This paper argues that the ‘city’ as a political entity is significant in struggles over the ‘urban’, by identifying two moments of ‘differential urbanization’ in the Middle East. Our study in Iran and Palestine/Israel shows that the vision of the ‘city’ as a legitimizing space for political citizenship is at the heart of conflicting imaginaries: in Iran, ‘cities of revolution’ built through housing the poor around Tehran, and redistributive politics that stand on filling the ‘rural/urban gap’, and in Palestine, the new city of Rawabi as a city of Palestinian independence, where privatized urban development contrasts colonial spatialities with anti-colonial potentials. Thus, the right to the ‘urban’ involves claims for the ‘city’ that go beyond the capitalist logic of urbanization. This theorization points to a troubling gap in the planetary urbanization thesis, which moves from collapsing the ‘urban/non-urban’ divide into ‘concentrated’, extended’ and ‘differential’ urbanization to diminishing the role of distinct sociospatial configurations in claims over the ‘urban’. Our case studies show that examining the reconfiguration of inherited spatialities in the context of particular political regimes is imperative for epistemology of the ‘urban’ in its planetary stage. Urbanization otherwise remains an uninterrupted process towards a non-spatial ‘urban condition’.

The right to housing is generally understood as a local struggle against the global commodification of housing. While useful for recognising overarching urbanisation processes, such understanding risks washing over the distinctive politics that produce the housing crisis and its ostensible solutions in different contexts around the globe. Situated in a settler-colonial context, this paper bridges recent comparative urban studies with Indigenous narratives of urbanisation, to re-think housing crisis solutions from the point of view of the colonised. Based on in-depth interviews with Palestinian citizens of Israel, the paper compares two cases of state-initiated, privatised housing developments, one in Israel and one in the Occupied Palestinian Territories: the new cities Tantour and Rawabi. Each case is examined as a singularity, distinctive formations of the spatialities of Zionist settlement in Palestine, which are now being transformed through privatised housing development. The paper presents these developments as mutually constituted through a colonial-settler project and Palestinian sumud resistance, the praxis of remaining on the land. The paper utilises comparison as a strategy, exploring each new city in turn, to reveal the range of directions in sumud. Thus, by seeing housing development as site for negotiating de-colonisation on the ground, the paper contributes to recent debates over the power of comparative urbanism to re-think global phenomena through treating urban terrains as singularities.

The opening editorial for Volume 19 of UnderCurrents.

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