Nasser Bantustan Sublime

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The bantustan sublime: reframing the colonial in RamallahNasser Abourahme

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CITY, VOL. 13, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2009

ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/09/040499-11 © 2009 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13604810903298771

DebatesThe bantustan sublime: reframing the colonial in Ramallah

Nasser AbourahmeTaylor and Francis

Ramallah has emerged as the de facto capital of a truncated Palestinian proto-state. Thecentralization of economic, political, cultural and recreational activity, the influx ofmigrants and diasporic returnees, the rise of new middle classes and a relative social open-ness all signal the possibility of the nucleus of real urbanity. The rhythms and patterns ofeveryday urban life are palpable; cultural and sub-cultural life are pronounced and womenhave achieved a relative degree of social and spatial freedom.

Yet Ramallah is a city under siege—encamped and militarily surrounded. It exists in acurious liminality: tethered between indirect colonial occupation and the restless mobiliza-tion of local urbanity—neither directly occupied nor free, besieged but somehow vibrant. Inits spatialization of new Palestinian wealth and power Ramallah has rewritten the coordi-nates of local politics, generated new class and professional interests and forged newconsumption-based subjectivities. Here, an elite-driven production of space intertwines withand often complements the changing mechanisms and tools of Israeli control by reinforcinga burgeoning ‘regime of normalization’. The city has begun to detach from wider scales ofaction and concern. Centralization, in this case, means an increased bantustanization andthe disintegration of national strategy in return for local and contained micro-freedoms. Theself-styled capital of the state-to-come becomes a node in the consolidation of precisely thecolonial structures that will indefinitely delay such a realization. In this the most stark andphysical manifestation of the singularity of ‘post-colonial colonialism’ a transience, at theheart of the crisis of Palestinian politics, consolidates: reality is suspended; national fatesdeferred; a solution postponed.

Key words: Ramallah; colonialism; neoliberalism; space; subjectivity; urban development

here is a recent story in the Israelipress that has gone largely unno-ticed (Eldar, 2008). The proposed

high-speed rail line between Jerusalem andTel Aviv passes, it seems, at two pointsthough the occupied territories of the WestBank. Over land that would have to berequisitioned. In its colonial conquest of

territory, Israel has at its disposal a complexarsenal of legal-institutional mechanismsthat include the discriminatory use ofOttoman, British Mandate and Jordanianlaws; in the case of major infrastructuralchange in the West Bank the mechanismmost relied on is a Jordanian law thatallows for state-led expropriation of land

T


ABOURAHME: THE BANTUSTAN SUBLIME 501

for public use. However, there is a catch:the provision of the Jordanian law underwhich expropriation in the occupied terri-tories is effected is subject to an explicittechnicality—expropriation for public useis not legitimate unless the entire popula-tion regardless of race, nationality orreligion benefits from such an action(B’Tselem, 2002). In a bid to get around thisrail engineers and legal advisers from theMinistry of Defence conjured up an aston-ishing sleight of hand. The submitted planwas changed to have a new station added toit: Ramallah. Hypothetically, in the nearfuture one could board a train in down-town Tel Aviv and get off, approximatelyhalf-an-hour later, in downtown Ramal-lah. Quite staggering for a city that was putunder total military curfew for 22 days onlysix years ago, and is still fenced-in byconcrete walling, checkpoints and rovingpatrols. The irony is striking: a regional railnetwork designed to fragment Palestinianurban space and tighten Israeli colonialcontrol over the West Bank, ends up usinga connection to Ramallah as a means oflegitimization. That somewhere in Israeliperception, Ramallah, as place, has shiftedis not only testimony to a multi-layered‘(re)imagineering’ of this city but alsoreveals just how radically the spatializationof new Palestinian power and wealth hasreconfigured and confused the meaning ofthis place.

Ramallah is a space of ambiguity. A greyzone. A black box. Tethered between indi-rect colonial occupation and the restlessmobilization of local urbanity, betweenencampment and the haphazard expansionof its urban fabric, it uneasily nestles in adistinctly liminal space—neither directlyoccupied nor free, besieged but somehowvibrant, neither the capital city of an emer-gent state nor just another squeezed andbattered Palestinian town, rife with newsocial contradictions but still tentativelyheld together by a kind of residual‘national’ solidarity, not really ‘inside’ butdefinitely not ‘outside’. In the post-Oslo

morass new modalities of Palestinian ‘repre-sentation, valorization and articulation’—what Derek Gregory (2004, p. 19) wouldcall ‘performances of space’—have emerged,with paradoxical effect, around and throughthis city (see Figure 1).

