions and related to the Israeli occupation, is sometimes unable to meet the real local needs.
Building new towns in the formation of a new state of Palestine
Third World Planning Review, 1998
RASSEM IZHAMAISI Building new towns in the formation of a new state of Palestine A new Palestinian state is due to emerge. It will need to supply houses, jobs, public services and infrastructure. The proposal to build new towns could help meet these needs. The proposed pattern of new towns and planning policies has been adapted from the experiences of other countries, but it is one that suits the Palestinian reality. Twin new towns near existing cities would solve the problem of housing hardship, which includes poor housing conditions and housing shortages. They would promote economic development, strengthen the existing cities, and facilitate the process of urbanisation in the new state.
Reconstructed urbanity: The rebirth of Palestinian urban life in Haifa
Current Israeli Palestinians' claims to the city, as translated into urban forms and politics, are examined in the context of the urban-rural dichotomy that has played a major role in the construction of Palestinian identity. The paper considers this divide, analyzing meaning and content in a situation in which a Palestinian urban neighborhood represents an ''Arab village", while a former European agricultural settlement becomes the center of a flourishing Palestinian urban culture. This inversion infuses the history of urban form with a new ethno-cultural meaning, representing a hybrid notion of urbanity. The paper considers this hybrid city-village reality within the contested environment of Israel/Palestine, and examines the potential of the built form for upholding the cultural meaning and authenticity that sustain ethnonational aspirations. The findings suggest interpretations and uses that negate unilateral understanding of the urban-rural divide.
For “a no-state yet to come”: Palestinian urban place-making in Kufr Aqab, Jerusalem
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2020
This article explores Palestinians' place-making in Jerusalem under the constant threat of displacement and dispossession. I center my focus on Kufr Aqab, a neighborhood that was cut off from Jerusalem by the construction of Wall in 2003 while remaining inside the borders of the city's municipality. After 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the borders of Jerusalem's municipality expanded and Kufr Aqab village was annexed as a neighborhood inside Jerusalem's newly formed borders. Since its occupation, a matrix of displacement and disposses-sion consisting of policies and practices was put in place to oversee the domination of the Palestinians in the city. In my research, I explore the possibilities of reconceptualizing Palestinian urban spaces and place-making in Kufr Aqab between the gap in settler-colonial gov-ernance and the Palestinian future of no-state. I show how the urban space emulates a camp-like space that I describe as an "affective infrastructure" of a camp. Being on the Israeli settler-colonial frontier, I argue that Kufr Aqab dwellers are kept suspended in time in a liminal zone between the ghost of displaceability from the Israeli state and in a deep suspension of no-state. I conclude by suggesting that the case of Kufr Aqab speaks to the space-making, displacement, and statelessness of the present as well as futurity of the West Bank (and East Jerusalem), where the future of the Palestinian state is far from being seen in the horizon and debilitated sovereignty is exercised on a limited scale in fragmented territories of governance.