This article advances a conceptualization of spatial distinction that, following Bourdieu, relates principles of division in 'social space' with formations of segregation in urban space. It applies this interpretive framework to concisely narrate the one hundred years' history of spatial distinction in Tel Aviv. Analyzing five moments in the city's development, it focuses on a dominant principle of distinction in each period and its ensuing segregations: predominantly ethno-national (Jewish-Arab) distinction that established Tel Aviv in opposition to Jaffa at the turn of the twentieth century; nuanced ethno-class distinction that shaped the city's rapid growth in the 1920s-30s and created an elaborate socio-spatial hierarchy of neighborhoods; institutionalized distinction that governed the collective supply of housing in the 1930s-40s, evolving into a complex system of housing classifications; 'distinction-by-distance' through exclusive suburbanization and the emergence of a metropolitan scale of distinction in the 1950s-70s; and a 'back-to-the-center' strategy of distinction by way of gentrification in the 1980s-90s and within gated residential enclaves at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Through this concise history, various principles, mechanisms and scales of spatial distinction are elaborated upon, as a way to think about the socially constructed, historically contingent and continuously changing divisions and segregations in cities.

In summer 2011, Israel was swept by unprecedented political protest as multiple encampments occupied streets and mass rallies were held weekly in Tel Aviv and other cities. The article focuses on the spatial politics of this protest, analysing the particular strategies it used to activise urban public space. The protest initially reflected a specific urban context and limited agenda—namely, the lack of affordable housing in Tel Aviv. However, as it materialised and expanded in public space, it also became more inclusive, incorporating more marginalised publics and places, addressing long-standing socio-spatial inequalities between Israel’s ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, and advancing a message of ‘social justice’—with the noted exception of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The analysis of the Israeli protest foregrounds some dynamics that it shares with other ‘global’ protests in 2011, from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street, pointing to the spatial politics of centrality, multiplicity and ‘media-space’, a mutually enforcing relationship between physical public space and mainstream and social media.

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This paper draws on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of 'principles of vision and division' to conceptualize the role of urban planning in processes of sociospatial differentiation and distinction. Planning, through its classification schemes and specific methodologies (such as zoning), mediates the long-term processes by which the divisions and hierarchies of social space are inscribed and reproduced in urban space. The paper develops this conceptual framework within a historically specific urban setting, analyzing Tel Aviv's planning and development across several periods, from the 1920s to the 1950s. It examines Tel Aviv's constitutive plans in a wider political, social, and cultural context, including colonial development, modernism, the Jewish-Arab ethnonational conflict and consecutive migrations to Palestine and Israel. The analysis highlights how urban planning in each period applied and mediated different visions and divisions to shape the sociospatial distinction between Tel Aviv, Jaffa, and the city's 'slums' and 'periphery'. In conclusion, the paper suggests some general contours of planning as vision and division to inform planning theory and urban research more widely, in historical and contemporary contexts.

This article analyses the conceptual work of urban strategic visions in two global South cities, Mumbai and Cape Town, in the context of urban inequality and informality. Theoretically, it develops two related conceptual tools: (1) Principles of vision and division: following Pierre Bourdieu's ideas on the predominant symbolic classifications by which we observe and organise our social world, these are classificatory schemes and categories (e.g., racial, religious, ethnic, economic) through which urban strategies "see" the city; (2) Vectors of integration: these are the main development trajectories that strategies promote, encompassing the directionality and content of prioritised urban interventions, and their potential inclusionary or exclusionary effects. Empirically, the article compares two strategic visions: the Concept Plan for Mumbai Metropolitan Region and Cape Town's City Development Strategy-Spatial Development Framework. The comparison reveals that strategies in both cities omit explicit discussion of dominant yet contentious social divisions, replacing them instead with "plannable" spatial distinctions: between city, slums and new suburbs in Mumbai; between formal and informal modes of development in Cape Town. Although the strategies explicitly highlight goals of urban integration through specific tools (i.e., "integrated townships" in Mumbai, "multidirectional accessibility grid" in Cape Town), their directionality and content entail geographical distancing and dislocation from urban centrality for residents living in informality or slums. The comparison thus underlines the inequitable consequences of classificatory schemes of strategic visions, and the uneven effects of direction, distance, density, and design of their long-term development trajectories. Overall, by applying these twinned conceptsvisions of divisions, vectors of integrationin two distinct cases, the article offers a sociologically and spatially insightful critique of contemporary urban strategy-making in the global South. It also contributes to the wider project of comparative urbanism, demonstrating new possibilities to compare "concepts with difference" across diverse geographical contexts and urban phenomena. K E Y W O R D SCape Town, comparative urbanism, Mumbai, strategic visions, urban inequality, urban planning ---