Okay. We're very happy to be hosting the real here today.
Gabriel is going to give a presentation of something like 45 minutes and then we will have 45 minutes for a question and answer.
So do be engaged. Just a small introduction.
So Gabriel's record as an assistant professor at fire and you will see that it still though he is a changed architects,
urban planner, researcher and historian. He completed his graduate and undergraduate studies at Tel Aviv University,
and he obtained his Ph.D. from Technical University in Delft, the Netherlands.
And he is the author of Dwelling on the Green Line Privatise and Rule in Israel, Palestine,
and several articles focusing on the influences of neo liberalism and nationalism on the process of spatial production.
His general areas of interest include urban and architectural history, housing, territoriality, contested spaces, privatisation and postcolonialism.
Gabriel studied, taught and conducted research at a variety of institutions, including Tel Aviv University,
Groningen Architecture, Architecture Academy, TU Delft and the University of Sheffield, Munich, Darmstadt and more and more.
And he is also an active practitioner and partner at studio Sabra in Amsterdam.
Thanks for doing that. And I always feel like an obituary. Yes.
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm very happy to be here. So thanks for inviting me.
I feel like a very important guest being at today's Israeli elections.
So but we're not going to talk about the elections. So, yeah, I think it's a great opportunity to come here and to talk about my work and my research,
what I've done previously and what I'm perhaps planning to do in the future as well.
So, so many talking about the reasons that led to my recently published book by Cambridge Press Dwelling on the Green Line,
which discusses this relationship between housing, territory and privatisation.
The Israeli settlements build along the border with the occupied West Bank, the so-called Green Line, and what I termed as privatised territoriality.
And this is based on the basic development of my PhD project,
which I did at the ultra immersive technology in the Netherlands and the Chair of History of Architecture and Urban Planning.
And here comes the question then why want an architecture and urban historian like myself?
And what do I have to say to people who are doing research or interested in this area?
Studies or political sciences looking at threatened transnational politics?
And I always like to start with with this example, hoping someone has an idea which what house this is or what it's a house in Paris.
Uh, I'm not sure whether it's ever been built. And all of sudden.
Zinoviev, it's not the Brooklyn. Uh, no, no, no, no.
It's the where the plot of Balzac's Father Grillo takes place.
And that is his own book. He was called.
And, uh, and but this house and the way built Zack uses it in the and the novel is is not just is this is not a basic scenery.
It's not a decoration. It's not where the plot takes place.
It is the plot in itself. Uh, some would say that the main protagonist of the, of the novel, some by chance the first chapter,
is a one long detailed description of the house and its different tenants.
And he explains to us how this house, in a way, embodies the social tensions of early 19th century Paris,
with the more the richer, uh, tenants living in the first floor.
Yeah. The, the sort of built houses. And as we go higher and higher and through the building, we reach the poorer tenants.
And then we meet Father Grillo and his neighbour who goes by the name genderless.
Um, and this is, this is in a way, Paris of the 19th century.
And, uh. Um, and later in chapter two, Balzac tells us that the Korean always lived on the third floor.
This is the one floor. And under the servants. Yeah. It actually began three years before the novel starts.
Began being a tenant. It was on vacation, but lived on the first floor. And as he got poorer and poorer and his economic status deteriorated again,
selling his assets and gradually moving along the building, reaching the third floor.
And so in that sense, the is deteriorating status is also a spatial one.
And um, and it's not by chance that there he meets the yeah, we just came to Paris and started the journey from the other way around.
So coming from nothing and eventually. I mean, a rich person.
And so and later on in the novel, when they plan the future activities to move to a different building where eventually resting,
I could live on the first floor and that and we all would live in the attic.
And so we would. Sacco tells us that in that sense, social mobility is also spatial, but it's also a zero sum game.
So one has to go up and someone has to go down. And but this is a it's not just an anecdote, but how so that this house is building that?
I'm not sure. No one's sure whether it ever existed.
It's a microcosm of of Paris in the 19th century.
And as I said before, it embodies the social and economic tensions of that time.
And so does Zarco, in a way, lost his fortune a couple of times due to real estate speculation, which would cause him actually to be in debt.
The person, some would say, even quite an anti-Semite.
And also 200 years ago, Rachel, as the built environment is basically a socioeconomic text.
And the question what interests me as an architecture and urban historian is how to how to read these, you know, bills, texts, as we call them.
And this, for me as a historian, is to say the essence of what Nietzsche called critical race theory,
which in contrast, is a monumental history which magnifies the past and creates myths.
