Unliveable Spaces Architecture and Violence in the West Bank Johannessen, Runa Publication date: 2018 Document version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Document license: CC BY-NC-ND Citation for published version (APA): Johannessen, R. (2018). Unliveable Spaces: Architecture and Violence in the West Bank. Det Humanistiske Fakultet, Københavns Universitet. Download date: 11. okt.. 2021 UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN FACULTY OF HUMANITIES PhD Thesis Runa Johannessen UNLIVEABLE SPACES Architecture and Violence in the West Bank UNLIVEABLE SPACES Architecture and Violence in the West Bank PhD Thesis Runa Johannessen University of Copenhagen Faculty of Humanities Department of Arts and Cultural Studies CONTENT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 4 INTRODUCTION: A VIOLENT PANORAMA 7 CHAPTER I: SPATIAL ANTAGONISM 17 Resistance and Power 18 Situational Spatial Practice 23 Sumud and Everyday Resistance 30 Historical Outline of Sumud 33 Practice of Freedom 38 Spatial Resistance 42 Territorialisation 44 CHAPTER II: MUGHRABI BRIDGE 51 Securing Unimpeded Access 53 Access Denied and Trespassed 57 Controversial Design 60 Seeking Access 65 Permanent Temporariness 71 Unintentional Monuments 72 CHAPTER III: UNPLANNING 81 Structural Conditions for Unplanning 85 Judicial Unplanning 92 Unplanning by Construction 98 Unplanning by Destruction 102 CHAPTER IV: UNLIVEABILITY 111 Phenomena of Violence 114 Necropolitical Order 121 Potential Violence 126 Unliveable Spaces 131 2 CHAPTER V: TIME MATTERS 135 The Jordan Valley 138 Buying Time: Humanitarian NGO 146 Future Ruin: Jordan Valley Solidarity 151 Killing Time 159 CHAPTER VI: PROBING THE TERRAIN 163 Mêtis 166 House in Disguise 170 Flexible Lines 175 Speculative Exchange 181 CONCLUSION: YET UNBORN REALITIES 185 Sense of Possibility 187 Speculation 191 Fiction/Friction 200 ABSTRACT (EN) 204 RESUMÉ (DK) 205 LIST OF FIGURES 206 BIBLIOGRAPHY 209 APPENDICES Appendix A: Emergency Response to Demolition 222 Interview with Humanitarian NGO Project Manager Appendix B: Post Oslo Urbanism 233 Interview with Yazid Anani 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly, I would like to express my special gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Frederik Tygstrup, whose patience, encouragement and exceptional ability to open doors to the world of thought have made this thesis possible. Thanks to my colleagues and fellow PhD students at the University of Copenhagen for contin- ued conversations, questions and advices, expanding my intellectual territories over the years. A special thanks to my PhD colleague Jens Bjering for the count- less discussions on early drafts and for tenaciously keeping spirits up. Thanks to Eyal Weizman and the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmith’s Univer- sity, London, for generously letting me learn from the most brilliant minds at the Centre’s PhD Roundtables. Thanks to Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti and, again, Eyal Weizman at Decolonizing Architecture for having me as part of their collab- orative research program in the West Bank in the summer of 2011, which provided crucial insights, experiences and prepared the ground for later fieldwork. Thanks also to fellow residents at DAAR. Thanks to all those who accepted to talk with me, share their thoughts and knowledge with me, open their homes for me, and show me around in the West Bank. Many encounters and meetings have informed the work with this thesis. Thanks to Rashid Khudairy and Jordan Valley Solidari- ty, Rami Nasrallah and the amazing staff at International Peace and Cooperation Centre in Jerusalem, the cunning builder HH, the NGO project worker TT, Yazid Anani, Afaf Shattara, EAPPI team members in Jayyous and Azzun, Jeff Halper, Khaldun Bshara, informants in Shu’fat RC, Livia Minoja, Nasir Samara, ShamsArd and Sami Murra, for in each their way, knowingly or not, leading me further in my research. A special thank go to Hassan Muamer for always offering new perspec- tives, enthusiasm and hospitality, and to Maya Lecker for extending our friendship to archival work in Hebrew. Thanks to Joachim Hamou and his invitation to con- tribute to his performative project United Israel Palestine UIP27; much enthusiasm and thoughtfulness came along when working with the UIP27 team. Thanks to the Lifta Coalition, and to the Lifta team at Architects Without Borders Denmark for an intense and rewarding year of work, keeping me on track while working on the side: Annette Bluhm Hovgaard, Kristina Maria Kaiser, Nicola Markhus, Sandra Scheller and Talieh Kaveh. Thanks to my colleagues Dag Petersson, Niels Grøn- 4 bæk and Olympia Nouska at Political Architecture — Critical Sustainability at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture. My research has in- deed developed in