Making Space on the Run: Exercising the Right to Move in Jerusalem Una McGahern Department of Politics, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK School of Geography, Politics & Sociology, 40-42 Great North Road, Newcastle NE1 7RU, [email protected] Senior Lecturer in Politics at Newcastle University. 1 Making Space on the Run: Exercising the Right to Move in Jerusalem This paper explores the politics of running in the fragmented city of Jerusalem. Through a series of ‘run-alongs’ – an innovative method of talking while running – with members of the city’s first Palestinian running group, it reveals the mobile, multi- sited and multi-modal practices they use to transgress borders and reclaim spaces for themselves to live within it. Situating an analysis of their running practices within a discussion of the right to the city, it draws attention to social running as a form of collective action and an ongoing exercise of their right to move in the city. Keywords: mobility; running; borders; right to the city; Palestinians in Jerusalem Introduction Following the launch in 2013 of the first Palestine Marathon in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, a Right to Movement (RTM) running community was established with the dual aim of drawing attention to the restrictions of movement experienced by Palestinians living across the occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) (Stacher 2018) and of encouraging Palestinian men and women to exercise their right to move in their home cities (righttomovement.org). Today, this grassroots social movement has branches in ten cities across Israel-Palestine (in Bethlehem, Gaza, Haifa, Hebron, Jaffa, Jericho, Jerusalem, Nablus, Nazareth and Ramallah), with hundreds of Palestinians exercising their right to move together on the run several times each week. Given their framing of running as a right to move in their home cities, an analysis of their running practices through the conceptual framework of the “right to the city” is fitting. Increasingly recognised as a basic human right (Wari 2011), the right to the city is understood to be more than the individual right to access urban resources (Harvey 2008). It represents, inter alia, a collective right to urban life (Lefebvre 1996); “a demand for the democratisation of control over the collective means of producing urban space” (Brenner 2017); a struggle to 2 “make yourself the centre of your own life, the centre of your own developmental process” (Merriman 2017); as well as an ongoing and open-ended “right-in-the-making” (Mitchell 2017) that is productive of new and alternative ways of moving and living in the city. Yet, prevailing analyses of the right to the city remain narrowly focused on direct forms of struggle that are rooted in place and result in visible transformations of the urban landscape, underemphasising the indirect, mobile and multi-sited ways in which marginalised and vulnerable groups subtly, cautiously and tentatively exercise their right to the city over time. Advancing a methodological critique of the right to the city concept, this paper draws on insights from the fields of mobilities, urban studies and contentious politics in order to argue that social running in Jerusalem provides a useful lens through which to reframe the right to the city as an ongoing political claim and exercise that is manifested through indirect, open-ended, and sustained practices of ordinary, yet contentious and transgressive movements that bring about subtle transformations of everyday life in the city. In the ‘contested’ (Rosen & Shlay 2014), ‘fragmented’ (Pullan 2013), ‘segregated’ (Shtern 2016) and ‘colonial’ (Nolte & Yacobi 2015) city of Jerusalem, patterns of (im)mobility as well as access to public spaces, services and opportunities are not only ethnically-differentiated but gendered and classed (Fenster 2005; Handel 2014; Kotef 2015; Peteet 2015; Berda 2017; McGahern 2017). Yet, this order is also unstable and fluid, subject to competing logics of ethnoterritorial expansionism and resistance (Yiftachel & Yacobi 2003: 690) as minority groups (must) find new and alternative ways to move in the city in order to satisfy their basic social and material needs. A growing body of work has begun to examine these alternative and resilient minority mobility practices (Greenberg-Raanan & Shoval 2014; Baumann 2016; Rokem & Vaughan 2017; Shtern & Yacobi 2018). Explorations of Palestinian leisure mobilities in the city remain, however, few and far 3 between (Meneley 2019) and, at the point of writing, there are no studies of Palestinian recreational running at all. This paper addresses this gap by providing an in-depth study of the city’s first running group organised by, and for, Palestinians. The analysis which follows builds on a ‘run-along’ method of ethnographic research which has been uniquely adapted here to the running subject and to the study of urban recreational running. This method speaks to emerging scholarship which engages with