Interrupting planetary urbanization: A view from Middle Eastern cities

Abstract

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’.

OUT IN SPACE: Difference and Abstraction in Planetary Urbanization

“…Many of the contributions use an illustrative case as the basis of their critique. Khatam and Haas (2018), for example, offer an investigation of two 'different contexts'--Tehran (Iran) and Rawabi (Palestine/Israel)--to argue for what they call 'the differential (Ruddick et al, 2018: 394). Davidson and Iveson, 2015;Schindler, 2017;Khatam and Haas, 2018;O'Callaghan, 2018;Reddy, 2018 2.…”

“…Khatam and Haas (2018), for example, offer an investigation of two 'different contexts'--Tehran (Iran) and Rawabi (Palestine/Israel)--to argue for what they call 'the differential (Ruddick et al, 2018: 394). Davidson and Iveson, 2015;Schindler, 2017;Khatam and Haas, 2018;O'Callaghan, 2018;Reddy, 2018 2. Epistemological 'It is jarring indeed to encounter a "new epistemology of the urban" that absorbs concepts of relationality and hybridity while jettisoning the political-epistemological corollary that there is no 'innocent' or objective place from which to know' (Derickson, 2018: 557).…”

POSTCOLONIZING PLANETARY URBANIZATION: Aníbal Quijano and an Alternative Genealogy of the Urban

“…Before delving deeper into the discussion, it is worth noting that, following the idea of moving the geographical gaze across space, some scholars have already attempted to adopt the planetary urbanization critique for studying the non-Western world. For instance, by investigating cities in Iran and Palestine, some studies have focused on the significance of urban struggles in creating the space for planetary urbanization, seeking to rethink its theoretical framework from the specificity of the Middle East (Khatam and Haas, 2018). Others have sought to elaborate further the Lefebvrian idea of urban society that lies at the core of his conceptualization of planetary urbanization, by concentrating on the immense extension and variety of suburbs that exist across--and which characterize--the space of the global South (Keil, 2018).…”

Heritage and the Middle East: Cities, power, and memory

“…Second, how are our understandings of modernization, globalization, and neoliberalization limited by assumptions that arrive from “outside”? This question is at the heart of Azam Khatam and Oded Haas' recent critique (Khatam & Haas, ). Planetary urbanization, they argue, privileges certain kinds of cities and regions as “models” and implicitly defines others as imitations, thus reproducing a colonial logic of belatedness.…”

“…Planetary urbanization, they argue, privileges certain kinds of cities and regions as “models” and implicitly defines others as imitations, thus reproducing a colonial logic of belatedness. In contrast, they suggest that scholars attend to the “struggles between states and their urbanized inhabitants that produce and are produced by particular agencies and ideologies of urbanization in and of the region” (Khatam & Haas, , p. 440). Examples such as attempts to remake Tehran as a moral city (Khatam, ), the Jewish community of Tangier's attempt to remake the city and thus renegotiate their relationships to Muslim neighbors (Miller, ), and the heated debates over the changing urban mores of occupied Istanbul (Mills, ) all demonstrate that processes of urban change emerge as a shifting boundary‐making project between people, places, and practices defined as “external” and those defined as “internal.”…”