Also, the antiquarian historical historiography, which is the nostalgic one, the old, the good and the new,
the critical one deals with the past, but in order to explore it, to understand its meaning,
and to dismantle these myths, and to carry out the geologies that re-examine borders and that are relevant today and see how we are even today,
reliving the past, but not understanding it in that sense.
So yeah, to understand the history and the way I think we should understand history with,
it needs to be examined from a theoretical socioeconomic and political perspective.
And and this is a, quote, a relay from the.
And whenever we're talking about which theories we use and we is from Graber when was the recent book The Dawn
of Everything Must Read to Everyone say that a social theory always necessary involves a bit of simplification,
essentially reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would be otherwise invisible.
One must simplify the world to discover something new about it.
The problem comes when, long after discovery has been made, people continue to simplify it.
And this is and this is something that I think is essential because it just reduces if you do history, look at one perspective.
You're always terribly. How to avoid it.
What I believe that one should do is to test the theories when they meet internal contradictions.
We are the less the relevant, and then to merge them or to contract or confront them with other ones.
And by that, to create a multilayered study of the built environment.
And there's sort of this way I usually try to do, you know, sort of focus on this socioeconomic tension with the relationship,
the relationship between national political processes, with the work of the house and the asset and national agendas of the other.
So this is the prison where I study the built environment because I believe that land or property never owned or houses there never just houses,
the lands and property. There are multiple connections, signs and signifiers that manifest the social context in which they are produced.
And yet, when we come to the idea of housing or of the nation building process, it was part of the emphasis of creating a nation of homeowners.
And it was an integral part of the post-war western democratic nation state,
which advocated for post welfare policy on one hand, but also to the poor.
The realisation of the working class who, by becoming a private, owning almost a private house,
could become a partner or a shareholder in the country, in the state and its economy.
And but housing as we know it today real estate and became one of the most significant and um parts
of national economies also benefiting an upper middle class have been turned into now asset owners.
You see this aggression and bigotry you see how that income from housing has increased
during the last 5060 years actually wasn't always a scary is the part of income in the US.
And we had slaves and it disappeared and then was translated into housing eventually.
But so with with this significant part of housing has been playing in national economies,
we see this a shift from where this focus of the upper middle class to become homeowners,
but not just homeowners as a place to to to live where one dwells, but to own assets,
to claim landlords, and eventually also rental hoarders, not the conceptual ones.
And they should build a process of national economies and so on and so on.
And to connect this actually with with the could avoid bringing this this with the night of elections today taking place in Israel.
And this is an image of an extreme right wing party it's my with it which translated into English as Jewish strength or Jewish might or Jewish power.
And there are slogans like Who are the who are the landlords or who are the home owners here?
And which illustrates for me it these the merger between the ownership concepts and housing discourse, but also,
of course, nationalism, because we all know who are the homeowners that they're talking about in a way.
Returning to my research for me. Yeah, it's to understand this dynamics between housing assets, privatisation and state territoriality.
We need to explore then how it evolved and eventually develop new theoretical frameworks that allow us to analyse history.
Now the history of the built environment I drew, uh, um.
But how to do that? I drew inspiration again from Graber when he says the 5000 years of debt,
the easiest way to understand the role that debt has played in human societies is simply to follow
the forms that money has taken and the way money has been used across the centuries and the origin.
The arguments that initially ensued about what all this means is very easy, the simplest way to do that.
So I was trying to do something similar and it's not 5000 years, not the entire world.
A very specific context of Israel-Palestine, a very specific racism in Palestine and over a period of four decades.
And but the reason I came to this actually was due to my work as an architect in the project.
I was involved in planning in southern Israel, in Dimona, and for the Ministry of Construction and Housing.
And then one of the meetings, the representative of the Ministry of Construction Housing told me, this is very nice.
What you did is very beautiful, but we cannot market this.
It's not market. It was not bankable, meaning we will not have entrepreneurs coming here, does not have enough, will generate enough profits.
And I was wondering then what does that mean, that planners are not supposed to create something good,
or are we supposed to create something profitable?
And that time I was doing my research on mentioned and if it said many mentioned the word Israeli to Palestinian
neighbourhoods in Israeli cities today and how their redevelopment was part of neo liberal processes.
And I was continuing to wanted to do that. It's in a bigger scale.
But at that time I was actually living in Tel Aviv and each and every other
week I was travelling to meet with my family in Nazareth or northern Israel,
so I was usually travelling along. This road.
Route number six, which is the first ever privatised piece of national infrastructure built in the late 1990,
is also them which symbolises to many others the Israel's neoliberal turn.
And driving along it, yeah, one cannot not notice the construction boom that that the area has witnessed in the last two or three decades.
