A false dichotomy? The binationalism debate and the future of divided Jerusalem

Divided cities within contested states are a category in their own right, in that their division is driven by issues of national sovereignty as well as ethnic, religious and linguistic cleavages. Reconstituting them as integrated urban spaces, therefore, requires policy shifts on many levels—local, municipal and state—but too often these are hampered by fears of loss of sovereignty and external domination. The case of Jerusalem in the Palestinian‐Israeli conflict is a prime example of how national sovereignty issues can be seen as having an impact upon urban divisions. One option that is proposed for the resolution of this conflict, which has generated intense debate on both sides, is that of a binational Israeli‐Palestinian state. This article argues that there is a false dichotomy concerning the competing benefits of binational and two‐state models in the Palestinian‐Israeli conflict. It contends, on the one hand, that the binational model comprises many forms, some of which are more confederal in structure. On the other hand, for the two state model to function effectively a high degree of interstate coordination is required which brings it close to some forms of confederalism. The article examines the discussions on divided Jerusalem to explore this argument and highlights the degree of interstate coordination that is required if any of the plans being put forward for the future of the city are to work. It concludes by relating the Jerusalem example to the wider issue of divided cities in contested states.     

Neoliberalising the divided city

This paper examines the relation between ethno-nationalism and neoliberalism in urban space. Contrary to common views in urban studies, it argues that the ‘ethno-nationally divided city’ and the ‘neoliberal city’ are not antithetical, but that neoliberal nationalism is a new modality of urban conflict in a globalised world, which reshapes the relation between the local and the global and draws new urban geopolitics. By investigating practices of nation-branding in a divided city, this paper bridges different theoretical fields to shed light on an aspect of urban conflict that has largely been ignored by the literature on nationalism and urban divisions. It also complements existing research on neoliberal nationalism by emphasising the spatial and material aspects of nation-branding, and by showing how it can be used by competing ethno-national leaders to mobilise their communities and extend their control at the national and urban levels. By highlighting processes common to neoliberal and divided cities, this paper draws on recent calls within urban geopolitics to rethink current theoretical categories and labels attributed to cities. It develops this analysis by examining contemporary neoliberal urban policies in Skopje, Macedonia, which have become a new battlefield where interethnic conflicts unfold.     

THE GREEN ECONOMY,SUSTAINABILITY TRANSITIONS AND TRANSITION REGIONS: A CASE STUDY OF BOSTON

This article is focused upon exploring the development of the green economy in particular locations, with the aim of identifying why some cities and regions have been successful in engendering green growth. To date we have little idea where the green economy is developing, nor much insight, beyond anecdotal evidence, into why certain cities and regions appear to be more successful than others in this regard. We position our analysis within the context of research on socio‐technical transitions that has theorized the potential shift to a more sustainable economy. We review the literature on sustainability transitions and the development of the multi‐level perspective encompassing niches, regimes and landscapes. However, most research into socio‐technical transitions has not given adequate consideration to the influence of places and spatial scale in these transition processes, and we therefore critique the socio‐technical transitions literature from a geographical perspective. In this article we are interested in four key questions. What role does the enabling and facilitative state play in these cities and regions? What new institutional forms and governance structures are being developed? How do actors in particular cities and regions construct their green vision, and how do they encourage other actors to buy‐in to this vision? How are links across levels and spatial scales developed to connect niches with the regime? We address these through a focus upon the Boston city‐region in the USA, drawing upon both primary and secondary research material. We utilize this case study example to re‐examine and re‐theorize work on sustainability transitions from a spatial perspective.     

Liminal condition as constant situation,the Israeli Jerusalem municipality, 1948-1955

The capital city is the place where political entities are represented in national space. This space acts as a mediating force between society, the nation, and the outside world, and it is very important for the development of a system of visual national symbols. The political leaders, national and local, are those who shape the capital city. Therefore, examining the relationship between municipal and national political systems in Jerusalem sheds light not only on local history but on national developments and the perception of Jerusalem as the capital in the national psyche. The years 1948-1955 were a very chaotic time in the annals of Jerusalem, Jerusalem became a city divided between Israel and Jordan in a semi-state of war that turned permanent despite the armistice agreements. Israel’s national leaders remained ambivalent about Jerusalem as capital city despite the rhetoric of figures from across the political spectrum. Their ambivalent attitude influenced the relationship with the Jerusalem Municipality. The article addresses the subject of the relations between the national government and the municipal political coalition in Jerusalem from 1948 to 1955.     

