Settler colonial temporalities, ruinations and neoliberal urban renewal: the case of Suknet Al-Huresh in Jaffa

Abstract

In a bid to Judaize the Palestinian space, Israel has imposed through its planning policies and practices different temporal structures and narratives of ruinations on Palestinian cities inside its 1948 borders. These different forms of ruins have created temporal segregation in adjacent spaces. This paper provides a temporal analysis of planning policies and practices imposed on Jaffa, a Palestinian city emptied of the bulk of its residents and turned after the 1948 war into a city of ruins. It provides an outline of Jaffa’s temporal map, which illustrates the varying temporalities that had been imposed by the municipality and governmental bodies on the city’s various quarters. Special attention is given to one section of Al-‘Ajami district—Suknet Al-Huresh/the Maronite Quarter which has taken a particular trajectory. To track these changes a micro and macro geography methods have been employed: a study of a specific house as well as an analysis of local urban plans and journalistic archives has been undertaken. The main findings show that neoliberal governmentality has enabled individual settlers’ control over time and space. While such a control maybe blatant in expanding settler colonialism’s frontiers, this article illustrates how it is assumed in a ‘normative setting’. Moreover, it shows how colonizers, as agents, create through neoliberal tools a linear temporality of terra sine tempore and contribute to the reproduction of the settler colonial structure. Yet, it is found that Palestinian inhabitants continued to perceive the space beyond such temporal presentations.