Shifting realities: dislocating Palestinian Jerusalemites from the capital to the edge

Lefebvre's ‘right to the city’ was an expression of a new politics of citizenship, residency and above all the right to urban life. We thus build our argument in this paper on the Lefebvre concept and through the case study of Kufr Aqab, the northernmost neighbourhood of the occupied city of Jerusalem. In order to systematically displace Palestinian Jerusalemites and to achieve the Judaisation of Jerusalem, the right to urban life and any sort of ‘right to the city’ have been completely denied. In fact, through the spatial–demographic policies practised by Israeli authorities, Kufr Aqab has been aggressively excluded from the central area of Jerusalem (by the separation wall and the military border crossing) and progressively ethnically segregated. Kufr Aqab is highly populated by displaced Palestinian Jerusalemites since it is the only alternative that allows them to maintain their Jerusalem residency and their few civic rights. Ongoing unregulated urban development and deliberate informality has rendered Kufr Aqab a space of legal and civic exceptions and an insecure environment suspended within a notion of ‘permanent temporariness’. This case study poses important questions to the relevance of Lefebvrian concepts, even if the ‘point of departure of this urban problematic’ is not industrialisation but the Israeli occupation, and the ‘critical point’ is not within a western context.