Decades resembles actually that the mark of planning that the Ministry of Construction Housing want me to do as I was like,
Oh, so this is what they're talking about. But also driving along the road.
He was very pleasant ride. And and as with the private role in the private construction,
it's impossible not to notice the famous WASP and Westmore whispering separation barrier.
Even if it's hidden by trees. So as if it's not there.
And so for me, it illustrates the connection between privatisation, the private road, the private house,
and the private construction and the free market, but also the violent apparatus of state territoriality that made it possible.
And I think the last the last I was going to quote Graber when he said that whenever someone starts talking about the free market,
it's a good idea to look around for the man with the gun. He's never far away.
And he said that, yes, because it's impossible to get free market without thinking and thinking of the agenda that it serves.
Um, so we have to, therefore to if we take this seriously to by examining the built environment,
we have to look at it through the common interests of both the free market and the man with the gun.
And if someone doubts whether there is a man with a gun and the settlements along
the green line and that this is an image from whatever and the 1990 and 1996.
But I is and I think this goes for the definition of a gun.
And the rifle is an upper middle class suburban community and not not concerned in in within the, say, Israel proper.
So it's not in the legal settlement.
But yeah, we can understand how this process of suburbanisation is then connected to the man with the gun eventually.
There are no tanks there today, but we need to ask whether the man with the gun be mayor is now redundant due privatisation due to suburbanisation.
But to understand that the territorial interests behind establishment base that whatever
we have to bid go through the historical context of settlements in Israel-Palestine.
So we have to go back a bit 100 years and understand how housing settlements were integral part of now what we would call in Hebrew,
which is my mind conquering the wastelands or the frontiers,
and which is a leading Zionist narrative which eventually paved the way to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
Uh, you know, the focus of creating a shared national identity through the act of settling Palestine,
which perceived the so-called land without the people, um, for the people without the land where they would eventually become a nation.
So therefore settlement housing dwelling units where there were a leading national mission.
And I building on the idea of the David Emperor, the divide and rule sometimes uh, wrongly translate to divide and conquer.
Chose to call this a settled rule through settlements.
One ruled over the land and in the central these action was the collude.
The pioneer was for firm ideological figure involved agricultural land redemption in Wales
of from forming this entity an antithesis the anti-Semitic image of Jews in the diaspora,
you know, the wandering nation of the foreign moneylenders that are far away from, you know, this strong men.
And so in certain passing, was this the knack of fulfilment, a map where one fulfils one's individual calling, but as part of the national, um,
the greater national mission and due to that,
that the house was always a small dwelling unit which received its meaning only as part of the larger communal context.
And this we see, see this in this and these elements into the communal settlements of the pre stages of years,
the famous communal Moussavi and kibbutzim and drawn know sketches from Alice and on in the 1950s made the sketches and it's always been stuck.
And so taking the idea of of the southern rule of that gold it and but looking at it through the agricultural perspective like I said,
actually is an act of cultivating or so through agriculture and settlement.
One then redeems the land.
And I think it's perfectly illustrated by this poster from the genocide in the 1920s, you know, uh, yeah, it's and polish and, and Polish in Yiddish.
But the act of farming is an act of redeeming the fatherland.
And this idea of, of cultivated rule of agricultural settlements, the rural settlements continued afterwards in the early statehood years,
with an additional moshav in kibbutzim built mainly along the newly formed borders of the State of Israel.
And these were eventually also enhanced by the new strategic plan draft for the young Jewish state drafted by architect Ari Sharon in 1949 to 1950,
when under the direct orders of the.
Ben-Gurion, which had four main objectives to disperse the Jewish population from the coastline and then heavily populated,
and to fortify the control over previously Arab areas and the new borders to stimulate the country's
industry and provide housing solutions to the waves of of newly coming Jewish immigrants.
And the answer of all these objectives was the development on the B two,
which were mid-sized peripheral industrial towns, both in areas with low Jewish presence.
And here as well, we see that the dwelling units was a basic entity that again received its meaning only as part of the created societal context,
so that so the spartan, minimalistic, very modernistic and part of forming a new melting pot,
new national identity are nothing but at the same time also to boost the industries
of therefore I continue to cultivate role at the end to industrialise more.
But the semi or quasi socialist territory development began changing, let's say in the mid 1960s with the gradual privatisation of the local economy.
Many see it in the construction of the metres along in 1965 in Tel Aviv and then the tallest building in the Middle East.
