Originally planning to explore memories of urbanities and lost and transformed urban landscapes in Jaffa and Tel Aviv, the vicissitudes of fieldwork brought me to a shared Zochrot-Badil project. ‘Envisioning the return of the Palestinian refugees’ ambitiously aspired to shift the discourse about the return from a ‘right’ to ‘practice’ by asking its participants, Israeli-Jews and Palestinians, to plan and imagine everyday life in a post-return polity on multiple scales, from state administrative, symbolic and legal apparatuses to micro levels of urban landscapes in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. This year-long joint project yielded a few unexpected twists and turns, taking us to Cape Town, South Africa, on a study tour of post-Apartheid society, and back to Palestine to dilapidated refugee camps. My paper will therefore offer preliminary thoughts about the multidirectionality not just of memory, but of place. The ‘directionality’ I am citing here alludes to spatial and geographical dimensions – itineraries within the city, across Palestine and to and from South Africa – as well as temporal ones; Allowing my research project to transform with shifting circumstances and opportunities redirected my focus from memories (dwelling on the past) to fantasies about the future(s), and therefore elicited reconsideration of temporalities and the ways in which they intersect with places and imbue them with meaning. In the end, the present urban spaces of Tel Aviv / Jaffa cease to be mere repositories of memories of lost homes and forms of sociability; in the same vain, they are not only lived spaces of current residents. By eliciting fantasies of possible futures, Tel Aviv and Jaffa become places that enact certain kinds of activism – towards return and reconciliation. And moreover, they become places that intersect and partially merge with other sites – refugee camps in the West Bank or a Cape Town neighbourhood razed by the apartheid regime. Finally, I also argue, these fantasies and imagined futures are shaped by those unexpected intersections of places as well as the emotionally-charged encounters between those who fantasize and between these people and the places they inhabit, visit, or pass through.