Reclaiming Jerusalem: Palestinians’ Informalized Place‐Making

In 2003, I was living in Jerusalem witnessing the city go through excruciating transformations after the construction of the Israeli wall at its outskirts. During its different stages of construction from 2003 to 2006, most Palestinians living in Jerusalem had to change their daily routine or take drastic decisions to move to different homes, relocate their children into different schools or change their jobs. My interest in Jerusalem as an urban space post the wall stems from my time living in the city before and after the wall’s construction. I moved from Nazareth to live in Jerusalem from 2000 to 2004, coinciding with the breaking of the Second Intifada. By the time I was ready to move out, the city had gone through irreversible transformations that rendered it increasingly inaccessible to most of its Palestinian dwellers; a process that holds its roots in the establishment of the state of Israel and the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinians, including those in Jerusalem. Since my departure, I visited Jerusalem a few weeks every year and stayed for six months in Kufr Aqab during my doctoral research in 2012-2013. Kufr Aqab today is a Palestinian neighbourhood at the northern outskirt borders of Jerusalem’s municipality. With each annual visit to Jerusalem, I became more preoccupied with the question: how do Palestinian Jerusalemites claim their city through spatial urban practices of informalized construction of homes? In the summers of 2017 and 2018, I went to Kufr Aqab with the intention to explore Palestinians’ practices of place-making as means of resisting dispossession and displacement from the city. I...