THE ROLE OF SUSTAINABLE SPATIAL STRATEGIES IN THE OCCUPIED WEST BANK OF PALESTINE
The ‘struggle over geography’ (Said, 1993, p. 6) which has defined the conflict between Israel and Palestine has had a comprehensively negative effect on the natural and social environment, architecture, and sustainability of the built environment of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). This protracted political context has created a built, social, and natural environment which Palestinian architect Omar Yousef refers to as a ‘forced ecology’. According to Yousef, this ecology is a reaction to the necessities of everyday life and is characterised by an environment of ‘crowdedness, instability, temporariness, destruction and improvisation’ (cited in Zandberg, 2010). Since the Israeli occupation in 1967, the policies enforced by the Israeli Civil Administration (ICA) have created a spatial 'ethnocracy' in the OPT (Yiftachel, 2006), a system of spatial repression which is enforced via numerous architectural, environmental, and planning strategies (Weizman, 2004, 2007). However, this process is not without opposition and is countered by various spatial and environmental strategies instigated by the Palestinian population, NGOs, INGOs, and international activists including Israelis. The research therefore aimed to analyse existing modes of strategic intervention undertaken by these groups in the occupied West Bank of Palestine which address issues of sustainability from the mitigation and challenging of the Israeli occupation, to the longer term shaping of the political process. The research identifies sustainability within a Palestinian context as differing greatly from a traditional understanding of the concept, especially in terms of its political agency which is expressed through the concept of environmental justice. It was identified that sustainability in the context of the occupied West Bank of Palestine (as expressed as environmental justice) is initiated via a triad of strategies relating to Conflict Transformation, Resilience, and Resistance. These strategies were further investigated via a series of case studies in order to identify the obstacles, impact, opportunities, and shortfalls of these approaches. Ultimately an investigation of sustainability within this ‘laboratory of the extreme’ (Weizman, 2007, p. 9), aimed to highlight the political and socially transformative nature inherent in the production of sustainable space.
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