Today, Ramallah functions—in real andimaginary ways—as a political and culturalnerve-centre for millions of Palestinians,only a tiny fraction of whom are ‘bound’ byits built form and with the rest hesitantly anddifferentially plugged in through the reach ofits political and economic institutions andthe consumption of its mediatized andpercolating imagery and repute (much of itspread by Israeli and international writers,flabbergasted at the thriving café and barculture). In relative terms, Ramallah embod-ies an astounding centralization of commer-cial, cultural, research, administrative andrecreational activities. For many of thosewho reside, work and attempt to reproducetheir daily lives in the city, it is a space ofincreasing potentiality, a space of toleranceand relative freedom. For many of those whodon’t, it increasingly represents an aspira-tional space, the new ‘promised land’ of acantonized and, more importantly, sealedWest Bank. All evidence, anecdotal andotherwise, suggests that no other localconurbation offers as much ‘breathing’ spacefor women. It is one of the few places inArab Palestine where traditional bonds ofbelonging—and with them the social circum-scriptions of family, clan, village—can be, atleast partially, dissolved and replaced withplace-based, lifestyle and consumption-driven affiliations. It is no surprise that itexperiences more in-migration than anyother Palestinian city, and even less so thatmore than half of its current residents wereborn elsewhere. It is in Ramallah with itsmyriad of international (and internationaliz-ing) organizations that a kind of diversity,even cosmopolitanism some would (hyper-bolically) say, inflects the social atmosphere.In the haunts of the upwardly mobile, bi-linguality and macaronic exchanges arecommonplace and inebriated conversation


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flows and oscillates freely and late into theearly hours of the morning. Musicians, intel-lectuals, artists, filmmakers, activists pepperthe place all centrally situated to ride thefundraising ‘gravy train’ that a distilled,serially imaged and feverishly peddled‘Palestine’ has become. In this, the mostfetishized of contexts, the art scene, a bit de-radicalized but diverse and markedlycontemporary, buzzes and shoots above itsweight, and the parameters of a kind of sub-culture, even a counter-culture can be traced.

Even without the social complexity andmultiplicity or the critical mass of metropoli-tan life, there is at times a distinctly urbanpace and temporal rhythm in central parts ofthe city: commerce buzzes, shoppers dart,hipsters loiter, young men ogle, music blares,odours mingle. On Thursday nights, a willedblindness—a kind of urban-veil—descendson the city, blotting out the settlements andwalls, the precarity and daily contingency,and even their memory. The urgent vivacityof borrowed time lived to its full is patently,viscerally, palpable. Reality is suspended,abstracted … postponed as people from allwalks of life try to fashion a semblance of

conventionality, a moment of extraordinaryordinariness. For those in the middle classes(myself included), this means a kind ofnormalcy, a normalcy we associate with theurbanity of those places that most directlyconfigure our coordinates of what is desir-able, progressive, free: the cities of WesternEurope and North America.

But at what price is normalcy attained in aradically and permanently exceptional real-ity? What underlying political project, some-times opaque but often brazen, underwritesand intertwines with the physical expansionand discursive articulation of this city? Inwhose image is this concrete and virtualpalimpsest being forged?

Ramallah is not just the story of new urbanidentities and possibilities, it is also a story ofclass, and still more a story of colonialism.Figure 1 Out with the old: discarded vending machines display some posters of leaders of the ancien regime.But first a caveat. No city can be reducedto a singular overriding logic, the ebbs andflows of counter-currents, weak as they maybecome (and in our ‘end of history’/post-everything days they are more than oftenweak) are a part and parcel of urban life.However, it is clear that Ramallah, in multi-ple ways, has become a crucial node in the

Figure 1 Out with the old: discarded vending machines display some posters of leaders of the ancien regime.



consolidation, complexification and rational-ization of the occupation. We can go furtherstill: it is this role—mediated through multi-ple, conscious and unconscious, channels—that ultimately defines what the productionof space in this city means.

