Recreating the public through transformation

The Arab-Palestinian society in Israel is undergoing in the past decades an intensive and paradoxical process of urbanisation without urbanity. That is, an accelerated growth of cities and urban spaces, with no political public space and a sense of urban life. The origins of this process are to be found in the 1948 war and the establishment of the state of Israel, when all Palestinian cities and urban centres, but one, went through destruction and desolation, and almost all Palestinian urban population and society was eradicated. Since then, state led planning and development policies have deterred the urban development of Palestinian settlements, condemning them to constant growth with no possibilities for expansion or evolvement. Thus, as spatial products of these processes, Palestinian settlements in Israel, are becoming more and more dense and deficient, lacking almost any sense of urban public life. In this paper, we will first outline the loss of the Palestinian city and the elimination of Palestinian urbanity; then, we will present final thesis projects, conducted under our supervision, of architecture students who aim, through research and design, to confront this reality and propose novel modes of intervention in the built environment of Palestinian localities in order to reclaim the urban public space, and through that to create new possibilities for collective social and cultural identities. We will define these proposed modes of intervention as three possible tactics: confrontation, subversion and negation.