Landscapes of Extraction

Landscapes of Extraction Mapping the Political Economy of Stone in the West Bank

Dustin May

Landscapes of Extraction: Mapping the Political Economy of Stone in the West Bank Dustin May

Contents

Introduction Literature Review: Systems of Dispossesion Grounding theories Critical Urban Theories The Role of the Architect

11 12 15

Chapter 1: Centring the Rural Critical Cartography Post-Oslo Political Economy The Political Economy of Stone

17 25 29

Chapter 2: Slow Violence The Quarry Landscape

35

Conservation Development The Production of Nature

1

4

43 45

Case Studies Om Sleiman PIBS Sakiya

47 49 51

Chapter 3: Developments of Resistance Traditional Ecological Knowledge Stone Waste Construction Landscape Transition Spatial Implementations

53 55 63 69

Conclusion

79

Appendix

81

List of Figures

83

Interview Transcripts

85

Bibliography

99

2

Figure 1: Quarry in Si’ir.

3

“Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography.

That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.”1

1. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1994), 82.

Introduction Each decision an architect or planner makes, from the construction details of door handles to stone flooring, has ramifications. Materials have political positions and structures of inequality and exploitation that dwell throughout their extraction, distribution, and lifecycle. Exploitation enacted within the periphery is foundational to capitalism and regional power dynamics; today’s social-democratic societies and social welfare states of the north are underpinned by plunder and the offshoring of extraction in the Global South.2

This thesis focuses on the industry of ‘Jerusalem Stone’ to illustrate how slow violence becomes a reinforcing cycle of dispossession. Furthermore, by situating the occupation and industry in the context of global environmental change and conservation development, the research builds on ‘traditional ecological knowledge’ (TEK) and local case studies to demonstrate alternative forms of development in the region - development that redefines human-nature relations within a process of rural and quarry rehabilitation.

The West Bank has a long and complex political geography. This thesis does not have the scope to explore the history of territorial and political change; however, Figure 2 illustrates pivotal moments that have shaped the region’s geography since 1900.

2. Nancy Fraser, ‘Climates of Capital’, New Left Review, no. 127 (2021): 94–127.

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Using the West Bank, Palestine and Israel as a valuable case study, this thesis demonstrates how construction materials and material accumulation are interconnected with spatial control and human exploitation.

Situating this idea within the framework of settler colonialism, the research explores the role of nature and landscape as a tool of both spatial control and resistance. In a critique of the dominant visual narratives of the occupation, which emphasise events and infrastructure, the research explores alternative representations by focusing on the ongoing structural systems of exploitation that are low in visual spectacle but high in social, economic, and environmental impact.

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1900 Palestine

1937 Peel Commision (Proposed)

Palestine

1947 UN General Assembly adopted Plan. 181 (II)

1949 Armistice Agreements

Palestine

Palestine

Palestine

Israel

Israel

Israel

British Mandate

British Mandate

6

1967 6 Day War

2021 Post Oslo II Accords

Area A Area B

Israel

Area C

Occupied Palestine

Annexed East Jeruselam

Occupied Egypt/Syria

No-mans Land

Figure 2: Boundaries of the region since 1900.

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The current governance structure in the region is vital for understanding its political geography. As illustrated in Figure 2, the Oslo Accords systematically fragmented the West Bank into Area A (Palestinian Authority [PA] has complete control over civil and security matters; Israel controls movement across borders); Area B (PA responsible for civil matters and public order; Israel controls military and security); and Area C (entire Israeli military and administrative control). Each area corresponds respectively, to roughly 17 per cent, 23 per cent, and 60 per cent of the entire territory.3 This fragmentation of Areas A and B into 227 non-continuous islands concentrated resource ownership and reinforced Palestinian de-development. The Israeli Government shifted its occupation strategy from direct military presence towards economic and bureaucratic control through the Oslo process. Without any fundamental shifts in Israel and Palestinian structural dynamics, the Accords reinforced the occupation by deepening the West Bank’s dependency on international institutions and actors,4 recasting the occupation in terms of ‘humanitarian politics’, which effectively released Israel from its responsibilities according to international law.5 This research examines how this restructuring of settler colonialism has led to the normalisation and stagnation of Palestinian resistance.

Acknowledging one’s own relationship with the subject of study is essential for establishing the necessary reflexivity required for academic research. By first acknowledging that my position, any position, cannot be neutral, my intent is to be analytical. As developed by the urban KNOW project on situated ethics, it is important to move beyond medical ethics based on three main principles: minimising harm, informed consent, and protection of privacy.6 Instead, I acknowledge that as a Western researcher, I am bound into the history of scholarship that “not only creates but also maintains” political power (as with a colonial or imperial estab-

lishment).7 Therefore, I have sensitively considered the process of data collection and the presentation of the thesis. In practice, all the interviewees provided prior consent and confidentiality was always respected, with names changed when appropriate.

The thesis is based on a mixed-methods qualitative approach. It draws on site observation, participant observation, analysis of planning and policy documents, targeted and incidental interviews, physical mapping, economic mapping, and design experiments. I carried out four formal, recorded interviews and thirteen informal interviews, ranging from quarry owners (Israeli and Palestinian) to a worker from RIWAQ, a researcher of the Palestinian Museum, architects, and a range of other Palestinians involved in sustainable land and construction practices. However, it is vital to acknowledge that bias remains. As Tahir discusses, “This distinction between truth and knowledge is a shift of the register.

Knowledge is place grasped through a map as a series of spatial points; it functions in binaries, ones and zeroes. Truth is bodied spatial practice, movement, and limbs and anxiety, tension, release.”8 Considering Tahir, in addition to recognising my own cultural and physical position of removal from the subject matter, this research seeks to broaden a critical analysis of the spatial and structural violence through cartographic, architectural and system visualisations.

My research methods shifted and adapted due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Ground study was not possible between September 2020 and September 2021 due to the closure of Israel’s border. I visited Israel and the West Bank twice, one week in December 2019 and one month over November–December 2021. On the second fieldwork trip, I cycled as the primary method of transport to both access the rural landscape and understand the shifting borders and terrain of the region (Figure 3).

3. Philipp Salzmann, ‘A Food Regime’s Perspective on Palestine: Neoliberalism and the Question of Land and Food Sovereignty within the Context of Occupation’, Journal Für Entwicklungspolitik, (2018), 14–34.

4. Sahar Taghdisi Rad, ‘Political Economy of Aid in Conflict: An Analysis of Pre- and Post-Intifada Donor Behaviour in the Occupied Palestinian Territories’, Stability: International Journal of Security & Development 4, no. 1 (2015).

5. Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land (2017).

6. Yael Padan, ‘Researching Architecture and Urban Inequality: Toward Engaged Ethics’, Architecture and Culture 8, (2020): 484–97, https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1792109.

7. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, (1995), 12.

8. Madiha Tahir, ‘The Ground Was Always in Play’, Public Culture, (2016).

Figure 4: Road to Mar Saba Monastery.

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Figure 5: Bicycle used for tour.

Figure 3: Bike route of fieldwork.

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Figure 6: The ‘united and diversity in nature and society project’ conference in Bethlehem. First human and natural biodiversity conference in the West Bank.

Figure 7: A.Grebelsky & Son Stone Factory.

Figure 8: Lidar scan of a quarry. Si’ir.

The fieldwork consisted of interviewing and volunteering, for up to two weeks, at three sustainable organisations: Om Sleiman, The Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS), and Sakiya. Volunteering at the organisations ranged from farm labouring; to designing PIBS’s end-of-year report; to helping help maintain stone (sansel) terraces and a palm-clad birdwatching hut. At Om Sleiman, I undertook a two-day earth construction workshop. During fieldwork, daily notes were taken of insights and interviews, and sites, land management, and construction techniques were photographed, lidar scanned, and sketched.

The research also included visiting the site of proposed development: the active quarry sites between Bani Na’im and Si’ir. In addition, a site visit to a stone factory was undertaken to see the process of stone, from block to tile, and a two-day stone carving course was also completed to understand the material properties of stone.

During the border closure of Israel, I conducted a range of research from a distance. A fieldwork trip to Brussels was taken to interview and see the site of BC Materials (2021), a specialist in earth construction. A two-day Open-Source Intelligence course was taken with Bellingcat (2020) to obtain internet and mapping research skills. A seven-week online Postgraduate Summer School by Bezalel University (2020) was also completed. This course focused on Learning from Jerusalem/Al-Quds and took a multidisciplinary research approach to understand the region’s critical theories and how the city’s historical, contemporary, and spatial tools of control are implemented.

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Several land use and architectural typologies were researched and visited during the fieldwork. To see contemporary uses of stone, I visited the Yasser Arafat Museum, the Palestinian Museum, and made two trips to the Israel National Library with the lead architect while it was under construction. For historical architecture and its use of stone and earth, I visited sites including the stone construction of Mar Saba Monastery, the earth construction Tell es-Sultan, and the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Battir’s stepped-terraced landscape.

This thesis compiles and synthesises the research into social and physical maps that draw attention to the systems of repression within the region. This visual method was chosen to make connections between underlying cycles of exploitation that are reinforcing and challenging to visualise and comprehend in isolation. The concluding chapter builds on the research and mapping to visualise possible spatial and regional developments. These design experiments have been done in parallel to the written research to clarify and progress the focus and analysis throughout the project.

From a building layout to a regional rehabilitation of sustainable land uses, the propositions are not considered the only viable outcome, but instead, an exploration and imagination for a possible future.

Literature Review: Architecture, Power, Territory

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The following chapter situates the thesis within wider academic discourses, reviewing the contemporary urban literature to illustrate the complexity and multifaceted methods of the Israeli regime’s spatial control. Building on critical urban theories on Jerusalem, this thesis connects the region’s urban environments to the West Bank’s highlands, enabling a shift of emphasis towards the role of the rural and human labour to explore systems of exploitation. Concurrently, positioning Palestinian rural practices within the context of resistance and resilience enables a critical shift, questioning narratives that have positioned Palestinians as passive subjects, and instead emphasising them as critical spatial actors. The concluding section positions this thesis as a connection between the Palestinian spatial practitioners and the theory of the political economy of territory and environment by Milica Topalovic and Marc Angélil.

Grounding Theories The framework of settler colonialism underpins this thesis. Developed by Yara Hawari within the context of Palestine, settler colonialism is both the conquest of the material (space) and the immaterial (time).9 Israel denies Palestinians a past and a future by othering Palestinian narratives, dismissing their temporal traditions and eliminating them from history.

As Patrick Wolfe defines, with the “elimination of the native”, settler colonialism is a structure rather than an event.10 By obtaining and maintaining territory, structural complexity is embedded into the process, with the state playing both an active and passive role.

9.

Thus, settler colonialism goes beyond space to incorporate history and narrative, as further explained by Fanon: “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the natives’ brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverse logic, it turns its attention to the past of the colonized people, and distorts it, disfigures and destroys it”.11 Israel’s occupation understood through a settler colonialism framework, is incomplete and ongoing in its dispossession. Furthermore, the framework becomes a valuable prism in researching and interpreting the current condition by emphasising systems and time.

However, it is also vital to acknowledge the importance of space within this process of power and control over territory. As defined by Fields’ study on Palestine, “Space is fundamental in any exercise of power”.12 This notion of power over space is grounded in Foucault’s conception of territoriality. Under Foucault’s framework, universal concentrated power as such does not exist; what exists are power relations – when power is put into action.13 This understanding of power and territoriality is a valuable tool in conceptualising the West Bank conflict by enabling the recognition of power and control as an omnipresent and delocalised relation of forces.

