Oren Yiftachel

New Paradigm or Old Myopia? Unsettling the Communicative Turn in Planning Theory

During the last decade or so, many planning theorists have taken a so-called communicative turn, to the point where somiie have declared the emergence of a dominant new paradigm supported by increasing consensus among theorists. We wish to raise a number of broad questions about the communicative paradigm and claims for its theoretical dominance. We point to alternative analytical positions that focus on issues of power, of the state, and of political economy, in ways that are often underplayed in the communicative literature and that demonstrate a healthy diversity in the field. We offer six critical propositions about communicative planning theory as a contribution to the ongoing debates, in theory and practice, about the conitested nature of planning, its practices and effects.

Critical theory and ‘gray space’: Mobilization of the colonized

The paper draws on critical urban theories (CUT) to trace the working of oppressive power and the emergence of new subjectivities through the production of space. Within such settings, it analyzes the struggle of Bedouin Arabs in the Beersheba metropolitan region, Israel/Palestine. The paper invokes the concept of ‘gray spacing’ as the practice of indefinitely positioning populations between the ‘lightness’ of legality, safety and full membership, and the ‘darkness’ of eviction, destruction and death. The amplification of gray space illuminates the emergence of urban colonial relations in a vast number of contemporary city regions. In the Israeli context, the ethnocratic state has forced the indigenous Bedouins into impoverished and criminalized gray space, in an attempt to hasten their forced urbanization and Israelization. This created a process of ‘creeping apartheid’, causing the transformation of Bedouin struggle from agonistic to antagonistic; and their mobilization from democratic to radical. The process is illustrated by highlighting three key dimensions of political articulation: sumood (hanging on), memory‐building and autonomous politics. These dynamics underscore the need for a revised CUT, which extends the scope of spatial–social critique and integrates better to conditions of urban colonialism, collective identity and space, for a better understanding of both oppression and resistance.

Urban Ethnocracy: Ethnicization and the Production of Space in an Israeli ‘Mixed City’:

In this paper we offer a critical analysis of ethnic relations in an Israeli ‘mixed city’. Similar to other sites shaped by the logics of settling ethnonationalism and capitalism, the ‘mixed city’ is characterized by stark patterns of segregation between a dominant majority and a subordinate minority, as well as by ethnoclass fragmentation within each group. ‘Mixed’ spaces are both exceptional and involuntary, often resulting from the process of ethnicization prevalent in contested urban spaces. We theorize this setting as an ‘urban ethnocracy’, where a dominant group appropriates the city apparatus to buttress its domination and expansion. In such settings, conspicuous tensions accompany the interaction between the citys economic and ethnoterritorial logics, producing sites of conflict and instability, and essentializing group identities and ethnic geographies. Empirically, the paper focuses on the city of Lod or Lydda, Israel, where the production of contested urban space has been linked to the construction of an exclusionary Israeli-Jewish national identity and to the establishment of hierarchical ethnic citizenship. Like other previously Arab cities, Lod has been the target of a concerted strategy of Judaization, which has formed the citys central planning goal since the late 1940s. We analyze in detail various aspects and sites of the Judaization process, and of the ensuing urban conflicts. We point to the chronic instability of urban ethnocracies, and to the need of planning to rise above narrow ethnocentric considerations in order for the ‘mixed city’ to prosper as the home for all communities.

Essay: Re-engaging Planning Theory? Towards ‘South-Eastern’ Perspectives

Yes, this is what they did to Tallinn . . . in a city where about 50 percent of the population is Russian, they simply removed all Russian signs, billboards, street names and Russian sounding businesses . . . Russian is not an official language, so we cannot use it in planning discussions and city government . . . we are wiped out of our own city, where most of us were born . . . (we are) now the invisible half of this place which still remains our homeland. (Vadim Polischuk, Russian human rights activist, Tallinn, Estonia, personal interview, May 2005)

Urban social sustainability: The planning of an Australian city

Abstract The debate on urban sustainability has mainly focused on environmental and economic factors, often neglecting the vital social aspect and an evaluation of the role of urban planning. This article attempts to redress this deficiency by examining the influence of urban planning on the level of urban social sustainability, using the planning of the central area of Perth, Western Australia, as a case study. First, a conceptual framework is developed, delineating three key dimensions of urban social sustainability: equity, community and urbanity. The framework is then applied to the case study, showing that under the web of past and existing local and metropolitan planning policies, Perths central area has not been able to sustain its social value for Perths metropolitan community. This deficiency has been partially due to the failure of urban planning to enhance equity, community and urbanity in guiding the development of central Perth.