How naive as the but yeah, that was a before before the Gulf kicked in and but yeah for me someone who's interested
in state economy relations I was interested in seeing how then this privatisation
process within harnessed for national interests to the territorial project because
at that time you see that following the occupation of the West Bank in 1967,
it expanded basically the national frontiers to be domesticated and provided this needed a platform where privatisation could be practised.
And if you look at the area which interests me, which is the one along the the seems on the scene line is called in the area of the green line.
Um, see that until the 1960s there was scarcely developed was several rural settlements, very,
very small because the state preferred other frontiers, many Galilee, the Negev which were had more priority that in that sense.
But let's say in the mid 1970s with a new metropolitan approach, um,
for the Tel Aviv metropolitan area done and this area became the mainland reserves for,
for development, which also enabled moving Israel's border resource to an end to the Green Line.
Even not officially. It is the fact that visual uh and exploring expanding what Israelis call the the narrow waist.
Yeah this it's a very very narrow piece of the around 15 to 21 kilometres.
And so in that sense,
this area is a place that experienced accelerated development mainly since the 1970s or during the time when privatisation started kicking in.
And what makes it into for me at least an ideal case study to analysing the built environment in light of the social,
economic and historical transformations.
But I was also I would like to talk about how do we do that? It's it's very easy.
And I started, you know, say with a quite interesting or the Marxist approach of historical materialism where, you know,
the built environment is one part of the superstructure which is needed by the base and the relations of production
and therefore is supposed to serve it uh and to neighbours continuity and we'll see we all with our remarks.
Uh, so if we understand the basis very simple to understand, build space as simple as that.
And it reminds me of the oldest example of the Jews lives from the movie.
They live when the character of Roddy Piper plays is sunglasses and he puts the sunglasses, able to read space, which is very nice.
It's very, very catchy. But remind me of the simplicity that the going wrong maybe we're talking about because we all know it's not that simple.
So and even if we y, if we think about the Frankfurt boys, mainly Adorno and Horkheimer,
we took the much more thrilling developed by coining the idea of in a cultural industry,
what they did was essentially abolish this distinction between base and superstructure.
We have just have culture.
Industry does everything together, which is yeah, it's very interesting that this is the multilayered perspective that we're talking about,
but it makes it also more difficult, especially in now liberalism because.
Complicates everything even more because apparently now liberalism is a platform for individual freedoms fulfilment.
But as David Harvey explains at the end,
it's usually meant usually promotes more investment and to this business climate, not necessarily individual freedom.
But we have to remember that usual main theories on neo liberalism and they represent spatial development like Harvey, but many others.
They're usually applicable to Western context and if there's such a thing in Western context.
But let's say that post came easy and forties states unless relevant to to places like Israel where it's hard to
say who's serving who and whether is the country that's a status is serving the market or the other way around.
And we should answer it's very hard to draw the line here and usually also we have a different answer, but I will get to that later.
And but and this is all part of, say, Western liberalism.
It's a European, but also North American one is the fact that, as Harvey says, it is then sort of a scheme,
you know, like, uh, and he does not say that it's, that it's kind of a conspiracy of the pre-war elites.
But in a way he said that it's a conspiracy of pre-war elites to regain the power that they
began losing during the the nature of the welfare and welfare years of the 1950s and 1960s.
And we see this is the income of upward design in the US and we see how it diminished during the 1950s and 1960s and in 2000s we're back to 1928.
So, uh, so if there is someone downstairs, this has been called name liberalism.
I think this graphic spans everything.
But then the question, what happens in context, like Israel, where there were no post-war release, if these are not economic ones, okay,
how does then privatisation, how, uh, neoliberalism,
how is it then manifested there and who help me actually in thinking about this was or solving but perhaps.
Frank So the question was Kim Novak in his right, in his writings about power or space control?
And one of the things that he points out is that social spatial theories are not all of
their own further than the other Frenchman and as well as historians that rely on them,
they usually ignore the question of agency and the fact that individual could be simultaneously empowered and disempowered by or through space.
And if we combine this with the concept of spatial privilege,
which explains the ability of hegemonic groups to influence the production of space according to their desires and to match their interests and to,
uh, to create these spatial hierarchies. Then we can understand that that agency of hegemonic groups is actually part of a states control mechanism.
And so what I was trying to do and what I did actually was to examine privatisation
by relying on this distinction of power over power to mine by David.
And I was arguing that and, and, and ethnic based post socialist democracies like in Israel to the process.
Privatisation is then directed to enhance the state's power over space by using it by giving privileged groups the power to influence space.
So in that sense, you know, for me two ways to enhance the state through its reality and through an integral research documents,
surveys, uh, statistical data mapping, modelling.
I was what I was trying to do all the time is to identify who these groups were.