The process of control is typically achieved by reorganising the economic life, politics, and culture of a place via reshaping space.14 Territoriality through enclosure first re-images the land through a narrative of progress, often imbued with John Locke’s enlightenment and the colonial notion of land. Second, boundaries, infrastructure, and sovereignty structures are reconfigured through legal and extra-legal instruments that redefine rights to property, ownership, use, access, and socioeconomic relations. Third, this reconfiguring is reinforced through the anchoring of architecture to

Yara Hawari, ‘Palestine Sine Tempore?’, Rethinking History, 2018.

10. Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409, https:// doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240.

11. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), 210.

12. Gary Fields, Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror (2017).

13. Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 777–95 14. Gary Fields, ‘Enclosure: Palestinian Landscape in a “Not-Too-Distant Mirror”: Enclosure’, Journal of Historical Sociology 23, no. 2 (2010): 216–50, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6443.2010.01373.x.

legitimise the new institutions of power. Reading Palestine through this prism helps explain the connection between settler colonialism and territoriality and how influence and control over space are developed through diverse, disconnected, competing acts and systems, material and immaterial.

Consequently, resistance to power also becomes a delocalised relation of forces, which operates on disparate spatial and temporal scales. As famously articulated in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, “where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power”.15

The literature on architecture and contested space within the Israel/Palestinian conflict is vast, often focusing on Jerusalem. Due to the transparent power imbalance playing, Jerusalem has become a paradigm for urban studies.19 As with the panopticon for Foucault, or the camp for Agamben, Jerusalem has become a prism for developing theoretical and epistemological positions on the spatiality of governance and power.20 This thesis expands on this literature by demonstrating the manifestations of such structural and underlying systems of exploitation that connect urban environments to their rural sites of extraction.

Critical urban theorists, such as Pullan, Yacobi, Braverman, Yiftachel, Weizman and Shlomo, have been fundamental to the understanding of how the politics of space and infrastructure have materialised within Israel/Palestine through the settler-colonial apparatus: a form of spatial violence, increasingly structural and diverse in its outcomes; thus, differing from the Western liberal model of an all-seeing, surveillant state.21 These academics, in addition to local organisations, have laid the groundwork for institutions such as B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch to establish reports and call the current condition, from the river to the sea, as Apartheid.22 Although the use of this terminology has been contested, this thesis follows these reports in understanding the region’s diverse and fragmented, contested sovereignty within an overarching system of oppression. The following section highlights how four frameworks of analysis, derived from critical urban theories of Jerusalem, demonstrate the multifaceted ways power and space are conceptualised or manifested within the region.

15. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality : An Introduction. Volume 1, the Will to Knowledge (1990), 87.

16. Nur Arafeh, ‘“Resistance Economy”: A New Buzzword?’, Journal Für Entwicklungspolitik, (2018), 91–102.

17. Runa Johannessen, ‘Unliveable Spaces; Architecture and Violence in the West Bank’, University of Copenhagen, (2018).

18. James C Scott, Weapons of The Weak (1985).

19. Camillo Boano, ‘Jerusalem as a Paradigm: Agamben’s “Whatever Urbanism” to Rescue Urban Exceptionalism’, City 20, no. 3 (2016): 455–71, https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.1166697.

20. Oren Yiftachel, ‘The Aleph-Jerusalem as Critical Learning’, City 20, no. 3 (2016): 483–94, https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.11667 02.

21. James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale, (2008).

22. B’Tselem, ed., A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid, (2021).

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Human Rights Watch, A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution, (2021).

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Within Palestine, popular struggles and resistance have a long history. The term ‘sumud’ (steadfastness) has shaped political movements across the territory since the 1960s. Sumud has multiple and complex meanings; however, the term denotes resistance against alienation from the land and a fight to retain territorial rights.16 The term also represents an alternative to violent confrontation or passive acceptance by building upon the agency of resisting through everyday practices.17 From walking within the landscape to keeping memory and culture alive, sumud is an active form of resistance overlooked due to historians’ reliance on written accounts, which overlook tend to ignore silent forms of class struggle.18 By emphasising everyday physical acts, this thesis adds to the literature by developing sustainable materials as another vital, contemporary form of sumud.

Critical Urban Theories

Dynamic Structuralism Yiftachel’s ‘dynamic structuralism’ is a useful theoretical lens for understanding the region’s multifaceted and overlapping production of space.23 Yiftachel identifies structural forces that shape the region (colonial,24 national,25 ethnicity,26 gendered,27 religious,28 LGBT,29 neoliberalism,30 class31) through their interactions and intersectionality. By emphasising place and time, structural forces become neither stable nor perpetual but continuous in their process of creation, legitimisation, and contestation. This framing becomes valuable in stitching together the counterclaims and universalist understandings of the conflict and its production of space. Moreover, this approach enables a theoretical framework to conceptualise the diversity of influences and powers that shape the contested region.

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Infrastructure and Services Both Jerusalem and the West Bank are divided, fractured, and contested, making the power to connect and disconnect, to territorialise and de-territorialise, at the heart of the struggle. Planning, infrastructure, and services are vital tools of this control, as demon-

strated by Nolte,32 through the Jerusalem Light Rail, or Braverman’s study of the national parks,33 and Shlomo’s research on Israel’s reorganisation of Palestinian buses.34 Seemingly mundane infrastructure and spaces are inherently political, with territory and narratives negotiated on multiple scales, from significant security highways to small motifs of bins, streetlamps, and signs.35 However, as theorised by building on Foucault, this urban planning is “not... a monolithic and singular regime of rule, but rather… a fragmented domain of multiple and competing sovereignties”.36 Grey Spaces The fragmentation of governance and space is further entrenched by what Yiftachel defines as ‘grey spaces’.37 A central technology of power in the region, these spaces fall under the classification of unplanned or illegal planned development. Such spaces contain many groups, housing, lands, economies, and discourses, lying literally ‘in the shadow’ of the formal. Ranging from Palestinian development in East Jerusalem to Elad land-grabbing in Silwan, demographic and spatial hegemony is deepened through these fractured

23. Yiftachel, ‘The Aleph—Jerusalem as Critical Learning’ 24. Wendy Pullan et al., The Struggle for Jerusalem’s Holy Places (2013).

25. Haim Yacobi, ‘Architecture, Orientalism and Identity: The Politics of the Israeli-Built Environment’, Israel Studies 13 (2008): 94–118, https://doi.org/10.2979/ISR.2008.13.1.94.

26. Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine (2006).

27. Malka Greenberg Raanan and Nufar Avni, ‘(Ad)Dressing Belonging in a Contested Space: Embodied Spatial Practices of Palestinian and Israeli Women in Jerusalem’, Political Geography 76 (2020): 102090, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.102090.

28. Nurit Alfasi, Shlomit Flint Ashery, and Itzhak Benenson, ‘Between the Individual and the Community: Residential Patterns of the Haredi Population in Jerusalem: Haredi Segregation in Jerusalem’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, no. 6 (2013): 2152–76, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2012.01187.x.

29. Gilly Hartal, ‘The Politics of Holding: Home and LGBT Visibility in Contested Jerusalem’, Gender, Place & Culture 23, no. 8 (2016): 1193–1206, https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2015.1136813.

30. Haim Yacobi and Erez Tzfadia, ‘Neo-Settler Colonialism and the Re-Formation of Territory: Privatization and Nationalization in Israel’, Mediterranean Politics, (2019), 1–19.

31. Marik Shtern and Haim Yacobi, ‘The Urban Geopolitics of Neighboring: Conflict, Encounter and Class in Jerusalem’s Settlement/Neighborhood’, Urban Geography 40, no. 4 (2019): 467–87, https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2018.1500251.

32. Amina Nolte, ‘Political Infrastructure and the Politics of Infrastructure: The Jerusalem Light Rail’, City 20, no. 3 (2016): 441–54, https:// doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.1169778.

33. Irus Braverman, ‘Nof Kdumim: Remaking the Ancient Landscape in East Jerusalem’s National Parks’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, (2019), https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619889594.

34. Oren Shlomo, ‘The Governmentalities of Infrastructure and Services amid Urban Conflict: East Jerusalem in the Post Oslo Era’, Political Geography 61 (2017): 224–36, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.09.011.

35. Pullan et al., The Struggle for Jerusalem’s Holy Places.

36. Nezar Alsayyad and Ananya Roy, ‘Medieval Modernity: On Citizenship and Urbanism in a Global Era’, Space and Polity 10, no. 1 (2006): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/13562570600796747, quoted in Oren Yiftachel and Oliver Legrand, ‘Sovereignty, Planning and Gray Space: Illegal Construction of Sarajevo and Jerusalem’ (2014), 215–37.

competing sovereign claims to the land. Thus, these spaces become of theoretical importance for highlighting urban development’s diverse relationship to the state and, in turn, the state’s relationship to the law.

Allowed under sites of exemptions, these spaces are in states of “‘permanent temporariness’, – concurrently tolerated and condemned, perpetually waiting ‘to be corrected’”.38 Mobility Cresswell defines the politics of mobility and immobility to incorporate motive force, speed, rhythm, route, experience, and friction.39 With this breakdown of (im) mobility, space within the region is divided across both soft and hard, physical and cognitive borders. Borders are predominantly dictated along the lines of ethnicity and national identity.40 As McGahern’s running ethnography highlights, Jerusalem space is negotiated and constrained in the most basic use and right to the city.41 Mobility reinforces power dynamics; Palestinian lives become dominated by an arbitrary matrix of differing spatial enclosures that sever connections for the Israeli Government’s fundamental aim of controlling space.42

However, unlike much of the literature, this thesis places Palestinian’s themselves at the forefront of study.

Much of the literature on Israel and Palestine emphasises the Israeli regime’s strategies of occupation and spatial governance. Exemplified in Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land,43 and its thorough deconstruction of the politics of the Israeli regime’s spatial control, Palestinians themselves, and their agency, are absent from the analysis. Focusing on the ‘oppressor’, Weizman renders Palestinians as passive subjects.44 This approach arguably repeats the process of erasure produced by settler colonialism, which has depicted the landscape as picturesque, biblical and devoid of Palestinian bodies and influence.45 While Weizmann’s – and others’– work has been instrumental in identifying and exposing settler-colonial strategies, there is an opportunity to developing the political geography. Refocusing on the rural, away from a preoccupation with the urban and towards the West Bank’s rural highlands, offers a critique of the region’s urbanisation and occupation. This thesis emphasises the reinforcing cycle of dispossession and slow violence and highlights how this process is strengthened through construction materials. Centring on Palestinians, the research highlights how landscape, conservation, and daily practices can develop resistance and resilience within a process of rural and quarry rehabilitation.

37. Yiftachel and Legrand, ‘Sovereignty, Planning and Gray Space: Illegal Construction of Sarajevo and Jerusalem’.

38. Oren Yiftachel, ‘Theoretical Notes On `Gray Cities’: The Coming of Urban Apartheid?’, Planning Theory 8, no. 1 (2009): 88–100, https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095208099300.

39. Tim Cresswell, ‘Towards a Politics of Mobility’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28, no. 1 (2010): 17–31, https://doi. org/10.1068/d11407.

40. Wendy Pullan, ‘The Space of Contested Jerusalem’, Jerusalem Quarterly 29 (2009).

41. Una McGahern, ‘Making Space on the Run: Exercising the Right to Move in Jerusalem’, Mobilities 14, no. 6 (2019): 890–905, https://doi. org/10.1080/17450101.2019.1626082.

42. Wendy Pullan, ‘Conflict’s Tools. Borders, Boundaries and Mobility in Jerusalem’s Spatial Structures’, Mobilities 8, no. 1 (2013): 125–47, https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2012.750040.

43. Weizman, Hollow Land.

44. Yara Sharif, ‘Spaces of Possibility & Imagination within the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict: Healing Fractures through the Dialogue of Everyday Behaviour’, University of Westminster, (2011).

45. Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape (Scribner, 2008).

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These theorists demonstrate complexity as a primary feature of the occupation in the forces of the production of space and its contested spatial boundaries. A deliberate condition established through Israel’s multifaceted and fragmented control of space, the region is a clear contemporary materialisation of Foucault’s notion of territoriality and Patrick Wolfe’s understanding of settler colonialism. Therefore, temporality, mobility, and spatial relationships become vital tools for

disentangling and understanding power and sovereign claims to land and infrastructure.

The Role of the Architect

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The PA has limited influence and centralised control over the West Bank, meaning space and development are negotiated across the region by architects, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and citizens. The critical spatial practice46 of these interdisciplinary practices positions architects beyond designers of contemporary urbanism; rather, as producers of spatial agency.47 The following section builds on architectural research on the region and bridges the discourse to the political economy of territory and environment to establish stone as a key regional actor.

Architects are defining actors within the region. This involvement is evident through conservation efforts, which have become a dynamic and progressive urban development tool, spearheaded by Riwaq in Ramallah but including the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee and Centre for Cultural Heritage Preservation (Bethlehem). Gaining international recognition with the Aga Khan Architecture Award for Berzeit’s redevelopment, Riwaq uses ‘stitching and empowering’ principles to build socioeconomic regeneration and cultural empowerment through rehabilitating rural villages.48 Built on a decentralised and networked understanding of spatial resistance, Riwaq moves beyond simply constructing physical structures to incorporate skilled labour training, publications on Palestinian cultural and architectural literature, Biennale exhibitions and lobbying by-laws to safeguard built heritage. Decolonising Architecture Art Residency (DAAR)49 also demonstrate how research, art, and architecture intersect to critique the occupation. By using ‘areas of speculation’ and ‘architectural fables’, the architects utilise loopholes and potential futures within the existing colonial control.50 Riwaq and DAAR, in addition to the architectural researchers Yara Sharif,51 Runa Johannessen,52 and Nora

Akawi,53 were instrumental in developing this thesis.

Through physical intervention and architectural research, these organisations and researchers have revealed diverse ways Palestine can develop systems of resistance against Israel’s multifaceted, fragmented dominance of space. This thesis bridges these architectural researchers to Milica Topalovic and Marc Angélil’s multidisciplinary work on the political economy of territory and environment.54 This research develops discourse beyond the conservation and appropriation of the built environment, examining the landscape and materials underpinning them, under the assertion that “research culture, and culture in general, is undeniably focused on cities and tends to neglect the importance of wider productive territories”.55 These productive landscapes, nature areas, countryside, or hinterlands are central to understanding urban and social sustainability. As developed within this thesis, the political economy of stone production is asserted as a critical actor of social and spatial conditions within the West Bank, enabling a compounding system of rural exploitation.

The literature review has ground this thesis within broad, regional, and architectural discourses to highlight the importance of processes and systems in the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians. By emphasising time and underlying structures, the region is shaped through diverse, disconnected, and competing acts of control over the region’s space, mobility, and economic relations. This thesis develops the literature, both geographically and theoretically, by positioning the rural landscape as an underlying and reinforcing cycle of dispossession. Highlighting Palestinian’s agency and influence within the region, the research proposes sustainable construction materials and land use as a critical form of sumud. The subsequent section demonstrates the importance of rural environments and their underpinning the region’s spatial, economic, and material exploitation.

46. Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (2006).

47. Jeremy Till, Tatjana Schneider, and Nishat Awan, Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture (2011).

48. Yara Sharif, Architecture of Resistance: Cultivating Moments of Possibility within the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict, Design Research in Architecture (2016) 49. Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, Permanent Temporariness, (2019).

50. Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, and Eyal Weizman, Architecture after Revolution (2013).

51. Sharif, ‘Spaces of Possibility & Imagination within the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict: Healing Fractures through the Dialogue of Everyday Behaviour’; Sharif, Architecture of Resistance, 2016.

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Figure 9: The Palestinian Museum - a contemporary stone building with an integrated stone terraced garden. Birzeit.

52. Runa Johannessen, ‘Unliveable Spaces; Architecture and Violence in the West Bank’, University of Copenhagen, (2018).

53. Nora Akawi, ‘Traversing Territories’, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, (2018), https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/event/nora-akawi/.

54. Milica Topalovic et al., Architecture of Territory - Hinterland: Singapore, Johor, Riau, (2013).

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Milica Topalovic, Architecture of Territory: Beyond the Limits of the City: Research and Design of Urbanising Territories: Inaugu-

ral Lecture ETH Zürich, Inaugural Lecture ETH Zürich, November 30, 2015 (2016), http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/127043.

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Marc Angélil and Cary Siress, ‘Cairo: Speculative Informality’, DisP - The Planning Review 52, no. 4 (2016): 6–15, https://doi.org/

10.1080/02513625.2016.1273655.

55. Topalovic, Architecture of Territory.

Chapter 1: Centring the Rural This chapter uses land use and landscape to create a critical cartography of the West Bank. The chapter first critiques the dominant visual narrative of the occupation, which emphasises events and infrastructure, and highlights the compounding relationship between social and physical environments. In opposition to prevailing scholarship, the subsequent section critiques the West Bank’s political economy and development strategy since the Oslo Accords to reinforce the importance of rural agency. The concluding section examines the stone and quarrying industry as a pivotal actor, connecting land use to the economy, material accumulation to spatial control.

Critical Cartography

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“In the history of colonial invasions, maps are always first drawn by the victors, since maps are instruments of conquest.

Geography is therefore the art of war but also be the art of resistance if there is a counter-map and a counter-strategy.”56 Maps are bound to conquest and territorial control.

The region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan Valley is one of the most disputed territories in history,57 with maps and cartography a central tool in underpinning this.

According to Corner, “the function of maps is not to depict but to enable, to precipitate a set of effects in time. Thus, mapping do not represent geographies or ideas; rather they affect their actualisation”.58 Maps do not reveal but produce reality; bounding and reformulating space and spatiality, enclosed, and projected.

Cartography is a key colonial technology, communicating, legitimising, and regularising the coloniser’s dominion over space, delimiting nationalities and their historiographies. Surveying and mapping became integral to the establishment of the Israeli state, controlling, dispossessing, and transferring land, instruments of (re)defining, (de)legitimising and (de)politicising landscapes.

Palestinians, academics, and human rights groups have long sought to establish counter-cartographies, rendering new images and socio-spatial practices, to construct fresh imaginaries of collective struggle and alternative worlds.

As discussed by Yara Sharif; “This aspect of the alternative is important from the Palestinian perspective because it’s always the maps that relate to an occupied territory thast are always prepared by a more powerful entity or by the other, and that other is always occupier or colonial and therefore they always have an absent layer.”59 Mapping has equally operated as a resistance tool, providing a visual critique of the occupation. Figures 10–13 highlight some of these critical points of spatial oppression, which are crucial for understanding Palestinians’ marginalising and dislocation from the landscape and their restricted mobility. However, as illustrated in the literature review, Israel and its control over the West Bank are now framed within a single regime and organising principle, one of Apartheid.60 Understanding such an ontological shift requires reframing the map to bridge the connections and systems that underline the physical manifestations of oppression.

This research does not attempt to negate the vital and influential role of academic and spatial practitioners, who clearly demonstrate the multifaceted spatial oc-

56. Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-1994 (1995), quoted in Yara Sharif, Architecture of Resistance: Cultivating Moments of Possibility within the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict, Design Research in Architecture (2016), 23.

57. Christine Leuenberger and Izhak Schnell, ‘The Politics of Maps: Constructing National Territories in Israel’, Social Studies of Science 40, no. 6 (2010): 803–42, https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312710370377.

58. James Corner, ‘The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention’ in Mappings’ (1999), 213–52.

59. Yara Sharif, Interview by author, (2021).

60. Nathan Thrall, ‘The Separate Regimes Delusion’, London Review of Books, (2021), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n02/nathan-thrall/the-separate-regimes-delusion.

Figure 11. Demolition and Seizure Orders.

Figure 12. Road Checkpoints.

Figure 13. Israeli Settlements and Military Buffer Zones.

18

Figure 10. Separation Barrier and Border Crossings.

cupation. Instead, this research widens the discourse by grounding these socio-political boundaries within the physio-material landscape, shifting temporalities and spatialities to consider methods of oppression through compounding systems and the complex relationship between the social and physical. Historically, the terrain has sculpted the Israeli/Palestinian spatial relationship on multiple scales. Understanding historical and contemporary relationships to the landscape is vital in constructing contemporary resistance and building agency, refuting Palestinians as passive victims, and demonstrating rural space and practices as key actors.

This thesis focuses on the highlands between Hebron and Bethlehem, selected specifically to broaden the

prevailing focus on NGO-centric cities, such as Ramallah,61 while providing an understanding of the geographic specificity of coloniality.

Figures 14–25 demonstrate a strong reciprocal relationship between the physical (temperature, rock type, geology, soil type, streams, topology) and human activity (groundwater contamination, quarries, nature reserves, Oslo boundaries, urban development). For example (Figure 26), Area C corresponds to geology (Lower Cenomanian), which relates to the topology, soil type and settlement location. These aspects affects the ‘natural’ landscape, exhibiting the cyclical and co-constitutive relationship between human and physical geographies.

61. Alessandro Petti, ‘It’s a City That’s in a Bubble: Ramallah Syndrome’, (2008), https://ramallahsyndrome.blogspot.com/2008/09/bantus-

19

tan-sublime.html.

Figure 14. Temperature

Figure 15. Rock Type

Figure 16. Geology

Figure 17. Soil Type

Figure 18. Streams & Qells

Figure 19. Topology

Figure 20. Quarries

Figure 21. Nature Reserves

Figure 23. Palestinian Urban Development

Figure 24. Israeli Settlements, Separation Barrier, Military Bases

Figure 25. Vulnerability of Groundwater Contamination

Figure 22. Area A:

Area B: Area C:

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Figure 26. Geology Map of Hebron-Bethlehem highlands, illustrating the relationship between Area C and Lower Cenomanian.

21

Figure 27. Palestinian Landuse (Area A & B), a landscape primarily of little vegetation, natural grassland, extraction sites and urban development.

22

Figure 28. The landuse of Israel’s controlled territory’s (Area C), a monopoly on drip arable, complex cultivation, forests, fruit trees, vineyards, and olive groves

23

This co-constitutive relationship is most evident through land use (Figures 27–28). One key example is pine afforestation. Pine trees, chosen for their rapid growth and Western lineage, were used to craft an idealised landscape and maintain territorial control;62 however, this affected the acidity of the soil transforming it into an inhospitable environment for most smaller plants. This choice reveals the consequences of Israel’s simplification of the environment into ideological terms. The ecology serves as a territorial tool, harming natural systems with compounding environmental and social consequences.

When further analysing Figures 27–28, Israel and Palestine have starkly different land uses, which correspond to Figures 14–25. The Israeli-controlled territory has a clear monopoly on drip arable, complex irrigation, forests, fruit trees, vineyards, and olive groves.

The Palestinian territory is principally left with a landscape of little vegetation, natural grassland, extraction sites and urban development. Considering the land use and landscape makes it possible to start visually understanding the stark water availability and economic consequences of the spatial occupation and its separation. Establishing this reciprocity between land use and Palestine’s political economy enables a critical understanding of systems of land dispossession.

Stripped of cultivatable land and with an increasingly threatened ecology, Palestinians are becoming an urban disposable wage labour force. This change enables a compounding cycle of rural degradation and urban migration, severing Palestinian heritage while enabling a land easier for settler expropriation. The subsequent section highlights how the regions dominant development agenda lacks this critical understanding of rural and social reciprocity.

