Futures
Bird City | Slum Metropolis
The speculation on future policies is based on a report done by Crisis Group (June 2019), which investigates Israeli plans for Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem both inside and outside the Wall. It focuses on the Greater Jerusalem bill, drafted in 2007 and voted on but shelved in the Israeli Parliament after winning the support of Netanyahu in 2017. One of the bill’s goals is to swap 140,000 Palestinian votes in municipal elections with 140,000 Jewish Israeli ones - known as ethnic gerrymandering.
Ethnocratic Territorialization
The Greater Jerusalem Bill to reestablish a “demographic balance” of a 70:30, Jews to Palestinians ratio in Jerusalem by de-facto annexing three major clusters of settlements in the West Bank and excising four Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem which have been sealed off by the Separation Wall.
“East Jerusalem remains stuck in our throat: we can’t swallow it and we can’t spit it out”
— A former Israeli Minister. Crisis Group interview, Jerusalem, October 2018
The terms “Bird City” and “Slum Metropolis”are based on a paper by Noura Alkhalili, “A Forest of Urbanization: Camp Metropolis in the edge areas”, Originally, Alkhalili considers the possible futures to be either a ‘City of Birds’, a city full of empty, deserted buildings, or to undergo a ‘Hong-kongization’ process, where the area goes through a process of intense urbanization. The term ‘Hong-kongization’ is replaced with ‘Slum Metropolis’ in this thesis so as to avoid misconceiving the comparison to be political rather than to describe an urban condition.
The Long Game
The two futures ‘Bird City’ and ‘Slum Metropolis’ are not separate, but rather feed off each other, raising the stakes every day. Slum Metropolis is a direct product of the current displacement of Palestinian Jerusalemites, and Bird City will be the second, if not third time the very same communities are displaced. This vicious cycle is the very definition of the state of limbo Palestinians live in and is always accompanied by the continuous expansion of Israeli territory.
