Reimagining resilience

Arpan Roy

City, 2016, vol. 20, issue 3, 368-388

Abstract: Although Palestinian society is urbanizing at a rapid rate, the land and its people remain seeped in rural imagery and symbolism in the Palestinian self-imagination. Meanwhile, to accommodate real estate demands in Ramallah, the West Bank's cultural and political hub, an ambitious new satellite city is being built that markets itself as the ‘first planned city in Palestinian history'. I develop the position in this paper that Rawabi, situated 9 km from Ramallah in the central West Bank highlands, is a symptom of an emerging trend in which a new capitalist class is reimagining the Palestinian symbolic self-image in terms of an urban strategy that Henri Lefebvre (2003, The Urban Revolution . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 144) believed ‘can only proceed using general rules of political analysis', and that this political process relies on emulating successful Zionist models of state-building that Palestinians have observed for about a century. This reimagination transcends the existing status quo of the existential relationship between Palestinians and the land, generally understood as sumud ‘steadfastness', and brings into form a new ethics in Palestinian politics that is at once global while also particular to a distinctly colonial situation.

Date: 2016
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DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2016.1142220

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