themes on Palestine: Spaces and Politics

Palestine Futures: Spaces and Imaginations

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 17:16:00 +0000

After the signing of the Oslo Accords, the 1990s saw a steady erosion of a Palestinian political project of territorial liberation and political emancipation. Radical politics and social imaginaries were replaced with a relentless integration into global neoliberalism. Simultaneously, the two-state solution was declared dead multiple times, and Palestinian calls for a one-state solution were revived. But as the region contends with a polycrisis of Israeli genocide and apartheid, capitalist erosion of the conditions of flourishing life, and an accelerating climate catastrophe, the future looks more precarious than ever, prompting a search for futures that assert the position of Palestine in relation to its regional context. Meanwhile, a rich preoccupation with alternative futurities abound: from speculative fiction and artwork, to endeavors of archiving and imagining a decolonial future beyond the violence of settler colonialism, to questions of social reproduction and embodied futurities.

Public Space and Resistance

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 17:16:00 +0000

Mass protest in public space is often situated as the normative mode of resistance in contemporary states. This was emphasized in 2011 when mass revolutionary protest emerged in large-scale public spaces in capital cities across the Arab region. In Palestine, this overlap of public space and resistance is interrupted. Decades of colonization, oppressive planning and policing, and the perpetuation of the refugee question have troubled notions of what constitutes the “public” and its representation in spaces designed and managed by the “state”. Studying public space and resistance in Palestine sheds light on the limitations and potentials of coupling these concepts, while providing inspiration for resistance acts in varied site types.

Mapping and Counter-mapping

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 17:16:00 +0000

Maps are central to the spatiality of Palestine, where practices of mapping and erasure are entangled in relations of power, of demarcating, naming, renaming, and representing space, as well as the creative remaking and reimagination of place and space. Due to its centrality in global narratives, Palestine has become one of the most surveyed places on earth, and yet data accessibility is very uneven, as gatekeeping becomes a security practice. Spatial data in the region is particularly contested, as Israel uses it to further state projects of spatial expansion, colonial dispossession, and apartheid, and Palestinians engage in counter-mapping as a form of asserting claims to the territory of Palestine, mediated through memory, nationalisms, and contested visions for the future. To consider practices of mapping and counter-mapping is to interrogate the cartographical archive we inherit and use, its conditions of making, access and obliteration, it is also to interrogate the techno-scientific, practical and imaginative practices involved in these contested processes.

The Vernacular and the Informal

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 17:17:00 +0000

A significant aspect of Palestinian history and culture can be understood by examining various forms of vernacularity and “informality” which have developed over centuries in response to environmental, socio-economic, and political changes. The historic and contemporary Bedouin, peasant, and urban architecture associated with vernacular and informal modes of living, whether in villages, refugee camps, Jerusalem’s “informal” neighbourhoods, or elsewhere, provide valuable insights into the role of colonialism, capitalism, and modernity in shaping Palestinian built environments. Similar to the histories of other regions worldwide, the vernacular and the informal in Palestine can be intertwined in ways that challenge their conventional understandings and meanings, offering a lens into intricate spatio-temporal relationships.

Cultural Heritage

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 18:38:00 +0000

From Aleppo to Beirut, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, cultural heritage sites in Bilad al-Sham and the Eastern Mediterranean span thousands of years. Within this context, notions of value, authenticity, and representation are contested and redefined. Yet, this complexity is perhaps most acute in Palestine, given its centrality to early explorations by European consular, scientific, and religious missions. Resulting from these interventions, Palestine’s cultural heritage has long been dominated by Orientalist, colonial, and theological narratives. In contrast, Palestinians have cultivated and sustained a heritage rooted in inclusivity—embracing diverse civilizations, historical layers, social classes, and religious groups—in deliberate contrast to the ethno-national exclusivity imposed by the settler colonial project. Cycles of expulsion, destruction, theft and spaciocide have damaged much of the tangible aspects of Palestinian life—such as civic buildings, homes, furniture, personal belongings, photographs, and documents—and, in parallel, have eroded centuries of intangible heritage, traditions, and social life. This has sparked a fervent awakening to preserve all facets of tangible and intangible heritage both within Palestine and in the diaspora (shatat). The preservation and documentation of traditional knowledge; solidarity and alternative cultural tourism; as well as the revitalization of historic towns have become tools of resistance, helping to remember the past, combat its erasure, and shape an emancipatory future. Architects, local communities, and heritage specialists actively work to preserve cultural heritage, engaging in critical questions about Palestine’s heritage sites—from the cultural landscape of olive groves and vineyards in Battir, the old city of Acre and the Saint Hilarion Monastery/Tell Umm Amer, to the modern architecture of refugee camps.

