Space, Architecture, and Environment
Introduction Video
Video coming soon
Description
How do roads, water, natural resources, and general infrastructure become tools for political control? This collection examines how space, architecture, and environmental governance operate as forms of power in Palestine.
Thinking with and beyond the material world, the sources in the collection considers how policy frameworks, infrastructure, ecological management, and cultural representation intersect with and are influenced by spatial organization. This raises important questions regarding how physical space is tied up with sovereignty and identity.
The collection spans disciplines, including environmental anthropology, human rights scholarship, urban planning, political geography, cultural analysis, and engineering; they are also methodologically diverse, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, architectural analysis, policy critique and media interpretation. Sources range from peer-reviewed journal articles to scholarly analyses of documentary media to a podcast episode. Geographically, topics range from specific urban case studies (for example, Nablus Old City and Al-Walaja) to general analyses spanning larger regions of infrastructure and environmental governance. Temporally, the works focus primarily on the contemporary period, but situate current dynamics within longer histories of territorial transformation.
Three major themes run through the collection. The first is the political nature of infrastructure, and how it functions as a mechanism of spatial governance. These studies show that infrastructure is inherently political as it shapes access to land, water, mobility, and economic opportunity in critical ways. Immaterial infrastructure, such as urban planning regimes, cartography, and land classification systems also serve as administrative technologies that produce territorial control and influence competing claims to sovereignty.
The second emphasizes the counterintuitive role of environmental policy in urban planning. Specifically, the collection explores how ecological initiatives often presented as neutral or progressive are, in reality, contributing to land dispossession and regulatory exclusion—or what is often described as greenwashing.
Third, the collection explores the relationship between space, landscape, identity (and more specifically, cultural preservation). Specifically, some of the works examine how practices such as foraging and traditional agriculture, and attempts to regulate these practices, illustrate broader struggles over indigeneity. Others consider renaming, mapping, and monuments heritage, and with it, cultural survival. Together, these works serve as an initial framework for understanding how Palestinian space is created, regulated, and contested. The collection will be meaningful for anyone curious about the intersections of environment, infrastructure, and spatial politics in the Middle East, particularly through the lens of settler-colonial power dynamics.