In this presentation, Professor Yacobi aims to discuss settler colonial urbanism(s) in Palestine/Israel, while exploring the different spatial and political typologies developed during the last few decades. He will discuss how colonial planning has been used as a tool of social, demographic, and spatial control and how Palestinian claims for the right to the city are meaningful political forms of protest. The presentation will refer to Palestinian cities (such as Lydda) that were transformed into ‘Jewish-Arab mixed cities’, to new ‘Jewish cities’ that are going through a process of ‘Arabisation’, to Jerusalem as a neo-apartheid city, and to the current spatiocide of Gaza. The argument to be articulated in this talk is that moving from the paradigm of separation into a shared homeland is the only sustainable approach which will lead to a shared future.
Haim Yacobi is a Professor of Development Planning at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit. With a background in architecture he specialised in critical urban studies and urban health. Between 2006-2007 he was a Fulbright Post-doctorate fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and then joined the Department of Politics and Government at BGU. For the years 2010-2012 he received a Marie Curie Grant which has enabled him to work at Cambridge University, where he conducted a research project that dealt with contested cities. The main issues that stand in the center of his research interest in relation to the urban space are social justice, the politics of identity, urban health, and colonial planning. In 1999 he formulated the idea of establishing ‘Bimkom – Planning in Human Rights’ an NGO that deals with human rights and planning in Israel/Palestine and was its co-founder. Currently he holds (together with Prof Omar Dajani) a UKRI ESRC grant: ‘The Shared Homeland Paradigm: Reimagining Space, Rights and Partnership in Palestine-Israel’.
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In this presentation, Professor Yacobi aims to discuss settler colonial urbanism(s) in Palestine/Israel, while exploring the different spatial and political typologies developed during the last few decades. He will discuss how colonial planning has been used as a tool of social, demographic, and spatial control and how Palestinian claims for the right to the city are meaningful political forms of protest. The presentation will refer to Palestinian cities (such as Lydda) that were transformed into ‘Jewish-Arab mixed cities’, to new ‘Jewish cities’ that are going through a process of ‘Arabisation’, to Jerusalem as a neo-apartheid city, and to the current spatiocide of Gaza. The argument to be articulated in this talk is that moving from the paradigm of separation into a shared homeland is the only sustainable approach which will lead to a shared future.
Haim Yacobi is a Professor of Development Planning at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit. With a background in architecture he specialised in critical urban studies and urban health. Between 2006-2007 he was a Fulbright Post-doctorate fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and then joined the Department of Politics and Government at BGU. For the years 2010-2012 he received a Marie Curie Grant which has enabled him to work at Cambridge University, where he conducted a research project that dealt with contested cities. The main issues that stand in the center of his research interest in relation to the urban space are social justice, the politics of identity, urban health, and colonial planning. In 1999 he formulated the idea of establishing ‘Bimkom – Planning in Human Rights’ an NGO that deals with human rights and planning in Israel/Palestine and was its co-founder. Currently he holds (together with Prof Omar Dajani) a UKRI ESRC grant: ‘The Shared Homeland Paradigm: Reimagining Space, Rights and Partnership in Palestine-Israel’.
Michal Huss - You cannot really live (or die) here: ongoing struggles over cemeteries and housing in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, 1957-2020
Israel Studies Seminar
47 minutes
1 year ago
Michal Huss - You cannot really live (or die) here: ongoing struggles over cemeteries and housing in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, 1957-2020
Debates over housing and cemeteries in Jaffa. In the summer of 2020, protests erupted in Jaffa against a plan to build a homeless shelter on the site of the ancient Al-Isaaf Muslim cemetery, and in the following year, the community mobilized to protest a wave of housing demolitions. These were the latest in a long line of actions by the Muslim community opposing the sale and demolition of Muslim cemeteries and fighting to remain in their homes in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. This paper maps these struggles over everyday spaces of living and dying from the 1950s to the present day and investigates how activists recently gained tangible achievements by framing their protests as an urban citizenship mobilization. The aim of the paper is twofold: it seeks to demonstrate the inter connections between the history of colonialism, partition, new state formation, and contemporary urban conflict; and to theorize the role of the built environment that facilitates daily life, rituals, and mourning, in shaping urban citizenship under post/coloniality. The paper builds on a participatory ‘walk-along’ ethnography, interviews with community leaders and activists, as well as archival tracing of court rulings, newspaper reports, and spatial plans. Utilizing this framework, it will show how activists invoked and reinterpreted the right-to-the-city ideas; deploying creative spatial performances and appealing to municipal governance to demand a deeper geo-temporal right-to-the-city that encompasses its religious and historical dimensions.
Dr Michal Huss is a Leverhulme early career fellow and assistant Professor in Human Geography at Durham University. She researches spatial in/justice and struggles over urban planning and the right to the city. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
Israel Studies Seminar
In this presentation, Professor Yacobi aims to discuss settler colonial urbanism(s) in Palestine/Israel, while exploring the different spatial and political typologies developed during the last few decades. He will discuss how colonial planning has been used as a tool of social, demographic, and spatial control and how Palestinian claims for the right to the city are meaningful political forms of protest. The presentation will refer to Palestinian cities (such as Lydda) that were transformed into ‘Jewish-Arab mixed cities’, to new ‘Jewish cities’ that are going through a process of ‘Arabisation’, to Jerusalem as a neo-apartheid city, and to the current spatiocide of Gaza. The argument to be articulated in this talk is that moving from the paradigm of separation into a shared homeland is the only sustainable approach which will lead to a shared future.
Haim Yacobi is a Professor of Development Planning at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit. With a background in architecture he specialised in critical urban studies and urban health. Between 2006-2007 he was a Fulbright Post-doctorate fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and then joined the Department of Politics and Government at BGU. For the years 2010-2012 he received a Marie Curie Grant which has enabled him to work at Cambridge University, where he conducted a research project that dealt with contested cities. The main issues that stand in the center of his research interest in relation to the urban space are social justice, the politics of identity, urban health, and colonial planning. In 1999 he formulated the idea of establishing ‘Bimkom – Planning in Human Rights’ an NGO that deals with human rights and planning in Israel/Palestine and was its co-founder. Currently he holds (together with Prof Omar Dajani) a UKRI ESRC grant: ‘The Shared Homeland Paradigm: Reimagining Space, Rights and Partnership in Palestine-Israel’.