co-evolution with PA-CS’s remarkable colleagues and students. Thanks to the Danish Institute in Damascus for providing financial support for an extended field trip and to the graduate school ‘InterArt’ at Freie Universität, Ber- lin, for generously offering a two months fellowship. Thanks to my shrewd and pa- tient friends Jonas Labbé, Helen Nishijo Andersen, Anne Haaning, Li Jonsson, Ma- rie Dahl and my sister Toril Johannessen who read along on pilot chapters where ideas were still in their embryo, and provided vital feedback, while Orr Frayden has been very helpful in Hebrew translations as well as being a thoughtful discus- sion partner. Thanks to Neil Bennun for most helpful language-guidance early on and to John Edom for skillful proofing of my manuscript, including valuable comments. At the end, I would especially like to thank my mother, Inger Karlsen, for inviting me to visit her while she was working in the West Bank in 2010, thus unwittingly guiding me into writing this thesis. And last, but certainly not least, I wish to thank my partner, Isak Winkel Holm, for endless amounts of support in all that matters — and to express my gratitude to our amazing and patient children, Leonard Winkel Holm and Eskild Johannessen. 5 6 INTRODUCTION A Violent Panorama Fig. 1: Southern Jerusalem hills (2011). In the documentary Rebel Architecture: The Architecture of Violence, directed by Ana Naomi de Sousa and broadcast by Al Jazeera in September 2014, we follow Eyal Weizman, the Israeli architect and theorist of spatial and visual cultures, on a tour of the West Bank and Jerusalem. “Everything in this panorama is a tactical tool in the architecture of occupation. You just need to know how to decode it”, Weizman says, looking at the seemingly quiet hillsides and valleys of southern Jerusalem.1 Here, the weapons of the battlefield are not guns, drones and bombs, but trees, ter- races, houses and their cladding. With Weizman as guide and interpreter of the landscape, the close relation- ship between architecture and violence in the Israel-Palestine conflict becomes visible. The violence of almost half a century of Israeli occupation is inscribed 1 Ana Naomi de Sousa, “The Architecture of Violence,” in Rebel Architecture (Al Jazeeera, 2014), 3:40. 7 on the Palestinian landscape through its built artefacts. The ruins of demolished houses are evidence of violence done to built structures; the brutal presence of the separation barrier is evidence of violence performed by built structures. However, in most cases the violence embedded in built artefacts is less self-explanatory. It might appear in the form of ordinary homes and infrastruc- ture that provide the spatial and material means for inhabiting a place, for exam- ple, or through significant historical buildings imbued with symbolic and religious meaning. In the political configuration of the built space of the Occupied Palestin- ian Territories (OPT), architecture appears as a tactically deployed weapon of ter- ritorial control. Standing in the dual position of being both a means to achieve an objective and the objective in itself, the elementary gestures of architecture — to control and inhabit a place — are employed in a conflict that concerns, fundamen- tally, who has the right to a future in this land. Invoking Weizman’s statement, my aim with this thesis has been to learn how to ‘decode the panorama’ of a landscape saturated by violence. To this end, the present text is concerned with reading architecture and its related practices as a weapon in a political conflict. This spatial instrumentalisation is effected by Israel through the commonplace civic practices of urban planning, house build- ing, and archaeological excavation by turning these practices into a means of spa- tial control and dispossession. Further, the restrictions pertaining to Palestinian building, the destruction of Palestinian houses, the construction of the separation barrier, and the settlements built on occupied land, have had a profound impact on shaping physically a landscape that attests to violence. Together, these prac- tices form a distinct category that will later be referred to as unplanning, whose attritional effect is the production of unliveable spaces. Conversely, Palestinians inhabiting Palestinian land also turn to a number of tactical tools: disguised con- struction to escape Israeli surveillance, the creation of infrastructural bypasses, or the establishment of Palestinian ‘facts on the ground’, for example.2 While some of these counter-tools are employed to challenge the mechanisms of the occupa- tion, others are used for survival in everyday life. Together, these practices form a spectrum of practices that will be explored as situationally moulded acts. However, given that power is evidently distributed asymmetrically between the two adversaries,