Gillad Rosen

Making Place: The Shifting Green Line and the Development of “Greater” Metropolitan Jerusalem

This paper is about place making in Jerusalem, an important city at the heart of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. It examines how place making in Jerusalem has had the consequence of shifting what is known as the Green Line. the Green Line represents the armistice or ceasefire boundaries following the end of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Development of different parts of captured territories after the 1967 War has shifted and rendered unstable perceptions of the Green Line and has wreaked havoc with prevailing conceptions over what constitutes Jerusalem. Symbolic and social boundary reconstruction is at the heart of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, a powerfully organized mechanism that tilts power to Israel with the use of bulldozers, bricks, and cranes as well as tanks and weapons. the shifting Green Line represents a battle line of an idea war over Israels ability to claim legitimacy over a new Jerusalem. This paper examines the dynamic processes of how boundaries are being shifted through narratives of various actors involved in these processes.

Enclosed Residential Neighborhoods in Israel: From Landscapes of Heritage and Frontier Enclaves to New Gated Communities

Contemporary studies of gated communities largely associate this phenomenon with global forces, emphasizing recent urban processes that operate across national borders. However, the Israeli experience demonstrates that multiple forces work simultaneously to produce various forms of enclosed residential communities that follow very different evolutionary routes. Older forms of gated spaces such as traditional and frontier enclaves, characterized by religious–cultural or ethno-national identities, coexist and evolve alongside newer forms of postwelfare-state market-driven enclaves also referred to as neoliberal enclaves. Although gated enclaves share some similar defining features, they differ significantly in reasons for enclosure, developmental mechanisms and gating effects. The diverse landscape of enclaves results from ongoing interactions of macrosocietal processes influenced by global trends, with place-specific institutional and cultural settings.

Armed Compounds and Broken Arms: The Cultural Production of Gated Communities

In recent geographic and urban discourse, neoliberalism increasingly appears as an explanatory framework for a range of spatial phenomena, including gated communities. This article compares the form and function of gated communities in Israel and Canada to illustrate how locally and historically contingent development processes and cultural understandings intersect and interact with globalizing practices and regional manifestations of neoliberal policies. In so doing, it explores the way that global and local processes collectively produce gated communities with varying regional expressions.

Castles in Toronto’s Sky: Condo-Ism as Urban Transformation

ABSTRACT: This article analyzes the evolution and spatial dynamics of condominium development in Toronto, the largest housing market in Canada and the site of a rapid take-up of condominium tenure and construction over the last 40 years. The article probes the most influential policies that fostered and regulated condominium growth, and explores the implications for the continued restructuring of the city. A host of factors, including neoliberal state policies, have played a decisive role in fostering what we term condo-ism, referring to an emerging nexus of economic development, finance, and consumption sector interests that have coalesced around condominium construction and culture. Policies have redirected growth to the urban core, channeled capital investments and young residents, and promoted gentrification, ultimately transforming the character of Toronto’s central business district. The article explores these changes, and discusses their implications for contemporary emerging forms of capitalist urbanization and restructuring of the city.

Whose Right to Jerusalem

Jerusalem is a city mired in spatial conflict. Its contested spaces represent deep conflicts among groups that vary by national identity, religion, religiosity and gender. The omnipresent nature of these conflicts provides an opportunity to look at Henri Lefebvres concept of the right to the city (RTC). The RTC has been adopted and celebrated as a political tool for positive change, enabling communities to take control of space. Based on extensive fieldwork and in-depth interviews, this article explores the complexity of the RTC principles and examines three urban battlefields in Jerusalem — Bar-Ilan Street, the Kotel and the Orient House. The RTC is a powerful idea, providing the opportunity to examine peoples everyday activities within the context of how space can be used to support their lives. Yet Jerusalems myriad divisions produce claims by different groups to different parts of the city. In Jerusalem, the RTC is not a clear vision but a kaleidoscope of rights that produces a fragmented landscape within a religious and ethno-national context governed by the nation state — Israel. The growth of cultural and ethnic diversity in urban areas may limit the possibility for a unified RTC to emerge in an urban sea of demands framed by difference. Space-based cultural conflict exemplifies urban divisions and exacerbates claims to ‘my Jerusalem’, not ‘our Jerusalem’. Identity-based claims to the RTC appear to work against, not for, a universalistic RTC.

