Spaces of sovereignty: A tale of an unrecognized Palestinian village in Israel

Abstract

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

‘Landscape of exception’: Power inequalities and ethical planning challenges in the landscape transformation of south-eastern Sicily

“…Thus, a question of an eminently ethical nature arises that concerns planning in its dual spatial and social function, both in relation to its role as an instrument for environment and landscape protection and in terms of social justice, in relation to protecting citizens' rights and in our specific case, greenhouse workers' rights (Berlan, 2002). With regard to this aspect, we agree with Milner and Yacobi (2017) who, citing Sandercock (1998), identify the 'dark side of planning' not just in planning as an oppressive tool of control, but also in its condition as a 'neutral and apolitical apparatus' (Milner and Yacobi, 2017: 7).…”

“…However, we argue that war contexts provide only a 'limited state of exception'. Indeed, we agree with Baptista (2013), Farías and Flores (2015) and Milner and Yacobi (2017) who argue that legal practices of exception profoundly reconfigure the power relationships within the state between different actors and agencies. In relation to this general framework, as Fawaz (2016) highlighted, the 'exception' condition manifests itself as a variable collection of policies with different forms (tolerance, concession, incentive), timescales (before/after building) and justifications (for political/social or development reasons), materialising in different legal statuses (within the framework of the law/temporary, extra-legal measures).…”

“…We agree with Gray and Porter (2014) that 'exceptionality' has been more extensively analysed in concentration and prison camps, in the fight against terrorism and in war contexts (Armitage, 2002;De Benoist, 2007;Ek, 2006;Gregory, 2006). In relation to this context, literature on the Israelian occupied territories, developed starting from Agamben's 'state of exception', is relevant (Boano and Marten, 2013;Handel, 2007;Katz, 2016;Milner and Yacobi, 2017;Ophir and Azoulay, 2008). These studies focus on the occupied territories, which were never fully annexed by Israel and where military law still prevails.…”