The ideal objective of planning is the achievement of social justice and welfare. Spaces and places are the arena of planning practices. At the same time they are seen as an arena to display power relations; power is spatially practiced. There is an important relationship between spatial organization and the operation of different forms of power. In other words, place and space are used in the exercise of power, they form a locus, a medium, an arena for practicing power and they also release and display power. Specifically “city” is a good example that represents this feature of “place” and “colonial power” is a good example of using cities as a field for its exercise. Cities historically have been the medium where the sovereign power of colonialism or warfare power is exercised by using the physical and humanistic characteristics of cities to implement systems of “urbicide”, “bio-politics” and the use of bare life to impose control. Our planning system in Palestine has been suffering from the effects of the use of the ideas of “urbicide”, “bio-politics” and the” use of bare life” in Palestinian cities by the Israeli occupation. The Israeli occupation has been repeatedly imposing siege, destruction, destroying and expanding distance and time on Palestinian cities through different practices and restrictions. As a result Palestinian planners find themselves in a situation to deal with damaged and destroyed places, to deal with unstable, dynamic, and changeable urban-space. Therefore, empowerment is the prerequisite of planning. For Palestinian planning to succeed in the face of the Israeli occupational power, Palestinian urban planning practices should take the opposite form of the spatial practice of domination. While, domination or oppression exercises through urban life, resistance can be facilitated by planning practice through its concentration on ‘ruralism’. That is a resistant planning agenda should focus on ways to encourage rural life in terms of less density and less dependence on urban technology. My idea of ‘ruralism’ in Palestinian planning will change the physical structure of the Palestinian Territories (PT). It does not consist any more of main cities; each of them has a group of villages (or rural areas) that depend on it in terms of services and resources. Rather, the resilient physical structure of the PT consists of well-developed rural areas (villages), each has the needed services, at the same time it has the sources for self-sufficiency. The physical structure of the PT will consist of the Palestinian version of “urban villages.”

Conference Title

CUI’17/V. International Contemporary Urban Issues Conference

Conference Country

Turkey

Conference Date

Dec. 1, 2017 - Dec. 2, 2017

Conference Sponsor

DAKAM: Eastern Mediterranean Academic Research Center

Additional Info

Conference Website