Abstract
Housing and settlement played a key role in the formation of an Israeli society and its territorial project. While earlier frontier settlement relied on the rural sector and on peripheral development towns, with the liberalisation and privatisation of the local economy it was incorporated in the nationwide suburbanisation process. Eventually, with the neoliberal turn, the state sought to redirect investors, entrepreneurs, developers, and families to frontier areas by creating a real estate market and thus financialising the national territorial enterprise. This paper focuses on Harish, a rapidly developing housing project on the border with the occupied Palestinian West-Bank (the Green-Line). Presenting the geopolitical and societal interests behind its development, as well as the transformations its planning processes went through, this paper shows how the state was able to financialise its frontier and to eventually domesticate its border area. Analysing the spatial characteristics of Harish, this paper explains how the built environment functioned both as the medium and outcome of the alliance between national interests and market economy, merging financial frontiers with economic ones.
Highlights
In the global neoliberal turn, city planning has been going through a worldwide process of gradual financialisation, which relies on the increasing subjection of urban systems to investment-oriented and speculative real estate development (Moreno, 2014)
Due to the growing reliance on the private sector, Israeli spatial development entered a gradual process of financialisation, which was significantly enhanced with the post-2008 national housing crisis, as the Israeli government sought to appease the growing public pressure by stimulating the real estate market in areas of geopolitical importance; increasing the focus on investment and regenerating the financial aspect of development once more(Charney, 2017; Mualem, 2018)
After the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the frontier was incorporated in the attempts to de-centralise the local population and to establish a series of medium-scale industrial towns; promoting a new national identity while fortifying the state's control over its new borders and areas predominantly populated by Arabs (Schwake, 2020b)
Summary
In the global neoliberal turn, city planning has been going through a worldwide process of gradual financialisation, which relies on the increasing subjection of urban systems to investment-oriented and speculative real estate development (Moreno, 2014). While critical analysis of neoliberalism usually depicts it as a large-scale intervention meant to serve economic elites, Harish demonstrates a unique case of a sited neoliberalism, where the state promotes financialisation, yet eventually to serve geopolitical interests; illustrating a more complex image of ends and means. To explain this unique case of geopolitical neoliberalism, the paper first explores the concept of Israeli frontiers and the global phenomenon of financialisation and its local implementation. Exploring the different development attempts of Harish, this paper sheds light on the financialisation of the Israel geopolitical project as an advanced attempt to adjust it to the prevailing neoliberal
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