Interrupting planetary urbanization: A view from Middle Eastern cities

Two moments of ‘differential urbanization’ in the Middle East

The planetary urbanization thesis changes the dominant understanding of urban/non-urban divisions to a dynamic relationship of concentrated, extended and differential urbanizations. This contribution is imperative for investigating urbanization in the Global South, where it is usually portrayed as transition of ‘rural’ dominant societies to ‘urban’. Already in the 1990s, urban scholars in Asia described extended urbanization as the expansion of capitalist labor markets into ’rural’ settings through a ‘village-based urbanization’ in China and India (McGee, 1991). Planetary urbanization contributes to the understanding of these changes, as the creative destruction of the ‘rural’ and the broader constitutive role it plays in production and reproduction of urban agglomerations.

However, we suggest that there is a troubling gap in the planetary urbanization thesis, articulated in the way it interprets the collapse of the ‘urban/non-urban’ divide into an all-encompassing ‘urban condition’ as a dissolution from the role of distinct sociospatial configurations in producing, shaping and, most importantly, claiming the urban. Brenner and Schmid argue that concentrated and extended urbanization unfold simultaneously with ‘differential urbanization,’ ‘in which inherited sociospatial configurations are continually creatively destroyed in relation to the broader developmental dynamics and crisis-tendencies of modern capitalism.’ Differential urbanization is understood then as the ‘result of various forms of urban struggle’ which ‘expresses the powerful potentials for radical social and political transformation that are unleashed, but often suppressed, through capitalist industrial development’ (2015: 178). This seemingly suggests that political struggle is inherent to planetary urbanization. Indeed, various contributions to the burgeoning planetary urbanization literature acknowledge, with attention to the relation of distinct histories and geographies to imposed spatialities, uneven development and radical claims to transform them, that unbounding the urban from its inherited sociospatial configurations is an open-ended process that necessarily entails struggles over space (see Goonewardena, 2014; Kanai, 2014; Kipfer, 2014). However, Brenner and Schmid clarify that the differential moment of urbanization occurs when ‘sociospatial configurations are tendentially established, only to be rendered obsolete and eventually superseded through the relentless forward motion of the accumulation process and industrial development’ (2015: 168). The potential for differential urbanization, for radical claims against imposed spatialities, is thus ascribed to a variegated sociospatial landscape that planetary urbanization renders trivial (Brenner, 2013).

We contend that such definition of differential urbanization leaves the process of planetary urbanization uninterrupted. As Ruddick et al. (2018) suggest in their contribution to this Special Issue, ‘Brenner and Schmid have reengaged Lefebvre’s thesis of complete urbanization’ following the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, but ‘crisis and social movements around the globe appear to play no constitutive role in their theorization of planetary urbanization’ (p. 3). Their thesis provides a predictable progression in a one-way movement towards a non-spatial complete urbanization, the nature of which is already known and determined by the logic of capital accumulation. It becomes a process that absorbs struggles against it and thus leaves no possibility for political transformation. The problem of ‘city’ and differential urbanization under the planetary thesis becomes clearer in Merrifield’s (2014b) consideration of political citizenship: the right to the city becomes the right to the urban, and the potential for political citizenship is found at the encounter of the local and the planetary. Instead of ‘right to the city’, there is right to ‘centrality’, understood as a non-geographical center of power to define the urban and over the production of space, because there is no longer ‘city’ to take over and to have a claim for (pp. 174–175). While a right to the urban signifies political adaptation to urbanization in its planetary stage, detracting attention from spatialized differentiations such as ‘city’ obscures the specific ways in which planetary urbanization encounters everyday life at the local, and the potential for radical claims for the urban remains vague at best.Schmid Brenner and Schmid (2015) does acknowledge that ‘city’ is where ‘social differences collide and become productive’ (p. 294), yet determines they ‘contribute to the specific character of urban territories’ (p. 296); meaning, the logic and direction of capitalist urbanization remains unchallenged: the ‘city’ is a localized manifestation, albeit unique, of the planetary. It remains unclear how it might become a site for claiming centrality. When planetary urbanization is challenged by collective struggle, ‘[r]ather than rejecting urban life, such mobilizations are often demanding a more socially equitable, democratically managed and environmentally sane form of urbanization than that being imposed by the forces of neoliberal capitalism’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 178).