62. Shaul Ephraim Cohen, The Politics of Planting: Israeli-Palestinian Competition for Control of Land in the Jerusalem Periphery (1993).

Figures 29. Olive tree with drip irrigation. Birzeit.

Figures 30. Palestinian landscape with little vegetation/irrigation. Bethlehem.

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Figures 31. Palestinian landscape with little vegetation/irrigation. Jerusalem.

Post-Oslo Political Economy

25

This section develops the cartographical analysis to recognise the region’s underpinning political economy. In opposition to dominant scholarship, which views Palestinian development as a socioeconomic issue, this section links Fayyad neoliberalism, international aid, and Palestinian labour to illustrate the need for West Bank development to engage explicitly with the region’s entangled economies and settler-colonial power structure. Building on the first section, this section questions the current institutionalisation and normalisation of occupation through rural development To comprehend Palestine’s economic condition, Sara Roy’s framework of ‘de-development’ helps define the structural process of Palestinian pauperisation.63 De-development deprives and destroys the capacity for sustainable, independent development in Palestine by restricting the capacity for production and structural transformation, rendering Palestinians dependent on Israel for employment while simultaneously displacing rural populations from their land.64 This process of de-development was further entrenched and institutionalised through the Oslo peace process and the establishment of the PA.

Fayyad Neoliberalism The Oslo Accords were established in an era of capitalist internationalisation of the global economy of the 1990s. Like patterns of capitalist development throughout the Middle East, a vision of neoliberal capitalism was embraced within an economic system based on “the principles of a free-market economy”.65 Nevertheless, the West Bank’s economic restructuring was not ful-

ly implemented until the split between Fatah and Hamas in 2006–2007. Led by President Mahmoud Abbas and former International Monetary Fund (IMF) official Salam Fayyad, as prime minister, various countries, and donor organisations supported the PA, pledging over $7.7 billion in 2007.66 Supported through the Palestine Reform and Development Plan for 2008–2010 (PRDP), reform was drawn up by the World Bank and the IMF that cemented the economic realignment that had been unfolding over the previous decade. However, neoliberal agendas of fiscal reform prioritised private sector-led development, and the PRDP’s development plan led to accusations that international financial bodies were “a de facto ‘shadow government’ in the West Bank, dictating the development programme of the Salam Fayyad government.”67 The result was deteriorating living standards and increased inequality,68 establishing a sharpening of class distinctions within the West Bank, with a middle class benefiting from connection to the PA. As a result, little was spent on manufacturing which further marginalised lower-income communities who had relied on this employment base.69 In 2008, debt deepened with the loosening of lending restrictions by the United States (US) and PA’s sponsored Affordable Mortgage and Loan Corporation.

Household debt increased six-fold between 2009 and 2014, while the national debt grew by 470 percent from 2007 to 2017.70 The swelling of debt and financial-based relations are instrumental to the current Palestinian condition. Individuals increasingly depend on financial markets to meet economic needs, corroding collective struggle and social solidarity.71

63. Sara Roy, ‘De-Development Revisited: Palestinian Economy and Society Since Oslo’, Journal of Palestine Studies 28, no. 3 (1999): 64–82, https://doi.org/10.2307/2538308.

64. Leila Farsakh, ‘“Hidden Gems” and “Greatest Hits”: The Political Economy of Palestine and the Palestinians’, Journal of Palestine Studies 50, no. 1 (2021): 106–11, https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2020.1842011.

65. The Palestinian Basic Law 2003’, www.palestinianbasiclaw.org/basic-law/2003-amended-basic-law.

66. Adam Hanieh, Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East (2013), 238.

67. Ibid. 243.

68. Ibid. 332.

69. Toufic Haddad, Palestine Ltd.: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory (2016), 270, https://doi. org/10.5040/9781350987456.

70. Andrew Ross, Stone Men (2019), 157 71. Adam Hanieh, ‘Development as Struggle: Confronting the Reality of Power in Palestine’, Journal of Palestine Studies 45, no. 4 (2016): 32–47, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2016.45.4.32.

This situation is compounded by an economic model largely dependent on cheap imports. Currently, 85 percent of the West Bank’s exports are absorbed by Israel, and 70 percent of the West Bank’s imports are from Israel.72 The dominance of cheap Israeli goods, monetary aid, and debt (all bolstered by prevailing international development agendas) have cemented Palestinian dependency on Israel. As put by Raja Khalidi and Sobhi Samour, “Soft economic boarders can only perpetuate Palestinian dependence on Israel and allow personal prosperity for some but communal impoverishment for all”.73

International Aid Agencies and Non-Profit Organisations International aid agencies and non-profit organisations were central to the shift in the region’s post-Oslo economic restructuring, embracing neoliberalism.74 It has been argued that NGOs are the primary agents in this neoliberal development model.75 Through the proliferation of aid across the Global South, around 95 percent of the PA’s budget depends on foreign donation.76

Urban-centric international aid has been under increasing criticism from Palestinians and academics for its unsustainable structure. As frequently discussed during fieldwork, one volunteer noted, “It is more important for international organisations to denounce Israel than keep on giving money to the PA”.79 Such critiques often argue that international agencies’ objectives and de facto assumptions regarding the benefits of development have aggravated the conflict’s impact on the Palestinian economy.80 Critiques have also highlighted the ways NGOs ignore power relations unfolding within the region. Overlooking – and often completely disregarding – the asymmetries of power dynamics obfuscate – and thereby strengthens – the process of Israeli settler-colonialism.81 Not only do these development agendas ignore power structures, they also arguably actively reinforce Israeli regimes colonialism. This situation is evident in the World Bank’s rhetoric from 2010, “The twin pillars of sustainable growth and robust institutions for the future Palestinian state must be a joint undertaking of the PA, GoI [Government of Israel], as well as the international community”.82 Simultaneously, it is built into their practices on the ground,

72. Maha Abdallah and Lydia De Leeuw, ‘Violations Set in Stone: HeidelbergCement in the Occupied Palestinian Territory’, (2020).

73. Raja Khalidi and Sobhi Samour, ‘Neoliberalism as Liberation: The Statehood Program and the Remaking of the Palestinian National Movement’, Journal of Palestine Studies 40, no. 2 (2011): 6–25, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2011.XL.2.6.

74. Ibid.

75. Hanieh, ‘Development as Struggle’.

76. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine, Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures (2020), 15.

77. Chiara De Cesari, Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine, Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures (2019), 115.

78. Ibid. 203.

79. Anonymous, Interview with volunteer by author, (2021).

80. Taghdisi Rad, ‘Political Economy of Aid in Conflict’.

81. Hanieh, ‘Development as Struggle’.

82. World Bank, The Underpinnings of the Future Palestinian State: Sustainable Growth and Institutions; Economic Monitoring Report to the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee, (2010), 30

26

This reliance on funding has made the PA’s governance determined by a (chaotic and often contradictory) patchwork of foreign governments, non-profit organisations, private companies, and individuals. Dominant humanitarian ideologies underpin this structure.

As Cesari notes, “Humanitarianism works by mobilising empathy and distributing of services instead of allocation due rights”.77 This structure has cemented emergency relief and quick job creation as the mainstay of donors’ agen-

das, prioritising immediate relief over long-term planning. In establishing services, NGOs enact multiple state-like, semi-governmental practices; however, they struggle to balance through the paradox of the more established success, the greater the challenge to the PA. This issue has ultimately resulted in ad hoc, makeshift coalitions, further hampering long-term action.78

with the World Bank’s funding of Israeli checkpoints inside the separation wall, which normalises the architecture of Israeli settler colonialism.83 This view of development as technocratic and apolitical reinforces the occupation and undermines Palestinian agency and capacity for resistance. Addressing this issue demands an explicit engagement and structural understanding of multi-scalar power relations that underly the occupation, connecting the local and international.

(GDP) has dropped by more than half,86 to 13.3 percent in 1994,87 and below 4 percent in 2019.88 The steady migration away from the rural highlands has become an integral economic and spatial tool of the Israeli regime’s occupation and seizure of land. Through the colonial process of the fragmentation of rural and consolidation of urban, reinforced by international governments and institutions, rural degradation has fundamental consequences that permeate Palestinians’ physical, social, and economic wellbeing.

Labour

27

The West Bank economy is intimately connected to – and, in fact, dependant – on Israel. As the region’s own productive capacities have been curtailed through land degradation and dispossession, Palestinians have been rendered dependent on employment from Israel.

In 2019, one-fifth of employed West Bank Palestinians worked in Israel or settlements; however, this fraction was likely higher due to official numbers only counting permit holders.84 This process has both prevented Palestine’s growth and redoubled Israel’s settlement; colonial architecture (border walls, housing, prisons, etc.) is being constructed by Palestinians themselves. This situation reveals the perverse and self-sustaining processes of settler-colonialism, as oppression and domination are created, deployed, and reinforced not just on the land but through it, not just on bodies but through them.

In Israel, wage pressure and inflation have reduced, facilitating social mobility for lower-class Jews (primarily Mizrahi) to work within higher-paid sectors.85 Furthermore, Israel’s ability to provide and retract labour, offers Israelis powerful political leverage. Again, this imbalance is institutionalised by the Oslo Accords, with selective, punitive work permits.

This situation underlines the importance of focusing on the rural. Agriculture has been in a state of continued decline for the past half-century. Since 1967, agriculture’s contribution to gross domestic product

This section has traced how dominant development agendas since the Oslo Accords are strengthening Israel’s settler colonialism. Making Palestine increasingly dependent on debt and financial support from international financial institutions, while overlooking asymmetric power dynamics, has reinforced the settler-colonial processes. Bridging the subsequent repercussions for Palestinian labour, analysis of cartography and land use further revealed the intimate interconnection between territory and economy.

To establish capacity for new spatial and economic development in the West Bank, one must connect and realise the issues and structures that have led to the current condition. Building on a critical understanding of Fayyad neoliberalism, international aid, and labour, future development must be grounded in the asymmetrical power relations of Israel as a settler-colonial power.

Practically, this understanding means placing rights above economic growth and rejecting the myth of market and development neutrality. A shift in timeframe is needed, which moves beyond debt payment for the individual or quick urban job creation through humanitarian aid to development grounded through rights to land and resources – decentralised and rural. The following subchapter takes the stone industry to connect the previous two sections, highlighting the industry’s role in the degradation of the rural and post-Oslo political economy.

83. Hanieh, ‘Development as Struggle’.

84. State of Palestine Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, ‘The Labour Force Survey Results 2019’, (2020), https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/ portals/_pcbs/PressRelease/Press_En_13-2-2020-LF2019-en.pdf 85. Sobhi Samour, ‘Covid-19 and the Necroeconomy of Palestinian Labor in Israel’, Journal of Palestine Studies 49, no. 4 (2020): 53–64, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2020.49.4.53.

28

Figures 32. Palestinian house, highlighting the current shift to detached homes financed through debt. Bethlehem.

86. Helmut Krieger, ‘Nurturing Alternative Development: Agricultural Cooperatives in Palestine’, Journal Für Entwicklungspolitik, (2018), 5–13.

87. Salzmann, ‘A Food Regime’s Perspective on Palestine: Neoliberalism and the Question of Land and Food Sovereignty within the Context of Occupation’.

88. The World Bank, ‘Agriculture, Forestry, and Fishing, Value Added (% of GDP)’, (2021), https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.AGR. TOTL.ZS?end=2020&start=1995.

The Political Economy of Stone

29

Resource extraction and the expropriation of nature have been and continue to be a defining mechanism of colonialism – and particularly settler-colonial regimes.

