Marking Politics Through Urban Planning: On the Performative Role of Planning Tools in Contested Terrain—The Case of Jerusalem

Authors

  • Peter Van Gielle Ruppe Geographisches Institut, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099, Berlin, Deutschland
  • Ilse Helbrecht Geographisches Institut, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099, Berlin, Deutschland
  • Peter Dirksmeier Geographisches Institut, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099, Berlin, Deutschland

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13147-012-0184-9

Keywords:

Urban planning, Politics, Jerusalem, geographic imaginations, Performance, arab-israeli conflict, Politics of scale

Abstract

The utilization of urban planning practices for political purposes has become an issue of planning theory in the last decades. Until the 1970s town planning was considered to be a neutral and rational instrument for the purpose of spatial regulation and administration as well as the general improvement of living conditions. Only recently with the rise of communicative planning theory this perspective has been complemented by critical perceptions of the political and ideological role of planning practices within society, their context-dependence, legitimization, normative purposes and also its interlinkages to individual aims as well as political and economic power. Jerusalem, the (partly occupied) capital of Israel, is a prototypic example of the utilization of urban planning for (even geo) political ends. This article is based on qualitative fieldwork and aims to scrutinize the scalar political consequences of various urban planning practices in Jerusalem. We undertake an analysis of the reciprocal relations of local, national, and geostrategic interests as well as the resulting actions by the relevant stakeholders. Theoretically informed by postcolonial geographies and performative approaches the paper concludes, that urban planning in Jerusalem is a highly political instrument that is strongly involved in the performative implementations of particular geographic imaginations of Jerusalem as a united capital of the state of Israel and historic as well as religious symbol of the Jewish nation. Hence urban planning in Jerusalem is an active element in the enforcement of hegemonic political interests which reach beyond the local context of Eastern Jerusalem.

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Published

2012-10-31

Issue

Vol. 70 No. 5 (2012)

Section

Research Article

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Copyright (c) 2012 RuR Editors

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Articles in Raumforschung und Raumordnung – Spatial Research and Planning are published under a Creative Commons license. From Vol. 79 No. 2 (2021), the license applied is CC BY 4.0. From Vol. 77 No. 1 to Vol. 79 No.1, articles were published under a CC BY-SA license. Earlier volumes have been re-published by oekom 2022 under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License CC BY 4.0. 

How to Cite

1.
Ruppe PVG, Helbrecht I, Dirksmeier P. Marking Politics Through Urban Planning: On the Performative Role of Planning Tools in Contested Terrain—The Case of Jerusalem. RuR [Internet]. 2012 Oct. 31 [cited 2024 May 2];70(5):411–424. Available from: https://rur.oekom.de/index.php/rur/article/view/771
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