Palestine: Spaces and Politics (PSP) is an open-access project that offers resources for education and research on Palestine’s built and natural environments through a critical lens. This initiative is a response to the growing demand for grounded academic resources on Palestine that offer depth and context beyond immediate colonial destruction.
The PSP Introductory Curriculum positions Palestine as a complex space inhabited by people who are producers of its own knowledge, rather than a mere object on which perpetual violence is inflicted. We situate Palestine as a conceptual site to reconsider core ideas in the fields of architecture, geography, urbanism, and planning. Particularly, by foregrounding Palestinian voices and perspectives, PSP presents substantive and vivid understandings of Palestine’s past, present, and potential futures. Ultimately, we consider Palestine as imperative for analyzing the critical intersections of spaces and politics at large.
The bilingual curriculum comprises several themes (more to come) that include an opening text, key questions, key cases, and open-access readings. We also provide further readings and audiovisual material and have aimed to include resources useful for both academic and non-academic users. The list of resources for each theme comprises Arabic and English texts; in cases where translations of the original text exist, we have provided their respective links. We sincerely appreciate Riwaq and the Institute of Palestine Studies for granting PSP readers with access to select book chapters.
PSP is a collective of geographers, architects, and urban planners committed to the study of Palestine in relation to regional and global contexts. It is an offshoot of the Arab Urbanism platform. PSP emerges from conversations among scholars whose lifeworlds have been variously impacted by the colonization and occupation of their land, the destruction of their cities and villages, and displacement from their countries.
We are Dena Qaddumi (coordinator), Nadi Abusaada , Majd Al-Shihabi , Ammar Azzouz , Samia Henni , Lana Judeh , Faiq Mari, Aya Nassar, and Omar Jabary Salamanca.
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Image: Bethlehem, 2013. Photograph by Dena Qaddumi.