From Canada’s oil industry to mining in Australia, colonial forces have repeatedly used resource extraction to marginalise indigenous communities and strategically undermine their economic capacities – with genocidal outcomes. In parallel, environmental preservation and discourses of ‘wilderness’, ‘nature’ and ‘sustainability’ have been used as neo-colonial tools for asserting territorial control- from fisheries management to reforestation efforts.

This scenario is playing out across the West Bank.

Here, quarries, factories, and workshops are almost exclusively run and owned by Palestinians.89 As a result, the industry has become a vital material and political locus of negotiation between both states and a central apparatus of Israel’s systematic control of Palestinian’s economy, landscape, and labour. As such, Jerusalem Stone offers a unique opportunity to dissect connections between the post-Oslo political economy and the degradation and exploitation of the rural. The industry is a means of recognising power asymmetries and market biases, as stone and quarrying highlight the intersection and history of resources to power relations within the region. The following section emphasises the political and spatial consequences of urban environments materiality, which is enacted throughout the construction industry.

Colonialism is rooted in materiality. Construction resources – both the material and its site of extraction – are a defining link connecting urban development and colonial expansion. To unpack the socio-political and physio-material consequences of resources within the

contested region enables a broader understanding of how extraction and material flows exploit periphery communities and environments and reinforce regional power dynamics. The central highlands chosen for this thesis is an apt situation for study, as these processes playing out within Palestine typify a wider process unfolding across the Global South.90 The central highlands of the West Bank harbour some of the best quality dolomitic limestones in the world; therefore, the region’s political and economic importance cannot be overstated. The geological landscape comprises eight variations of stone, including limestone, dolomite, and dolomitic limestone rocks of Upper Cretaceous age, ranging in colour from white to pink, yellow, and tawny – all defined within the industry as ‘Jerusalem Stone’.91 This term was defined by Arik Grebelsky, from Israel’s largest stone supplier, A. Grebelsky & Son, defined during the 1980s to establish a larger international export market.92 However, the history and importance of the stone in particular, and building materials in general, have had a complex relationship with both states that stretches back beyond Arik Grebelsky’s marketing.

The stone industry and craftsmanship have long been central to Palestinian culture, with references across songs, literature, and narratives of resistance and uprising.93 During the Ottoman period and the British Mandate, large villages in Palestine hosted a master mason who designed and constructed homesteads and common-use buildings. Tools and techniques were passed down through generations, leading to the construction of palaces, hilltop villages, and towns still admired today. However, stone is inextricably linked with Palestinian dispossession.

“It would be no exaggeration to say that the ‘stone men’ of Pal-

89. Ross, Stone Men. 90. Stephen Gasteyer et al., ‘Water Grabbing in Colonial Perspective: Land and Water in Israel/Palestine’, Water Alternatives 5 (2012).

91. Hilmi S. Salem, ‘Evaluation of the Stone and Marble Industry in Palestine: Environmental, Geological, Health, Socioeconomic, Cultural, and Legal Perspectives, in View of Sustainable Development’, Environmental Science and Pollution Research 28, no. 22 (2021): 28058–80, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-12526-4.

92. Arik Grebelsky, Interview by author, (2019).

93. Adam Hanieh, ‘Stone, Labor, and the Building of Israel’, Journal of Palestine Studies 49, no. 2 (2020): 80–86, https://doi.org/10.1525/ jps.2020.49.2.80.

estine have built almost every state in the Middle East except their own,” says Ross.94

duced spatial, political, and economic ramifications for the Palestinians.

Building materials and labour have served as political and symbolic tools for establishing and strengthening the Israeli state. Israel’s iconic concrete and modernist development were expounded as symbolic of the forward-looking spirit of a new Hebrew society as well as a metaphor for the formidable fortitude of the Israeli national character.95 However, underlying this ideology was the desired exclusion of Palestinians. Stemmed from the growing tensions of the 1920s and 1930s, Israel began building out of concrete and silicate bricks to exclude stone masons and quarry owners (predominantly Palestinian) from labour markets and urban spaces.96

There has been a resurgence of stone masonry and Palestinian cultural development with the likes of Riwaq; nonetheless, Israel and Israeli settlements dominate the stone market, purchasing 75 percent of exports.100 This is a large figure, considering that 96 percent of stone is exported.101 At the same time, due to strict environmental measures governing pollution and toxicity, the Israeli stone industry has steadily decreased, further driving outsourcing – particularly from across the green line (1949 Armistice border). The influence of the industry within the West Bank has led some to define the resource as ‘white oil’,102 a defining component of the Palestinian economy. The economic indicators below demonstrate this:

Economic Indicators - Current estimated reserves $30 billion - Employment: 25,000–30,000 workers, dispersed in 1,200 firms.

- 12th largest stone production in the world - Produce over 100 million tons of raw stone and approximately 25 million square meters of stone per annum - USD 400 million in total annual revenues.

- 25% of the national industrial production.

- 4.5% of the Gross National Product (GNP) - 5.5% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) - Contribution to Palestinian exports 26 % - Stone exports to Israel, 75.4% - Potential annual value of quarrying is estimated at USD 900 million annually (Economic Indicators references in Appendix)

94. Ross, Stone Men, 42.

95. Ibid. 72.

96. Hanieh, ‘Stone, Labor, and the Building of Israel’.

97. Weizman, Hollow Land, 27.

98. Ibid. 28.

99. Sharif, Interview by author. (2021) 100. Salem, ‘Evaluation of the Stone and Marble Industry in Palestine’.

101. Artemis Kubala, ‘The Political Economy of Stone Quarrying in the West Bank (Palestine)’, University of Gent, (2015).

102. Judy Price, ‘White Oil, Excavations and Disappearance’, University of the Creative Arts and University of Brighton, (2014).

30

This ideology was inverted in 1967 when the Israeli army completed the occupation of the eastern part of Jerusalem and began archaeological digs. The 1968 master plan saw the historic stone as a tool to unify the built city and prevent future repartitioning through reinstating a bylaw first authorised in 1918 by the British Mandate city governor, who stated stone was “the only material allowed on exterior walls in the city”.97 The new use of Jerusalem Stone became a visual tool to sustain territorial expansion while ideologically linking new illegal developments to the stones embodied “earthly nature of place” and its “sense of spirituality and even holiness”.98 “There is a cultural aspect of the stone being used as a cultural currency to route one into the land by this aspect of the holy stone. Every synagogue has to have Jerusalem holy stone”.99 This belief is implemented regionally with settlements and internationally by religious institutions and private companies (including A Grebelsky & Son). Over the past forty years, growing demand from Israel for stone has pro-

A critical analysis of the stone industry requires embedding its economic significance into its broader political and spatial consequences. Such analysis also provides a key case study for exploring the settler-colonial processes at play and the importance of materiality, which is vital to architectural study.

David Harvey, in his theory of paths of capital accumulation (Figure 33), builds on Marx’s value theory by conceptualising a continuous cycle of capitalist accumulation that derives its power from the labour of the working classes.103

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Figures 33. Paths of Capital Accumulation, By David Harvey.

Through understanding the economy as a reinforcing system and process of exploitation, Harvey’s framework of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ provides key academic underpinnings for this research.104 The accumulation of Israel’s political power and control over the industry, Palestinians are dispossessed of both landscape and human rights. As considered by Kubula, Harvey’s framework can be positioned within the context of Palestine’s stone industry and be developed into ‘accumulation by normalisation’.105 The accumulation is primarily beneficial to Israel’s economy and a select few quarry owners, while normalisation becomes increasingly entrenched through an extension of the status quo of the occupation. Employing both ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and ‘accumulation by normalisation’ enables a systems approach to the industry. Understanding the compounding cycle of exploitation and normalisation for the Palestinians and the accumulation of political power and control for Israel enables an essential platform for enabling change within such a political economy.

Palestinian quarries are subject to restrictions due to

Israeli governmental control. Today, only a select few remaining quarries are still operating legally in Area C as the Israeli Natural Resources Administration has not issued new permits since 1994.106 Area C is the largest area within the West Bank and holds the most abundant natural rock reserves. According to the World Bank, if the Israeli Government lifted the Area C quarrying restriction, it could be worth up to $2.2 billion annually, resulting in up to $30 billion in total.107 Restrictions on excavation and the prohibition of expansion have resulted in a severe depletion of reserves in Areas A and B.108 While forcing quarries out of business, the Civil Administration has also failed to regulate properly the closure of quarries, resulting in “serious ecological and environmental harm”.109 In contrast, on the Israel side of the green line, there is a 5 percent fund for preserving and safely closing disused quarrying sites.110 To further control the industry, Israel’s government has systematically restricted the sale of international exports, consolidating their market control. Only one checkpoint permits the transit of stone, with a quota of

103. David Harvey, ‘Value in Motion’, New Left Review, no. 126 (2020).

104. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (2003).

105. Kubala, ‘The Political Economy of Stone Quarrying in the West Bank (Palestine)’.

106. Human Rights Watch (Organization), ed., Occupation, Inc: How Settlement Businesses Contribute to Israel’s Violations of Palestinian Rights (2016).

107. World Bank, ‘Area C and the Future of the Palestinian Economy’, (2013).

108. Salem, ‘Evaluation of the Stone and Marble Industry in Palestine’.

109. Human Rights Watch (Organization), Occupation, Inc. 110. Grebelsky, Interview by author. (2019) 111. Union of Stone and Marble Industry, ‘Stone & Marble in Palestine; Developing a Strategy for the Future’, (2011). 27

just 125 trucks a day.111 The remaining stone for international export is required to be transferred from Palestinian to Israeli trucks at the border. This process results in an extra cost of haulage and packaging, delays to shipments, frequent damage of goods and an overall unpredictability to the process that prices Palestinian manufacturers out of the international stone market.

To connect Israel’s economic control and Palestinian dispossession, Figure 35 illustrates the role of quarrying and its relationship to Israeli and West Bank economies, demonstrating the embedded relationship of stone to the broader economics of Israel’s territorial and industrial expansion within the West Bank. By mapping the economic and political connections within a system, Figure 35 moves beyond cartographic or physical representations of the conflict. Instead, the figure rep-

By bridging cartography, post-Oslo economics and the quarrying industry, this chapter demonstrates why rural development is imperative to sever dependency and normalisation to the process of Israel’s settler-colonialism. Debt and landscape are reinforcing systems and processes of exploitation that self-sustain the region’s entangled economic and settler-colonial power structure. With physical and economic maps, the research has aimed to emphasise the relationships and processes of exploitation. Developed through the stone industry, the chapter highlights resource extraction as a defining mechanism that exploits periphery communities and environments to enable territorial control and settlement expansion. The following chapter develops upon this analysis by grounding the research within the framework of slow violence and the region’s need for climate adaptation development.

resents the system of power relations that restricts and controls quarrying and stone for Israel’s gain.

32

Figure 34: Quarry in Si’ir.

Israeli Goverment Ministry of Defense

Ministry of Economy

Ministry of Energy

[2]

Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories

Israeli Civil Administration

Issuing Licenses

Power Structure

[5]

Settlement Municipalities

Collect Taxes

w

ed ur

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ag

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Israeli Quarries

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> 70 per cent of the production of all West Bank quarries are taken to Israel

Palestinian Urban Development

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of of $12.

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Israeli Construction

Israeli Economy

if n

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Manufacturing, mining and quarrying constituted 19 per cent of Israel’s product composition.

o re

strictions [ 9]

Israel’s GDP per capita: $35,293 Palestinian GDP per capita: $2,923 [10]

11,000 of 17,000 people formally employed in settlements are Palestinian.

Most workers receive $2 to $4 an hour (Israel’s minimum wage: $5.75)

Settlements Israel has established at least 250 settlements and outposts in the past 53 years, housing more than 600,000 Israeli settlers.