We argue that such conceptualization of differential urbanization is problematic for ignoring possibilities for political transformation negotiated in struggles over specific forms, types and spatial landscapes. These struggles, which expose the class, gender, racial and ethnic inequalities that compose concentrated urbanization and which disrupt the forward movement of extended urbanization may engage the sociospatial configurations of urban society as grounds for resisting and transforming what Lefebvre defined as the ‘state mode of production’: the production of (national) territory as part of the process of the capitalist production of space. Importantly, the state has the power to assign particular uses to particular spaces according to a specific division of labor and political regime (Lefebvre, 2009[1978]: 224). In fact, Brenner and Elden (2009) confirm that the state is at the core of Lefebvre’s spatialization of Marx’s Capital (p. 357). Not only does the state mode of production operates on all scales simultaneously – local, regional, national and worldwide – but state interventions are also spatially selective, aimed at specific scales, territories or places (p. 359). What follows is that national territory is produced as the concrete abstraction of the politics of a particular regime. And while state interest is born out of social division of labor, it also has the power to shape it and is therefore not limited to capitalist economy (Lefebvre, 1969: 154). Social struggle is then displaced from the realm of production to that of the political, as an ideological struggle for shaping the state apparatuses and policies. Brenner and Elden further warn against a territorial ‘trap’ of identifying capitalist development with national borders, thus naturalizing and neutralizing state intervention (2009: 370). We contend that planetary urbanization takes a similar risk when, in the process of collapsing the non-urban into the urban, it renders distinctions of inherited sociospatial categories such as ‘city’ futile, rather than examining their reconfiguration and redefinition under particular regimes.

Specifically, we argue that forsaking the city as ‘thought object’ and ‘category of practice’ rather than ‘category of analysis’ (Wachsmuth, 2014: 357) is a lacking development by the planetary urbanization thesis of Lefebvre’s conception of ‘city’ as an image and ideology (2003[1970]: 57). In planetary urbanization debates, Wachsmuth suggests that ‘city’ should be understood as a fetish, ‘as a phenomenological category’ – a practical understanding of the urban space – which distorts what it represents: ‘an ideological representation of urbanization processes rather than a moment in them’ (2014: 359). Moreover, Merrifield (2013) reminds us that ‘centrality’ ‘does not imply some absolute center, geographically located in absolute space, but is a locus of actions that attract and repel, that structure and organize a social space, that define the urban’ (p. 918). Such distinction between concentrated urbanization and centrality explains why cities are no longer necessarily the defining units of capitalist urbanization, yet at the same time reveals the enduring and diverse differentiation mechanisms that diminish and re-establish centers and their mutually constituted peripheries. Based on the case studies in Tehran (Iran) and Rawabi (Palestine), we suggest that an ideological conception of ‘city’ in the state mode of production has a meaningful role in differential moments of claiming centrality: an alternative production of the urban by disadvantaged, marginalized, peripheralized populations. In the highly transformative region, we examine, where old centralities are being claimed through wars, changes in national borders and out-migrations, and new centralities emerge through occupation, oil investments and state-building schemes, we identify that moments of resistance of inhabitants against capitalist speculative integration into the urban make use of local political conceptions of ‘city’. In the following sections, we recognize a particular meaning of ‘city’ within the struggle between ‘a dominated periphery and a dominating center’ (Lefebvre, 2003[1970]: 113). Housing the poor in 1979 Tehran and building a new Palestinian urban settlement in the occupied West Bank are both parts of broader projects of nation-building. In both cases, the ‘city’ emerges as a privileged space of inclusion in the ‘nation’.

The differential ‘city’

For long and throughout the Middle East, collective access to local municipal services has been the focus of nation-states’ rhetoric as well as of marginalized groups’ mobilization efforts in negotiating inclusion and exclusion from the ‘nation’. Promises to save tenure security of informal settlers by the Justice and Development Party in Istanbul, the Beirut Madinaty (Beirut our city) campaign for changing the central budgeting of public spending and solving the city’s severe shortfall of municipal services as manifested in the garbage crisis, riots provoked by police assault on street vendors in various Arab cities in 2011, are all examples of the central role of the ‘city’: a political space for producing alternatives to exclusion and marginalization at all scales, an imaginary worth fighting for.

In 1979 Iran, a claim for transforming the urban and building an alternative ‘city’ was in full swing. The spectacular land occupation and distribution, confiscation of hefty landlords’ buildings, seize of international hotels for residence and integration of ‘illegal’ communities into the fabric of cities built an alternative perception of urban citizenry and rejected the state’s exclusionary binary of city/non-city. The Iranian revolution established a basis for enduring practices of claim-making by the urban poor around the country, and although squatting had begun long before the revolution, economic populism of the Islamic revolutionaries rendered the practice legitimate and a sign of the incompetence of the previous regime. Popular media engaged in debates around the squatters’ claim to shahriyat or ‘cityness’. Left political forces, from secular and Islamic camps, called for rapid transformation of slums, ‘affordable modernity’ and ‘average’ urbanity, where communities are connected to piped water, have a network of paved streets, and where public transport, garbage collection and other community services are in place. To be included in ‘city’ under their own terms, the squatters fought a class war over urban land. Since the political jurisdiction at the time was limited to either ‘city’ or ‘village’, shahriyat claim had to be packed in the language of ‘city’. In that context, the ‘city’ provided its inhabitants with full citizenship rights, hence the rejection of city/non-city binary offered slum dwellers something far more important than better houses and improved urban environment: such spatial configuration flagged that ‘illegals’ are ultimately citizens.