At the level of formal politics this relation-ship is unabashed. Ramallah is the base ofoperations for the truncated fiefdom that thePalestinian Authority (PA) has gleefullyaccepted in return for taking over the day-to-day policing of Palestinians in the WestBank. If the occupation has been sub-contracted to the Authority then Ramallah isthe factory. One academic dubbed it theGreen Zone (Massad, 2006). He might havebeen a bit brusque, but analytically he is nottoo far off. That this obsequious relationshipis becoming more clear to people is evident inthe increasingly paranoiac, and internallyfocused, securitization of the city. A coterieof carefully groomed politicians and admin-istrators are anchored in the city and projecttheir grip through mobilizations of coercivepolice power; as is clear in the bullish buttheatrical deployment of various securityforces across different points in the city—asort of political performativity designed as akind of symbolic embodiment of the sover-eignty-less statehood exercised by the PA.Concomitant with this securitization ofspace, an atmosphere of growing hesitancyripples in the air these days, and the sketch-ings of the proto-typical bureaucraticauthoritarianism of the Arab political sceneare beginning to spatially and forcefully takeshape. Surreptitious arrests, torture, beatings,draconian overview are becoming part of theestablished canon of what some are describ-ing as an evolving police state. In many waysRamallah the city and Ramallah the authoritycannot be distinguished.

At a popular level reality is, naturally (andreassuringly), more fuzzy. That the citydisplays a kind of collective coma or apraxiais not in its own right that problematic orentirely distinctive. Urban history is litteredwith examples of cities that ‘cognitivelydetach’ from wider environs and forge alter-

native links and identity formations incontradistinction to, or at least outside,national or regional configurations. Tel Avivis something of such a phenomenon, oftenresentfully dubbed by many Israelis as a‘bubble’. It has even become catchy to talkabout Tel Aviv and Ramallah as parallelnodes of escapism and detachment. Twinbubbles. But this is a sophistic analogy.Ramallah the bubble, Ramallah the enclave isalso Ramallah the bantustan, even if itdoesn’t always feel like it. Fragmentation,here, is the name of the game not somebenign side effect. This is not the story of acapital or main city overtaking or outgrow-ing its peripheral peers, becoming too cool,too hip for its ugly sisters; this is about activeand directed fractalization. It’s a carving up.With the blunt side of a knife. The rest of theWest Bank’s cities are besieged and coer-cively de-modernized, while Israeli mastery(or is it munificence?) and foreign, mainlyEuropean, aid keep Ramallah dependentlyand indifferently ticking along, like a junkiewith a ‘benevolent’ dealer. The effect is inpart a carefully orchestrated assassination ofArab Jerusalem, which feeds into the widergoals of making any kind of centralized andcoordinated national-scale political mobiliza-tion impossible. This is nothing new. The de-rationalization of a coherent Palestiniannational political community has alwaysbeen an overriding imperative of the Israelicolonial regime. That the current movers andshakers, policymakers and powerbrokers inRamallah passively or actively feed into thislogic, however, is a shocking developmentand a damning indictment.

Perhaps the clearest indicator that Ramallahis given room to flourish is the drawnout construction boom—a banal but brashspeculative concrete expansion powered bylaissez-faire private contractors. At face value,the city, trapped in a sad state of mimesis,looks like a fledgling Amman—where aprivate-led building bonanza has produced agarish, consumption-heavy and class-frac-tured urban landscape that signals both theascendancy of new elite formations and


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the city’s re-positioning as a nodal point in theimperial restructuring of the region. What firstcatches the eye in Ramallah is a phenomenaland, at times, chaotic building spree. With theenduring image as the half-finished apartmentbuilding that sprouts up almost over night andthen takes years to finish; in some places thesespectral monoliths fill entire streets, creatinginstant ghost-neighbourhoods with a builtquality disturbingly reminiscent of the proxi-mate and (clearly) overbearing settlements(Figures 2 and 3). It is precisely this relentlesskinetic energy that Israeli MK Effi Eitam waspicturing when he warned that Palestinianswere waging a ‘jihad of buildings’ against theJewish state. There is something incredible inthe obdurate refusal to stop expanding againstall odds, and, moreover, the vista of an active,living, metamorphosing city will providetimely affirmations to peering suburbansettler-colonists of the futility of containmentand the inexorability of change.Figure 2 Red-roof echo: a ‘ghost-neighbourhood’ on the eastern fringe of Ramallah echoes the aesthetic sensibility of the back-grounded settlement of Psagot.Figure 3 Spectral suburbia: another suburban development, this time on the northern fringe of Ramallah, is mostly uninhabited reflecting a building boom that has surged well ahead of consumer demand.But there is something deeper and muchmore problematic to the underbelly of thisconcrete transmogrification, something that

goes beyond the aesthetic or ecologicalpoverty of most of the buildings, and pastthe corrupt procedures that ease theirconstruction.