Preserving ‘the Enemy’s’ architecture: preservation and gentrification in a formerly Palestinian Jerusalem neighbourhood

This article relates to the preservation of Palestinian buildings in Jerusalem and raises the question why state-sanctioned institutions act to preserve Palestinian architecture built pre-1948, bearing in mind the context of a difficult past and an on-going conflict? The article addresses the manner in which Jerusalem’s authorised heritage discourse focuses only on preserving Palestinian buildings’ tangible aspects (architectural styles), and not on intangible aspects such as the narrative of their builders. The main argument is that while preservation is presented as a civilised practice, it is driven by the commodification of the buildings and sites and their valued ‘authenticity’. The common practice is to ‘preserve’ these buildings by developing them to create more housing units. This practice inevitably leads to gentrification. Moreover, even when intangible aspects of heritage are pushed aside, preserving these buildings comes with the ‘risk’ of them being used as memory sites for subaltern groups. The article focuses on one formerly Palestinian West Jerusalem neighbourhood, Baka, where gentrification was triggered by historic Palestinian homes and where the neighbourhood’s development continues to be linked with historic preservation.     

Geneva's future: reflections on the role of a values‐based city

In a world where most of the great cities are heavily branding themselves to compete for lucrativebusiness, political and sporting events, what future role is there for an international values‐based city like Geneva? This article reflects on the history of ideas that have taken root in Geneva over the centuries and suggests how they might be actively re‐positioned to give the city continuing relevance in the coming century. It looks at eleven political and practical ideas that have hadimportant manifestations in Geneva and have been embodied in some of its international organizations, notably: freedom of movement; free thinking; political self‐determination; compassionate warfare; peace and trade among others. It then argues that, in order to survive as a leading international city, Geneva must develop real expertise on these big‐hitting political issues, improve its ability to deliver on them and create a dynamic alliance of other internationalist valuesbased cities around the world which can mobilize similar concerns and embody a similarly Genevan model of international space.     

长江三角洲都市连绵区城市规模结构演变研究

本文选取长江三角洲都市连绵区7个年份的城市人口规模数据,分别从城市规模等级结构、首位度、城市规模分形以及城市规模的空间演化等层面对城市规模结构的演变进行了分析,初步揭示了长江三角洲都市连绵区规模结构的分布特征和演变规律,并对其空间演变特征进行了总结。     

针对突发灾害:大城市的人居安全及其政策

非典事件折射出了大城市在应对突发灾害时抗灾能力低下的脆弱性以及严重的人居安全问题。大城市的人居安全问题与其规模、密度和形态的不协调有关。基于人居安全的城市政策应该是规模、密度、形态三位一体的城市政策。规模过大会引起安全问题,技术进步使人们解决城市问题的能力不断增强,因而城市规模的极限也不断被突破。但是,连续的、密集分布的城区终究不应该是无限放大的,从这点上看,城市形态的不佳将加重规模和密度过大所导致的问题。现阶段我国的城市政策几乎是不存在的,城市安全意识尚未发展成为全局性的"城市安全观",目前大城市的规模、形态、密度的失控是缺乏有效制约的市场力量作用的结果,规划失效的原因之一是没有清晰的城市政策,因而市政当局过分迁就开发商。新的城市政策对于大城市尤其要严格控制其密度,对城市提出明确的形态要求,制止城市蔓延,推进有组织的"都市区化"。     

Ghosts,Memory, and the Right to the Divided City: Resisting Amnesia in Beirut City Centre

Violently divided cities are incubators of ethnic conflicts. Under the auspices of postwar reconstruction, these cities are supposedly disciplined into peace through the regeneration of the city centre, including privatization, commercial adaptation and gentrification strategies. Such dynamics render city centre space amnesiac, with no reference to the history of sectarian violence, and exclusivist by limiting public access. Rather than foster peacebuilding, city centre regeneration exposes the dangerous weakness of the neoliberal peace built on accommodating ethnic and socioeconomic divisions. This paper connects Lefebvre's right‐to‐the‐city to non‐sectarian social movements’ struggle to forge participatory democracy in Beirut's city centre. A key aspect of these movements’ activities is to reprogramme memory—cosmopolitan and inclusivist—into the city centre, a project supporting peacebuilding.     

Aesthetic Dissent: Urban Redevelopment and Political Belonging in Luanda,Angola

Over the previous decade, African cities experienced a wave of frenzied construction driven by imaginations of world‐city status. While these projects provoked new discussions about African urbanism, the literature on them has focused more on the paperwork of planning than actual urban experiences. This article addresses this lacuna by investigating residents' reactions to the post‐conflict building boom in Luanda, Angola. I show that Luandans' held highly ambivalent orientations towards the emerging city. Their views were shaped by suspicions about pacts between Angolan elites and international capital that recapitulated longstanding tensions over national belonging. These concerns were voiced via discussions of the very aesthetics of the new city. Buildings became catalysts for expressions of dissent that put into question the very project of state‐driven worlding. The paper therefore argues that the politics of aesthetics are central to grasping the contested understandings of urbanism currently emerging in various African cities.     