Large cities were at the forefront of the Iranian revolution. The urban poor were heavily involved in the 18-month serial urban riots that led to the collapse of Pahlavi government; being pacified by his majesty’s, 1963 land reform, peasantry considered weakly connected, if not isolated, from the 18-month demonstrations, strikes and occupations of symbolic sites around cities in Iran. In April 1979, after two months in power, Ayatollah Khomeini addressed the urban poor and promised them: ‘This is a right for anyone to have a shelter… there should be no payment for land’ (1999[1378]: 520). However, without a new conception of land ownership rights, it was not possible to build a land reservoir for such redistributive proposes. Two main political factions of the Islamic regime, the Islamic left and conservative clergies, engaged in a full-fledged struggle over redefining ownership rights on urban land and large-scale land transfer. Young Islamic technocrats formulated the ‘Ownership Repeal Act’ based on radical Islamic texts, reasoning that land belongs to God and that private ownership on land is conditioned upon development activity on the land. Once formulated to confirm the property rights of the farmers on undeveloped lands then cultivated by their labor, that reasoning would be then used in a revolutionary moment to repeal the private ownership of the lands that lacked such abstract labor. Hundreds of acres of undeveloped lands in urban zones speculatively registered as private in the 1960s–1970s were nationalized. Ownership Repeal Act also targeted the private ownership on abandoned lands (once developed, now vacant lands) and limited it to 1000 square meter. A large land reservoir thus emerged out of land expropriation and was available for the redistributive policies of the new regime.

‘Cities of revolution’ emerged out of a dynamic vision of the ‘city’ as a legitimizing space. After two decades of resisting demolition orders on their settlements, the claims of ‘illegal’ settlers evolved to pressure the new regime to establish a ‘city’ administration in their community to deal with their needs. ‘Self-help’ municipality (shahrdari-e khodyar) was born as immediate response to those demands. This unprecedented form of urban government was tasked with providing minimal collective urban services as well as with control over the communities’ further development, but these would enhance to become fully formal municipality in the coming years. Cities born out of legitimizing space demands then received public budget, government investment in infrastructure and a publicly financed administration tasked to deal with issues like garbage collection, public transport, etc. They were also covered by local services of the central ministries, the most needed ones be power, piped water, education and health. ‘Self-help’ municipality, on the other hand, saved the government from political pressures demanding regular municipality services being provided for all settlements and larger public budget be allocated to them to speed up their improvement. The ‘self-help’ municipalities in large populated settlements enhanced to fully formal municipalities in less than one decade. By 1986, Tehran metropolitan area had 36 ‘self-help’ municipalities and in less than one decade the number of ‘cities’ administered by regular municipality increased from 15 to 23. The increase was dramatic, regarding the fact that none of the ‘illegal’ settlements, even the suburban towns developed by private capital in the previous two decades, received such recognition. The process continued through the 1990s. To improve the image of space in transition, the ‘illegal’ settlers would change the stigmatized names of their communities and try to cut themselves off from ‘illegal’ past. Names like zoorabad (meaning forcefully developed), an example of stigmatized names found in all cities under ‘illegal’ construction, conflicted transitional moves. Commonly, previously ‘illegal’ settlers would choose Islamic names with the prefix shahrak (meaning small town) for their communities, a term designating upper and middle-class suburban complexes, to emphasise their contribution to the revolution and in a symbolic attempt to leave the stigmatized past behind. ¹

The vision of the ‘city’ as a legitimizing space is also at the heart of conflicting imaginaries in the project of Rawabi in Palestine: A completely new city being built north of the de-facto capital Ramallah, planned to house 40,000 residents. For the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) in the West Bank, the sociospatial configuration ‘city’ is essential for tasking the Rawabi project, the very first Palestinian-produced urban space since the 1948 Nakba, with concretizing Palestinian independence. A modern development of an orderly, planned urban settlement that was constructed through international cooperation and has the largest Palestinian flag ever produced flying over its main entrance, Rawabi makes Palestinian independence tangible and marks the dominance and capability of the Fatah-led government. The project’s explicit designation as a ‘new city’ suggests an alternative space to the impoverished Palestinian villages withered by the Israeli occupation as well as to the crowded cities that cannot sustain their burgeoning population under the tight Israeli hold over the Palestinian economy and infrastructure. Rawabi is devised as a space of consumption: municipal services are privately managed; participation in local government is only possible through homeowners associations and it boasts extensive public spaces purposely designed to hold large festivals and events that would attract spectators from the whole of the West Bank and possibly Jordan. While the project is meant to fulfill the PNA’s commitment of providing affordable housing (Rabie, 2014: 106), it also manifests the broader project of the Palestinian statehood program for building nationhood through development, which is pronounced most explicitly in the Palestine Reform and Development Plan 2008–2010 (Khalidi and Samour, 2011). Therefore, Rawabi may also be seen as spatializing a differentiation between a national liberation approach of building an independent state through development (identified with the Fatah) and a militarized resistance to the occupation. Indeed, the project has been criticized for contributing to the formation a new, de-politicized Palestinian middle class that would be drawn out of existing spaces of resistance into the new city (Grandinetti, 2015).