Splintering Skylines in a Fractured City: High-Rise Geographies in Jerusalem

This paper examines the production of contested and mundane spaces in Jerusalem. So far, scholarship has focused primarily on the turbulent ethnonational relations in Jerusalem, while paying less attention to struggles over issues of growth and development that do not touch directly upon Israeli—Palestinian controversies. In this paper we consider late entrants to the Jerusalem scene, tall buildings, to investigate how planning policies and practices have shaped some contested and mundane spaces in the city. Through the examination of planning documents and in-depth interviews, we outline the high-rise geographies of ‘Three Jerusalems’: the Old City, Israeli Jerusalem, and Arab Jerusalem. In each of these cities diverse planning approaches, values, and motivations contribute to the transforming cityscape. The Old City remains a protected space of immense significance in the long-lasting visual image of a Holy City. In Israeli Jerusalem, exceptional tall buildings have become more acceptable, as entrepreneurialism gains power; in Arab Jerusalem, enduring exclusion and discrimination against the Palestinian population makes taller buildings possible, provided that they are built within the informal development path. Overall, high-rise geographies demonstrate the different dimensions of Jerusalem relating to ethnonational rifts, capitalistic ambitions, and to formal and informal processes of reproduction and transformation.

Toronto’s condo-builders: development approaches and spatial preferences

ABSTRACT The City of Toronto has undergone a number of dramatic transformations in the last several decades morphing from an industrial-driven metropolis into a thriving real estate and consumer amenities market. Over these decades, the development of condominiums has significantly transformed Toronto’s cityscape surpassing by far other types of real estate development. Based chiefly on a series of interviews with property developers and local politicians, this article explores development from the perspective of condo developers. The article identifies the key condo developers and categorizes them according to their development approaches and spatial preferences. Findings reiterate the need to consider property developers as highly diverse and flexible place entrepreneurs. Differences play out not merely in preferred development location and size, but also in target population, tenure mix, corporate structure, and the extent to which capitalism and economic gain are mixed with more idealistic motivations such as social benefits.

Condo-ism and Urban Renewal: Insights from Toronto and Jerusalem

This chapter explores how condo-ism may be used to promote urban renewal and introduce inclusive planning principles, such as social mix and supply of public goods via linked developments. Four residential projects in the cities of Toronto and Jerusalem are discussed. It is demonstrated how despite some similarities in motivations and planning paths, the variances in local political aims, consumer preferences, and social values have had a very different impact on urban life in these urban environments. The analysis is based on findings from two independent research projects that explore urban growth, planning policies, and urban restructuring.

The challenge of conceptualizing affordable housing: definitions and their underlying agendas in Israel

Abstract While critical work has focused on revealing underpinning motives of affordable housing strategy, there has been lesser attention given to how factors beyond affordability undergird affordable housing definition. The cultural embeddedness of affordable housing in Israel enables the concept to exist without formal definition, thus, laying bare the agendas and causal narratives and providing an effective laboratory to explore affordable housing’s varied interpretations. This research is based on 60 interviews, analysis of legislation, policy documents and newspaper articles. We use the framework of problem definition and social construction to explain how affordable housing can be manipulated by various institutions and actors to promote interests or agendas that may have little to do with affordability. The findings reveal that Israel’s affordable housing definition, or lack thereof, reflect both various demographic, fiscal, social and political interests and a perpetuation of an ideological shift from the social welfare state to a neoliberal regime.

Sport facility development: municipal capital and shutting out the private sector

ABSTRACT Regime theory provides a framework for exploring changes in development patterns and internal dynamics of growth coalitions. Academic debates on sport and urban development have focused on large American and European markets, where such venues are increasingly led by urban regimes that aim to leverage public goals through private investment. Based on a detailed qualitative analysis of four projects in three major Israeli cities, this work examines a different typology of sport venue development – ‘public regime’, which operates in a small market context. The Israeli public regime neither allows the private sector to assume central roles in the design, development and operation of venues nor does it stimulate real estate development anchored by the venue. The assumption that professional sports is not a viable business in small markets is used to justify the public monopoly that regards the venues as public amenities, legitimizing the lack of strategic and business plans, producing benefits for the local political elite but doing little to stabilize professional sport and secure economic returns for the public. The more affluent city of Tel Aviv demonstrates a breakout from a pure public regime, where public control is retained but more business-oriented considerations are incorporated.