These are now cited as reasons for demolitions. “The echoes of empire ring down to the present in other ways in the Mandate Plans, too… Importing a ‘solution’ intended to tackle the sprawl that was stretching along the radial roads of UK cities, the plans declared wide building-lines to set development well back from primary roads. Source: Martin Crookston (2017) Echoes of Empire: British Mandate planning in Palestine and its influence in the West Bank today, Planning Perspectives, 32:1, 87-98, DOI:10.1080/02665433.2016.1213183įurthermore, as is typical with the international transfer of planning expertise, British planners brought with them planning solutions which may have worked in Britain but did not necessarily work in Palestine. In the whole of Mandate Palestine, some 900 Arab villages saw only 25 outline plans prepared for them – eight of them in what is now the West Bank.” A British Mandate Plan for part of Historic Palestine (1947). There was intended to be a layer of more local planning below these ‘regional’ plans, but it never really happened, or only to a tiny extent. But the Plans did not record all the villages in 1940s Palestine so these yellow circles do not represent a complete picture of rural settlement even then. “The map below indicates in yellows circles the villages. What is even more shocking is that these plans are still in use today by the Israeli government. As Martin Crookston, a contemporary British planner, describes in this review, the plans developed by the British under this mandate did not even record all the existing Palestinian villages, let alone plan for their development or expansion to meet the future needs of the indigenous population (as is normal practice). Planning during the British Mandate (1920 – 1947)Īfter the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I, Palestine came under the control of the British government. For a visual representation of how the creation of the State of Israel physically transformed Palestinian cities and villages, I highly recommend this excellent project by Visualizing Palestine. For further reading on this history as told and experienced by the occupied (not the occupier), I recommend sources like Decolonise Palestine and Palestine Remembered. While this essay focuses on the planning history, I have provided brief commentary and infographics connecting to the wider context and broader history. The rest of this essay is organized mostly chronologically to address each of the key periods of the past century, with a final section focusing on the city of Jerusalem. I do this by highlighting excerpts from some of the research and scholarly work on this topic. Spatial planning policies, systematically introduced and enforced over the past century first by the British Mandate and then the Israeli government, have been instrumental in creating the unjust physical realities experienced by Palestinians today.īelow, I provide a glimpse of this planning history, which is vitally important to understanding today’s reality. Yet, even as a planning professional of Palestinian origin who has visited the occupied West Bank many times and witnessed and experienced the discrimination against Palestinians there firsthand, the extent of the influence of planning policy was not obvious to me until I began researching it. Much has been written, for example, on the discriminatory urban planning practices in the United States and their impact on exacerbating racial injustices against African Americans, in particular. As UCLA Professor Ananya Roy puts it: “Urban planning has repeatedly produced segregation and displacement”. Urban planning often serves existing power structures to the detriment of the marginalized and as such has been used as a tool for racial segregation and discrimination in many contexts. Perhaps what differentiates Palestine today is the ongoing settler colonialization. Urban planning in Palestine over the past century is no exception. Around the world, urban planning is inextricably linked to both historic and current power structures.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |