‘Your daily reality is rubbish’: Waste as a means of urban exclusion in the suspended spaces of East Jerusalem

Hanna Baumann,Manal Massalha

doi:10.1177/00420980211018642

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic and visual research, this article examines the role of waste in two areas of occupied East Jerusalem cut off from the city by the Separation Wall and military checkpoints, Kufr Aqab and Shuafat Refugee Camp as well as their immediate surroundings. In asking how urban exclusion operates on the margins of the city, we argue that rubbish can disclose broader socio-spatial relations at work in Jerusalem from the ground up. We find that waste serves to reduce the ambiguity at work in these interstitial zones by furthering exclusion – it operates through the urban everyday where the legal and political situations are in suspension. Conceptually, we contribute to the discussion on spatial stigma associated with infrastructural violence by arguing for a multi-layered understanding of the way waste ‘works’ in urban exclusion. Three registers mutually constitute each other in this process: the materiality of waste with its embodied and affective interactions, the symbolic and discursive violence associated with waste, as well as spatialised stigma and bordering processes.

Highlights

There is more rubbish here than human beings
While much of the existing literature highlights their interstitial nature from a biopolitical point of view, we argue that examining this state of suspension through the materiality of urban everyday experience can add valuable insights on how urban geopolitics are enacted from the ground up
In the areas of occupied East Jerusalem that have been cut off by the Wall, spatialised stigma operates in complex ways that intertwine materiality and affect, semiotics and discourse to redraw the boundaries of the city and urban citizenship

Summary

Introduction

There is more rubbish here than human beings. Deep inside [the camp], it is even worse. Over the past 15 years, the neighbourhoods of Shuafat Refugee Camp and Kufr Aqab and their subneighbourhoods experienced unprecedented, rapid growth and their cityscape underwent a radical transformation: from a mere few thousand residents living in low-rise, detached buildings in the early 2000s to an estimated 100,000 to 150,0003 residents – about one-third of Jerusalem’s Palestinian population – living in densely built high-rise blocks today These areas are de jure inside the municipal borders, as determined by the Israeli authorities, but have been de facto severed from the city by the Wall and Israeli military checkpoints which regulate their residents’ access to the city; they are territorially contiguous with the West Bank but do not fall under the mandate of the Palestinian Authority. Through its materiality, entangled with the embodied and affective impact it has on residents and the stigmatising discursive uses it serves, waste minimises ambiguity in these liminal areas, advancing the exclusion of these spaces and the symbolic expulsion of their residents from the city

Background

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion