Violent acts over the past fifteen years have profoundly altered civil rituals, cultural identity, and the meaning of place in Tel Aviv. Three events in particular have shed light on the global rule of urban space in the struggle for territory, resources, and power: the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin in 1995 in the city council square; the suicidal bombing at the Dolphinarium Discothèque along the shoreline in 2001; and bombings in the Neve Shaanan neighborhood in 2003. Tali Hatuka uses an interdisciplinary framework of urban theory and sociopolitical theory to shed light on the discourse regarding violent events to include an analysis of the physical space where these events take place. She exposes the complex relationships among local groups, the state, and the city, challenging the national discourse by offering a fresh interpretation of contesting forces and their effect on the urban environment. Perhaps the most valuable contribution of this book is its critical assessment of the current Israeli reality, which is affected by violent events that continually alter the everyday life of its citizens. Although these events have been widely publicized by the media, there is scant literature focusing on their impact on the urban spaces where people live and meet. In addition, Hatuka shows how sociopolitical events become crucial defining moments in contemporary lived experience, allowing us to examine universal questions about the way democracy, ideology, and memory are manifested in the city.

Remembering, Forgetting and City Builders critically explores how urban spaces are designed, planned and experienced in relation to the politics of collective and personal memory construction. Bringing together case studies from North America, South Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the book analyzes how contested national, ethnic and cultural sentiments clash in planning and experiencing urban spaces. Going beyond the claim that such situations exist in many parts of the world because communities construct their 'past memories' within their current daily life and future aspirations, the book explores how the very acts of planning and urban design are rooted in the existing structures of hegemonic power. With contributors from the fields of architecture, geography, planning, anthropology and sociology, urban studies and cultural studies, the book provides a rich, interdisciplinary view into the conflicts over memory and belonging which are spatially expressed and mediated through the official planning apparatus.

In Being Urban, Simon Goldhill and his team of outstanding urbanists explore the meaning of the urban condition, with particular reference to the Middle East. As Goldhill explains in his introduction, ‘What is a good city?’, five questions motivate the book: How can a city be systematically planned and yet maintain a possibility of flexibility, change, and the wellbeing of citizens? How does the city represent itself to itself, and image its past, its present and its future? What is it to dwell in, and experience, a city? How does violence erupt in and to a city, and what strategies of reconciliation and reconstruction can be employed? And finally, what is the relationship between the infrastructure of the city and the political process? Following the introduction, the twelve chapters are grouped into four sections: Engagement and Space; Infrastructure and Space; Conflict and Structures; and Curating the City. Through each chapter, the contributors reflect on aspects of urban infrastructure and culture, citizenship, belonging and exclusion, politics and conflict, with examples from across the Middle East, from Cairo to Tehran, Tel Aviv to Istanbul. Not only will Being Urban further understanding of the topography of citizenship in the Middle East and beyond, it will also contribute to answering one of today’s key questions: What Is A Good City?

The contributions collected in the second volume of Resistance and the City are devoted to the three markers of identity that cultural studies has recognised as paramount for our understanding of difference, inequality, and solidarity in modern societies: race, class, and gender. These categories, tightly linked to the mechanics of power, domination and subordination, have often played an eminent role in contemporary struggles and clashes in urban space. The confluence of people from diverse ethnic, social, and sexual backgrounds in the city has not only raised their awareness of a variety of life concepts and motivated them to negotiate their own positions, but has also encouraged them to develop strategies of resistance against patterns of social and spatial exclusion. Contributors: Oliver von Knebel Doeberitz, Barbara Korte, Anna Lienen, Gill Plain, Frank Erik Pointner, Katrin Röder, Ingrid von Rosenberg, Mark Schmitt, Ralf Schneider, Christoph Singer, Sabine Smith, Merle Tönnies, Ger Zielinski

This book explores violence in the public lives of modern Middle Eastern cities, approaching violence as an individual and collective experience, a historical event, and an urban process. Violence and the city coexist in a complicated dialogue, and critical consideration of the city offers an important way to understand the transformative powers of violence—its ability to redraw the boundaries of urban life, to create and divide communities, and to affect the ruling strategies of local elites, governments, and transnational political players. The essays included in this volume reflect the diversity of Middle Eastern urbanism from the eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries, from the capitals of Cairo, Tunis, and Baghdad to the provincial towns of Jeddah, Nablus, and Basra and the oil settlements of Dhahran and Abadan. In reconstructing the violent pasts of cities, new vistas on modern Middle Eastern history are opened, offering alternative and complementary perspectives to the making and unmaking of empires, nations, and states. Given the crucial importance of urban centers in shaping the Middle East in the modern era, and the ongoing potential of public histories to foster dialogue and reconciliation, this volume is both critical and timely.

Public protests are a vital tool for asserting grievances and creating temporary, yet tangible, communities as the world becomes more democratic and urban in the twenty-first century. While the political and social aspects of protest have been extensively studied, little attention has been paid to the physical spaces in which protests happen. Yet place is a crucial aspect of protests, influencing the dynamics and engagement patterns among participants. In The Design of Protest, Tali Hatuka offers the first extensive discussion of the act of protest as a design: that is, a planned event in a space whose physical geometry and symbolic meaning are used and appropriated by its organizers, who aim to challenge socio-spatial distance between political institutions and the people they should serve. Presenting case studies from around the world, including Tiananmen Square in Beijing; the National Mall in Washington, DC; Rabin Square in Tel Aviv; and the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Hatuka identifies three major dimensions of public protests: the process of planning the protest in a particular place; the choice of spatial choreography of the event, including the value and meaning of specific tactics; and the challenges of performing contemporary protests in public space in a fragmented, complex, and conflicted world. Numerous photographs, detailed diagrams, and plans complement the case studies, which draw upon interviews with city officials, urban planners, and protesters themselves.

Since the Industrial Revolution, cities and industry have grown together; towns and metropolitan regions have evolved around factories and expanding industries. New Industrial Urbanism explores the evolving and future relationships between cities and places of production, focusing on the spatial implications and physical design of integrating contemporary manufacturing into the city. The book examines recent developments that have led to dramatic shifts in the manufacturing sector – from large-scale mass production methods to small-scale distributed systems; from polluting and consumptive production methods to a cleaner and more sustainable process; from broad demand for unskilled labor to a growing need for a more educated and specialized workforce – to show how cities see new investment and increased employment opportunities. Looking ahead to the quest to make cities more competitive and resilient, New Industrial Urbanism provides lessons from cases around the world and suggests adopting New Industrial Urbanism as an action framework that reconnects what has been separated: people, places, and production. Moving the conversation beyond the reflexively-negative characterizations of industry, more than two centuries after the start of the Industrial Revolution, this book calls to re-consider the ways in which industry creates places, sustains jobs, and supports environmental sustainability in our cities. This book is available as Open Acess through https://www.taylorfrancis.com/.