Building identity through manifold displacements: dwelling cultures in urban Palestine

Since 1948, the everyday existence of Palestinians is characterised by manifold experiences of displacement.Starting with refugees, passing to exiles, returnees, nomadic communities -the Bedouins-, urbanised villagers, economic and educational migrants, and black-market labours going back and forth from Israel and its settlements in the West Bank, each of these experiences of displacement is connoted by a different relation with temporariness and a different conceptualisation of the home, expressed on the ground by distinctive built structures and everyday practices. At the same time, the various types of displacements can be also read as the outcome of specific aspects of complex historical processes. In so far, the scholarly debate approached the Palestinian case mainly through the lenses of the conflict, hence often overlooking other dynamics that derive less directly from the Israeli occupation and that, nevertheless, are equally core to the construction of the Palestinian socio-spatial identity in the contemporary. This contribution pursues a close-up view on the different homing cultures deriving from two processes of displacement that mostly characterise the today’s urban West Bank, explored through the case of two households respectively situated in Al-Amari Refugee Camp and Umm Al-Sharayiet. Although closely located in the suburb of Ramallah, the study cases represent quite opposite socio-spatial systems coexisting in the city, with Al-Amari being the long-term outcome of the forcible eviction of Palestinians by the Israeli occupation since 1948, developed through incremental and informal dynamics, and Umm Al-Sharayiet a recent neighbourhood largely built by private speculators in response to the internal migration of clerical workers from minor centres across the West Bank. Drawing from Setha Low’s concept of “homing the city” (2016) and relying upon an extensive fieldwork that interpolates full-immersiveethnographic methods and architectural analysis, this contribution redraws the relation with home and temporariness expressed by the two cases, contextualising the experience in the field within the broader frame of displacement processes.

ISBN:978-9-4927-8004-1

Publication year:2019