2025 Workshop
Lucy Garbett
London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Department of Sociology
Provisional title: ‘Bits and Pieces Planning’: Palestinian modalities of housing in Jerusalem
“In Jerusalem these days the war with us and the Zionists is not through guns or arms but planning and trying to build. It is obvious to all, the battle is for Palestinians to attempt to remain and nothing else. This is how they are waging war against us with building and planning and how we are trying to defend ourselves through building and construction. This is Jerusalem. Planning is politics and their politics is very clear.”
- Interview with a Palestinian engineer and urban planner, September 2023, Jerusalem.
In Jerusalem, the municipality is run on clear demographic aims and ‘ratios’ of 70 percent Jews to 30 percent Arabs. A litany of laws implement these aims through manipulations of who is ‘absentee’ and a bureaucratic labyrinth awaits Palestinians in order to mediate their precarious residency status. Housing and urban planning are central to remain within the city and maintain ‘center of life’ for ID card requirements. They are therefore commonly the target of settler colonial violence, through restriction of building permits, house demolitions, residency revocations, land grabs, and plunder of private property through land registration and settler movements. In my work rather than focus on what has been destroyed, I study how and what and where Palestinians build in Jerusalem despite all odds and through its contradictions. I center the Palestinian applicant as they move through and examine issues of time, capital, knowledge as they mediate possibilities of navigation. While settler bureaucracy is constantly adapting itself to further curtail Palestinian growth and future, this is in part due to Palestinians constant ‘hustle’ to remain despite all odds.
I use their experiences and case studies of Palestinian building projects to shed new light on several aspects of Palestinian social life in the city, but also of settler-colonial bureaucracy and oppression. I chose to study only building projects that received a building permit from the authorities due to scope and identified several modalities of Palestinian building projects. In this paper I will give a brief overview to urban planning in Jerusalem, and specifically how the bureaucratic requirements impact the Palestinian applicant differently. The different housing projects include: 1) projects related to the churches, 2) individual wealthy families, 3) projects related to various unions such as the architects, teachers and doctors’ unions, 4) small scale developers 5) collectives that band together and build a housing project. Without trying to offer a romanticised image of collective building in Jerusalem, I do situate how many of these practices have developed due to a curtailing of a large scale real estate sector unlike that in the West Bank. Many of these practices have developed as one of the few ways Palestinians in Jerusalem can meet the enormous capital needed to engage with the building permit process.
This is an ethnographic endeavour of course, because much of these stories and navigations of power will not be found in reports, municipality officials, or statistics. Instead they are found in speaking to the navigators, the Palestinians, themselves. The lawyers, the residents, the architects, the planners, the developers, the engineers who all navigate this bureaucratic labyrinth of life in Jerusalem. It is based on over thirty interviews with Palestinian spatial practitioners, residents, civil society groups, freedom of information requests on building permits from the Jerusalem municipality, over several months of fieldwork over three years and a lifetime of experience as a Palestinian Jerusalemite myself.
This micro approach enables a finer grained understanding of the impact on Palestinian social relations and a class-based manoeuvrability of Palestinians of the settler bureaucracy. In doing so, it tells us about Palestinian attempts at collectivity and navigation of a system aimed at their erasure. But it also sheds light on a political economy of the housing market, the cost of engaging with Israeli bureaucracy and the role of time, risk and delay.
Lucy Garbett is a PhD candidate in the department of sociology at the London School of Economics (LSE). Her work focuses on Palestinian life, land and property in Jerusalem. Garbetts research interests include urban studies, feminist theory, legal geography, Middle East, and political economy.