IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/urbstu/v59y2022i8p1676-1693.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

De-colonising the right to housing, one new city at a time: Seeing housing development from Palestine/Israel

Author

Listed:
  • Oded Haas

Abstract

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Oded Haas, 2022. "De-colonising the right to housing, one new city at a time: Seeing housing development from Palestine/Israel," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 59(8), pages 1676-1693, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:59:y:2022:i:8:p:1676-1693
    DOI: 10.1177/00420980211056226
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00420980211056226
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/00420980211056226?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Mualam, Nir, 2018. "Playing with Supertankers: Centralization in Land Use Planning in Israel — A National Experiment Underway," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 75(C), pages 269-283.
    2. Marik Shtern, 2019. "Towards ‘ethno-national peripheralisation’? Economic dependency amidst political resistance in Palestinian East Jerusalem," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 56(6), pages 1129-1147, May.
    3. Naama Blatman‐Thomas & Libby Porter, 2019. "Placing Property: Theorizing the Urban from Settler Colonial Cities," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 43(1), pages 30-45, January.
    4. Jamie Peck, 2017. "Transatlantic city, part 1: Conjunctural urbanism," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 54(1), pages 4-30, January.
    5. Rachel Kallus & Hubert Law Yone, 2002. "National Home/Personal Home: Public Housing and the Shaping of National Space in Israel," European Planning Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 10(6), pages 765-779, September.
    6. Colin Mcfarlane, 2010. "The Comparative City: Knowledge, Learning, Urbanism," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 34(4), pages 725-742, December.
    7. Oren Yiftachel, 2020. "From displacement to displaceability," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 24(1-2), pages 151-165, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jennifer Robinson, 2022. "Introduction: Generating concepts of ‘the urban’ through comparative practice," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 59(8), pages 1521-1535, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jennifer Robinson, 2022. "Introduction: Generating concepts of ‘the urban’ through comparative practice," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 59(8), pages 1521-1535, June.
    2. Rachel Friedman & Gillad Rosen, 2020. "The face of affordable housing in a neoliberal paradigm," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 57(5), pages 959-975, April.
    3. Sergio Montero & Gianpaolo Baiocchi, 2022. "A posteriori comparisons, repeated instances and urban policy mobilities: What ‘best practices’ leave behind," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 59(8), pages 1536-1555, June.
    4. Alfasi, Nurit & Migdalovich, Eyal, 2020. "Losing faith in planning," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 97(C).
    5. Vanesa Castán Broto & Harriet Bulkeley, 2013. "Maintaining Climate Change Experiments: Urban Political Ecology and the Everyday Reconfiguration of Urban Infrastructure," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 37(6), pages 1934-1948, November.
    6. Partha Mukhopadhyay & Marie‐Hélène Zérah & Eric Denis, 2020. "Subaltern Urbanization: Indian Insights for Urban Theory," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 44(4), pages 582-598, July.
    7. Jennifer Robinson & Katia Attuyer, 2021. "Extracting Value, London Style: Revisiting the Role of the State in Urban Development," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(2), pages 303-331, March.
    8. Yael Allweil, 2018. "The tent: The uncanny architecture of agonism for Israel–Palestine, 1910–2011," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 55(2), pages 316-331, February.
    9. Tsahor, Michal & Katoshevski-Cavari, Rachel & Alfasi, Nurit, 2023. "Assessing urban adaptability: The key is in the land use plan," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 126(C).
    10. Dawson, Katherine, 2021. "Under the wire: splintered time and ongoing temporariness in Accra’s electropolis," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 108572, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    11. Yong-Sook Lee & Eun-Jung Hwang, 2012. "Global Urban Frontiers through Policy Transfer? Unpacking Seoul’s Creative City Programmes," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 49(13), pages 2817-2837, October.
    12. Margalit, Talia & Mualam, Nir, 2020. "Selective rescaling, inequality and popular growth coalitions: The case of the Israeli national plan for earthquake preparedness," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 99(C).
    13. Murphy James T., 2022. "Urban-economic geographies beyond production: Nairobi’s sociotechnical system and the challenge of generative urbanization," ZFW – Advances in Economic Geography, De Gruyter, vol. 66(1), pages 18-35, May.
    14. Colin Lorne, 2020. "The limits to openness: Co-working, design and social innovation in the neoliberal city," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 52(4), pages 747-765, June.
    15. Alistair Sheldrick & James Evans & Gabriele Schliwa, 2017. "Policy learning and sustainable urban transitions: Mobilising Berlin’s cycling renaissance," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 54(12), pages 2739-2762, September.
    16. Wen-I Lin & Chaolee Kuo, 2013. "Community Governance and Pastorship in Shanghai: A Case Study of Luwan District," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 50(6), pages 1260-1276, May.
    17. Edward Yates & Ian Clark & William Rossiter, 2021. "Local economic governance strategies in the UK’s post-industrial cities and the challenges of improving local work and employment conditions," Local Economy, London South Bank University, vol. 36(2), pages 115-132, March.
    18. Zhenfa Li & Fulong Wu & Fangzhu Zhang, 2023. "Adaptable state-controlled market actors: Underwriters and investors in the market of local government bonds in China," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 55(8), pages 2088-2107, November.
    19. Julie-Anne Boudreau & Liette Gilbert & Danielle Labbé, 2016. "Uneven state formalization and periurban housing production in Hanoi and Mexico City: Comparative reflections from the global South," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 48(12), pages 2383-2401, December.
    20. Ryan Burns & Victoria Fast & Anthony Levenda & Byron Miller, 2021. "Smart cities: Between worlding and provincialising," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 58(3), pages 461-470, February.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:59:y:2022:i:8:p:1676-1693. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/urbanstudiesjournal .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.