This paper examines the continuity of the Israeli settler colonial project into the contemporary moment – as manifested in the city of Tel Aviv – and its transfiguration into current socio-political and spatial processes in the urban arena. It offers a close reading of a case study from which such continuity emerges, exposing the settler colonial terms of production of Tel Aviv in current entrepreneurial real-estate projects. The case study under analysis is of the Giv’at-Amal neighbourhood, established on the emptied Palestinian village of Jamassin in the war of 1948, now facing eviction by private entrepreneurs constructing a luxurious residential compound. The paper aims to expose the ways in which the urban entrepreneurialism in Giv’at-Amal reproduces the settler colonial logic of devaluation, erasure and replacement of existing inhabitants of the land. It further conceptualises the area as an urban frontier, in which current neoliberal restructuring plays an active role in the ongoing production of the settler colonial urban space. By so doing, it aims to undermine the notion that settler colonial projects of replacing existing people and geographies are completed historical events, and to re-articulate them as ongoing contemporary processes.
PrefaceInformal housing environments, namely the construction of houses without acquiring building permits, are perceived as chaotic spaces of illegality, developing outside and against the formal planning system in Israel. Yet, as Ananya Roy (2011) suggests, such informal urban development cannot be viewed as external to the planning system, a matter that has been discussed by several researchers studying planning and legal geography in Israel (Kedar, 1998;Fenster. 2012;Yiftachel, 2006;2009;Tzfadia and Yiftachel, 2014).The main argument raised by these scholars is that legal unrecognition of Palestinian habitat by the state causes informality, especially in peripheral areas outside the Israeli urban core, and mainly regarding the Bedouin settlement in the Negev (Weizman and Sheikh, 2015;Roded, 2012). Furthermore, as claimed by Yacobi (2009), informal housing production is a response to unrecognition which constitutes constant minority challenges to the prevailing order. This is expressed in the growing phenomenon of urban informality that emerges as a permanent feature of different cities in Israel, and becomes a central strategy of both ruling authorities and resisting, peripheral groups.In other words, policy-makers allow urban informality because it provides indirect and inexpensive rule of the 'ungovernable' (Roy, 2005). The tactic is avoidance and containment from a distance, but the result is the condemnation of large communities to un-serviced, deprived, and stigmatized urban fringes. In this way, urban informality emerges as a planning strategy; it allows the urban elites to represent municipal government as egalitarian, civil, and democratic, while at the same time, denying some urban residents basic rights and services in the locations into which they were forced. City and state elites draw legitimacy from this partial and distorted representation of planning as 'professional,' enabling the preservation of the privileged ethno-class strata, and a precarious maintenance of the system (Yacobi, 2009).The case study that will be examined in this paper -the unrecognized Palestinian village of Dahmesh 1 -is such a case of informal housing environment and can be read using these theoretical tools. Nevertheless, in this paper we wish to expend the discussion on informality by analyzing it from a different perspective and examining the role of the unrecognized village in
This article critically analyses and theoretically conceptualises the links between settler colonialism, planning and health. Based on the case of the Bedouin community in the Negev/Naqab, we argue that the production of settler colonial space has a profound impact on health, and should therefore be referred to as a specific category for analysing health disparities, simultaneously entangling territorial control and biopolitics towards indigenous communities. Furthermore, we suggest that this relationship between space and health constructs stigma that justifies and facilitates – in turn – the ongoing territorial control over the indigenous Bedouin population in Israel. By reviewing existing data on health and planning, especially in relation to infrastructure and access to services, we contribute to the growing literature on the nexus of settler-colonialism/health with urban and regional planning. Importantly, throughout this paper we refer to the Bedouin localities as part of the production of urban territory, illuminating the urban as a multidimensional process of political struggle, including the metropolin informal fringes.
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