It is clear that, on one level, the new urbandevelopments sprouting on the edges ofRamallah are initiating a form of suburban-ization meant to incubate new spatial andsocial structures. Like English-languageschools before them, they are intended quiteexplicitly to ‘modernize’ or socializeupwardly mobile Palestinians. The AspenInstitute talked of one such project—theeagerly anticipated Rawabi: a 5000 housingunit complex planned just north of Ramallahwith full Israeli blessing and Qatari capitaland dubbed the ‘first planned Palestiniancity’—as a way of steering Palestinians intomore moderate positions and changingpeople’s voting patterns; Palestinian entre-preneurs have echoed these sentiments—higher living standards and ‘happier’ livingenvironments they claim will improve stabil-ity and the prospects of peace (Holmes,2009). This is not just the familiar story of

Figure 2 Red-roof echo: a ‘ghost-neighbourhood’ on the eastern fringe of Ramallah echoes the aesthetic sensibility of the back-grounded settlement of Psagot.



suburbanization as atomization, it is urbandevelopment as political subjectivication writlarge. And the middle classes may be justabout ready for it.

The current evolution of the built environ-ment is, to a large extent, part of a clear andostentatious mobilization of a middle classdetermined to become more socially visible(Taraki, 2008), a class that has little interest in‘old’ politics or national projects—a classlargely preoccupied with social distinction.With its ascension, new subjectivitiespremised on consumption as a social valuehave emerged and, as corollaries, discoursesof non-violence and post-national/civil-soci-ety politics have been disseminated to reachan almost hegemonic level. It is a class withan outward gaze and strong transnationallinks. Their networks are broad and their tiesmultiple. Through the most mobile fractionsof this middle class Ramallah is arguablybetter linked to Amman, the Gulf, Europeand North America than it is to the rest of

the West Bank. Every summer an influx ofdiasporic Palestinians converge on the cityand consolidate the networked physical andexperiential ties between it and what isbecoming a regional and international matrix.It is this middle class—apolitical, consump-tion-driven, status-conscious, fetishistic,internationally oriented—that leaves its markmost heavily and legibly on the social spacesof the city. Ammanization here is not just areference, it is the paragon.

But there is more to this picture. Thisevolution of urban class structure and theconcomitant inequality and socio-economicpolarization is symptomatic of widereconomic restructuring in which Ramallah isheavily implicated. Ramallah is at the centre ofthe unpacking of a radical neoliberal projectdirected at Palestinian economic space and therelations contained therein. The reform plansendorsed by the PA (see the Palestine Reformand Development Plan—PRDP) make thisabundantly clear. Already a smattering of

Figure 3 Spectral suburbia: another suburban development, this time on the northern fringe of Ramallah, is mostly uninhabited reflecting a building boom that has surged well ahead of consumer demand.


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entrepreneurs are tied into this evolvingregime and stand to make serious gains—aswas ineluctably clear in the rapturous recep-tion with which local businessmen greeted thePalestine Investment Conference in 2008.Beyond the customary voodoo that every-where underpins the panacea of economicliberalization, this restructuring project isquite simply about the conjugation orcoupling of colonial occupation and economicgrowth; coloniality cloaked and diffusedthrough the seemingly apolitical and neutralexpansion of (neo)liberalized economic rela-tions. Take, for example, the case of theproposed, and much touted, industrial zoneswhere Palestinian, Israeli and internationalcapital are set to exploit a reserve army ofPalestinian labour—already pauperized byIsraeli closures—in totally unregulated,union-free conditions. While previouslyIsrael has had to ease movement restrictions inorder to exploit Palestinian labour, this modelof ‘development’ is structurally predicated onthe occupation’s twin strategies of militarypacification and spatial control. A salientexample of this concatenation is the case of theJenin Industrial Estate which will be built onland confiscated for the ‘buffer zone’ aroundthe Wall and whose northern border will actu-ally be formed by the Wall itself (Hanieh,2008). The industrial zones, thus, serve notonly to normalize the occupation regime butin effect complement Israeli policies ofimpoverishment by rewarding Israeli capitalwith access to higher rates of return. Neolib-eralization in Palestine means not just spiral-ling inequality but a stealthy consolidationand complexification of the colonial order.This is the hidden equation that underwritesBenjamin Netanyahu’s ‘economic peace’.