Israeli Industry Israeli commercial activity: 6km2 footprint (larger than settlements) 20 industrial zones 1,000 factories 187 shopping centers

300 opperations [8] und o r a

Palestinian Quarries (Area C)

illi

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% successful its, 6 Perm ] [4

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33

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Palestinian Economy Palestinians forced to leave land and work for Settelemnts and Isreal [11]

Palestinian Labour

$320 Million loss in Area C tax and fees (2001-17)

[1] - Israeli Government categorises most Jewish settlements and almost all settlement industrial zones as National Priority Areas (NPAs). Government benefits for these areas include; reductions in the price of land, preferential loans and grants for purchasing homes, grants for investors and the development of infrastructure for industrial zones, coverage for customs duties imposed by European Union countries, and reductions in individuals and companies income tax.

Palestine Goverment

0.5 million cubic meters a year.

Water

Exports 0.7-1.0 million tons of toxic slurry waste a year.

Israeli Civil Administration’s failure to properly regulate abandoned quarries in Area C has led to “serious ecological and environmental harm.”

Environmental Degradation

Waste

Palestinians have struggled to obtain funding and permits for landfills. All authorized landfills servicing Palestinians are funded by international donors.

[3] - The funds, which are designed to benefit the Palestinian population under international law, are instead transferred into the Israeli State fund and not to a separate fund; therefore, it is difficult to know how the funds are used.

[4] - Israel has altered Jordanian planning laws to exclude Palestinians from the planning processes, while military orders create a separate planning route for settlers. Israel has designated 70 per cent of Area C for settlement regional councils, approved master plans for Jewish settlements covering 26 per cent of Area C. Only 1 per cent of Area C has developed building plans for Palestinians, with most already built up. According to the Civil Administration, from 2000 to 2012, 210 out of 3,565 Palestinian building permit requests were granted.

[5] - The Natural Resources Administration holds the responsibility and authority to grant permits for new quarries and extractive industries and approve the renewal of licences.

6] - Under the Oslo Accords, Israel can siphon off up to 80 per cent of West Bank water reserves. The World Bank estimates it costs the agricultural sector $704 million annually.

[7] - Encouraged to open quarries in the West Bank, but not required to follow Israeli environmental standards and procedures, causing damage to the residents, land, landscape and environment. [8] - As of 2013, only 70 of around 300 Palestinian stone mining and quarrying operations are located in Area C. Being reduced in 2016, when the Israeli Civil Administration, with the support of the Israeli military, shut down 35 quarries in the Palestinian town of Beit Fajar.

[9] - According to the World Bank, an additional $30 billion could be added to the Palestinian economy should Israel remove its restrictions imposed on Palestinian development of stone reserves in Area C. Revenue from natural resources in Area C could contribute about $2.2 billion annually to the Palestinian economy.

[10] - Israeli restrictions on Palestinian access to international markets also maintain Palestinian dependency on the Israeli economy. Thirty-nine per cent of exports from Israel to the occupied Palestinian territories are imported from third countries and resold to Palestinian consumers. UNCTAD estimates this costs the Palestinian Authority $115 million annually in lost customs duties.

[11] - Farmers in Area C are particularly hard hit by Israel’s discriminatory land and water policies. Therefore, many Palestinians are left with little choice but to seek employment in settlements, providing a steady source of cheap labour for settlement companies. Twenty-four per cent of Palestinians in Area C are farmers, 10 per cent are herders, and 24 per cent currently work in settlements. In 2009, 11,000 out of 17,000 people formally employed in settlements were Palestinian.

Figure 35: Process of accumulation and dispossession. References in Appendix.

34

Palestinian Quarries

Palestinian Water Authority

legislation [6]

Grant Permits (for Area A & B)

Natural Resources Department

[2] - Since the mid-1970s, Israel’s Military Commander of the West Bank has issued permits to Israeli-administered companies to carry out quarrying activities in the OPT, mostly on public land declared by the Israeli Civil Administration as ‘State land’.

Chapter 2: Slow Violence

35

The Quarry Landscape When travelling through the West Bank’s highlands, extractive quarry sites are stark markers cutting through the landscape. The Israeli regime’s control and manipulation of the stone market have clear physical repercussions on both the human and nonhuman.

Fragmentation and isolation are key tools of settler colonialism and territoriality within the broader context; thus, they are consequently reproduced within the stone industry. To gain a position within the restricted labour market, Palestinians have been compelled to sacrifice their health, community, and land. This chapter emphasises such sacrifices as a form of slow violence. In opposition to the dominant scholarship of infrastructure and explicit acts of violence, such as checkpoints and house demolitions, the following sections demonstrate the structural violence of the quarrying industry and the need for waste management and environmentalism to recognise the region’s power dynamics as global warming, and consequently, conservation development intensifies. By emphasising the importance of climate adaptation development to the region, the concluding section positions the occupa-

Figure 36: Separation barrier. Bethlehem.

tion within the society/nature dichotomy to illustrate the interconnection between material accumulation, spatial control, and exploitation of marginalised populations.

Coined by Rob Nixon (2011),112 ‘slow violence’ is a helpful insight to understand the destruction of Palestinian heritage and land caused by the stone industry: “A violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all… a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive”.113 Nixon’s words reveal the significant challenge of garnering international attention towards a violence that lacks the immediate visceral impact of much conflict. Using Nixon’s theory of environmental and cultural violence, it is of particular importance to represent and consider violence, not only over space and bodies, but also over human labour, natural resources, and the longue durée.

Infrastructure Quarry sites are scattered chaotically throughout the landscape, established by Israel’s occupation but, in part, encouraged through the PA’s legislation (see Figure 37). Since the PA’s 1999 privatisation and deregulation of the industry, the parcelling of land and increase in dangerous extraction methods has only grown.114 The predominantly family-owned manufacturers are pitted against each other to establish a low-wage, competitive market that often overlooks licence requirements, health and safety, and pollution. With a lack of regulation and weaknesses in applying them, people expand their operations to areas that do not belong to them, with few judicial repercussions.115 These small, isolated quarry owners and stone manufacturers have little bargaining power and inhibited ability to coordinate with each other or related institutions and government,116 resulting in deficient and inappropriate infrastructure and knowledge. The industry, thus, requires a comprehensive inventory and

112. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674061194.

113. Ibid. 2.

114. ‘Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency - Extraction’, Extraction, (n.d.), www.decolonizing.ps/site/extraction.

115. Ibid.

116. Salem, ‘Evaluation of the Stone and Marble Industry in Palestine’.

B

Ar ea

Area A

Area B

Area C

36

1 0.6

Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (Sentinel-Hub)

0.2 0 -0.1 -0.2 -0.5 -1 0

Quarry

500m

1km

Figure 37. Quarry locations and Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (health and state of surrounding landscape) for the highlands between Si’ir to Bani Na’im (Hebron). Data from Sentinel-Hub.

survey of further excavation suitability. Such a survey would include the physical, chemical, mechanical, and biological properties of the quarrying region and its geological, geophysical, hydrological, and hydrogeological settings and ecological dimensions, as called for in Article (3) of the Natural Resources Law.117 The stone quarrying sites continue to use outdated infrastructure with little financial support at the governmental level for improvement.118 As a result, roads, power, and water supply are patchwork, outdated, and dangerous, pushing up premium costs. Thus, the Palestinian industry is being denied capacity for development – inhibiting economic and political independence.

37

Health With both disordered locations and inappropriate technology, the stone industry is physically toxic and dangerous. Due to a lack of awareness and enforcement of health and safety, accidents are prevalent within the industry.119 Of particular importance is the dust created by the excavation and workshop process, which is especially prevalent within the West Bank as 90 percent of the stone-cutting facilities do not have appropriate filter-press machines.120 The fine stone waste, seen throughout the landscape, harms the health of the labourers and the surrounding community. Residents living close to extraction sites have claimed: “For days we cannot open our windows, our children are unable to venture outside”.121 Furthermore, with prolonged exposure to these fine stone particles, namely ≤

PM1 and ≤PM2.5, the dust can prompt and exacerbate chronic respiratory and cardiac diseases.122 Doctors in the West Bank have noticed a disproportionate increase in blood cancers, kidney diseases, pneumonia, and other pulmonary ailments among patients from towns close to quarries. With Ross quoting one medic stating, “In his estimate, 80 per cent or more of their patients were either from stone producing towns in the area, a ratio far out of proportion to the area’s population distribution”.123

Environment Quarries and stone-cutting industries cause severe ecological destruction. The industrial process and resulting waste pollute natural flora, fauna, air, land and water, prompting agricultural degradation.124 Regarding natural flora, the stone slurry and dust result in a thick white layer over the leaves, which inhibits photosynthetic activity and the ability to repel pests and disease.125 When left on soil, the dust causes considerable fertility degradation, changing its pH value, electric conductivity, porosity, permeability, and salinity.126 These soil changes have repercussions on the underground water recharge, which amplify stormwater drainage issues while contaminating water storage and groundwater aquifers. One study on Jammain found that 68 percent of the respondents stated their groundwater was polluted due to quarrying debris.127 Quarrying dust also impacts agricultural land, severely affecting crop yields. Another Jammain report found 95 percent of respondents claimed their harvests decreased by at least 30 percent annually.128 Fruit trees are

117. Paltrade, ‘Stones and Marble: Sector Export Strategy 2014-2018’ (2014).

118. ‘Stone and Marble Industry in Palestine’, Union of Stone and Marble Industry, (2012).

119. Ahmed Abu Hanieh, Sadiq AbdElall, and Afif Hasan, ‘Sustainable Development of Stone and Marble Sector in Palestine’, Journal of Cleaner Production 84 (2014): 581–88, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2013.10.045.

120. Nabil Al-Joulani and Nidal Salah, ‘The Stone Slurry in Palestine from Environmental Burden to Economic Opportunities—Feasibility Analysis’, Journal of Environmental Protection 05, no. 12 (2014): 1075–90, https://doi.org/10.4236/jep.2014.512106.

121. Wattan News Agency’, (n.d.), www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4mPUXDlJho. 122. Salem, ‘Evaluation of the Stone and Marble Industry in Palestine’.

123. Ross, Stone Men, 203.

124. Tahseen Sayara, ‘Environmental Impact Assessment Of Quarries And Stone Cutting Industries In Palestine: Case Study Of Jammain’, Journal of Environment Protection and Sustainable Development, (2016), 32–38.

125. Salem, ‘Evaluation of the Stone and Marble Industry in Palestine’.

+ Disregard of Article (3) of the Natural Resources Law, which calls for carrying out research and conducting geological mapping and surveying of natural resources + Deregulation and fragmentation of ownership structure

+ Poor infrastructure (electricity and roads) + Old technologies/tool within factories and mining + Cant use explosives

+ No geological study of remaining stone deposits

Coordination

+ Absence of a government - backed loan / credit guarantee scheme

Finance

+ Lack of coordination between related institutions (GOV & NGO) + Small family businesses - Little concern for the environmental and safety hazards

+ Difficult to access credit from both institutional and enterprise level + The lack of financial resources at the government level - challenging to fund infrastructure projects

+ Chaotic location of quarrying sites

+ Up to 70% of material is wasted,30% of stone slabs are not usable

+ Lack of planning regarding waste dumping sites

+ Total solid and fluid waste generated annually is no less than 1.24 million ton (1.24 billion kg). + High proportion of recyclable water is lost

Waste

+ Power and water supplies are not reliable

Policy

+ Lack of governmental support/regulations, or weakness in applying them.