However, interviews we conducted in 2016 with PCI who purchased apartments in Rawabi reveal that Rawabi the ‘city’ also plays a role in the possibility of a future Palestinian everyday life to produce its own space: intimate space of resistance to Israeli occupation and Zionist colonization, to PNA strategies and to Palestinian traditional society. While PCI are undoubtedly a minority of Rawabi residents, as a group they are uniquely situated at the intersection of the Zionist colonial regime and Palestinian nationalism. First, PCI are systemically marginalized by Israeli state institutions, including the planning mechanisms and legal land system that render them unequal citizens and spatialize them into under-resourced ‘villages’. As a ‘city’, Rawabi emerges from its PCI inhabitants’ imaginaries as an anti-thesis to the Israeli ‘mythical Arab village’ (Yacobi, 2008); a colonial image of Palestinian space as an unplanned, backwards, fertile ground for resistance, coupled with systemic marginalization by the state’s planning institutions that has contributed to poor infrastructure, lack of available land for development and extreme over-crowdedness often accompanied by corruption in local government (Khamaisi, 2013). Second, this group’s transition from the Israeli economy into the Palestinian housing market renders them a separate class from West Bank Palestinians. As one interviewee puts it: ‘by moving there, we’re going from the bottom of society to the top’ (PCI homeowners in Rawabi, 2016, personal communication). Filled with pride about the Palestinian national accomplishment in Rawabi, PCI at the same time anticipate to experience social change generated by the city. Unlike the ‘villages’ in Israel where PCI homeowners grew up or live in, Rawabi represents modernity and personal freedom. The ‘city’ rhetoric implies a space that is not abiding to the traditional khamula (clan) structure, which still has a very strong hold on Palestinian local governance in Israel. Since Rawabi is a new city, its residents come from various places in Israel, Palestine and beyond, creating an urban anonymity that might help people break free from the traditional, conservative strains such as gender inequality or prejudice towards certain family lineages. As one woman describes:

in my town in Israel I cannot wear a jogging outfit because of the strict conservative religious atmosphere, so this forces me to drive to the nearest Jewish town for working out. I don’t think I will have this problem in Rawabi. (PCI homeowners in Rawabi, 2016, personal communication)

As in the post-revolution shahraks in Tehran, Rawabi exposes ideologies of production of space that go beyond capitalist urbanization. In both instances, differential urbanization hinges upon the making of ‘city’ as well as on the transformation of marginalized communities into ‘city’ dwellers. These are not merely cities in Iran and Palestine, but ‘cities’ of revolution and independence, respectively; products of contesting urbanizations under particular regimes.

Shifting centrality and new peripheries

According to Lefebvre’s dialectical approach to the production of space, which is the ground for discussing the urbanization of society, ‘centrality’ can be defined as a process of consolidation of wealth, knowledge, culture, information and decision-making power (1991[1974]). Differential urbanization is therefore spatialized through the simultaneous production of center and periphery, key concepts for examining the emerging territorialities of political powers involved in producing the urban. To understand the emerging forms of center and periphery in planetary urbanization, we should not abandon inherited categories of the urban but rather examine how they are being transformed:

Does the extension of the urban phenomenon, the formation of a time-space differential on a global scale, have any relationship to what is still called ‘historicity’? This phase is accompanied by the emergence of complex entities, new functions and structures, but this does not mean that the old ones necessarily disappear. For this reason, what is called for is a repeated, and repeatedly refined, analysis of the relations between form and content. (Lefebvre, 2003[1970]: 170)