Okay with the likely name, how the ideological nucleus is in school in Hebrew or colonels, uh, or housing associations or later than entrepreneurs.
What were the special privileges that they received to establish community and to build one, to plan to, to,
to market a space and then analyse the spatial product, uh, which includes in the settlement itself, its planning and housing, its architecture.
And then to understand is this link between the relationship between the power over and power two,
because again we have done some of the privatisation and this is uh,
what Danny Goodfriend claims that privatisation, Israel was where we always say that 1977 to 1977 seven,
everything was great, country was socialist, and then everything went wrong.
But the way that Dan Guofeng explains that no privatisation started so much earlier and without privatisation,
without the new economic elites that started forming during the 1960s, uh, the 1977 Journal War would not have taken place.
So it is because in his brain it is actually the alliance with the,
the right wing kibbutz party with the Liberals, the free Liberals, that the turn over was eventually successful.
And so it is this reliance on this new class, but also on the.
Support of the so-called socialist elite is reflected in the Economic Stabilisation Stabilisation Plan from 1985,
which was authorised by Shimon Peres.
Until he died, he was still going to the internationalist conferences.
But we see here that this process will always.
Part of me see that these influential groups like the Save the Labour Party or its members
of its lobby were able to steer the process of privatisation to benefit their interests,
but also to translate a political or cultural capital into.
Real capital, in our case, real estate. So we can call this process basically a process of selective privatisation.
So if we look at the settlements along the Green Line and asking then how, how this segment 60 privatisation developed,
meaning who were these groups, what were the privileges that they they received?
We saw understanding Israel's name legalisation, how it became an integral part in the national interests.
And so contrary actually to most writing on and politics and architecture which focussed mainly on monuments,
the buildings on, say and capital cities.
And in the case of Israel, it's a hard core par excellence, settlements and the depth of the West Bank or contested spaces of East Jerusalem,
Morocco or Jaffa was what I thought that actually this boring architecture and this really the scenery actually represents better
than the historical process of privatisation or the privatising national positive sense which exists within Israel proper,
but also continues beyond the Green Line into the West Bank.
So I came on these metrics that we had cultivated rules, industrialise rule that we continue to privatise and rule.
And, but also this privatisation rule is not static, it's,
it has its own and for some periods as identified them each with its own mode of production.
So we have the natural realisation in the 1970s, late 1970s and eighties,
and then the gentrification of the Green Line and then the massive urbanisation, the 1990s,
and then current finance financialization, which is what we see today and we're talking about now the near rural phase is the first step,
I think at least the previous segment of the Green Line.
And the focus here was meaning with the goal. Then the commune, the settlements is quasi agricultural there in for now rural settlements that
that causes quite small number of of families of very homogenous character.
And these were used by the government basically to attract the urban upper middle class,
mainly young secular couples to frontier areas by providing them this pioneering experience and giving
them special privileges here to to establish an isolated community and in a very small and gated one.
Yeah. So designing it was this pioneer experience and social seclusion.
This what was, was the main focus of the late 1970s, the 1980s.
And we see this, for example, in the late 1980s, 1980, the construction of the first houses.
See that this is still suburbia. Greg was stuck and it's quite hard living there then.
Now it's a really nice. Then it was quite hard with these prefabricated units and this is the settlement cluster.
And I said, Oh, by the way, let's see your name.
Both groups were secular centre even calls themselves leftists.
Uh, but quite meagre additions in the same year with shenanigans occurred.
So all but old urban families, upper middle class or middle class that want to move around and to look for something new, something different.
And this is part of the say already, namely within this post-industrial experience oriented development.
And we see also that the planning phases and the layout all resemble the what I call this the cluster model.
They resemble the communal settlement with their resembled the mausoleum, they resemble the global scene.
We had this minimal dwelling units sharing one big open green space.
But unlike the most remarkable team, we have something here that's lacking, which is finance.
So they're designed as agricultural settlements, but not without any agricultural functions, without any means of production.
So it was like an agriculture same without agricultural land.
So this is why this whites now rural but not really rural,
but since the early days they were prefabricated units, fortified concrete or assembled on sides.
Very minimal is slowly families began expanding them.
But we're not so not talking about and and this suburban settlements that we
know today this began changing in the early 1980s with settlements like millet,
west and west on the green line in Israel proper, which was planned this model beginning but began expanding what I call the star model.
And this semi Americanised way of suburbia are not not there yet but we're getting there slowly.
Slowly. Yeah, but the, and also the example of Yara, which is why I would say American housing, suburbia, Levittown,
etc. and they both symbolise the other, the intervention of the growing intervention of private companies there.
