Middle East Urbanism Beyond Conflict: Current Research, Ongoing Debates, and Next Directions

Middle East Urbanism Beyond Conflict: Current Research, Ongoing Debates, and Next Directions

Middle East Urbanism Beyond Conflict: Current Research, Ongoing Debates, and Next Directions

By : Jadaliyya Reports

The Post-Conflict Cities Lab at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation is hosting a two-day graduate student conference titled “Middle East Urbanism Beyond Conflict: Current Research, Ongoing Debates, and Next Directions,” to be held on February 16-17, 2023 in the East Gallery of Buell Hall at Columbia University. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to bring together doctoral students and scholars working on issues related to urbanism and the production of space in Middle Eastern and North African cities (MENA). The MENA region has been mostly discussed and narrated from the perspective of conflict and delineated as a space from which theory cannot emerge. However, the critical research coming out from the Middle East and North African cities is providing cutting edge scholarly contributions on how urban space is shaped by a range of actors (including political parties, international aid organizations, religious groups, and NGOs) and a variety of geo-political flows (such as capital, migration, labor, revolutionary solidarities, and militarization) that produce space and the built environment from housing and infrastructure to borders and refugee camps. This emerging body of urban scholarship is contributing to theorizing about the urban condition from the Global South at large.

This conference includes panels of graduate students led by faculty discussants along with a faculty roundtable on the current status and future of Middle Eastern urban studies. In coming together for this conference, we look forward to providing the space to push the conversation on urbanism and spatial production in Middle Eastern and North African cities, and the theoretical implications of theorizing about the urban from the MENA region.

The conference is graciously cosponsored by the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Middle East Institute, The Post-Conflict Cities Lab, Graduate School for Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Maison Française, and Barnard Urban Studies.

For updates and news regarding virtual attendance, visit the event website.

Event Schedule:


Thursday, February 16th

9:30-10am | Opening Remarks

Hiba Bou Akar, Mekarem Eljamal, Calvin Harrison 

10-11:45am | Ruinations and Rebuilding

Dina Yunis - "Against Ruination: Space, Creativity, and Political Identities in Beirut and Aleppo"
Hayfaa Abou Ibrahim and Rand Makarem - "A Polycrisis and an Absent State: Implications of Post-Disaster Urban Recovery in Beirut, Lebanon"
Thayer Hastings - "Slow Violence in Sheikh Jarrah"
Nikolas Michael - "Utopia in the Ghost City: Competing Visions for Varosha"
Idil Onen - "The Production of Kurdish Urban Identity Beyond Conflict"
Discussant: Claire Panetta

1-2:45pm | Resistances and (Imagined) Urban Futures

Andres F. Ramirez - "Qiddiya’s Journey: A Case Study in Urban Imagineering and Image Laundering"
Lama Suleiman - "Parallax Haifa"
Mekarem Eljamal - "Reading Urban Futures: Urban Imaginations in Palestine +100"
Mahdi Sabbagh - "Means of Environmental Manipulation in Silwan"
Motasem Abuzaid - "Urban Collective Action in Damascus, Aleppo, and Hama"
Discussant: Rosie Bsheer

3-4:45pm | Encampments and Informalities

Eric Raimondi - "Border Securitization and Human Mobility on Samos"
Matthew DeMaio - "Urban Encampment in Yarmouk"
Marylin Chahine - "Self-help and Mutual Aid in Hay al-Tanak"
Amir Khaghani - "Place making in Tehran: Enghelab Street and Spatialities of Changing Perceptions"
Francesco Pasta - "Soon-to-be but Not Quite Yet: Migration, Urban Transformation, and Extended Transiency in Fikirtepe, Istanbul
Discussant: Berna Turam

5:30-7:15pm | Faculty Roundtable

Ziad Abu-Rish
Hiba Bou Akar
Rosie Bsheer
Arang Keshavarzian
Claire Panetta
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins
Berna Turam
Moderator: Calvin Harrison

Friday, February 17

10-11:45am | Environments and Infrastructures

Megan Awwad - "The Jordan River: Memory, Displacement, and Return" 
Rawan Alsaffar - "Constructing Water: The Infrastructure and Politics of Desalination in Kuwait"
Anas Al-Khatib and Raneem Ayyad - "Dashed Line: A Deconstruction of Wadi Gaza’s Reality Alice Kezhaya - Building Lebanon’s National Electricity Headquarters as Infrastructure"
Ingy Higazy - "The Contentious Ring Road: The Politics of Urban Mobility (In)Justice in Cairo"
Discussant: Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

1-2:45pm | Political Economies of Land

Azadeh Mashayekhi - "State and Religious Institutions Relations in Governing Urban Change and Tackling Urban Inequalities: Insights from Iran, Tehran" 
John Jamil Kallas - "Uneven Housing Development under Syria’s Ba’ath Party"
Ibrahim Abdou - "Negotiating the Legal Landscape on Cairo’s Periphery"
Omnia Khalil - "Baltaga, Maslaha, and the Political Economy of Violence in Boulaq Abule’lla"
Diala Lteif - "The Slaughterhouse of the Year 2000: Labor Struggles and the Production of Space"
Discussant: Arang Keshavarzian

3-4:45pm | Urban Histories

Nadia Tadros - "Bottom-up History in Ramallah: the Story of Abu Jamal al-Zain"
Asmaa Elgamal - "Planning as Risk Management: Soldiers, Land Agents and Spies in Colonial Morocco"
Jan Altaner - "Solidere’s Predecessors: Class and Urban Planning in Downtown Beirut, 1958-1975"
Rawan Hayat - "Beyond Oil and the State: New Histories for Kuwait City"
Janina Shirin Santer - "Nighttime in the City: Infrastructures of Popular Culture in Beirut (1940s-1950s)"
Discussant: Ziad Abu-Rish

4:45-5pm | Closing Remarks

Hiba Bou Akar

[Thumbnail image courtesy of Hiba Bou Akar.]
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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