Infrastructures of Exclusion: the Politics of Housing, Heritage and Ruination in Jaffa's Urban Borderlands

Many peripheral neighbourhoods in contemporaryTel Aviv-Jaffa are dominated by two forms of urban infrastructure: rows of shikunim, monotonous socialist modernist housing built by the Israeli state in the 1960-70s, and the remnants of bayarat, pre-1948 dwelling forms in which Palestinian bourgeois families and peasant families lived, working together, and sometimes with Jews, to produce a vibrant national citrus industry. Today, the few Palestinians who remained in this area after 1948 live in informal urban settings legally delegitimised by the Tel Aviv Municipality.

In areas that were fully depopulated, these buildings have either fallen into ruination or been actively conserved in heritage projects. Populated mostly by an ethno-class of Mizrahim - Jews of Middle Eastern origin - as well as Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia and the Former Soviet Union, Palestinians (in Jaffa), migrant workers (from Philippines, Nigeria and elsewhere), and refugees/asylum seekers (from Eritrea and Sudan), these urban borderlands present a powerful case study for understanding how ethno-national regimes achieve territorial sovereignty and ethno-class hierarchy through urban infrastructures in depopulated urban areas.

The research alters the lens through which to explore race, ethnicity, urban space, and the "improvised lives" (Simone 2019) of Israel's marginalised groups. It does this by raising awareness of the borderland spaces in which Palestinians cohabit with marginalised Israeli-Jewish and migrant groups, presenting an innovative understanding of such relations - making them relational to the physical infrastructures and representational neighourhood plans that inform notions of dwelling in dense built space.

In doing so, it makes a case for the study of ethnic relations to be grounded in the affects generated by processes of Israeli state transformation of historic Palestinian landscapes.

It also interrogates two existing Israeli literatures on cities with mixed Jewish-Palestinian populations. Arguing that nationalism is central to urban spatial dynamics, political geographers have demonstrated how top-down municipal planning procedures produce segregation (Yiftachel 2006, Yiftachel and Ghanem 2004, Tzfadia and Yacobi 2011). Conversely, anthropologists have used ethnographic analysis and a relational sociological lens to illustrate forms of social interaction that break down nationalist binaries in these atypical urban domains (Monterescu 2015, Monterescu and Hazan 2018, Nathanson 2010, 2017).

Through an ethnography of Jaffa, a mixed city municipally united with Tel Aviv in 1950, my doctoral intervention demonstrates how state sovereignty is produced infrastructurally through a multiplicity of agents in the city's peripheral borderlands. In doing so, the research makes broader claims about interdisciplinary research on cities - arguing for methodological innovation that brings "top-down" and "bottom-up" perspectives into dialogue.

In order to finalise the book manuscript, this project seeks to develop the broader conceptual questions raised by the doctoral research, by moving beyond the initial field site into other configurations of ethnicity, race, and infrastructure/ruins within Tel Aviv-Jaffa. It aims to develop two analytical notions. First, to describe behaviours that inhabitants of a place manifest (e.g. deception, avoidance) when constructing a sense of place that relates urban landscape to Israeli national identity despite marks of a Palestinian past.

Second, to describe memory gaps that facilitate challenges to regimes of national placemaking. The project draws attention to the infrastructural politics of forgetting and erasure that mark many contemporary cities - but particularly those governed by ethno-states (comparisons could be found in Istanbul or Delhi). The key innovation is to use ethnographic methodology to illustrate how the infrastructural isn't separate from social life - but in fact moves through and with it.