By Ahmad Barclay and Dena Qaddumi This article was originally posted on opendemocracy.net as part of the Cities in Conflict Series. The establishment of the village Bab Al-Shams (“gate of the sun”) on 11 January 2013 represented a new evolution in the unfolding patterns of […]
Category Archives: Spatial Analysis

Parallel Walks in Al-Khalil
By Isis Nusair This article is a co-publication, also appearing on Jadaliyya alongside arenaofspeculation.org. I last visited Al-Khalil (Hebron) with my family when I was a child in the mid 1970s. I only have vague recollections of that visit, except for the place where Ibrahim […]

Considering the Political Agency of Residual Landscapes in the West Bank
by Suzanne Harris-Brandts Amidst a series of dramatic events in recent weeks, the Palestinian strife of living under Israeli occupation for close to half a century has once again entered global media attention. Contributing to the headlines were two new Israeli announcements of Jewish-only settlement […]

Ramallah: The ‘Transforming City’
by Nura Alkhalili This photo essay was originally published in the Berkeley Planning Journal. It is republished on arenaofspeculation.org with kind permission from the author. The piece, based on a study between May and November 2011, traces the evolution of a wall located between a […]

The Palestinian Authority, UNESCO, and the Illusion of Triumph
By Ryvka Barnard This article was originally posted on Jadaliyya, and is re-posted on arenaofspeculation.org with permission from the author. Over one weekend, two seemingly incongruous sets of images dominated the news from Palestine: one set displayed local tourism operators and Palestinian Authority (PA) officials […]

#3awda – New Project to Focus Creative Energy on Return to Palestine
Below is an introduction to a new project related to al-3awda. It can also be found in Arabic. arenaofspeculation.org has helped to establish this project and will post some of its features from time to time. Today we launch #3awda. A collective project seeking to […]

Remapping Palestine and the Politics of Injury
By Aimee Shalan This article, a reflection on the 2009 film “Videomappings: Aida, Palestine” by Till Roeskens, was originally published on Jadaliyya. It is featured on arenaofspeculation.org with kind permission from the author. The struggle over Palestine—a struggle in which ideas, representations, rhetoric, and images […]

Signposts from a Contested Landscape: A Photographic Archive
Words and images by Diego Segatto In this original article for arenaofspeculation.org, Diego Segatto shares his experiences of reading the conflict through the built and natural landscapes of Israel-Palestine. His photographs are generously shared here on a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. Questo articolo è […]

Weaponized Architecture: A Discussion with Léopold Lambert
The following is an interview with Léopold Lambert (@TheFunambulist_), author of ‘Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence’ (published by dpr-barcelona), a new publication that offers an analysis of Israel’s architecture of colonization in the context of global trends in architecture and urbanism, and uses architectural […]

From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record, 1947-50
Throughout this month the Mosaic Rooms in London plays host to the exhibition “From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction & State Formation 1947-50”. The timing of the exhibition, curated by visual theorist Ariella Azoulay, coincides with the release of an English translation […]
Fighting new Nakba in the Negev
By Ben White This article was originally published on Al Jazeera English. It is posted on arenaofspeculation.org with kind permission from the author. From the refugees in 1949 looking over the Lebanese border at the land from which they were expelled, to the students in […]