The seminar is part of the USF-funded Seminar Series “Urbicide in Gaza: spatial violence, reconstruction, and resistance” that began in Gaza, the site of the most intense manifestations of contemporary spatial violence, before moving to the geography of the 1948 Palestinians (Palestinians inside the Green Line)—in time as well as place—as a pivotal arena for understanding what happened to Palestinian cities after 1948. Here, the Nakba is approached as a foundational moment that reordered the urban landscape politically, socially, and legally, setting the cities in which Palestinians remained on a long journey of reorganisation and redefinition.
The seminar focuses on cities such as Haifa, Yaffa (Jaffa), and al-Lydd (Lydda), which experienced ruptures in demographic structure, property ownership, political representation, and forms of local governance. This was followed by a gradual re-engineering of the space and the relationships that govern it, through transformations in the municipal sphere, planning patterns, land and housing management, and the redefinition of public space.
The seminar also raises the question of urban temporality: how is the past reordered, how is memory managed, and how is daily life reproduced amid a continuous spatial and political fracture? The session is part of a larger project that contemplates violence that operates across space, and reconsiders terminology itself, asking: how and to what extent do concepts such as “urbicide” enable a deeper understanding of what has happened and is continuing to happen in historical Palestinian cities, and do they help us to analyze the processes of deconstruction and re-engineering over the long term?
Presentations:
- Destruction and the Concept of Time within the Palestinian Urban Context
Yara Sa’di-Ibraheem, a Postdoctoral Researcher in Political and Human Geography at the University of Toronto, Canada. - “Who Lives There Down Under the Rubble?” A Visit to the city of al-Lydd Before the Upheaval
Tawfiq Da’adli, a Lecturer at the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies and the Department of Art History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. - Deconstructing Emerging Urbanity: Redrawing the Political Arena in Haifa After 1948
Himmat Zoubi, a Researcher in Urban Sociology at Mada al-Carmel.
The seminar will be moderated by Dr Orwa Switat, a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Palestinian Studies at Brown University.