And we see also has brought this new typology of the new house and put the nuclear family this.
Now what's what's important here? We had the big house in the lot with the house sits on other than the centre of the planning process.
This is not the ideal two years and we have a totally different architecture and this continues to develop in Korea that this focus on the, the,
the family and the private family, the private life house of the community,
what I call the gentrification of the Green Line and which we now the suburban settlement, the pure.
And these were small scale, but now larger 2500 families.
This is interesting that still they count families.
So it's a it's a term that all planning establishments in a way took from the rural settlements of the pre-state was
years and the resemble the the community settlements but the is still different we don't have an ideological group.
We have housing associations or housing groups and they're usually privileged members of, let's say, influence groups,
either the IDF political parties that would be now the Ministry of Defence or the military industries.
And these people, in a way receiving these groups receive the rights and privilege to build their own house,
their own settlement and their own houses. And what we're seen before transforming their political capital into housing.
And so something much as we see them, the House itself now and the family began that being the focus of planning,
like the case of Kohavi in a town of youngsters, IDF and the Association of the Federation of Zionists of South Africa.
Um, and just looking at who was able to get out of those 4 hours.
But what was interesting here, we see that now we don't have there's no hierarchy, we just have plots that we're just put together.
That's it. And it's this new form of planning. The Union of Plots is a new union of individuals.
That sense. And so it's the house themselves, the larger, much more extravagant talking about large house 25 and 250 metres.
That's quite huge for the everyone lived in and there was an upper middle class but they're still not we're not rich and there were young officers.
And what's also interesting here is the uniformity of design.
All hands looked the same, and that is 100 degrees of the other upper middle class that was getting the right to build their own houses,
which is the design of the class who were always seen as building this novel.
Faceless villains. But, you know, this is the beautiful Israeli, the ideological one as it's going through, which was a vocation.
But still it has its its its ideological.
Also, you can call it still socialism in that sense that we're all the same, even if we're living in and in extravagant villas.
But so this this newly formed and newly formed the upper middle class,
one whose large class now in the mid 1980s was the main force behind development of cities,
is said to have a west of the green line, but also east of the Green Line,
reminiscent of the same design principles originally intended for military officers and or unit.
And we see this in this section of the house, this split level house with the family area and the backyard,
with the cross facade towards the community.
So if we had the communal setting of the five years before, I would say the minimum Willingham is what's important with the folks was the community.
Now, the focus here is totally that the private house, the car we see,
the small windows that are directed towards the the the the neighbours and everything is happening inside.
So and this is, is taking place parallel to the transition from community to individual.
We can call it. Um, and actually if you talk about the direction of the facade of the living rooms,
there's this quote from, from, from the advertisement from Hollow Land actually started with him and.
SIEGEL analysing this typology and civilian occupation and then then leaned
on very low and said that this is in a way can be read as a panoptic order.
So and in Holland, Batman takes this further.
And he simply says that in a way that it was purposely designed to make settlers as part of the of the occupying force,
which is it's an interesting explanation, but I believe it's a bit farfetched.
And this, again, oversimplification, because we have to take economy into its, you know, bigger than the desire for better living standards into it,
especially when we see that this design is resulting from the recommendations of the Jewish Agency several years ago and
how to build in mountainous and mountainous areas and how to create optimal panoramas and and sense of space and privacy.
That's the most important. And again, we see this then this model implement everywhere.
This is military still today, many military personnel living there.
And even here where there is no topography, they still build as if there was.
But they create this this split level model to emphasise the separation between the family and the family area and, you know, the outside, you know.
And so this was mainly the main protagonist neighbour and then the main,
the main driving force and this and this continued evolving this in the mid 1990s with the massive boom,
the massive suburbanisation of the area was called in the star's plan having relying on the name
reveal your star and was promoted by a number of Middle Eastern one of the founders of the of Kohavi.
But now what we had here what we have here now is now totally well-coordinated mechanism,
as is the sort of assembly line that started with locating lands for development.
But the ones that we had first turn towards significance,
which is either where there are no known of Jewish settlements or near to many Arab settlements on the one hand, but also economic feasibility.
This started being something that's very important, which did not appear in protocols before that,
and then serving and mapping the areas and then planning them and dividing them
into clusters and plans and then allocating parcels for development and beginning.
We see some housing associations that one idea for political parties.
But by the mid 1990s the Minister of Construction Housing stopped relying on them and shifted towards private construction companies.
