Architecture and Development front matter+table of contents

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 2023

In the contexts of decolonization and Cold War, the postcolonial Global South was a contested zone with fierce competition among various donors over development aid, in which the architectural aid constituted the backbone. The existing studies of the postcolonial built environment still tend to be weighed towards the two-way flows of people, institutions, things and knowledges between the South and either former Euro-American metropole or socialist Eastern-bloc, while a third category of emerging aid donors, such as China, Japan, South Korea or Brazil, seems largely peripheral to these studies. Ayala Levin's (2022) Architecture and Development is thus a valuable contribution to this scholarship by providing a novel narrative of a much less-researched donor through the lens of architecture, i.e. how Israel, which positioned itself as a fellow postcolonial developing country, turned its settler colonial experience into a new global development expertise that could be exported to the decolonizing South.

This article critically discusses the image and the imagining of the Arab village produced by two cultures, the national-Zionist from the 1930s onwards, and the national-Palestinian during the last decade. Unlike fellow theorists and researchers, we are reluctant to be satisfied with the claim that throughout history the Jews, establishing their identity vis-à-vis the rural and oriental 'other', perceived the Arab village in an inversely mirrored manner. Instead, we suggest that it took the Arab village only a few years to transform from an object which represents the 'other' and a signifier of the backward enemy, to what we would define as 'still life', a-historical and de-politicised. The Arab village, we would argue, became an object, a source of colonial imagination in the Israeli architectural culture, which sought the 'local' in order to establish a national identity, without associating it with its creator, the Arab society. Within this framework, we also suggest that through a process of 'mutual contamination' the Arab village is perceived and politically re-constructed by Palestinian architectural discourse and practice within the boundaries of Israel.

The 2011 PhD YearBook contains a short description of the PhD programmes at Politecnico di Milano and an abstract of each of the PhD theses defended and awarded this year. Within School of Doctoral Programmes of Politecnico di Milano (www.polimi.it/phd), high-quality programmes in engineering, architecture, and design offer the possibility of studying and performing research in qualified laboratories and research groups. Therefore, the description of the research work at PhD level provides a broad overview of research being developed at Politecnico di Milano and in particular of the original contributions developed by PhD candidates, who, with their strenuous and dedicated work contribute to the advancement of knowledge in their research areas. In presenting this book, I would like to congratulate the 2011 Doctors for their achievements and I wish them all the best for their future professional life as researchers and innovators both in academic and in other organizations and companies.

IJIA, 2020

C o p y r i g h t I n t e l l e c t L t d 2 0 1 9 N o t f o r d i s t r i b u t i o n C o p y r i g h t I n t e l l e c t L t d 2 0 1 9 N o t f o r d i s t r i b u t i o n Abstract Conducting research on Israel's settlement project has become increasingly difficult throughout the past decade due to restrictions on public access to both the field and archives, including those of contemporary planning data. Meanwhile, scholars and activists have continued to document the spatial implications of settlements by diversifying their methods, including using architecture as forensic evidence of political aggression. In response, those who regulate access to archives and the field have focused on obfuscating information that could corroborate the illegality of settlements. This has led to a cyclical process in which the exposure of information and data has prompted the creation of further barriers to the field. Deep gaps in formal, authoritative data require methodological creativity and flexibility, such as reading the built environment itself as a primary source. Borrowing from Roland Barthes, this article points to the transgressive potential of architecture as a punc-tum, a point that opens research to multiple interpretations and helps researchers circumvent restrictions imposed by those regulating access to primary material. In this case study, we show how limited access to archival data has led researchers to study pre-approved settlement planning documents and settler-produced documentary clips, interweaving field and archive in meaningful ways. We argue that, by taking such an approach, researchers may transcend not only issues of access but also traditional boundaries of disciplines. Scholars and the general public alike have critically discussed the architecture and planning of settlements as structural violence in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Eyal Weizman, Oren Yiftachel, Neve Gordon, and

Planning Perspectives, 2006

A border is an ideological socio-cultural construct by which communities define and defend their territory. But what are its formal and spatial configurations? How is the border architecturally conceived and perceived? This paper investigates these questions through analysis of three border typologiesthe door, the bridge and the gateway -fostering a new discussion of architecture as a border-making practice. It also relates to how architects and planners contribute to conflict, and to ethnic and physical barrier-making by not being fully aware of the cultural and political implications of their actions. These ideas are discussed in the context of Israel/Palestine and the dynamic of the demarcation and separation between Israelis and Palestinians since the early twentieth century. It focuses specifically on the border zone between Tel Aviv and Jaffa, the Menshiyeh quarter. By examining border-making from architectural and urban perspectives, the paper expands the political-historical discussion of Israeli boundaries and clarifies the relationships between conflict (destruction), architecture (construction) and the everyday life of groups and individuals in today's world of modern nationalism. *Tali Hatuka is currently a Fulbright post-doctorate fellow at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has recently completed her PhD dissertation in Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. She has a BArch. from the Technion and an MA in Urban Design from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh College of Art and has taught Architecture and Town Planning at Technion. Her research and publications focus on the relationship between extreme events of violence, everyday life and the built environment.

The Next Urban Question (Bandieramonte V., Cavalieri C., Guida I., Rahidzadeh K. (eds), 2013

In the years of ripe imperialism, the great infrastructures represent for the development of territory, what the pioneers represent for the activity of settlers: a first sign, a guideline. As for the pioneers, likewise for the great infrastructures -and especially for the railways -narratives and myths have played a role which is decisive but also often detached from the work's concrete features, and even from the actual completion of the same: the Berlin-Baghdad Railway is probably one of the most clear and well-known examples of this rupture between history and mythology. However, this rupture is only apparent: history and mythology actually move towards a common process that we here call, using a concept from Max Weber's sociology, Land Use Rationalisation. In Palestine, before the outbreak of the first world war, this process was fostered by heterogeneous and mostly original settlement practices, generally ascribed to the category of colonisation: a word beset by many semantic ambiguities and that can here be understood as the settlement of community of emigrants in a foreign land. This paper aims at relating these two chapters of the history of Palestine that represent, at one and the same time, two specific declinations of the question of mobility.

International Journal of Islamic Architecture, 2021

During a class on the politics of architecture in Israel, a graduate student approached me with a personal inquiry, asking how to locate her family home in the history of architecture in Israel. She learned during her professional training to distinguish between different architectural modernisms-the interwar modernism that won Tel Aviv its international fame, the bare, efficient, and repetitive modernism of the postwar era, the sleek and elegant high modernism of public buildings, and the blunt Brutalism alongside the revisionist regionalism of younger rebels. She was also familiar with the Ottoman architecture that won Acre, for example, a UNESCO declaration, and was well acquainted with the Palestinian vernacular that was ambivalently admired by Israeli architects for capturing 'the genetic code of the place'. 1 But she grew up in Nazareth, and although she could identify its Old City with the Ottoman vernacular, the house she grew up in, outside the city centre, was clearly modern [Figure 1]. It was built during the 1960s by a prominent architect, and its architecture fell into none of the familiar categories she learned. How can we call this architecture, she asked. Is there an Arab modernism in Israel? This simple question testifies to an entrenched lacuna in the architectural historiography of Israel/Palestine-the architecture of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who constitute 20 per cent of the Israeli population. But this conspicuous absence pertains to a much larger predicament of writing the architectural histories of societies that suffer intense political conflicts. Much of the scholarship on the Middle East, and on Islamic societies elsewhere, is entangled in such dynamics-national struggles and repeated outbreaks of violence. The question is how eruptions of strife shape architectural and urban