There is a paradox that is critical here. It isthat the closure, and the ensuing centraliza-tion of Ramallah, is precisely what hasallowed for the increase in the fortunes andsocial status of so many of the city’s middleand upper classes, for the emergence of newelites. The point is, and herein lies the trag-edy, that it becomes in the interests of differ-ent social fractions to protect and protract

the status quo. Entrepreneurs, intelligentsia,think tanks, research centres, media outlets,official bureaucracy and policymakers form akind of plexiform web embedded in Ramal-lah the enclave, not Ramallah the city. This isa city that purports to lead a nation yet offersno resistance or even alternatives to US andIsraeli designs for the area. Quite thecontrary, what is on offer, one way oranother, is wholesale endorsement. Criticalcurrents exist but are decentred and margin-alized. No major alternative project is beingmooted, not from the intelligentsia or fromthe arts and certainly not from the politicalestablishment.

At heart what is emerging is an uncheckedprocess of subject (re)formation—a desubjec-tivication–subjectivication synthesis—onethat is premised on the trauma and shock ofthe radical violence and the desecration anddismantling of national and civil institutionsunleashed during the Second Intifada. Thepower of shock writes Naomi Klein (2007)has been used to ‘clean the slate’, to ‘de-pattern’ societies and individuals beforetheir ‘re-making’. In Ramallah shock therapyhas laid the ground for a reformulation ofPalestinian subjecthood built atop the debrisof defeat and moulded through the twinpillars of statecraft–governmentality (andbarely concealed repression) and commodityspectacle–lifestyle choice—this is the affec-tive politics at the root of General Dayton’s‘new Palestinian men’.1

Still, restructuring, fragmentation andbantustanization are rationalized, (andimplicitly endorsed) by some, as platforms ortrade-offs for some kind of urban (and secu-lar) modernity. This is illusory. The birth of a‘real city’ here is a chimera. The radicalanonymity—being a stranger in the middleof the crowd—which most critically marksurban modernity does not exist. Nor do thefluid and turbulent social dynamics thatthrow people and buildings into maelstromsof relentless renewal, that shatter establishedand sacrosanct norms, that turn existinggivens upside down, that ‘melt all that is solidinto air’; the city does not live the kind of



faceless perpetual becoming that character-izes the capitalist metropolises of our age.‘Creative destruction’ in Ramallah is stillmost clearly expressed in the occasional,paroxysmal spatial interventions of theIsraeli war machine not by capital unboundand new liberated social sensibilities. In factmost times there is a prosaic stillness andstubborn provinciality to the place; tradi-tional bonds are still salient and the public–private (or bourgeois–citizen) split at beststill embryonic, a public space, never mind apublic sphere, is hard to pin down. Ramallahis not Cairo or even Beirut. Ramallah is asparochial as Amman will always be.Certainly, Ramallah is urbanizing, but inpartial, deformed and highly costly ways. Itis not at all clear that Ramallah represents arevival of the nascent urban modernityabruptly aborted by the Zionist colonialproject in 1948 in Palestine’s coastal cities.This is not to say that Ramallah does notoffer a space of relative freedom and open-

ness that is clearly in demand, nor is it a callfor some kind of atavistic return to previous,more clear, rhythms and movements ofsocio-spatial life. Quite the opposite.

