URBAN TALK
May 28, 2015 | 18.30 Uhr | Room HBS 02

Haim Yacobi
Surveillance and Spatial Protest: Urban Informality in the Jewish-Arab ‚mixed city‘ of Lod

This presentation will focus on the case of the ‚mixed city‘ of Lod, accentuating the informal mechanisms of housing and infrastructure supply, the „strategic reversibility“ of power relations and the struggle for identity evident in the Palestinian community‘s protest in this city. The aim is to highlight the ways in which social conflict is expressed through analyzing the conceived space, the perceived space and the lived space. By doing so, the act of urban resistance is reconceptualised, and the role of spatial protest as an alternative pattern of opposition vis à vis the surveillance mechanisms implemented in the city is stressed.

Prof. Haim Yacobi, an architect who specialized in urban and political geography, is the head of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University. The main issues that stand in the center of his research interest in relation to the urban space are social justice, the politics of identity, migration, and colonial planning. In 1999 he formulated the idea of establishing „Bimkom – Planners for Planning Rights“ and NGO that deals with human rights and planning in Israel and was its co-founder. His work has been published widely in some of the leading journals such as Environment and Planning A, Environment and Planning D, Urban Geography, City, Planning Theory and Practice and the International Journal of Middle East Studies. His latest books are Rethinking Israeli Space: Periphery and Identity (Routledge 2011 with Erez Tzfadia) and The Jewish-Arab City: Spatio-Politics in a Mixed Community (Routledge 2009).

The lecture series "Urban Talks" is jointly organized by the Habitat Unit and the Urban Management Program at Technical University Berlin.

Room HBS 02, TU Berlin
Hardenbergstraße 16-18
10623 Berlin