+ Limited knowledge/inventory of the distribution of quarries and their excavation’s suitability as stipulated in the Natural Resources Law + Onerous and costly licensing and registration procedures

+ High cost of fuel

Infrastructure

+ Industry uses approximately 0.5 million cubic meters of water each year

Environment

+ Annual dry mud waste, 190,000 t (190 million kg)

+ Degradation to biodiversity and landscape

+ Annual slurry waste - around 600,000 t (600 million kg)

+ Produces acid rain and khamsin winds + Reduces soil fertility, due to changes in the pH-value, electric conductivity (EC), salinity, and total dissolved solids (TDS)

+ Dust from the quarries, crushers and factories is harmful for workers, inhabitants from nearby villages and camps (lung fibrosis, chest diseases, asbestosis)

Health

+ Poor product diversity (mainly traditional products, like building stones)

+ Frequent accidents from machine use

International Participation + Limited management expertise

Education + Limited number of skilled workers through TVET (Stone and Marble Centre) + Don’t have experienced marketing staff, universities do not offer adequate courses

+ Poor packaging + Back to back truck loading

+ Export clearances from the Ministry of Environmental Affairs can take several months and in some cases years to be granted + Lack of effective branding in the sector from fragmented marketing efforts by individual firms rather than concerted joint efforts

+ Lack of health and safety knowledge - both from dust/waste and tool use

also being damaged. In towns such as Beit Fajjar, fruit is no longer sold in surrounding city markets, and the residents are forced to buy vegetables and fruit sourced from surrounding villages within the West Bank or Israel.129 Figure 38 synthesises and outlines connections between the stone industry’s slow violence on health, environmental, and infrastructure. As the figure displays, little technological development has been possible

due to a lack of financial, infrastructure, and education support from the PA, and has been compounded

by Israel’s manipulation of the Palestinian economy, reinforcing a cycle of dispossession. Such slow violence and environmental degradation underpin broader rural deterioration and urban-centric development.

Palestinian agrarian cultural heritage is also eroded.

The resulting unfertile, unproductive, and uninhabited land is key to the legitimation of Israel’s territorial claims and resulting settlements.

126. Nabil AL-Joulani, ‘Soil Contamination in Hebron District Due to Stone Cutting Industry’ 10 (2008).

127. Sayara, ‘Environmental Impact Assessment Of Quarries And Stone Cutting Industries In Palestine: Case Study Of Jammain’.

128. Tahseen Sayara, Yamen Hamdan, and Rezq Basheer-Salimia, ‘Impact of Air Pollution from Quarrying and Stone Cutting Industries on Agriculture and Plant Biodiversity’, Resources and Environment 6 (2016): 122–26, https://doi.org/10.5923/j.re.20160606.04.

129. Salem, ‘Evaluation of the Stone and Marble Industry in Palestine’.

38

Figure 38. The interconnecting issues of the West Bank’s stone industry.

39

Figure 39. Quarry dust.

40

Figure 40. Quarry’s polluted ground.

Waste

41

As displayed in Figures 38 and 41, tthe waste produced by the industry facilitates dispossession. The waste, particularly slurry and dust, is significant because it is an aspect within the economic and infrastructure process that can be developed, whereas the industry is still controlled and restricted by current Israeli dominance and PA limitation. Figure 41 highlights the stone production process in the West Bank to demonstrate key moments of waste produced during the stone manufacturing process. The industry’s total waste is up to 70 percent of the final produced stone – up to 1.24 billion kg per year.130 There is also a vital need to recycle water and use filter press-water treatments because the industry currently uses 0.5 million m3 annually, an added strain to an already water-scarce region.131 Waste is a potent issue in the region. Stone waste is only one form of waste produced by the intensified capitalist material expansion of the region since the Oslo Accords. This manifestation of waste within the landscape is just one form of the occupation’s structural violence; a shift from the Israeli Government’s more overt violent tactics of the early 2000s. The small region of the West Bank is a critical indicator of how materiality and consumption are used within an imbalance of power dynamics. In addition, the politics playing out in the region highlights issues around the negotiation of waste management beyond its geographical territory, where similar struggles occur; for example, how toxic waste facilities and landfills disproportionately burden African American communities132 or the geopolitics of clothing waste in Ghana.133 Waste and waste management of stone, domestic water waste, and others are critical issues for Palestine.

This waste establishes a constant presence of ecology, a fundamental part of the daily lived experience of the political condition. The waste is there for all to smell, see, and feel. There is a wastescape in which people dwell and that dwells within them through the toxins that course through their bloodstreams.134 Palestini-

an’s waste situation starkly demonstrates an ecology without harmony.

Shifting Harvey’s ‘accumulation by dispossession’ to ‘dispossession by accumulation’ helps conceptualise the temporality of waste’s role in the broader process of Israel’s claim to territory. Dispossession by accumulation broadens the dominant narrative of environmental destruction as an issue of depletion (rainforests, coral reefs, ice caps). Within the West Bank, the accumulation of waste is a tool to bolster the colonial argument of the Zionist imaginary of Palestine as unhabitable and abandoned. Through new agricultural and water-production techniques, Israel profits while Palestinians are confined to evermore toxic and diminishing land. This system of territoriality and waste becomes a reinforcing cycle of dispossession, which is of particular importance with the growing impact of climate change and environmental policy on the region.

Central to the West Bank’s dispossession by accumulation lies the asymmetrical colonial power dynamics of environmental protection in the region. For example, Uzi Landau, the infrastructure minister, was quoted in the Jerusalem Post saying, “It is infuriating that we give the Palestinians fresh water and they do not adequately treat their sewage and instead pollute our shared environment”.135 By stating “shared environment”, Landau implicitly depicts Israel as a victim and even saviour. However, it is important to note that Landau is an influential individual in the construction of Palestinian sanitary infrastructure. One example, the Tulkarem treatment plant, has been pending governmental approval since 1995, despite having 20 million euros pledged by the German development agency, KfW.136 The conflicting narratives of environmental protection to legitimise infrastructural and territorial development will continue to intensify with climate adaptation. As highlighted previously, through the economy, waste development (both quarry and other) must incorporate and understand the political power relations to realise resilient Palestinian landscape development.

130. Salem, ‘Evaluation of the Stone and Marble Industry in Palestine’.

131. Paltrade, ‘Stones and Marble: Sector Export Strategy 2014-2018’.

132. Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, 3rd ed (2000).

133. Jo Lorenz, ‘Decolonising Fashion: How An Influx Of “Dead White Man’s Clothes” Is Affecting Ghana’, (2020), https://eco-age.com/ resources/decolonising-fashion-dead-white-mans-clothes-ghana/.

Calibration, Polishing, Tile Cutting

Block Sawing

Blocks Slabs

eje 8% R

Final Stone Output

s

en Tiles

b cted Sla

Brok 10%

Sl u Sand and 12%

dge

dge

Fresh Water: 0.5 Million m3 Annually

Tiles

Slabs

locks Broken B 10%

d Slu Sand an 18%

Process of Extraction

Blocks

1.2 4B ill i

a kg on

Waste

r Yea

Opp

ort

~ 70%

un

it y

Us

t

o

eR

ecy

cl e d

Wa ter to Reduce Total Annual Input

of W ate r

Slurry 34% Water .

(Filter Presses) 600 Million kg a Year

Stone Dust

Solid 36% 640 Million kg a Year

200 - 250 Million kg a Year

134. Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Waste Siege, 107.

135. Ibid. 191.

136. Ibid. 189.

42

Figure 41. Waste in stone production process.

Conservation Development

43

This section discusses how global warming and associated resource and landscape depletion will intensify slow violence. Connecting the West Bank to global agendas of climate mitigation and adaptation, the chapter looks to frames future development within the historical use of Environmental Orientalism to illustrate the importance of Palestinian-led sustainable rural development.

The West Bank is located in an area susceptible to environmental degradation. The Eastern Mediterranean is predicted to warm at a higher rate than the global average; at current projections, the temperature will increase between 1.2°C and 2.6°C by mid-century and up to 4.8°C by the end of the century, with an average monthly precipitation fall of 8–10 mm.137 This stress on the communities and landscape will be particularly pertinent because of existing water insecurity. Furthermore, predictions suggest that unless emissions are reduced, large parts of the region will likely experience temperature levels that are intolerable to humans by the end of this century.138 Consequently, protecting biodiversity and ecology for climate adaptation will become an increasingly politicised issue as Israel and Palestine attempt to manage and conserve land and resources.

Biodiversity and adaptation have become an increasingly vital aspect of climate mitigation, and are central to curbing global climate emissions. As stated in the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report, one million plant and animal species are threatened with extinction, and 60 percent of terrestrial wildlife has already been lost since 1970.139 This shift has led to the United Nations Convention of Biological Diversity’s COP15 initiative to protect at least 30 percent of our lands, oceans, rivers, lakes, and wetlands by 2030. Conservation of 30 percent of land in strategic locations could safeguard 500 gigatons of carbon storage in veg-

etation and soils,140 meaning natural climate solutions of conservation, restoration, and improved land management can provide over one-third of the cost-effective climate mitigation needed between now and 2030 to stabilise the temperature rise to below 2°C.141 When considering the development of these international agendas, the West Bank is well-positioned to benefit from this recent emphasis on nature-based adaptation. Palestine has very high biodiversity for the size and latitude of the country, with over 50,000 species in the region.142 As such, protection and control over the rural landscape and resources will become progressively essential and bound to the region’s power dynamics. However, when considering environmentalism within international development agendas, it is vital to place the region within the historical use of Environmental Orientalism as a method for territoriality and the expropriation of land.

Edward Said described environmentalism as “the indulgence of spoiled tree-huggers who lack a proper cause”.143 Said’s identification of environmentalism as a bourgeois indulgence was formed with a clear historical understanding of how Israel, in line with other colonial powers, has used environmental discourse to legitimise territorial expansion for state-building. Such acts of colonialism through environmentalism and conservation have a long history, as demonstrated by W. J. T. Mitchell,144 who connects the Israel idol of the holy landscape to the wilderness of the United States in the construction of national parks to prevent indigenous communities access their lands.

This strategy is evident in the Israel–Palestine relationship. With famous phrases such as ‘make the desert bloom,’ European-centric landscapes and forests became an icon within the national Zionist movement.145 By erasing the Arab presence in the landscape and covering up the villages destroyed in the Nakba, the parks construct a new, Western idealisation of a pic-

137. United Nations Environment Programme, ‘State of Environment and Outlook Report for the Occupied Palestinian Territory 2020’, (2020).

138. Naomi Klein, ‘Let Them Drown’, London Review of Books, (2016), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n11/naomi-klein/let-themdrown 139. IPBES, ‘Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’ (2019), https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.3831673.

turesque biblical land.146 Within this process, trees became a powerful territorial weapon, something that has a long pagan tradition of imagining forests as the primal birthplace of nations – a particularly potent symbol during Romantic German nationalism.147 Enacted by the Jewish National Fund, with its iconic blue donation boxes worldwide, and under the slogan ‘Turning the desert green’, 250 million trees have been planted since 1901.148 By uprooting countless olive and pistachio trees, the refashioning of the landscape in purely ideological terms has been devastating. Sprawling, non-indigenous eucalyptus and pine forests have changed soil characteristics, rendering them inhospitable to the indigenous ecology.149

Figure 42. Trees recently planted with cranes in the distance, illustrating how both are tools for refashioning the landscape. Israel.

140. Xavier De Lamo et al., ‘Strengthening Synergies: How Action to Achieve Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Conservation Targets Can Contribute to Mitigating Climate Change’, (2020), https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.16283.08486.

141. Bronson W. Griscom et al., ‘Natural Climate Solutions’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 44 (2017): 11645–50, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1710465114.

142. ‘Environmental Conservation and Protected Areas in Palestine’, Mahmiyat, (2017).

143. Klein, ‘Let Them Drown’.

144. W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power (1994).

-

W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness’, Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (2000): 193–223.