The Internal Frontier: Territorial Control and Ethnic Relations in Israel 1

YIFTACHEL O. (1996) The internal frontier: territorial control and ethnic relations in Israel, Reg. Studies 30, 493–508. In settler societies the development of frontier regions has played an important role in the complementary processes of nation building and state building. However, studies of frontier and regional development have paid little attention to the creation of ‘internal frontier’ regions, where large concentrations of ethnic minorities exist within established multiethnic states. The present study proposes a theoretical framework for the understanding of internal frontiers, drawing on the physical, social and cultural characteristics of frontier colonization and settlement in pre- and post-state periods. It further argues that state policies in such areas are marked by constant attempts to exert territorial control over minority populations. The paper then illustrates the above propositions, by analysing in detail Israels policies and their impact on a typical Arab village in the Galilee – ...

Towards a New Typology of Urban Planning Theories

Urban planning theory has been widely criticised by academics and practitioners as being confused and impractical. In this review paper a tentative first step to remedy the situation is proposed, outlining a new typology of urban planning theories with an aim to clarify the academic discourse and to provide a useful guide for practising planners. Three major ‘debates’ are identified as forming the main streams of thought in the development of urban planning. These are termed the ‘analytical’, ‘urban form’, and ‘procedural’ debates, which are shown to have developed in parallel. The three debates are also shown to focus on different stages of the planning process and to be mainly based on explanatory or prescriptive theories. Hence, it is argued that approaches which have often been described as irreconcilable can constructively coexist under the umbrella of urban planning theories without sacrificing their theoretical underpinnings. In this paper a general evolutionary trend from consensus to diversity is identified across the three streams of thought, and it is shown that, in the future, planning theories are likely to become more explicitly divided between openly politicised approaches and persisting technical-neutral orientations. The structure and evolution of the planning discipline outlined in this paper provide a framework for advancing towards a more clearly defined and coherent body of urban planning knowledge.

Questioning "Ethnic Democracy": A Response to Sammy Smooha

IN THIS ESSAY WE PRESENT a critique of the “ethnic democracy” model, formulated by political sociologist Sammy Smooha to account for Israel’s political structure. During the last two decades, Smooha’s voluminous work on ethnic politics in Israel has gained a central position among social scientists in Israel and beyond. His conceptual and empirical explorations of the country’s ethnic relations have laid important and insightful foundations for Israeli critical research by thoroughly documenting and explicating Israel’s pervasive ethnic stratiWcation and disparities between Jews and Palestinian-Arabs, as well as between Ashkenazi and Mizrakhi Jews. Most notably, his “ethnic democracy” model, which provides a structural account of Arab-Jewish relations in Israel, has been widely accepted in recent literature on Israel. The most lucid elaboration and explication of the model was published recently on the pages of this journal. In this model, Smooha manages to combine theoretical claims about the nature of democratic states dominated by an ethnic majority, with a wealth of (mainly attitudinal) data and a new conceptualization of the Israeli case. On the theoretical level, he claims,

Planning Theory at a Crossroad: The Third Oxford Conference:

Like most academic fields, planning theory constantly changes. One arena in which scholarly changes are introduced, fought, won, or lost is the arena of academic conferences, particularly those focusing on a specific topic. Such was the third Oxford Conference on planning theory, which took place in April 1998, following two highly successful previous gatherings of planning theorists at Oxford in 1981 and 1991. Below

Nation‐building and the division of space: Ashkenazi domination in the Israeli ‘ethnocracy’

Studies of nationalism have only rarely explored the intra‐national stratification associated with the politics of nation‐building. The article focuses on these processes from a spatial perspective, by studying the population of ‘internal frontiers’ in settler societies, focusing on the case of Israel. The settlement of the frontiers in the Israeli ‘ethnocracy’ exacerbated the marginalized incorporation of Mizrahi (Eastern Jews), as many of them were settled in peripheral, low‐status and segregated localities. These structural conditions help explain the persisting disparities between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews. The case of Israel thus exposes a paradox: the very frontier settlement promoted as essential for nation‐building may cause intra‐national fragmentation and conflict.