Israel’s complex apparatus of security controls spatial, social and cultural movements in the West Bank. Checkpoints, borders, fences, cameras and watch towers have become part of the everyday landscape; Israel’s presence in the Occupied Territories is undisguised and purposefully palpable. This intricate, powerful and responsive network of structures adapts its behavior based on its subject, efficiently regulating target groups while vaporizing into vernacular para-military scenery for international and Israeli subjects. The law no longer corresponds to geographical location but has become contingent on individual identity, reforming comportment based on State affiliation and sectoral alignment.
Military thinking informs and reshapes nearly all matters in the Occupied territories, including urban planning. Israeli settlements, State owned bypass roads, the Oslo Accord, etc are in fact military devices produced through the mechanism of urban planning. This complex military urbanism, beautiful in its convoluted ingenuity yet alarming in its purpose, dismisses cohesive urban design, instead producing a divisive landscape entrenched in a plethora of recurring physical and psychological violence.
Decolonizing Architecture uses art and architecture to expose and challenge spatial injustices and the colonial occupation in Palestine, efficiently articulating the spatial dimension of a process of decolonization essential to the social, cultural and environmental sustainability of the region. This lecture will discuss the ways in which urban planning has become a central tool to the Israeli Occupation in the West Bank and explore the innovative work of Decolonizing Architecture in countering Israel's militant urbanism of exclusion, dominance and control.
