Agamben’s urbanism of exception: Jerusalem’s border mechanics and biopolitical strongholds

Abstract

Grounded in Agamben’s spatial ontology, this paper analyses complex urban conditions in the West Bank, extracting phenomena of contested border zones that act as a microcosm of contemporary urban reality. Repositioning Agamben’s spatial exception at the urban scale, the argument is made for expanding from an isolated camp instrumentalism into a sustained analytical apparatus that goes, possibly, beyond the nested borders and biopolitical territorialisation of the case study. By looking at the capacity of Agamben’s discourse to enhance the study of urban phenomena, we suggest the possibility of visualising an urbanism of exception through a categorisation of fields of tension, hinting at the numerous forces acting on space beyond physical structures. This framework, far from being normative and over-comprehensive, attempts to open possible paths of interpretation about exceptionality, conceiving the city of exception as the ulterior vantage point that oversees its evolution from a sovereign mechanism to a spatial materialisation. By applying this analysis on Jerusalem it becomes clear that far from being a linear or gradual sequence, or acting just as bi-dimensional borders, spaces of exception in the city are like the city itself: multiple, parallel, crosscutting and relentless.