Urban Palestine

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 17:17:00 +0000

The study of the modern urban history of Palestine, like other spaces in the Global South, is often dominated by colonial experiments, figures, visions, and projects. Recently, there has been a growing interest in revisiting this history beyond the colonial frame, acknowledging the active role Palestinians took in producing their urban modernity within and beyond imperial and colonial influence. This perspective positions Palestinian collective agency within regional and global networks of urban modernity that helped shape new Palestinian urban classes and modern forms of urban governance, political life, economic pursuits, and cultural expressions. The continuous waves of urbanisation and de-urbanisation in Palestine under colonial rule have transformed and reshaped Palestinian social fabric. This has impacted class structure, urban-rural dynamics, and urban identities, citizenship, lifestyles, and spatial organisation. A key historic moment was the loss of the cosmopolitan space and urban networks of the coastal cities, juxtaposed with the rising prominence of mountain cities after the 1948 Nakba. Urban colonial policies, whether through urban annihilation, heritage dispossession, ghettoization, gentrification, or through aggressive new developments, have motivated Palestinians for over a century to engage in various forms of urban resistance.

Destruction and Reconstruction

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 17:16:00 +0000

Today, as the world continues to watch the mass destruction of Gaza, questions of reconstruction emerge again, reflecting on more than a century marked by destruction, writing and rewriting of history in Palestine. The settler colonial system has destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages, educational centers, archives, and universities, changed streets’ and villages’ names, and continues to forcibly evict Palestinians from their homes and cities. This material and symbolic erasure has been used by Israel as a tool to uproot Palestinians and their heritage from their homeland. Millions of Palestinian refugees remain scattered around the world with no right to return even to the ruins of their homes and to commemorate the Nakba. Despite the scale of this loss and injury, Palestine teaches us—geographers, architects and urban planners—to rethink the politics and aims of reconstruction towards imagining a free and just future that connects Palestinians within their own country, as well as Palestinians in diaspora. But where to start without an end of colonization?

Political Ecology

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 17:16:00 +0000

Ecologies, the interdependent systems that sustain inhabitation, are always political. Considering the political ecologies in Palestine helps us articulate the intersections of several questions and discourses that often seem contradictory or are often kept conveniently separate. Palestine reveals the multiplicity of such issues: from logics of conservation of nature that rely on ecocide, to circuits of violence that lay waste on land, air and water; from the interconnections of extracting resources to the movement of building material; from debates about native and invasive plants, to questions about food and food sovereignty, preservation and resisting the slow toxicities of occupation. In all of these, a critical lens on ecologies and the multiple logics of environmentalism help us connect the dots of how space is embroiled in an ongoing struggle over land itself. It further orients us to questions of livelihoods, inhabitation, and futurities. This theme suggests an organization around key, ordinary, ecological elements to trace the worlds, discourses and politics they gather. Plants; which help unpack logics of conservation, seeds, food and practices of foraging, and landscaping as a settler colonial tool. Stone; which helps unpack the ecologies of extraction, quarrying, building and, often, demolitions. Water; which orients towards the flows of life, cultivation, waste and toxicities.

Communal and Colonial Infrastructures

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 17:15:00 +0000

Throughout history, communities of peasants, urban dwellers, and Bedouins in Palestine have cultivated a local knowledge of infrastructure—shaped through a close relationship with the natural environment and evolving socio-economic structures. This knowledge has included collective stewardship over water, means of production, and transportation. Simultaneously, the geography of Palestine has been, for millennia, a palimpsest of mega-infrastructure projects that fulfilled the dreams of imperial and colonial expansion—from Roman aqueducts and Ottoman railways to the British Mandate’s electrification project and Israel’s National Water Carrier. These projects have profoundly influenced the lives of ordinary people and their relationship with their surroundings. Against this backdrop, the “infrastructural turn” in Middle East and Palestine studies urges a closer examination of how infrastructure shapes spatial relations of power and dissent, while simultaneously connecting the region to global structures of capitalism and colonialism. Nowhere is this more evident than in Palestine, where everyday infrastructures—and their failures—are entangled with settler-colonial rule, humanitarian interventionism, developmentalist agendas, and segregationist logics. Whether through roads and checkpoints, waste management systems, or digital connectivity, infrastructure actively assembles political life—shaping how colonized space is governed and controlled by the colonial, and inhabited and resisted by the colonized.

Global Palestine

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 17:15:00 +0000

The postcolonial global condition is often characterised by migration patterns linking urban centres of empire with former colonies. For Palestinians, the colonial condition is ongoing and operates in distinct temporal and spatial modalities, in which settler colonialism persists alongside policies of ethnic cleansing. Key markers, such as 1948 and 1967, triggered waves of mass forced displacement both within and beyond Palestine, resulting in the presence of over 6 million Palestinians outside their homeland, scattered across the globe and denied the right of return. Variously categorised as the shatat—whether as refugees, migrants, or citizens of other countries—they form transnational communities in exile spatialised in a diversity of built forms—e.g. camps, ethnic neighbourhoods, informal settlements, and urban peripheries, centres and suburbs—predominately across the Arab world, Europe, and the Americas. The shatat are simultaneously rooted in a particular locality while networked with each other and with Palestine. This social and spatial relation is dynamic, producing waves of multi-generational displacement, exile, migration, and return to and from multiple territories, geographies, and communities. The Palestinian shatat thus engages in a multi-faceted spatial politics related to both city and world-making, while maintaining a society struggling for liberation. In so doing, they have also contributed to global solidarities related to anticolonialism.