In the years of the Iranian revolution, uneven geographical development discourse gained momentum, blaming the Pahlavi regime for spatial polarization of wealth and power in the capital. It was up to the revolutionary government to break down the primacy of Tehran over the country by reversing the economic drivers of subnational disparities. New developmental institutions were created to improve the rural infrastructure, increase agricultural production and provide welfare facilities in underprivileged areas. Provincial centers were prioritized over Tehran in receiving public investments, both in industry and in social services. The removal of the socio-economic gap between ‘city’ and ‘rural’ and the redemption of the multipolar national urban network was at stake. ‘Rural development’ policy focused on increase of the households’ land for cultivation as well as large investments in ‘rural’ physical and social infrastructures. Extended urbanization processes into ‘rural’ Iran are therefore best understood as the result of political agency to make claims for centrality. Neither the logic of accumulation of capital that led to partial integration of ‘villages’ in a ‘village based urbanization’ in China nor the ‘socio-metabolic imperatives associated with urban growth’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 166) would grasp the motives of the historical moment of bringing the ‘rural’ into the center in Iran. Due to such agencies, at least half of the ‘rural’ population (16 million) witnessed a dramatic shift in their standard of living over one generation. Except for settlements located in the Iran–Iraq war zones, majority of 40 thousands ‘rural’ settlements had more stabilized population in the 1980s–1990s, due to the shift in centrality. They were better connected to each other and to cities around, both in physical and non-physical terms. Access to electricity had been increased from 16 to 96% and to piped water from 11 to 86% in one decade. The so-called urban/rural income gap decreased from 2.7 to 1.7 (Khatam and Athari, 2005: 3–23). Moreover, the rhetorical and practical support for squatters changed the meaning of ‘center’ inside the city itself. Occupation of new-built and unfinished housing blocks in wealthy and middle-class neighborhoods of Tehran by immigrants and poor families transformed these previously homogeneous neighborhoods and changed hierarchical relations in the city.

However, the time for making radical claims over the ‘city’ and citizenship was short. A shift to a market economy was engineered in the second decade of the revolution, to contain the intensified factional conflicts in the post-Khomeini era and to respond to the economic and social crisis of the eight-year war with Iraq (1980–1988) and international sanctions. The second decade of the revolution begins with suppressive practices against dissident poor and ends ‘street politics’ of the revolution (Bayat, 1997; Ehsani, 1999). Political normalization of the post-Khomeini era removed the barriers on the process of re-concentrating the capital and power in Tehran. Tehran re-emerged as the center of the ‘nation’, and the Tehran Municipality played a pioneer role in adopting strategies to ‘order’ the poor based on market ideology. Polic-e sakhteman, a police force of 4000 members, was organized to interdict new ‘illegal’ construction. Megacities deemed to have major contribution in market-oriented development projects, and Tehran, with then a population of seven million within city limits and more than 10 million in its urban region, was an aspiring megacity and considered by the national regime to be a showcase for post-war reconstruction. In response to questions around rising in housing prices, Tehran’s new mayor Karbschi suggested that the city should no longer accommodate the residence of lower income groups and that increase in housing prices will function as catalyzer. Physical barriers, like the Tehran Green Belt, were also erected to support the practice of construction police in emerging peripheries. However, the ideal and practice of alternative spatialities endured. The mid-1990s saw a period of renewed urban uprising in Tehran and other large cities in Iran. Most of these incidents involved urban squatters concerned with destruction in their communities (Bayat, 1994: 10). Urban riots reflected the reaction of the poor to the reorganization of space and reestablishment of the old centrality, and eventually made the post-war government to retreat partially from its plans. The centrality of the ‘city’ is therefore produced with peripheries of state ideology.

In Palestine after the Oslo Accords (1993–1995), a ‘neoliberal turn’ started a shift in the anti-colonial struggle towards cooperation with global markets, which would eventually concretize in the centrality of the ‘city’ in Rawabi and its co-constitutive new peripheries. First, this ‘turn’ rendered Ramallah the center of Palestinian nationhood, where concentration of official state institutions, bureaucracy and international NGO activity engendered a thin elite layer, a new Palestinian middle class, that has been dependent on collaboration with Israeli factors for capital accumulation (Hanieh, 2013). This centrality was doubled with the spatiality of the Israeli occupation, which has been perpetuated by the same Oslo Accords that granted some level of self-rule to the Palestinians, namely, the dissecting of the West Bank into Areas A, B and C of Palestinian and Israeli control, thereby reinforcing territorial fragmentation, movement restriction and Israeli domination over all aspects of Palestinian agriculture, industry and economy. Such strategies have been facilitating ‘economic peace’: a seemingly neutral process led by global monetary organizations that provide crucial financial support to Palestine, in which the PNA maintains a relationship with the occupier that in turn becomes a potential partner in Palestinian development. This ultimately enables the Israeli state to penetrate the everyday lives of Palestinians (Abourahme, 2009; Khalidi and Samour, 2011; Taraki, 2008). The ensuing middle class is therefore spatially and socially disconnected from the broader West Bank population, and even more so from the Gaza Strip, and thus from a possibility to form a possible national middle class. The centrality of Ramallah gains its middle class some economic freedom at the price of sustained colonial order and peripheralization of the collective national struggle itself (Abourahme, 2009). The Rawabi project is a striking example for the reorganization of Palestinian space under the ‘economic peace’ strategy, for the related emergence of a de-politicized middle class and for the new peripheries produced by the PNA in its mission to gain independence through development. In this project, some internal contradictions of the PNA’s state mode of production become clear: building a state and gaining national independence through urban development, facilitated by partnerships with private developers. The Rawabi project began with the vision of a single entrepreneur, the Palestinian American Bashar Masri, who bought the lands for the city as an investment. As the project of the new city evolved, Masri brought on board the Qatari government as main investors. His personal and business ties with international investment funds as well as with American, European and Israeli politicians became crucial for materializing the vision (Rabie, 2014). While the PNA shared the vision of a new city, which would serve its state-building project, and committed to provide funding and infrastructure to Rawabi, it had no material or economic capacity to fulfill its commitments (Rabie, 2014: 99–101). Along with other factors, namely internal corruption and external international pressure to privatize state-building efforts (Haddad, 2016), it resulted in increased reliance on private capital for the project. This in turn opened the door to involvement of people and companies from outside the Palestinian state, including Israeli politicians (Rabie, 2014: 38, 212) and companies (Grandinetti, 2015: 10–11), who do not share the PNA’s nationalist goals.

