Politics And Planning In The Holy City

Jerusalem is not just another city that illustrates the conflict between interests of professional planners and competing political perspectives. It is the Holy City, with a history of some 3,000 years. Moreover, numerous layers of historical remains have importance for intense and competitive religious and national interests. Israelis claim it as the capital of their country, and Palestinians want it--or part of it--as the capital of their not yet created state.Jerusalem is also a place where more than 700,000 people live, and the center of a metropolitan area with more than twice that number. Along with religious and national interests, there are the customary conflicts between what various groups--property developers, politicians, professional planners, neighborhood residents, and environmental activists--want to do with the land. Politics and Planning in the Holy City describes and analyzes the tensions between politics and planning.The authors tackle the economic, social, and political contexts that shape conflicts. Such problems include deciding what should be called Jerusalem and difficulties surrounding the construction of a defense barrier to protect Israelis from Palestinian terrorists--in the framework of a multicultural city where 30 to 40 percent of its residents are Palestinians. There is dissent over locating rail lines to the city, as some interests want them here, there, or nowhere, and over building a light rail line within a city already crowded and beset with conflicting interests. The creation of a football stadium is another venue for conflict, as many religious Jews view sports as a threat to their way of life.Issues include locating a site for housing new immigrants, as few Jerusalemites want large numbers of newcomers in their neighborhoods, and deciding which sites merit preservation in a city with many deserving candidates, but severely limited resources. This volume will attract urban specialists as well as those concerned with larger p

The Global City & the Holy City explores the local embodied knowledge of women and men of different national, cultural and ethnic identities and age groups, living in London and Jerusalem. Their narratives focus on the three main concepts of Comfort, Belonging and Commitment to the various spaces in which they live. By deconstructing the meanings of these three notions and analyzing their expression in cognitive temporal maps, The Global City & The Holy City examines the practicalities of incorporating this kind of local embodied knowledge into the professional planning and management of cities in the age of globalization.

This book examines how policy decisions have been made on urban development in Israel's two largest cities, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It shows the influence of such factors as the Israeli system's structural features; the institutionalized arrangements between the national and urban governments, and the changing rules of these arrangements; and the processes by which the state tries to intervene in local issues. Contents: The Political and Organizational Framework of Planning; The Implementation of Urban Policy; Structural Determinants of Planning Policy; Normative Determinants of Planning Policy; Central-Local Parallel Planning; The Politics of Urban Growth. Co-published with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

-- Michael C. Hudson, Georgetown University

Shaping Jerusalem: Spatial planning, politics and the conflict focuses on a hidden facet of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the relentless reshaping of the Holy City by the Israeli authorities through urban policies, spatial plans, infrastructural and architectural projects, land use and building regulations. From a political point of view, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may appear to be at an impasse; however, it is precisely by looking at the city’s physical space that one can perceive that a war of cement and stone is under way. Many books have been written on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over Jerusalem; some of them have focused on the urban fabric; Shaping Jerusalem uniquely discusses the role of Israeli spatial actions within the conflict. It argues that Israel’s main political objective – control over the whole city – is ordinarily and silently pursued through physical devices which permanently modify the territory and the urban fabric. Relying on strong empirical evidence and data through the analysis of statistical data, official policies, urban projects, and laws, author Francesco Chiodelli substantiates the political discussion with facts and figures about the current territorial situation of the city, and about the Israeli policies implemented in the city in the past six decades.

Much hope has been placed in the potential of planning to solve social and economic problems. In the East ~nd the West, in devel oped and less-developed countries, planning has become widespread. It has been praised and ridiculed, used and misused, both as a catch word for a better future and as a scapegoat for bitter failure. Plan ning has been interpreted differently by every society, giving rise to a wide range of styles and approaches. Fascination with the phenom enon has yielded a variety of definitions of planning, each of them influenced by the actual problems facing the planners on the one hand, and by the imagination, ideology and aspirations of the theo rists on the other. However, the variety of approaches and definitions has almost obscured the phenomenon itself and blurred its specific meaning. This fact, coupled with disappointment with the practical achievements of plannings, has created much criticism of the social and political value of planning in the West. In this volume we do not intend to answer the question whether planning in Western countries has been successful, nor to suggest specific ways of improving it. We shall limit ourselves to presenting a case study of national planning in one country. The title of this book suggests that the crucial question regarding planning efforts in Israel and perhaps in other countries is the tension between images of planning processes (systematic, comprehensive, structured, etc. ) and political processes (improvised, fragmented, diffused, etc. ).

Much hope has been placed in the potential of planning to solve social and economic problems. In the East ~nd the West, in devel oped and less-developed countries, planning has become widespread. It has been praised and ridiculed, used and misused, both as a catch word for a better future and as a scapegoat for bitter failure. Plan ning has been interpreted differently by every society, giving rise to a wide range of styles and approaches. Fascination with the phenom enon has yielded a variety of definitions of planning, each of them influenced by the actual problems facing the planners on the one hand, and by the imagination, ideology and aspirations of the theo rists on the other. However, the variety of approaches and definitions has almost obscured the phenomenon itself and blurred its specific meaning. This fact, coupled with disappointment with the practical achievements of plannings, has created much criticism of the social and political value of planning in the West. In this volume we do not intend to answer the question whether planning in Western countries has been successful, nor to suggest specific ways of improving it. We shall limit ourselves to presenting a case study of national planning in one country. The title of this book suggests that the crucial question regarding planning efforts in Israel and perhaps in other countries is the tension between images of planning processes (systematic, comprehensive, structured, etc. ) and political processes (improvised, fragmented, diffused, etc. ).