De-colonising the right to housing, one new city at a time: Seeing housing development from Palestine/Israel

The right to housing is generally understood as a local struggle against the global commodification of housing. While useful for recognising overarching urbanisation processes, such understanding risks washing over the distinctive politics that produce the housing crisis and its ostensible solutions in different contexts around the globe. Situated in a settler-colonial context, this paper bridges recent comparative urban studies with Indigenous narratives of urbanisation, to re-think housing crisis solutions from the point of view of the colonised. Based on in-depth interviews with Palestinian citizens of Israel, the paper compares two cases of state-initiated, privatised housing developments, one in Israel and one in the Occupied Palestinian Territories: the new cities Tantour and Rawabi. Each case is examined as a singularity, distinctive formations of the spatialities of Zionist settlement in Palestine, which are now being transformed through privatised housing development. The paper presents these developments as mutually constituted through a colonial-settler project and Palestinian sumud resistance, the praxis of remaining on the land. The paper utilises comparison as a strategy, exploring each new city in turn, to reveal the range of directions in sumud. Thus, by seeing housing development as site for negotiating de-colonisation on the ground, the paper contributes to recent debates over the power of comparative urbanism to re-think global phenomena through treating urban terrains as singularities.

Socialist worldmaking: The political economy of urban comparison in the Global Cold War

This article revisits comparative urban studies produced during the Cold War in the framework of ‘socialist worldmaking’, or multiple, evolving and sometimes antagonistic practices of cooperation between socialist countries in Eastern Europe and decolonising countries in Africa and Asia. Much like the recent ‘new comparative urbanism’, these studies extended the candidates, terms and positionalities of comparison beyond the Global North. This article focuses on operative concepts employed by Soviet, Eastern European, African and Asian scholars and professionals in economic and spatial planning across diverse locations, and shows how they were produced by means of ‘adaptive’ and ‘appropriative’ comparison. While adaptive comparison was instrumental in the application of Soviet concepts in countries embarking on the socialist development path, appropriative comparison juxtaposed concepts from various contexts – whether the ‘West’ or the ‘East’ – in order to select those best suitable for the means and needs on the ground. This article argues that this conceptual production was conditioned by the political economy of socialist worldmaking and shows how these experiences are useful for a more critical advancement of comparative urban research today.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter summarises the key findings and suggests policy recommendations. Part I delineated the pernicious impacts of neoliberalism and austerity on public/social housing in London, and analysed the role that estate demolition has played. Part II cast a sociological gaze not only at how working-class housing, lives and spaces are materially deprived and symbolically devalued by powerful external forces (neoliberalism and austerity), but also at how such housing, lives and spaces become valued and valuable. This emphasis on positive values corrects those policy perspectives that view estates through the epistemologically narrow lens of quantitative area-based deprivation indices. In comparative urbanism terms, London social housing estates remain substantially different from the anomic, often dangerous spaces of urban marginality such as US public housing projects (Wacquant). Part III focused on residents’ experiences of living through regeneration. It demonstrated how the valuation/devaluation duality tilts around in terms of place belonging. Comprehensive redevelopment diminishes the valued aspects of estates, while the devalued aspects are heightened and eventually dominate. The book provides several policy recommendations and research agendas. Demolition-based regeneration schemes inevitably result in state-led gentrification, but refurbishment-only schemes have the potential to improve estates and residents’ lives.

Elsewheres

By examining 798 in Beijing and Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Chapter 1 establishes the context for a comparative study of art spaces. Rather than empirical anomalies of their respective settings, these examples evince the capacity of art spaces to transform cities and the contested perceptions of their role in cities. The dual aims of the book are to understand how the place-making activities of art spaces add to an understanding about aspiration in the city as well as to develop a means to operationalize comparative urbanism. Beyond a critique of parochialism in urban theory, this empirical study of art spaces offers some guidance about how to engage with comparative urbanism as a framework for research. An overview of the chapters is provided.

Engaging Comparative Urbanism

The concepts employed to understand cities around the world are sourced form a limited set of urban experiences. Comparative urbanism seeks to address this problem, but has yet to offer concrete tools to do so. This book engages with comparative urbanisms as one of the most critical debates facing urban studies. Rather than corrective inclusion, an analysis of the premises behind comparative urbanism suggests that the focus should be on how cities and cases are compared. An epistemic inversion is necessary to redraw the relationship of models and cases. Employing an empirical study of art spaces in Beijing and Berlin to engage with this experiment, the qualitative investigation delves into their motivations and practices, discovering how non-profit art spaces claim and sustain their space in a competitive urban landscape. The nature of these art spaces as temporary is considered in the context of precarity and nomadism, but also challenged as the durability of many art spaces transcend the material space. The spaces of possibility that are exposed in a context of perceived inevitabilities reveal the function of aspiration. Aspiration, as a navigational capacity, is not only a function of the individual but also about the presence of elsewhere. This was significant for the imagination of the possible, and for their attainment.