running as a distinct and valuable mode of ethnographic enquiry of the politics of everyday life in Israel-Palestine (Mannes-Abbott 2012; Dumper 2014). Its broader aim, however, is to contribute to wider explorations of recreational running as a political claim, strategy and activity whereby key political rights – namely, the right to move and the right to recreation – are not only practiced but exercised together on a regular and incremental basis. The paper proceeds as follows: The first section outlines the paper’s mobility-based and social-needs driven conceptualisation of the right to the city. The next section outlines the contours of mobility and space in Jerusalem. The third section outlines insights from current scholarship on leisure practices in Jerusalem while the following section narrows in on the embodied effects of running. The paper then outlines the “run-along” method used here, before analysing the routes used, patterns observed, and meanings, values and feelings that were produced and shared on the run. The paper concludes with a discussion of the relevance of its findings for the study of the right to the city more generally. Exercising the Right to Move in the City “The right to the city might seem a fuzzy sort of human right, but it is very concrete. It means the right to live out the city as one’s own, to live for the city, to be happy there. The right to affordable housing, a decent school for the kids, accessible services, reliable public transport. The right to have your urban horizon as wide or as narrow as you want. This might mean an allegiance to the neighbourhood, to 4 your street or building, but also to what lies beyond. The urban as a whole should be yours, yours to move in yours to explore, possess, feel you have a stake in – should you want it.” (Merrifield 2017) Increasingly recognised as a basic human right that must be preserved and guaranteed (Wari 2011: 469), the right to the city has nonetheless been criticised as a “fuzzy” concept (Attoh 2011: 678) that is excessively broad, abstract and lacking in a clear analytical framework that would make it applicable or responsive to different forms of urban exclusion as well as struggles for urban life that are experienced by different groups of people living in different cities around the world (Rosen & Shlay 2014; Jabareen 2014). As Shahd Wari (2011: 469-70) observes, the concept includes a vast umbrella of rights, such as “equality of participation in using the city space and in formulating and producing it”, “the right to occupy and own land”, “the provision of public transportation, energy and basic infrastructure”, “freedom of movement within the urban space”, “internationally recognised human rights to housing, social security, work, appropriate living standards, recreation, information, organisation and freedom of assembly, water and food”, as well as “health, education, culture, privacy and security, a safe and healthy environment”. In order to provide it with greater analytical traction, Palestinian planner Yousef Jabareen (2014) set out six main types of right which are constitutive of the right to the city. These are: the right of appropriation, the right of participation, the right to centrality, the right to inhabit, the right to habitat, as well as the right to individualization in socialization. To this, I add the right to movement as a key corollary right of the right to the city and a basic measure of it, whereby the right to centrality, participation, individualisation in socialisation, space production, etc., are all understood to be fundamentally dependent upon a preceding right to movement. 5 The analysis put forward here focuses on the right to movement in relation to one other right that is often neglected within broader discussions of the right to the city: the right to leisure. In order to support this move, I return to Henri Lefebvre’s seminal Writings on Cities in which he sets out his conceptualisation of the right to the city as based not only on the social needs of urban inhabitants, but on their efforts to satisfy them. The need for “security and opening”, “certainty and adventure”, “organization of work and play”, “isolation and encounter”, “exchange and investments”, for “independence (even solitude) and communication” (Lefebvre 1996: 147), are all understood by him to be not only relational and dynamic, but rooted in ordinary, open-ended and mobile practices that individuals and groups engage in as part of their everyday life. Efforts to satisfy these basic needs can be observed in a myriad of ordinary mobilities, from the daily work commute, through shopping practices, to leisure and sporting practices. Here, it is important to note that, as with the right to recreation, the pursuit of leisure and sporting activities is not considered to be a privileged add-on to Lefebvre’s conceptualisation of the right to the city, but a key component of it: “The human being has the need to accumulate energies and to spend them, even waste them in play.