Divided Communities addresses the challenges of urban planning and community mobilization in the contested city of (East) Jerusalem. The research sought to give voice to geographically and socially divided communities that have experienced the hardships of the polarized geography of the city—namely, Palestinians and Israeli Palestinians East Jerusalem residents—and elucidate the coping mechanisms they employ in their everyday lives with respect to urban planning, infrastructure, and local leadership. While the ‘divided cities’ framework—and research on the geopolitics of Jerusalem more broadly—have placed little emphasis on the agency and grassroots aspects of Palestinian communities in Jerusalem, this research made these front and center.
The overarching objective of this research was to study the ongoing dynamics of integration and exclusion in three Palestinian and Israeli-Palestinian East Jerusalem divided communities with respect to planning, infrastructure, and services. The general questions motivating the proposed research were: (1) What are the major threats and pressures that these Palestinian communities face? What are the major differences and similarities between them? (2) Who are the major actors involved in the governance and management of these different communities, both governmental and ‘bottom up?’ What are their motivations and barriers? (3) What are the major mechanisms that these communities employ to overcome or mitigate the structural difficulties they face? (4) To what extent are these governance models and mechanisms of transformation unique to divided cities, or can they be transferred to other more ‘ordinary’ cases of underserved communities? In order to answer these questions, the neighbourhoods were compared and contrasted according to four key parameters: a) governance, b) local leadership), c) housing, and d) municipal services and public infrastructure. Special emphasis was placed on the neighbourhood scale and on the agency of the communities under study.
To support this framework, the study used qualitative methodologies to explore everyday settings of community mobilization and leadership around urban planning issues in East Jerusalem, focusing in particular on how everyday life can transcend political challenges and how a neighbourhood-level reading of the city alters our knowledge on urban politics. Over 80 in-depth interviews were conducted with different stakeholder groups, as well as participant observations and urban walks.
The project’s theoretical framework suggested to explore the dynamics of community engagement in urban issues through a global-south perspective that helps illuminate the extent of, and the ways in which, ‘bottom-up’ forces influence urban development. ‘Theorizing from Jerusalem’ emphasizes the various and intersectional logics that operate in contested urban spaces such as ethnicity, capitalism, gender, oppression and resistance, religion, and nationalism. Employing the notion of Urban Citizenship, the project has called for a more nuanced understanding of the term, bearing in mind a context where urban residents are state-less citizens due to geopolitical contestations. Exploring the quotidian challenges of marginalized communities from their own perspective has expanded our understanding of life under political and national barriers, which contributes to a more inclusionary theorization in urban planning and related fields. It is timely as the challenges of living in complex and polarized urban environments, e.g. divided cities, only grow stronger yet are understudied.
While the research focused on Jerusalem, findings from the research would be applicable to a host of marginalized communities worldwide, in both ‘divided’ and ‘ordinary’ cities.
