“Housing as strategy: whose ideal city?” Oded Haas* © by the author(s) (*) Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University Health, Nursing and Environmental Studies Building 4700 Keele Street, Toronto ON, M3J 1P3
[email protected] Paper presented at the RC21 International Conference on “The Ideal City: between myth and reality. Representations, policies, contradictions and challenges for tomorrow's urban life” Urbino (Italy) 27-29 August 2015. http://www.rc21.org/en/conferences/urbino2015/ Forward This paper is part of an ongoing work that asks how global processes of urbanization may be informed by particular spatial politics in the Middle East, specifically in face of housing debates that refer to a global ‘housing crisis’ and focus on affordability as a solution.1 The paper was devised as a suggestion for future research that examines how the right to housing – understood as integral to Henri Lefebvre’s Right to the city (1968) – is influenced by local politics and global processes of urbanization simultaneously. Introduction In November 2014, the Israeli national planning authority approved the construction of a new city in the Western Galilee region in the northern part of the country: Tantour. The city is meant to provide housing to Israeli-Arab citizens, as a response to an acute housing distress within Israel’s most marginalized population.2 In this paper, I ask how the local housing crisis itself (defined and ostensibly solved by the state) is used by the state as a strategy for re-producing existing socio-spatial relations, and how it may be used by urban citizens for undermining the process of production of ‘ethnocratic’ space.