0000000000717371
AUTHOR
Abedal Rhma Halawani
Toward Livable City Centers. Hebron as a Case Study
City centers of Palestinian cities face many urban planning problems; the downtown city is mostly crowded especially in the last few years, because of the increasing population of the cities and the daily migration of the residents from the nearby villages. Everyone can touch the traffic jam problem, the bad quality of urban spaces, the lack of gardens and open spaces in the city center. All this affects negatively the citizens of the city, feeling uncomfortable in the city center. Thus, this study comes to light to draw guidelines to create a comfortable and livable urban environment for people in the city center and to develop the city center to a more environmental, functional, beautiful…
The Reality and Unreality of Jerusalem
Urban Planning emerged out to achieve welfare and progress of human being. Many theorists wrote about the utopian and the good city. Planners has been working hard to create suitable and workable cities. However, there are situations in which planning is used to strengthen a dominant group upon marginalized groups. Jerusalem is one of those cases in which planning is used as a control tool upon other groups. The occupation of Jerusalem from the Israeli side and the injustice in the city, has forced many theorists to think about the future of Jerusalem. Since the beginning of the struggle between Palestinians and Israelis more several solutions have been proposed for the context of Jerusalem…
The Concept of Exception: from Politics to Spatial Domain
During the last decade, the concept of the state of exception has branched out from the field of politics into other fields, including planning. Since planning is inseparable from politics and because planning laws are largely influenced by the nature of each political regime. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben was inspired by the German philosopher Carl Schmitt and consequently developed a theory of the state of exception. Schmitt pointed out that the context of exception is declared by a sovereign power and he tied this concept with dictatorship. Agamben, however, argues that the state of exception is not a special kind of law, but it is a zone of anomie, where all legal determinatio…
Manipulation of landscape as an Exercise of Unfair Power: the Case of Qalqiliya in the Occupied Palestine
Planning, as emphasized by planning theories, is supposed to contribute to the progress of mankind through always developing policies, regulations, methods, and concepts, to support the welfare of individuals and their communities. Therefore, themes such as ethic of planning and the issue of just city have been discussed intensively in planning theories and the main dominated question is: what is the good planning? Many planning theorists answer this question by addressing various types of planning such as collaborative, deliberative, radical planning and so on as good tools to achieve progress and prosperity. However, Palestine is a case where the contradiction between theory and practice …