The right to normalcy, to the reproduc-tion of daily life, to difference—all of whichthe occupation targets—are rights worthfighting for. As is the right to the trappings,potentialities and contradictions of urbanmodernity, no matter how intellectuallyproblematic these can be. But beware thetrade-off. Here, today, urbanization cannotbe divorced from colonialism. Ramallah (ifnot its refugee camps) is spared the nightlyincursions of places like Nablus and Jeninfor a reason; if it is given room to breathethen to be sure there is a price to pay. Localand contained micro-freedoms are ulti-mately paid for with the disintegration ofnational strategy. Uncritical ingestion andpassive adaptation have numbed us to thestrategic profoundness of current change.Our critical faculties are emaciated. We are

Figure 4 Stuck between then and now: a traditional mural is juxtaposed against billboard advertising. Most expres-sive form in Ramallah seems captured either by over-signified, folkloric motifs or de-politicizing, consumerist spectacle.


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fragmented in space, disconnected fromplace and static in time.

Normalcy carries too high a price to pay,if it means accepting the status quo. If itmeans swallowing an ultra-policed bantustanmarked by social inequality and new camp–city polarizations; political apathy and thegaudy expression of elite supremacy; ‘remotecontrol occupation’ and a co-production ofcolonial order. Even if this all comes withsome of the localized accoutrements of actualcities.Figure 4 Stuck between then and now: a traditional mural is juxtaposed against billboard advertising. Most expressive form in Ramallah seems captured either by over-signified, folkloric motifs or de-politicizing, consumerist spectacle.These reflections are offered, not as distan-ciated observation, but in part as the self-critique of an inhabitant of this space. And,in part, as a way of polemically stimulatingan urgent conversation that can begin to posesome necessary questions: Can the energyand centrality of Ramallah, in large measurean effect of its isolation, be subverted to linkand connect? How can this city and its rela-tional dynamics be recast, so as to open upother potential urban narratives and tran-scend zero-sum relationality? Rather thanbeing an arena for the percolation of statistpower can it become a node in the evolutionof urban networks of regulation that aredesigned contra to central(izing) power? Atthe same time how can this space repositionitself within the national question, still thecritical frame of reference and scalar level foranti-colonial struggle? Can we (re)discovercontemporary expressive form that is notjingoistic, folkloric and sloganeered and stillconceptually rooted in the actualities of lifeunder ‘late colonialism’ (see Figure 4)?Where can we begin to locate a local reflexiveprocess of critique?

In a famous passage, French philosopherHenri Lefebvre proclaimed that space ismuch more than an object or static form, itis active both as instrument and goal, meansand end. The production of space, heargued, involves the most fundamentalprocesses of social life, including the experi-ence and representation of place and theconstruction of identity. How we plan andarticulate Ramallah has much to do withhow we construct and articulate ourselves.

The design of this city and its relation toPalestine’s other urban spaces is inexorablylinked with, not only how we confront aninescapable ‘colonial present’, but also withwhat kind of society we end up living anddying in.

The railway may never be built; or morelikely it will never reach Ramallah. CertainlyIsrael will continue to use differentiallyaccessed infrastructure to ‘splinter’, toborrow Stephen Graham’s term, Palestinianconurbations (2001; see also Graham andMarvin, 2001). The question that remains iswhether Ramallah will reinforce the colo-nial–neoliberal logic of space and entrenchthis particular brand of ‘post-colonial colo-nialism’, or whether the city will use theinevitable openings that colonial performa-tivity leaves behind to force genuine‘newness’, to manifest an alternative politicalproject in the interstices between colonialdesign and the failure of a national elite.

Note

1 1 Lieutenant General Keith W. Dayton is US Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority and is in charge of overseeing the training of Palestinian security forces. In his keynote speech at the Washington Institute’s 2009 Soref Symposium he made a series of remarks about the ‘creation’ of new Palestinian men (www.washingtoninstitute.org/html/pdf/DaytonKeynote.pdf).

References

B’Tselem (2002) Land Grab: Israel’s Settlement Policy in the West Bank, May.

Eldar, A. (2008) ‘Border control/next stop, Ramallah’, Haaretz, 9 September.

Graham, S. (2001) ‘The spectre of the splintering metropolis’, Cities 18(6), pp. 365–368.

Graham, S. and Marvin, S. (2001) Splintering Urbanism. London: Routledge.

Gregory, D. (2004) The Colonial Present. Oxford: Blackwell.

Hanieh, A. (2008) ‘Palestine in the Middle East: opposing neoliberalism and US power: Part 2’, MRZine, 19 July.