Human security and development in Africa

There has been a recent rise in optimism about Africa's prospects: increased economic growth; renewed regional and national political commitments to good governance; and fewer conflicts. Yet, given current trends and with less than eight years until 2015, Africa is likely to fail to meet every single one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Home to almost one‐third of the world's poor, Africa's challenges remain as daunting as ever. Despite highly publicized increased growth in some economies, the combined economies of Africa have, on average, actually shrunk and are far from meeting the required 7 per cent growth needed to tackle extreme poverty. A similar picture emerges from the analysis of Africa's performance on the other MDGs. In a world where security and development are inextricably connected in complex and multifaceted ways, Africans are, as a result, among the most insecure. By reviewing a select number of political, security and socio‐economic indicators for the continent, this analysis evaluates the reasons underlying Africa's continuing predicament. It identifies four critical issues: ensuring peace and security; fostering good governance; fighting HIV/ AIDS; and managing the debt crisis. In assessing these developmental security challenges, the article recalls that the MDGs are more than time bound, quantified targets for poverty alleviation–they also represent a commitment by all members of the international community, underwritten by principles of co‐responsibility and partnership, to an enlarged notion of development based on the recognition that human development is key to sustaining social and economic progress. In recent years, and often following failures, especially in Africa, to protect civilian populations from the violence and predation of civil wars, a series of high‐level commissions and expert groups have conducted strategic reviews of the UN system and its function in global politics. The debate has also developed at the theoretical level involving both a recon‐ceptualization of security, from state centred norms to what is referred to as the globalization of security around the human security norm. There has also been a reconceptualization of peacekeeping, where the peacekeeping force has enough robustness to use force not only to protect populations under the emergent responsibility to protect norm, but also enough conflict resolution capacity to facilitate operations across the conflict–development–peacebuilding continuum. This article opens up a discussion of how these ideas might be relevant to security regime building and conflict resolution in African contexts, and suggests how initiatives in Africa might begin to make a contribution to the theory and practice of cosmopolitan peacekeeping.     

The governmentalities of infrastructure and services amid urban conflict: East Jerusalem in the post Oslo era

Urban conflict in Jerusalem has mainly been studied through the lens of spatial and functional segregation and discriminative fragmentation between Israeli and Palestinian localities. This article adopts a governmentality approach to the study of the politics of urban infrastructure and services in urban conflict, and argues that a governmentalization process of East Jerusalem by Israel has evolved in the last two decades that has been enacted mainly through the control and management of Palestinian urban infrastructure and services. Since, as manifestations of resistance to Israeli occupation, many of the Palestinian urban functionalities historically operated separately from Israeli state apparatuses, this new development and its consequences indicate an increasing dependency and forced adaptation of Palestinians in Jerusalem to Israeli rule. Based on analysis of Palestinian public transport and education systems, the article demonstrates how the “soft” power of governmentality – mediated through the control and management of urban infrastructure and services – diffuses among the Palestinian population and in space, restructuring them as objects and subjects of Israeli administration and governmental order. In this light, urban infrastructure and services appear in the course of urban conflict as an arena of governmentality and counter-governmentality. On the one hand they serve as a site where identities are practiced and defended; on the other, they may mediate and facilitate the restructuring of political subjectivities and normalization of political structures and hierarchies.     

Political Security Issues at the Concluding Statements of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Sessions 1981–2001: an Analytical Study of the Content

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the contents of the concluding statements of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) sessions from 1981 to 2001 concerning political and security issues. In particular, the study reviews six topics, including cooperation in the military field, cooperation in the field of security, the Iraqi‐Kuwaiti issue, the Arab‐Israeli conflict, cooperation in the field of fighting terrorism, and GCC Iranian relations. The GCC Supreme Council affirmed the right of the Palestinians to establish their independent state whose capital would be Eastern Jerusalem. The GCC demanded the elimination of weapons of mass destruction when it came to the issue of the Iraqi ‐ Kuwait problem. Concerning the relations between the GCC and Iran, the emphasis was on calling for a peaceful resolution to the problems of the islands [Abu Musa, Tunb Major and Tunb Minor]. The GCC stressed the importance of intensive communications among the security agencies in the member states, and condemning terrorism in all its forms and types. Finally, the GCC expressed satisfaction with the accomplishments in the military and defense sector.     

