Belonging,memory and the politics of planning in Israel

This paper focuses on contradictory expressions of memory and belonging of Jews and Palestinians in Israel. It examines the conflicts over planning procedures, which engage such contradictory memories, and belonging at the national and local scales of planning. It explores how the dynamics of power relations can operate differently at each level and can result in planning resolutions, which link in different ways to the constructions of memory and belonging of Jews and Palestinians. The paper begins with an overview of the expressions of belonging and commemoration at the national scale of planning; in the agenda of the Council for the Restoration and Preservation of Historic Sites (CRPHS) in Israel and the rhetoric of the government National Master Plan of Israel (TAMA/35). It challenges this rhetoric in two local planning events: ‘the road and the graveyard’ and the ‘new Jewish neighbourhood and the old Palestinian village’.     

Gender and feminist geographies in the Middle East

This article aimed to review the research carried out in the Middle East primarily on gender and feminist geography and also on place formation, urban space, movement and mobility in the social and political sciences. This aim turned out to be challenging primarily because of the colonial and post-colonial history of the region that continues to have a profound effect on the development of academic knowledge among Middle Eastern scholars as well as a restricted accessibility to material published inside the Middle East. Despite this, the article primarily focuses on feminist research on Middle Eastern women done by Middle Eastern scholars and published in Middle Eastern journals and books primarily in Arabic (and Hebrew in Israel). However, during the process of reviewing a large variety of articles, book chapters and books that exist on Middle Eastern women, we realized that it is sometimes difficult and rather artificial to review the material with only this division in mind. In the end, we reviewed the literature on gender and feminism in the Middle East mainly highlighting local published research and also briefly referring to research published in the West by both Westerners and local researchers. The article begins with presenting its research methodology. It then analyzes the website and literature review that we carried out on the contexts, frameworks and themes of gender and feminist geography and spatial research in the Middle East with particular attention on the research carried out in Israel/Palestine. We focus on the private–public spheres; migration and diaspora and the veil as key concepts in analyzing the literature in this section. In the last section, we explain the reasons for the limitations on gender and feminist research in geography inside the Middle East and mention some general conclusions.     

Planning with communities in regeneration projects: toward a gendered civic capacity

This article explores the central role that gender plays across a variety of scales in the development of civic capacity among residents of Meonot-Yam neighborhood in Bat-Yam, Israel. The article proposes a new, gendered reading of civic capacity which involves transforming women’s and men’s ways of thinking and acting out of the ordinary in this regeneration project, with the aim of updating and revising the term as related to planning with communities approaches. Using a performative understanding of gender based on feminist poststructuralist analysis to identity knowledge/power and place, we combine the analysis of community and personal scales, looking at ‘paradoxical moments’ to understand how the transformation in power relations has taken place and how civic capacity is developed. We do so by conducting a critical analysis of biweekly meeting minutes and in-depth interviews held over a three-year period (2010–2013). This civic capacity development is particularly important for women who manage to enhance and increase their social capital throughout those years.     

Reinforcing Diversity: From the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’

This paper focuses on Jan Monk's contribution to reinforcing diversity and collaboration in the field of human geography. It illustrates how gendered diversity and feminism is promoted in her academic work both inside the Anglo-American academic world and outside, by exposing the feminist voices from around the world and mainstreaming them in her collaborative work. Fostering and reinforcing diversity has become a body of knowledge in her extensive publications in which she assesses the varying extent and nature of feminist geography in the Anglophone world and across countries, attempting to interpret differences in terms of geographical and cultural contexts and disciplinary trends. The paper emphasizes how fostering diversity and collaboration in Jan's academic work is not only about writing articles, editing books and producing a film, but also engages the formulation of organizational structures such as the Routledge book series and the initiation and establishment of the Commission of Gender and Geography of the International Geographical Union which have contributed to the production of collaborative feminist geographical knowledge across spaces and places.     

Israeli feminist geography: women,gender and queer geographies

Abstract

This article charts the changing knowledges within Israeli feminist geography in the last few decades. It briefly reviews some of the topics that characterize Israeli scholarship, and in particular the ways in which the academic knowledge changed from the focus on women’s geography, to feminist and gendered analysis of spaces, to a more recent focus on sexuality and gender. We argue that it is not that one knowledge replacing others, but rather all knowledges and approaches exist simultaneously within Israeli geography today.     

WHOSE KNOWLEDGE,WHOSE POWER? ETHICS IN URBAN REGENERATION PROJECTS WITH COMMUNITIES

This paper examines “moments of residents' awareness” and their ethics in three planning processes, each representing different relations between local and professional knowledge in the course of the three‐year regeneration project in Meonot Yam neighborhood, Bat Yam, Israel. This new terminology emphasizes how nuanced relations between various types of knowledge better explain the challenges faced by planners and residents in regeneration projects. These moments reflect residents' empowerment, challenging the binary view of professional/powerful versus local/ powerless knowledge that characterizes modernist thinking. The paper proposes that in such complicated processes it helps to analyze moments of power/knowledge transformation, from which one can learn that conflict and disagreement, and not only consensus, can lead to residents' empowerment.