Call for Participants: “Les Ateliers” Urban Planning Workshop in Nouakchott

[Nouakchott. Image by Les Ateliers] [Nouakchott. Image by Les Ateliers]

Call for Participants: “Les Ateliers” Urban Planning Workshop in Nouakchott

By : Jadaliyya Reports

The French association Les Ateliers is organizing an urban planning professional workshop in Nouakchatt, Mauritania, between 26 April and 11 May 2014, entitled “The Future as Challenge” (L’avenir pour défi.) Les Ateliers (International workshops of planning and urban design) is a non-profit organization created in 1982 that aims to promote the creation of ideas examining the challenges and processes of everyday city planning and design. It does so by fostering a process of collective and multidisciplinary work that produces innovative proposals relating to urban design and spatial development. Whether it involves students or professionals, each “Atelier” brings together people of diverse nationalities and disciplines: architecture and urban planning, as well as geography, economics, landscape architecture, sociology, art, engineering, and environment studies. Year after year, Les Ateliers international network has been growing: it includes today more than two thousand former participants who are now professionals, academics, and decision-makers in the urban field.

The call for participants for the Nouakchott urban planning workshop is available in both English and in French. The background document presenting the city’s urban history and complex urban challenges is available on the Ateliers site, also in English and in French. Below is the Nouakchott workshop’s concept note.

Nouakchott: The Future as Challenge

Nouakchott was created ex-nihilo in 1960 as the capital of Mauritania, and has since known an exponential growth, from an original count of five hundred inhabitants (at the time of Independence) to over one million, encompassing approximately one-third of the national population. This is partly due to the droughts of the 1970s, causing thousands of nomads to head towards the new capital city. Ever since, Nouakchott has become the major activity center for the country and spread in an uncontrolled, anarchic way. Its star-like shape covers about thirty kilometers in diameter and has defeated successive ordering attempts by urban planning schemes.

Fifty or so years after the creation of Nouakchott, urban authorities are now looking into the future of the Mauritanian capital. The Urban Community of Nouakchott is studying possible directions in which to pursue urban development in order to tackle the multiple environmental, social, and economic challenges facing the city, such as:
- High population growth
- Significant urban sprawl fed by high real-estate speculation
- Environmental threats, such as flood risks and sand build-up, due to the site’s specific vulnerability linked to human interventions and climate change
- Weak infrastructure and engineering systems (e.g. water provision, sewage treatment, electricity networks and garbage collection), related to both national and local poverty levels
- Complex urban governance system, due to competition between central and local governments, the overlapping of competencies, incomplete decentralization and weak human resources
- A recently established capital city with limited urban identity, timidly appropriated by newly settled dwellers marked by rural culture.

The April-May 2014 session of Les Ateliers will brainstorm the future of Nouakchott, its possible adaptations and mutations to tackle the aforementioned multiple challenges. It invited participants to conceive Nouakchott as:
(i) An urban space able to face environmental challenges
(ii) A regional metropolis between Maghreb and Sub-Saharan Africa, attempting its best to manage its growth
(iii) A capital city seeking a future that will secure the well-being of all its citizens.

To Participate

The team organizing the workshop will select twenty-one participants on the basis on their professional capabilities, their experience on similar topics, their approach to the subject of the workshop, their communication skills (both in terms of language and graphic skills), their interest and enthusiasm!

To apply, please send an email by Sunday 23 February 2014, at the latest, to nouakchott@ateliers.org, with one single PDF document (file name: SURNAME_first name) attached, including:
- Application form (which can be downloaded from www.ateliers.org)
- CV (one or two pages long)
- One or two pages in which you explain the nature of your interest in participating in the workshop, the skills/ experiences you can build on, and most importantly your initial ideas on the topic (either in text form and/or using graphics.)

Deadline for applications: 23 February 2014.
Announcement of selected participants: Early March 2014
Workshop Dates: 26 April to 11 May 2014

Workshop Coordinators: Armelle Choplin, Geographer and Lecturer, Institut Français d’Urbanisme; Frédérique Vincent, Engineer and Director, Institut Supérieur en Ingénierie et Gestion de l’Environnement (MINES Paris Tech, ISIGE).

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412