Holmes, C. (2009) ‘Palestinian Authority approves West Bank’s first planned city: is Palestine inching toward statehood?’, Huffington Post, 28 July, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/catesby-holmes/palestinian-authority-app_b_246172.html

Klein, N. (2007) The Shock Doctrine. New York: Metropolitan.

Massad, J. (2006) ‘Pinochet in Palestine’, Al-Ahram Weekly Online No. 819(9–15 November), http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/819/op2.htm

Taraki, L. (2008) ‘Enclave micropolis: the paradoxical case of Ramallah/al-Bireh’, Journal of Palestine Studies XXXVII(4) (Summer), pp. 6–20.

Nasser Abourahme is an urban planner andwriter currently working on a community-based urban planning project in two WestBank refugee camps. Currently he is engagedin a number of research projects that coalesce

around issues of power, subjectivity andextraterritoriality, including ongoing researchinto spatial production, political subjectivicationand the reformulation of refugeehood inPalestinian refugee camps and a ‘(re)-read-ing’ of Jerusalem that breaks with dominantconceptualizations of ‘divided cities’, toexamine the convergence of colonial andneoliberal spatial forms, discourses and imagi-naries. He is also co-founder of RamallahSyndrome a research project that tries toproblematize—through a series of conversa-tions—the contemporary meaning and role ofthe city of Ramallah in lieu of its restructur-ing as the ‘capital’ of a truncated fiefdom ofPalestinian bantustans (http://www.ramal-lahsyndrome.blogspot.com). Email: [email protected]


CITYTaylor and FrancisCCIT_A_GN156975.sgm10.1080/City1360-4813 (print)/1470-3629 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & Francis134000000December 2009

VOLUME 13 NUMBER 4 DECEMBER 2009

EDITORIAL 379

ArticlesCITIES AS BATTLESPACE: THE NEW MILITARY URBANISM

Stephen Graham 383

TRANSPARENT CITIES: RE-SHAPING THE URBAN EXPERIENCE THROUGH INTERACTIVE

VIDEO GAME SIMULATION

Rowland Atkinson and Paul Willis 403

NEO-URBANISM IN THE MAKING UNDER CHINA’S MARKET TRANSITION

Fulong Wu 418

PROBING THE SYMPTOMATIC SILENCES OF MIDDLE-CLASS SETTLEMENT: A CASE STUDY

OF GENTRIFICATION PROCESSES IN GLASGOW

Kirsteen Paton 432

URBAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND SMALL PLACES: SLOW CITIES AS SITES OF ACTIVISM

Sarah Pink 451

‘Cities for People, Not for Profit’: background and commentsEDITOR’S INTRODUCTION 466

PETER MARCUSE AND THE ‘RIGHT TO THE CITY’: INTRODUCTION TO THE KEYNOTE

LECTURE BY PETER MARCUSE

Bruno Flierl 471

RESCUING THE ‘RIGHT TO THE CITY’Martin Woessner 474

THE NEW MIKADO? TOM SLATER, GENTRIFICATION AND DISPLACEMENT

Chris Hamnett 476

CITIES FOR PEOPLE, NOT FOR PROFIT—FROM A RADICAL-LIBERTARIAN AND

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE

Marcelo Lopes de Souza 483

CITIES AFTER OIL (ONE MORE TIME)Adrian Atkinson 493


DebatesTHE BANTUSTAN SUBLIME: REFRAMING THE COLONIAL IN RAMALLAH

Nasser Abourahme 499

Scenes & SoundsCHICAGO FADE: PUTTING THE RESEARCHER’S BODY BACK INTO PLAY

Loïc Wacquant 510

ReviewsTHINKING THE URBAN: ON RECENT WRITINGS ON PHILOSOPHY AND THE CITY

Philosophy and the City: Classical to Contemporary Writings, edited bySharon M. MeagherGlobal Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory, by Eduardo MendietaReviewed by David Cunningham 517

EndpieceIS IT ALL COMING TOGETHER? THOUGHTS ON URBAN STUDIES AND THE PRESENT CRISIS: (16) COMRADES AGAINST THE COUNTERREVOLUTIONS: BRINGING PEOPLE (BACK?) IN

Bob Catterall 531

Volume Content and Author Index 551


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