and culturally naturalized to such a degree that returning or removing state housing projects built within them has become a politically controversial act of ‘partitioning Jerusalem’. Any act of decolonization in the area now called Jerusalem must thus start with a process of secularizing and denaturalizing the Jewish neighbourhoods/settlements of greater Jerusalem.
Demographic architecture
Like many colonial cities, Jerusalem has its dark enclaves for its native inhabitants, ruled by the border police, with surprise checkpoints between neighbourhoods. For the Palestinian inhabitants of Jerusalem, unlike the Jewish residents, hardly anything was ever planned but their departure. Within the municipal borders of the city, architects and planners were given the task not only of constructing homes and developing a new ‘national style’ but also of maintaining the ‘demographic balance’, which at the time of occupation in 1967, and within Jerusalem’s gerrymandered borders, stood at about three Jewish inhabitants to every Palestinian. The faster growth rate of the Palestinian population was seen by Israel as a ‘demographic time-bomb’. In 1993 City Engineer Elinoar Barzacchi echoed an ongoing state policy when she outlined how the municipality intends to deal with this problem: ‘There is a government decision to maintain the proportion between the Arab and Jewish populations in the city at 28 per cent Arab and 72 per cent Jew. The only way to cope with that ratio is through the housing potential.’64 This policy of maintaining ‘demographic balance’ has informed the underlying logic of almost every masterplan prepared for the city’s development.65
Model of the neighbourhood of Gilo (Architects: Arvraham Yaski, Yaakov Gil, Yosef Sivan).
Design session on Gilo in the early 1970s. In the centre, pointing, is team leader Avraham Yaski, who later received the Israel Prize for this design. Ram Karmi (with sunglasses and sideburns) is sitting at the centre.
By trying to achieve the demographic and geographic guidelines of the political masterplans, the planners and architects of the municipality of Jerusalem and those working for them have effectively taken part in a national policy of forced migration, unofficially referred to in Israeli circles as the ‘silent transfer’, a crime according to international law.66 The evidence for these crimes is not only to be found in protocols or in the wording of political masterplans, but in the drawings of architects and planners. They can be seen as lines in their plans.67 Yet, remarkably, in spite of all Israel’s efforts to keep the 28 per cent Palestinian to 72 per cent Jewish ratio, its planning policy is falling short of its target. Out of the 650,000 registered residents of Jerusalem in 2005, about a third were Palestinians. This has obviously increased the frustration that further accelerates Israel’s draconian measures.
Whereas demographic policies are clearly outlined in political masterplans, which are seen as guidelines only, in town-building schemes and local plans – which are statutory documents having the force of law – these intentions are camouflaged within the techno-professional language of planning. Since the government guidelines are in blatant violation of both Israeli and international law, a deliberate discrepancy in language has opened up between political and architectural documents. The illegal policy was implemented by manipulating seemingly mundane planning categories. Maintaining the ‘demographic balance’ through the ‘housing potential’, when Palestinian demographic growth is so much faster, implied the use of one or both of two planning policies: one promoting the construction of housing in Jewish neighbourhoods and the other limiting the expansion of Palestinian ones. While issuing an annual average of 1,500 building permits to Jewish Israelis and constructing 90,000 housing units for Jews in all parts of East Jerusalem since 1967, the municipality has issued an annual average of only 100 building permits to Palestinians in the city, thus creating a Palestinian housing crisis with a shortfall of more than 25,000 housing units.68 Without the possibility of obtaining planning permissions, many Palestinian families have built homes ‘illegally’ and exposed themselves to the random actions of municipal demolition squads. These demolitions are undertaken mainly in the most disadvantaged Palestinian neighbourhoods, where residents cannot afford legal defence.69
Other spatial manipulations were similarly undertaken to try to maintain the ‘demographic balance’. The construction of the new Jewish neighbourhood/settlements were also seen as antidotes to Palestinian urbanization and were planned in such a way as to create wedges between Palestinian neighbourhoods and villages, limiting their possible expansion and splintering Palestinian urban contiguity. For example, the neighbourhoods of Ramat Eshkol and the French Hill north of the Old City were laid out to form an elongated arc that cut the Palestinian neighbourhood of Shuafat from the Palestinian Old City and the neighbourhood of Seikh Jarah, which previously comprised a continuous urban area. Indeed, the location and layout of the new neighbourhoods were conceived not only as a utilitarian receptacle for the Jewish population, but also as a means of preventing Jerusalem from functioning as a Palestinian city and making it harder to be a Palestinian in Jerusalem.
The massive overcrowding in Palestinian neighbourhoods, and the rapid increase in property prices that ensued, ultimately forced many Palestinian families to leave Jerusalem for nearby towns and villages in the West Bank, where housing is considerably cheaper. This was precisely what the government planners intended. By leaving the city, Palestinians also lost the status of ‘Israeli residency’, which differentiates those Palestinians included within Jerusalem’s post-1967 borders from those in the rest of the West Bank, and which, among other things, allowed the former access to state services and healthcare, and freedom to enter and work in Israel. In the past forty years more than 50,000 Palestinians have lost their residency status in this manner. Tens of thousands of others have moved outside the municipal boundaries but have kept an address in the city in order to keep these rights and often travel to work there. One of the factors in the routing of the Separation Wall around Jerusalem was to cut these Palestinians out of the city, and close this loophole. The Palestinian residents of Jerusalem now face having to choose which side of the Wall to live on – a crowded and expensive Jerusalem, where they cannot build, or give up the rights they previously had and live in the surrounding towns and villages of the West Bank.70
Throughout the years of Israeli domination in Jerusalem, about 40 per cent of the land that would have been available for Palestinians in the occupied part of the city was marked up on municipal plans as open, public space. This was presented, for legal reasons, as an amenity for the improvement of the quality of life and air of the residents of the Palestinian neighbourhoods, but it effectively framed them within zones into which expansion was forbidden. Whenever the status of these ‘green areas’ was ‘unfrozen’ and earmarked for construction, they were allocated for the expansion of Jewish neighbourhoods. This was openly admitted by Mayor Kollek: ‘the primary purpose of defining Shuafat Ridge [then still an empty hill in the occupied part to the north of the city next to the Palestinian neighbourhood of Shuafat mentioned above] as a green area was to prevent Arab building [there] until the time was ripe to build a new Jewish neighbourhood’.71
Yet another planning strategy used to limit Palestinian residential construction and demographic growth is the pretext of preservation. Professing to protect the traditional rural character of Palestinian villages within the municipal area, and the historic nature of Palestinian neighbourhoods, the municipality insisted that the floor area ratio (FAR) – a planning ratio that defines the relation between the size of a plot and the size of the building – is kept low. So, while the building rights in the Jewish neighbourhood of Talpiot-Mizrah permit the construction of buildings of five storeys, in the adjacent Palestinian neighbourhood of Jabal al-Mukaber, buildings may occupy only 25 per cent of the building plot, resulting in a small house within a large plot.72
Jerusalem
