Wadi Rushmia: The variegated histories of a lost nature and community

Abstract

This essay will examine a place and community in the city of Haifa, Israel, that no longer exists - a resilient community that survived destruction for decades, until it gave in to the attempts of destruction and evacuation by the municipality of Haifa. The essay will review the history of the urban planning of the place as appears in surveys, maps and planning schemes, in parallel, the essay will explore the history of the place as narrated through a series of essay-form documentary films. The paper will explore the potential for a variegated, full and rich history of the resilient Wadi Rushmia and its inhabitants. The paper will describe the formal history of Wadi Rushmia as it appears in historical documents and planning materials such as maps and plans, and then examine its history through documentary films that use self-narrated stories of inhabitants and poetic point of view of the film maker, to challenge conventional top down planning practices. It will be argued that the destruction of the community and nature of the Wadi and its replacement by a network of roads, has turned it from what Augé (1995) refers to as a 'place', in which people have lived their everyday life, accumulating memories, time spent together, and collective history, into a 'non-place' a space of transience, in which the time of living and social communication is replaced by an accelerated temporality. The paper will then refer to film, to demonstrate the immense generative potentials presented by the filmmaking medium to research of the built environment and that using particular filming methodologies may contribute to the accumulation of multi-media knowledge of place. Film, it will be argued, works against these processes of destruction of the place, as it captures the spatial and temporal experience of the daily lives of the Wadi's community, in its final years. It will be argued that films form an alternative archive, of the everyday life of ordinary people, an archive which will not only guard the past, but also project into the future, to the imagination of a more ethical and sustainable urban reality.