Dans le cadre du séminaire Villes territoires mondialisations, organisé par Myriam Houssay Holzschuch et moi-même, nous avons le plaisir d’accueillir Haim Yacobi, lecturer à l’université Ben Gourion, actuellement bénéficiaire d’une bourse Marie Curie à l’Université de Cambridge. Il présentera ses travaux sous le titre Israeli Cities : Power, Contest, Space, le 10 novembre 2011 à 9h, à l’ENS de Lyon.

La séance comprendra un exposé et sera suivie d’une discussion, le tout en anglais. Cet exposé et cette discussion seront particulièrement basés sur les travaux suivants :

Yacobi, H. 2004. « In-Between Surveillance and Spatial Protest: the Production of Space of the’Mixed City’of Lod ». Surveillance and Society 2 (1): 55–77.

This paper analyses the historical process during which the Israeli territory, including previously Palestinian cities, has been profoundly Judaized. More specifically, Based on Henri Lefebvre’s conceptualization of the production of space, the paper focuses on the case of the ‘mixed city’ of Lod, accentuating the informal mechanisms of housing and infrastructure supply, the “strategic reversibility” of power relations and the struggle for identity evident in the Palestinian community’s protest in this city. Theoretically, the paper highlights the ways in which social conflict is expressed through analyzing the conceived space, the perceived space and the lived space. By doing so, it reconceptualizes the act of urban resistance, and to stress the role of spatial protest as an alternative pattern of opposition vis a vis the surveillance mechanisms implemented in the city.

Yacobi, Haim, et Erez Tzfadia. 2009. « Multiculturalism, Nationalism, and the Politics of the Israeli City ». International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (02): 289-307. doi:10.1017/S0020743809090679.

One of the central issues in the study of urban politics today is the fact that many cities have become multicultural arenas. The liberal viewpoint stresses the potential of the city—unlike other spaces—to offer many and equal opportunities for all residents regardless of religion, gender, or ethnic affiliation, but the critical body of knowledge highlights the ways in which the city, although apparently released from the shackles of nation- and state-building projects, continues to reproduce existing power structures and is a stratifying place, maintaining patterns of discrimination, exclusion, and segregation. This tension between the city as an enabling space versus the city as a reinforcer of socionational stratification is at the center of this article.

Yiftachel, O., et H. Yacobi. 2003. « Urban ethnocracy: ethnicization and the production of space in an Israeli mixed city’ ». Environment and Planning D 21 (6): 673–694.

In this paper we offer a critical analysis of ethnic relations in an Israeli `mixed city’. Similar to other sites shaped by the logics of settling ethnonationalism and capitalism, the `mixed city’ is characterized by stark patterns of segregation between a dominant majority and a subordinate minority, as well as by ethnoclass fragmentation within each group. `Mixed’ spaces are both exceptional and involuntary, often resulting from the process of ethnicization prevalent in contested urban spaces.We theorize this setting as an `urban ethnocracy’, where a dominant group appropriates the city apparatus to buttress its domination and expansion. In such settings, conspicuous tensions accompany the interaction between the city’s economic and ethnoterritorial logics, producing sites of conflict and instability, and essentializing group identities and ethnic geographies. Empirically, the paper focuses on the city of Lod or Lydda, Israel, where the production of contested urban space has been linked to the construction of an exclusionary Israeli-Jewish national identity and to the establishment of hierarchical ethnic citizenship. Like other previously Arab cities, Lod has been the target of a concerted strategy of Judaization, which has formed the city’s central planning goal since the late 1940s. We analyze in detail various aspects and sites of the Judaization process, and of the ensuing urban conflicts.We point to the chronic instability of urban ethnocracies, and to the need of planning to rise above narrow ethnocentric considerations in order for the `mixed city’ to prosper as the home for all communities.

The Jewish-Arab City, Routledge

Haim Yacobi est aussi l’auteur d’un livre tiré de sa thèse : The Jewish-Arab City: Spatio-politics in a mixed community (Routledge).

Le séminaire est prioritairement destiné aux étudiants de master mais nous serons très heureux d’y accueillir d’autres participants. N’hésitez pas à nous contacter pour signaler votre intérêt et pour que nous vous envoyons les textes.

Eric Verdeil

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