Ethnic groups and the meaning of urban place: The German Colony and Palestinians and Jews in Haifa

Abstract

This article examines the contribution of the concepts trust and risk to our understanding of place meaning as people perceive it, and compares the meanings of a place to two different ethnic groups: Arabs and Jews in Israel. The empirical quantitative study was conducted among 210 Arab and Jewish adults who visited the renovated German Colony, a leisure place of restaurants and bars, in Haifa in August 2003. Arab and Jewish participants attributed the following conceptions to the German Colony: a place of trust, safety, good qualities, friendships, and an ethnic minority place. The Arab participants provided four more distinctive conceptions: privacy, trust within their group, unprecedented place, and culturally shared activities. The Jewish participants added a place of a specific class. The study suggests that concepts of trust and risk and their entailments are helpful for further elaborating research questions and hypotheses. The framework could applied to compare meanings of place among different ethnic groups, and comparison along class and gender lines, etc.