Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Social Ecologies and Borderlands
- Part I FRAMES: MAPPING SOCIAL ECOLOGIES IN BORDER TERRITORIES
- Part II BRIDGES: RESILIENCE, RESTORATION AND RECLAMATION
- Part III CORRIDORS: CATALYSTS AND COLLABORATION IN CONFINED SPACES
- Chapter Eight Ensuring Hope in Militarized Landscapes: The Case of Lebanon
- Chapter Nine Domesticating and Enlarging One's Territory: Day-to-Day Politics in a Confined Space — The Shu'fat Refugee Camp in East Jerusalem
- Chapter Ten Urban Alternatives and Collaborative Economics in Belfast's Contested Space
- Part IV PORTALS: DIALOGUE, EXCEPTION AND RETERRITORIALIZATION
- Conclusion: Making Sense of Social Ecology, Borders and the Environment
- Index
Chapter Ten - Urban Alternatives and Collaborative Economics in Belfast's Contested Space
from Part III - CORRIDORS: CATALYSTS AND COLLABORATION IN CONFINED SPACES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Social Ecologies and Borderlands
- Part I FRAMES: MAPPING SOCIAL ECOLOGIES IN BORDER TERRITORIES
- Part II BRIDGES: RESILIENCE, RESTORATION AND RECLAMATION
- Part III CORRIDORS: CATALYSTS AND COLLABORATION IN CONFINED SPACES
- Chapter Eight Ensuring Hope in Militarized Landscapes: The Case of Lebanon
- Chapter Nine Domesticating and Enlarging One's Territory: Day-to-Day Politics in a Confined Space — The Shu'fat Refugee Camp in East Jerusalem
- Chapter Ten Urban Alternatives and Collaborative Economics in Belfast's Contested Space
- Part IV PORTALS: DIALOGUE, EXCEPTION AND RETERRITORIALIZATION
- Conclusion: Making Sense of Social Ecology, Borders and the Environment
- Index
Summary
Introduction
The transformative social and physical character of cities coming out of conflict has attracted increasing attention from academics as well as urban managers. In particular, the potential to reengineer borderscapes via local development and land use policies focuses attention on the normative possibilities and the type of practices that might create new forms of integration and spatial diversity. For Yiftachel, these transitional cities can be understood through the interplay of ethnocracy, capital and governance. He does not posit a new theory of urban change, but suggests that borderscapes can be best understood as a dynamic in which different forces compete for authority, legitimacy and, ultimately, spatial hegemony. Social ecology rejects the fixity of geographic boundaries by emphasizing the need to understand spatial reproduction via multi-scalar processes that “drop down” to local territories, communities and border formations. Thus, ethnocratic forces bolster racial elites and their capacity to reproduce authority via territorial control, separation and interfacing. Land becomes a signifier of security and conquest, and a vital resource in wider national struggles for identification and survival. The national is intimately connected to the local and the space for negotiation or collaboration becomes highly constrained.
However, the end of conflict can also de-risk cities and facilitate accumulation, although capital is selective in seeking certainty, political endorsement and, crucially, the places that enable its reproduction. Governance thus helps and as Peck and Tickell have pointed out, planning, urban policy and economic development are geared to extending the “viral” reach of the neoliberal project even into areas that were previously incubated by violence and insecurity. Yiftachel's framework helps to explain the cities that have negotiated their way out of conflict to join the market, global circuits of wealth and exchange and some form of civic stability. It also identifies the cities that remain dominated by an ethnocratic regime where identity trumps the market and resource competition, violence and the rigid control of territory endure in the socio-spatial construct of the borderscapes.
This chapter argues that these processes can operate simultaneously at the urban scale to explain the spatial proximity of reterritorialization and deterritorialization, especially in cities moving between violence to some form of ethnic accommodation.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Social Ecology of Border Landscapes , pp. 181 - 194Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2017