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Authority over Spatial Identity: Municipal Documentation Narrating Lydd’s Identity
Abstract
As space and place are constructed through affective relations to geographies and the social relations within them, urban planning interventions order people into place. Such orderings, though, are normative and political, and the ensuing urban planning interventions seek to alter the built environment in a manner that aligns with the normative values held by the individual planner and the larger institution. While planning is not reducible to government institutions, the official planning departments in municipalities hold significant rhetorical and policing power in shaping the city’s reputation. With such a central role, this paper aims to highlight how the Lydd municipal government understands and constructs the city’s “mixed” identity. At the national scale, the state thrusts a ‘mixed’ identity upon the city. Ambiguously defined as a city with a “significant” number of Jewish and Palestinian residents, the question though becomes how is a “mixed city” envisioned, emplaced, and enacted by the municipality. Incredibly malleable and unstable, spatial identity assertions and constructions are found in and produced by a variety of municipal materials. This research turns primarily to master and comprehensive plans and urban renewal projects published by the municipality as the foundation from which to build an understanding of how the City wants Lydd to be perceived. By taking together the language of the justifications for construction, preservation, and redevelopment enfolded within the project narratives alongside the geographies repeatedly denoted as needing intervention, ultimately, a pattern of Palestinian erasure and replacement emerges despite the generative opportunity for diverse encounters that mixity, which encompasses the physical proximity garnered through social mix projects and the rhetoric surrounding intercommunal encounters, theoretically espouses. This exploration into municipal interventions in Lydd asks how does mixity become a smokescreen to enact exclusion and erasure. While attention to the municipal enactments of identity over space is merely one side of placemaking, the focus on governing institutions underscores the political dynamics and circumstances within which Palestinians, as well as other informal and formal non-government institutions and collectives, are engaging to assert their own understanding of Lydd’s. Setting this groundwork then allows the opportunity for further research into the reactions and proactive attempts of others in shaping Lydd, especially the Palestinian residents as they too engage with and negotiation the city’s “mixed” identity.
Discipline
Architecture & Urban Planning
Geographic Area
Israel
Palestine
Sub Area
None