And with that we see that there was a planning of the houses and studies themselves in a way
continue resembles the houses of the 1980s but now much higher uniformity because we have a well
said would well coordinated the much more significant scope of construction and and in that sense
also one that is totally directed by by the market and that lets us then to the final stage.
What's taking place today. Wonderful. The financialization of the green line, meaning cohesion.
And so it's not which. Started actually as a continuation of earlier stages.
So it was initially a kibbutz, so its heart was in the development of an autonomous rural settlement.
Musharaff But due to a lack of interest, the state repeatedly halted the construction but tried every time it ignited the construction.
It was then adapted to the relevant mode of production then.
So beginning in the 1980s, after the the failed rule phase, the trial,
communal settlement and then more semi-arid suburban ones in the early 1990s or high rise suburbia in the late 1990s.
And but what's interesting here is that continuously what the state did mainly after 2001, that as these projects did not ignite,
there was no there was a lack of interest, mainly from contractors, not from not from families or potential buyers.
What the Ministry of Construction did was to repeatedly guarantee the economic feasibility through alteration of
planning and redesigning re re parcelling and changing the housing typologies from low to mid same dwelling units.
But a rearranged and has quotes extra intended to exploit the economic potential of the land and quote this official statement of misery,
construction of housing. And this was eventually and then enhanced by allocating entire complexes to or neighbours
as one single entrepreneur to make do to enhance economic feasibility once again.
And this exactly then this change in passing from this spatial privilege from
initially that the gully name and the associations to eventually the way the private
entrepreneurs that we began moving from the idea from the house to well we
have your property and eventually the asset which eventually would use hybrid.
I know as an architect I cannot say what this is and this is it's this hybrid of suburban
urban typologies that one finds it hard to find the parallels in other complexes.
I have to say,
when we look at the land that there is this house that is called and these were the building which now it's a symbol of the Israeli built environment.
We'll see how it evolved there during that time.
And in a way, we can call this type of neo liberal vernacular, which for me it completes the final transition from the House into an asset.
But we're constantly facilitating the contamination of the national territorial agenda, but simultaneously transforming the the landscape.
And I will start wrapping up my by giving this example.
So if we started with Barack I will finish with the commission accommodates one of the most popular Israeli comedy series from the 1990s which
sadly we're still very funny to date and and this and this a sketch and Rami Rami might be playing the role of a typical secular settler.
Why it doesn't have a it doesn't have a yarmulke. This was intentional.
But the as the set the tone and the set is telling us about the quality of life of the settlement in light of the fears
evacuation the 1990 as people were still thinking that the sermons will be evicted because it's the happy days of Oslo then.
So when the whole building and the settlers started telling us, look at this view, vegetation, boulders, rocks, animals, you have everything here.
Look at the horizon, how bright it is. Look at the houses, how nice they are.
The kids are playing in the yard. Look how everything was built here with faith, love, honesty.
Do you feel the breeze? Do you see the skies are in the blue are here.
Breathe, breathe. It's not Tel Aviv here you can breathe with all the lungs.
You know, I opened my eyes here in the morning birds are on the windows, sunset over the mountains.
This house, for example, built to stand for years, three floors with room for many children and grandson and grandchildren.
Inshallah, the basketball that I installed in the yard, the pool is almost finished.
Just have to pave around it. Now, I'm not a religious person, but add to that all this at all.
There's the sense of mission and the power of that and the concept of ancestral land which all have real meaning here.
A tangible one. Isn't this worth one one or 200,000 shekels?
No. What did they have there? And you meet an Israeli settlement in the Sinai was evacuated in 19 2081.
What did they have? Golan The ground. It's the whole land in the desert since Moses, not even a dog, was there.
And what do they get? People there open banks with the money they received from the state banks.
They built villas. So. What's for a house like this in the central centre of the country?
They won't give 1 million. 200,000. Come on, get out of here.
You're making me crazy. 1 million. 400,000? No. Let's go tell your government.
Otherwise there is no peace. Oh, we're not allowed to be. So what?
You're only harbouring or trying to tell us here will actually live on and that the building of violence is not just.
It's a multilayer text. It's not just the house. And it's not as an asset.
It's not just the territory. It's all of them together. But it's also a lot of the multitude of signs,
signifiers and meanings that only through this multi-layered historical perspective, we're able to start dismantling them.
And now, after finishing that, those things are clear.
Now what? And, uh, what I'm doing now is continuing, but in a mirror image, you know, wrapping out of this,
this, uh, recent research I did about this, uh, neighbourhood in the 1950s,
and its affiliates then get up and sell it to the end of Hagelin because in the
1950s it was an officer's neighbourhood for the newly formed Northern Command,
and it was part of, uh, you know, the interest to Judaism, the Galilee in to enhance states to the state control over the area,
meaning mainly the largest Arab city in Israel, Nazareth.