Specifically, the design process of Rawabi followed a delegation of Palestinian planners who went to Israel in 2007 to learn about the planning of new cities. According to the planners who were working on the Rawabi project from its early stages onward, tangible inspiration for the project came directly from the Israeli city of Modi’in (personal communication with city planners, 2016), the epitome of local suburban development that was built adjacent to the Green Line to serve the Israeli–Jewish middle class. Like Modi’in and many other Israeli localities on both sides of the Green Line, the sprawl of Rawabi is staking a concrete claim to lands that would have a role in any future political agreement between Israel and Palestine. Moreover, while the PNA transferred power and responsibility to local government and private companies, it nonetheless had a crucial role in facilitating the acquisition of lands by the private developer and consequent displacement of local villagers (Rabie, 2014: 134; Haddad, 2016: 259). ² Furthermore, water supply, transport of construction materials and many other infrastructural issues had to be coordinated with Israeli authorities, thus proving the depth of Israeli domination over Area A in the West Bank, which is formally under full Palestinian control. Therefore, while the Rawabi project may indicate a major step towards Palestinian independence, it is at the same time re-producing the spatiality of the occupation (Grandinetti, 2015). Indeed, it manifests the extension of Israeli colonial urbanization into Palestinian state-building, which establishes centralities, in this case – Rawabi the ‘city’ – according to its own political ambitions. Here too, the ‘imperatives associated with urban growth’ under capitalist urbanization (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 166), which direct global development and manifest locally in, for example, the construction of new cities in both Israel and Palestine, are not the only powers at play. There is at the same time an urbanization process that is produced by Zionist ideology (Yiftachel, 2006): a mode of capitalist production surrendered to the ethnically differentiated spatialization of Israel/Palestine as a whole; an ethnic logic of space.

While the rhetoric of ‘city’ opens up opportunity for radical claims to centrality, it at the same time enables Rawabi to fulfill a double role as a space of Palestinian independence and for Palestinian consumption, the product of and re-producing ‘economic peace’. Building a ‘new city’ requires compromising between resistance and cooperation with – possibly leading to ‘normalization’ of – the occupation, and thus enables investment of private capital and involvement of international actors in the project. On the one hand, urbanization under neoliberal development produces consumption-based subjectivities that are distracted from collective struggle (Hanieh, 2013; Taraki, 2008). Despite urban development ostensibly showcasing Palestinian independence in face of Israeli colonization, it is then questionable whether and how the city Rawabi private project may be claimed by its inhabitants as space of resistance. This cannot be disconnected from the context of deep ongoing crisis in Palestinian nationalism that has been exacerbated since the Oslo Accords (Ghanem, 2013). Rawabi’s de-politicized alternative Palestinian ‘city’ shifts the centrality of the Palestinian national struggle itself towards privatized (urban) development, thus compromising Palestinian politics on middle-class needs. On the other hand, new peripheries provide spaces for enduring struggles: in Rawabi, two groups differentiated by the territoriality of the Israeli occupation, PCI and Palestinian from the West Bank, will be potentially producing a joined urban space while living in two, uneven, dominating and dominated parallel societies; in the periphery of the project, local villagers become doubly marginalized by Israeli occupation and the PNA’s transfer of lands to foreign investors; and the existing peripheries of the Zionist colonial regime, the Palestinian spaces of resistance – including ‘Arab villages’ in Israel – may lose some of their middle-class inhabitants and become further marginalized. Rawabi is produced simultaneously with these peripheries as a potential centrality. Some PCI homeowners see their future home in Rawabi, while others see it as a mere real estate investment. Either way, the speculative aspect of the project is ultimately politicized by residents’ imaginary of Rawabi as an ‘in-between’ space. In Rawabi, they are citizens of Israel but residents of Palestine, with different citizenship rights than their West Bank Palestinian neighbors. They have full citizenship in the occupying state, yet no legal status in the state they see themselves part of, in the space they move into. Interviewees described the space of Rawabi as not exactly Palestinian, since it is different from the known spaces of the occupied West Bank, but also different from Palestinian localities within Israel. Not necessarily manifesting collective struggle for Palestinian independence, but also not completely colonized by the Zionist regime in familiar ways (PCI homeowners in Rawabi, 2016, personal communication). Thus, it is potential ground for social and political transformation.