The pilgrimage economy of Early Roman Jerusalem (1st century BCE–70 CE) reconstructed from the δN and δC values of goat and sheep remains

Religious and historical sources suggest that pilgrimage formed a major source of Jerusalem's economy during the Early Roman period due to the Temple's role as a religious and judicial center for the Jewish diaspora. Until now, this assertion has been supported by little material evidence. In this study, the carbon and nitrogen isotope values of local arcahaeological and, modern wild herbivores from known environments were used to determine the environmental origins of domesticated sheep and goat that were traded and consumed in Early Roman Jerusalem. Pinpointing the environmental origins of these herd animals can determine if they were raised in specialized farms in the vicinity of Jerusalem, brought to the city by local pilgrims, or were part of organized importation of sacrifice animals from desert regions that lie beyond the boundaries of the province of Judea. The results indicate that at minimum 37% of the goat and sheep consumed in Jerusalem during the Early Roman period were brought from desert regions. The inter-provincial importation of animals to Jerusalem to meet high demands for sacrifice by pilgrims is the first material evidence for large scale economic specialization in the city. Furthermore, the results imply that desert animals were further marketed for domestic use in contemporaneous farm sites out of Jerusalem.     

An Independent Palestine: The Security Dimension

If negotiations produce an end to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict then a sovereign, independent Palestine may emerge. But what is required for it to succeed? Nothing is more important than the security of a Palestinian state–for itself, for Israel, and for the region: security trumps all else. In addition to the problem of dealing effectively with opposition to a peace agreement within Palestine or directed against it from outside, the nature and magnitude of the security challenge will depend in large part on three issues: the drawing of borders between Israel and Palestine–and whether they are porous or marked by a rigid line of barriers; whether Israeli settlements are withdrawn, or in part incorporated into Israel, perhaps through land swaps with Palestine; and what arrangements are made for Jerusalem. One answer is the creation of effective Palestinian military forces (in addition to police), but this course could be divisive; a second is the development of a series of Israeli–Palestinian confidence‐building and share–security measures, including intelligence cooperation; a third is progress towards reducing external threats to Israel–Palestine, including success in Iraq and in defusing other Middle East problems. Most useful, however, would be the creation of an American‐led peace enabling force, ideally modelled on NATO. This force would need to be agreed by both Israel and Palestine; it must be adequately staffed, trained and equipped; its duties and rules of engagement must make sense to all parties; and it must be part of a network of dispute‐resolution and confidence‐building measures in full partnership with Israeli and Palestinian authorities.     

Post‐political planning and community opposition: asserting and challenging consensus in planning urban regeneration in Newcastle,New South Wales

This paper examines recent urban regeneration plans for inner city Newcastle, in New South Wales, Australia. The focus is on recent plans to rejuvenate the historical commercial centre of the city—the Hunter Street Mall. Recent plans for the city are positioned as post‐political efforts by planning and development agents to limit antagonistic politics and secure consensus around a future planning vision. Core to this new vision is high‐rise development. Formal and technocratic consultation processes are central to efforts to secure consensus and limit conflict. Yet, conflict nevertheless arises as local residents, community groups, and politicians oppose the planning vision pursued by planning and development agents. Debates about the need for regeneration and the form of regeneration surface as central points of contest. Likewise, the material configuration of the city and wider political context frame both post‐political planning efforts and oppositional politics. The paper contributes to a growing body of work by scholars who question the presence of a dominant, overarching post‐political condition. Rather, post‐political efforts emerge as contextual and fluid processes to secure the planning and development objectives of urban elites. As the case study illustrates, such post‐political efforts are rarely unchallenged, as contest and antagonistic politics emerge, allowing citizens to resist the efforts of state and development actors and help shape their cities.     

Contesting the Divided City: Arts of Resistance in Skopje

This paper examines issues of power and resistance in “divided cities”. Basing my analysis on fieldwork I carried out in Skopje, Macedonia, I look at how urban space may be constructed and used by hegemonic groups as a means of asserting their power and how, in turn, the city may be a place of resistance where power is contested and public space reappropriated. Drawing on Lefebvre's perspective on the production of space, I compare the conceived city to the lived city and examine how urban inhabitants may resist the division of the city and challenge hegemonic representations. I also draw on Debord's psychogeography to define an artistic, active and participatory approach to urban space through which the inhabitants may re‐conquer their right to the œuvre and to the city. I argue that the city as a lived environment may offer narratives other than division and that there are alternatives to the divided city.