Um, by settling the around especially by officers of the North Command.
But what's interesting here is that due to the proximity to Nazareth,
which is the centre of the Arab community inside Israel, uh, what we see actually is this new uniform bourgeois Arab class.
Late 1970s and early 1980s that started looking for a better quality of life, which they couldn't find in their own cities.
And they began moving to. Of Nazareth.
Mainly to the officers neighbourhood. And we see this in the late 1970s.
No Arabs. We see the 1980s, some Arab Arab families moving in 1990s and by 2020 the former and still called by the official name of the neighbourhood,
still the military neighbourhood and officers neighbourhood and is 95% Arab today.
And yeah, we can we can we can in a way say it's similar to what they what they call in the US white flight.
The first black family moves in, all white families move out.
But this is usually accompanied by deteriorating real estate prices is usually why families using.
We don't want them we don't we we don't hate black people now we just we don't want our property to lose its its value.
But what happened here actually is that prices exploded.
So in that sense. So on one hand, we have one fight, but on the other hand, we have gentrification, right?
We have upper upper class Arab families moving in and middle class Jewish families moving out.
So in a way these are the powerful group here economically is actually the one was that's now the underprivileged one.
Yeah. And how do we define this?
Decolonising gentrification is very hard to say.
And and we see that with the changes visual.
The first lady returning from small scale houses near designed into the same house, the same perspective.
And this is grand villas.
But the ones who are aware of the differences of event can see that these also aesthetically turn into an Arab neighbourhood.
The use of stone. The use of arches. The satellite dishes, which are usually especially if you have to if you have to sell,
is a problem because you always need one satellite in the Arab world and one oriented to the to the Western world,
whereas Jewish families usually don't have satellite dishes that will have cables and as has the Russian immigrants.
But but even for people who are not experts in reading identity through architecture,
this is you can see that once you see that the house is already have grown engravings for Christmas trees.
So one entering the neighbourhood today and I took these images in in during
Christmas you see that it's it's a it's already a it's a it's an Arab neighbourhood.
So it is a question of re appropriation on the one hand, but privatisation on the other.
So it's in a way a mirror image of what I was doing before and try now to develop this new theoretical framework.
Can we talk about privatised decolonisation? Is there such a thing?
Which is it's a question that I've not been able to answer because we see this in other places, we see them.
And then people wrote about individual Omar Salaam,
which is an alternative by ethnic binational community that was built in the early 1980s, began as this alternative project.
And today, equality, a binational real estate project that even here, it's hardly noticeable to understand which family lives in which house.
And I can tell the difference by design who lives, who are Arabs and who are Jews?
And I was asking myself whether this intention was lucky or because they don't know.
This is how we. Represent our identity.
Through the market. And while this is seen as a work why it is costly in poor planning to say something in small scale inside
Israel in the West Bank is taking a much larger risk area with the construction of a lobby and 2008,
uh, by Bashar al Masri, uh, you know, open to say the privatisation of the organisation of the Palestinian cause.
So through the commercial real estate, through speculation, uh, through private initiative.
Palestine will be liberated, which is in a way the it and what I was talking about before and what we're watching today,
which is, you know, we can talk about whether it's a failed project or not.
And architecturally,
financially is a footnote because what what the and Palestine Investment Fund is doing today is establishing much larger projects,
uh, like the handle Jinan,
but also other ones like superheroes or because there is a ties and ruled neighbourhoods always,
you know, very also know and well marketed, uh, real estate projects, very suburban and very high end.
And the highlight of everything is, is Moon City, uh, which is, you know, promoted as this luxurious city and a close, you know, high rise,
a high end housing spa's research facilities, you know, the, the, the,
as far as possible what someone could think of when talking about decolonisation.
Yeah. But when promoted, if you go to the, to the promotion campaigns, it was oh,
it's always promoted as part of the Palestinian cause, which for me is just, you know, it's so it's fun.
It's about I can, uh, I was watching all these promotion campaigns for hours,
but I think that we, we cannot say no and can't say yes, and we have to then continue thing.
You know, if we talk about colonisation, when what about decolonisation?
And I think we cannot just give this, uh, over this past.
Now that does not work. Yeah, it doesn't work.
But we have to talk about it because as I said a couple of times before on say for the last time build spaces is the multilayer text.
Yeah, it is. It's territories and assets. It's all of this together.
And only by understanding this set of signs and signifiers, uh, we're able to read this text and then finish.
Well, that then. Thanks.