Homeownership: A radical political claim?

State attempts to establish new centralities by making and re-making ‘cities’ are articulated in specific strategies tied in neoliberal urbanization, such as increasing the rate of homeownership among citizens. In various contexts, homeownership has symbolized the right to participate in the center of power and decision-making of the ‘city.’ In the Middle East specifically, homeownership has been a prominent instrument for producing national territory (Keshavarzian, 2015). It has significant implications for defining not only urban but explicitly national citizenship rights and for exclusion of immigrants, ‘illegal’ settlers and also religious and ethnic minorities. At the same time, as we show below, it may be a tool for claiming political citizenship by urbanized inhabitants.

Responding to a question about the features of an Islamic government in the heydays of the revolution, Khomeini emphasized that its public would ‘own a shelter of their own.’ To make it happen, he took the risks of opposing the conservative clergy on dispute over the confiscations of assets of major landlords, a group with close historical ties to elite clergymen. Disappointed by vain charity works to provide affordable housing and Robin Hood type practices of asset confiscation, the Leftist Islamists pursued the ‘Ownership Repeal Act’ more forcefully and in 1980 they got it ratified by Parliament under the title of Urban Land Law. An Urban Land Organization (ULO) was then formed to implement the Law, and to deal with private owners who were to transfer their lands to the government and people in need who were to receive a plot of land (Behdad, 1989: 188; Keivani et al., 2008: 1133).

The land distributed by the ULO comprised 34% of the total plots under housing construction in the first decade of the revolution. During this period, almost half a million households received public residential lands mainly around the cities, meaning one-fourth of the two million households added to Iran’s urban population was suburbanized at the time. Tehran received fewer lands, as it deemed to have less people in need. While in fact, the vast presence and active agency of urban poor in the capital made squatting prevalent practice in the most politicized metropolitan region of Iran. Distribution of affordable land and effective function of informal housing market led to dramatic reduction in the price of land, and as a result the land’s share in the cost of housing units decreased from over 43% in 1976 to 26% in 1988 (Khatam, 2015). The change reduced spatial disparities but did not remove them. Living in a self-owned home at a poorly serviced suburb was the second best choice to homeownership in Tehran. Even low- and middle-income state employees were massively suburbanized with bureaucratization of land distribution in the 1990s, when ULO mainly targeted social groups organized in housing cooperatives. Homeownership thus came as a response to claims by the urban poor for centrality. It relocated them to new peripheries, while granting them full citizenship rights.

In a similar contradiction, for PCI in Rawabi, homeownership enables to claim political centrality in face of the Zionist colonial regime, by moving to the occupied West Bank. Clearly, the Israeli interest in shifting Palestinian politics towards middle-class consumption of housing is to abate radical claims for an alternative urban. Increased homeownership among Palestinians in the West Bank sustains the management of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through ‘economic peace’, and thus furthers Israeli control over the Occupied Territories. For the PNA, privatized residential development affirms the Fatah-led government’s effectiveness in gaining international recognition and support. Still, for PCI, homeownership in the Occupied Territories emerges as a potentially anti-colonial practice.

PCI homeowners acknowledge that the Rawabi project embodies a risk of de-politicizing the Palestinian struggle for independence, but explain that such a risk is inconsequential, since ‘at the end of the day, everyone living in the city will have to go through IDF checkpoints to get to work’, and therefore, ‘if anything, it will make those of us [PCI] who now live relatively conveniently more aware’ of infraction on their mobility rights (PCI homeowners in Rawabi, 2016, personal communication). In fact, while privatized homeownership may alienate middle-class PCI from the collective struggle for Palestinian liberation, it could also offer a new anti-colonial practice. It enables participation in the Palestinian struggle for those who have been integrated by urbanization. In some of the more dramatic interviews with PCI, interviewees bring up homeownership in the ‘first modern Palestinian city’ as a practical, second-best choice for Palestinians expelled in the Nakba to the unattainable ‘right to return’ to their lands (PCI homeowners in Rawabi, 2016, personal communication). Potentially, having a legal, Israeli-recognized ownership claim to Palestinian land, in a space spatialized as a modern, orderly ‘city’, could become a ground for empowered resistance to the occupation. Moreover, as PCI become, in the eyes of the Israeli state, legitimate owners of land in the West Bank, they contest Zionist colonization and the privileged, exclusive and exclusionary hold that Israeli–Jewish settlers have on establishing new settlements on the occupied land. Two of the interviewed PCI homeowners who work in Government institutions in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv joked about being ‘the new mitnahalim’ (a word indicating Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories). ‘Colleagues who are mitnahalim told me: you are now one of us’ and ‘I will be able to carpool with my [mitnahalim] colleagues. It will help crossing the [IDF] checkpoints with no problem’ (2016, personal communication). This has the potential to disturb territorialized assumptions in the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

In both case studies, the ‘state mode of production’ facilitates an increase in the rate of homeownership (including when the production of national territory is privatized). This in turn opens up possibilities for appropriation of space and new potential sites for political class struggle, both of which are imperative for ‘differential space’ (Lefebvre, 1991[1974]): the space produced out of inhabitants’ everyday life in resistance to the imposed space of capitalist ideology. Rawabi, the ‘city’ of Palestinian independence, and the Iranian ‘cities of revolution’ are moments of potential differential urbanization in the contexts of colonial and authoritarian regimes. At the same time, middle-class claims for homeownership produce isolation and alienation from possible radical forms of the urban. Rawabi produces space of simultaneous re-colonization and potential de-colonization. In Iran, the ‘cities of revolution’ mark the moment of political centrality of the poor and at the same time relocate them to peripheral zones. This dialectical spatialization, the mutual production of centers and peripheries, implies a potential for moments of differential urbanization.

Conclusion

This paper sought to problematize the move that the planetary urbanization thesis does from collapsing an urban/non-urban binary to eliminating the analytical value of the ‘city’. We argued that moving away from the urban/non-urban binary must include dynamic transformation of, rather than desertion of, inherited sociospatial configurations. Otherwise, any potential for political change that is grounded in everyday life is vague and inconsequential. Indeed, ’city’ making through revolutionary and anti-colonial practices in Iran and Palestine shows that centralities and peripheries may emerge as a result from collective struggle or political strategies aimed at sociospatial distinctions, rather than from generalized structural dynamics of capitalist accumulation. In the two cases presented here, the ‘city’ emerges not as a bounded unit of urbanization but as a site for making claims for the urban. The politics of the urban poor in Tehran and PCI in Rawabi are focused on the ‘city’ as a political entity, since, in these contexts, inclusion in the ‘city’ implies belonging to the ‘nation’ and also may be in itself a form of resistance.

We further argued that as an analytical ‘framework’, planetary urbanization contradicts its own proposition of differential urbanization, as particular spatialities vanish from its analytical vocabulary and are diminished to a ‘variegated urban’. The planetary thesis thus remains insufficient for understanding the seemingly ‘forward moving notion’, that is in fact constantly challenged, of capitalist urbanization. In the Palestinian state-building project as in the Iranian revolution, radical political claims involve struggles over space and resistance to the imposed spatialities of the state mode of production. A universal claim for transformation of the ‘urban’ would be hollow in an analytical framework that eliminates the sites where alternative spatialities may be produced, the potential sites of everyday life to produce differential urbanization. Thus, the local becomes imperative for differentiating the planetary. In Tehran, the legal and administrative concept of ‘city’ opens up possibility for the ‘informal’ periphery and the urban poor to make a claim to ‘centrality’, whereas in Rawabi, the ‘city’ is understood in relation to the oppressive spatiality of the Zionist colonial regime and to anti-colonial potentials. In both contexts, homeownership expresses, on the one hand, a radical claim of inhabitants to challenge local, particular ideologies of exclusion, and on the other hand, state interest that cannot be fully defined by a global shift towards neoliberal urbanization. Framing planetary urbanization as an urban theory ‘without an outside’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2015) is therefore misleading, for overlooking the fact that capitalist urbanization always advances with and against particular ‘outsides’ to the specific powers that produce space through their political, religious, cultural and ethnic logics.

In order to understand what a completely urbanized world and society might mean for state power, social mobilization, political transformation and resistance, a spatialized understanding of planetary urbanization is needed. Examining sociospatial configurations as contested sites for producing the urban and exploring the agencies engaged in transformation of inherited binaries such as formal/informal and colonizer/colonized become vital for considering the political potential of differential urbanization.

But moving from the Middle East to the planetary, if the planetary urbanization framework is to be imperative for investigating urbanization in different contexts, and especially the Global South, it must address in the first place possible political meanings, ideologies and imaginaries of the binaries it seeks to eliminate; significantly, ‘urbanity’ and ‘rurality’ in contexts known as majority ‘rural’ societies. Such imaginaries may produce transformative practices alternative to the linear progression of the non-urban to be absorbed in the urban.