145. Nur Masalha, The Palestine Nakba (2012). 120 146. Weizman, Hollow Land. 134-137 147. Mitchell, ‘Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness’.

148. Klein, ‘Let Them Drown’.

149. Cohen, The Politics of Planting: Israeli-Palestinian Competition for Control of Land in the Jerusalem Periphery.

150. Don Mitchell, ‘Cultural Landscapes: Just Landscapes or Landscapes of Justice?’, Progress in Human Geography, (2003).

44

Placing Israel’s current relationship to the landscape within the history of colonial systems enables clarity of insight into the physical and ideological methods that enable the dismantling of heritage and the legitimising territorial claims. Don Mitchell, discussing landscape, said, “Precisely because it is part of the everyday… it is rather the foundation, the very groundwork of empire”.150 Connecting the quarry industry’s slow violence within the asymmetrical colonial power dynamics and its historical lineage of Environmental Orientalism enables consolidation of why the industry reinforces cycles of Palestinian dispossession while benefiting Israel’s expansion, and thus, why sustainable, everyday rural development is vital to future Palestinian growth and resilience.

The Production of Nature This concluding section places the occupation and stone industry within the historical and underlying structural systems of extractivism, nationalist enclosure, and urban migration, highlighting the relationship between the expropriation of nature for material accumulation and the exploitation of marginalised populations. Accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the production of nature are interwoven into the singularity of historical capitalism.151 Material accumulation is built on sacrificial places and people through the ideology of ‘othering’, defined in Orientalism as “disregarding, essentialising, denuding the humanity of another culture, people, or geographical region”.152 The West Bank is therefore a potent, example of how modern, state sponsored capitalism controls and appropriates land, people, and resources.

45

To frame capitalism and modernity within its production and commodification of nature requires a shift away from Cartesian dualism, which has enabled nature to be objectified and externalised as humanity’s antithesis, positioning humans as masters of nature

and with licence to plunder. Even then, however, most humans have been excluded from the category of humanity, such as indigenous populations, enslaved Africans, and women, and are, thus, defined as part of nature and treated accordingly. The human/nature divide has transformed during capitalism’s history; however, it remains a dominant narrative in society, with the two main contemporary environmental critiques of modern capitalist society – humanity’s footprint and the Anthropocene – having nature externalised to humans inscribed into their ideology. This framing prioritises a particular focus on natural catastrophes and physical repercussions, which does not challenge the inequalities and contradictions within the power dynamics of capitalism’s cycle of accumulation. Instead, through the premise of humanity being inside nature, nature being inside humanity, human activism and organisation must be understood as environment-making, a shift in observation that moves nature from a noun (the environment) to a verb (environment-making).153 In this faming of human/nature, capitalism acts through – rather than on – nature, meaning power and capital did not create the ecological crisis; it is created through its nature-society relations.154 This creation enables an

Figure 43. Sufi dwelling integrated into a hill. Sakiya.

ontological shift from what capitalism does to nature, to how nature works for capitalism, and from how the occupation impacts nature to how nature works for the occupation.

By focusing on the West Bank’s land use and the extractive stone industry, the region provides a case study on how the expropriation of nature is linked to the exploitation of marginalised populations in state-building. Questioning the society/nature dichotomy, it is vital to move away from eco-abuses embodied by the Anthropocene and instead focus on the historical evolution of underlying structural systems and slow violence that underpin and connect material accumulation to spatial control. In this context, the inequalities within power dynamics connect social and natural exploitation, making it a pivotal insight to question the very exploitative dynamics of the global capitalist system enacted across different geographic scales. The region also reveals the vital need to link both environmental and non-environmental crises. To counter and forge a different ontology between society and nature – one must look beyond extraction and to alternative relationships with other species to co-produce a planet that is more habitable and just.

151. Jason W. Moore, ‘Transcending the Metabolic Rift: A Theory of Crises in the Capitalist World-Ecology’, Journal of Peasant Studies 38, no. 1 (2011): 1–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2010.538579.

152. Said, Orientalism, 109.

157. Jason W. Moore, ‘The Rise of Cheap Nature’, Sociology Faculty Scholarship. 2., (2016), https://orb.binghamton.edu/so3iology_fac/2.

154. Moore, ‘Transcending the Metabolic Rift’.

155. Donna Haraway et al., ‘Anthropologists Are Talking – About the Anthropocene’, Ethnos 81, no. 3 (2016): 535–64, htps://doi.org/10.10 80/00141844.2015.1105838.

156. Fraser, ‘Climates of Capital’.

157. Moore, ‘The Rise of Cheap Nature’.

158. K. William Kapp, ‘The Social Costs of Private Enterprise.’, The Economic Journal 61, no. 241 (1951): 142, https://doi. org/10.2307/2226619.

46

The theorising of capitalism must be expanded beyond a purely economic system and towards its role in defining and organising nature. Capitalism is “a historically situated complex of metabolisms and assemblages”.155 Embedded in this system lies ecological and social contradictions that are appropriated and defined as non-economic to make ‘the economy’ possible. This separation of economy from nature, social care, state powers, and racial/imperial expropriation highlights how the historical structure of capitalism appropriates ‘non-economic’ inputs to extract value and material accumulation,156 enabling an underlying connection between ecological destruction, racial oppression, imperial domination, and indigenous dispossession: “Capitalism has always flourished as archipelagos of commodified relations within oceans of uncommodified life-activity, living and (in the case of fossil fuels) dead”.157 Alternatively, according to William Kapp, the modern economy is a system of “unpaid costs”.158 Thus, within critical theory, it becomes vital to conceptualise and connect these false externalities of capitalism. Social, environmental, and economic inequalities cannot be solved in iso-

lation and must be understood within a single frame.

As highlighted throughout this thesis, the West Bank’s economy and quarry industry become a vital example of how human and nature exploitation are structurally interconnected.

1

Om Sleiman Om Sleiman is a small community farm near the village of Bil’in. The farm is on the edge of the West Bank’s territories, looking over the eight-metre-high concrete separation barrier and the ever-expanding Modi’in Illit settlement beyond. The farm’s land is of political and historical importance. Being previously under Israel’s control, Israel’s highest court ordered the military to move the 2004 separation barrier route closer to Israel, which resulted in roughly half of the original seized land being given back to the village of Bil’in after nearing ten years of its seizure.

159. Anonymous, Interview with volunteer by author (2021)

47

Established by Muhab Al Alami and Mohammad Abu Jayyab in 2016, the farm is located on a section of the returned land. The farm volunteers and workers have nurtured and transformed the landscape and soil destroyed by the Israeli bulldozers and heavy machinery into a small, productive farm. As discussed by a volunteer, “If we can grow here, people can grow anywhere in

Palestine”.159 To detach Palestinians from being dependent on Israeli produce, the farm is based on a community-supported agriculture (CSA) model, in which the forty members receive twelve or thirteen pieces of organic seasonal fruit or vegetables a week. This model aims to connect the consumers and farmers back to the land, establishing secure, environmentally friendly, and fair food production.

Figure 44. Site Location

Case Study

Figure 45. Om Sleiman farm and hut.

Figure 46. Om Sleiman’s view over the separation barrier and Modi’in Illit settlement.

48

Figure 47. Om Sleiman farm and compost toilet with Modi’in Illit settlement in the distance.

2

The Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability The institute at Bethlehem University educates about, researches, and conserves Palestine’s biodiversity, culture, and heritage. The different strands of the organisation centre on developing and increasing respect “for ourselves (self-empowerment), for our fellow human beings regardless of background, and for all living creatures and our shared earth”.160

160.

Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability, ‘Annual

Report 2021’, (2021).

49

Established in June 2014 by Prof. Mazin Qumsiyeh, the institution has eight full-time staff in addition to a steady stream of international and domestic volunteers. The institute is far-reaching and diverse in its programmes and aims. Under Prof. Qumsiyeh, PIBS includes a Museum of Natural History, Ethnography Exhibit, Herbarium Unit, a Molecular and Taxonomy Laboratory, and a Taxidermy Unit. These research labs and exhibits are within in-situ conservation grounds, including a Botanical Garden, Community Garden,

Permaculture Facilities, and Children’s Playground.

The centre pioneers a blending of mainstream science (research, academic papers, and conferences) with traditional and environmental landscape knowledge. The site facilitates a space to promote the local community, particularly children, to educate and empower them in protecting and conserving the heritage and biodiversity of the region.

Figure 48. Site Location

Case Study

Figure 49. Natural history museum ar PIBS.

Figure 50. A Rescued Kestral at PIBS. 50

Figure 51. The aquaponic system at PIBS.

3

Sakiya Sakiya is a progressive academy for experimental knowledge production that connects local agrarian traditions with contemporary art and ecological practices.

Located within a nature reserve only accessible by foot, the site overlooks Ein Qiniya village on the outskirts of Ramallah. The organisation contains two refurbished buildings (Late Ottoman and British Mandate), and the surrounding site includes structures and trees dating back over 1,000 years.

161. Interview with Sahar Qawasmi by author (2022).

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Sahar Qawasmi, architect restorer, planner, and cultural heritage expert, and the artist Nida Sinnokrot, currently teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), established the organisation. The site is primarily for artist residencies, with Sakiya’s core programmes engaging with interdisciplinary practices that integrate agriculture and ecological practices into exhibitions, symposia, publications, and educational/ training workshops. Connecting farmers and craft in-

dustries to artists and scholars, the centre attempts to learn from nature, as explained by Sahrar, “It is a space to reconnect with nature, to de-learn, and to learn from nature as the measure, a place of inquiry and exploration and testing, and learning, and it is a place to try to understand how we can organise ourselves through understanding how we can organise in nature and with nature.”161

Figure 48. Site Location

Case Study

Figure 53. Sakiya well and building integrated into stone terraces and the hill.

Figure 54. Sakiya’s two donkeys for getting supplies to the site.

52

Figure 55. Lidar scan of oak tree and rocks.

Figure 56. Lidar scan of a tree integrated into a stone wall.

Chapter 3: Developments of Resistance This chapter analyses alternative forms of development that question the dominant relationship to resources and landscape within the West Bank. Drawing upon fieldwork, the research is predominantly derived from volunteering and interviewing the three case study organisations. First, the section highlights TEK as a form of resource management and how similar frameworks can be developed into a new form of building materiality derived from stone waste. The subsequent section aims to understand the possibility of applying such a shift in materiality within a broader transformation of land management to enable a gradual move away from the region’s detrimental, extractive stone industry. Finally, the chapter concludes by visualising hypothetical architectural and landscape configurations of such a transition.

with one another and with their environment”.162 TEK is also understood through interrelated levels of ecosystem management, defined by ecologist Fikret Berkes as a Knowledge-Practice-Belief Complex. This representation translates TEK into a Western scientific framework of four levels of ecosystem management:163 (1) Local knowledge (animals, plants and landscapes) (2) Resource management (practices, tools, and techniques) (3) Social networks and institutions (coordination, cooperation, and governance) (4) Worldview and belief systems This holistic and integrated system of environmental knowledge is often neglected in mainstream science and climate change resilience.164 However, due to the multifaceted, interconnected oppression of Palestinians, as explored, any development and critique of the region must be embedded within a holistic, all-inclu-

53

Traditional Ecological Knowledge All three organisations mentioned above involve a critical understanding of the interconnection between rural landscape and cultural rehabilitation. Although using different tools and frameworks, all have a clear interdisciplinary understanding of modern and traditional land techniques, which connect education, land use, and architecture. Furthermore, due to the occupation, the political and cultural relationship towards landscape is at the forefront of each organisation’s agenda, making TEK, in addition to access to landscape and knowledge, a key point of resistance.

TEK, also understood as ethnobiology, ethnoornithology, and biocultural diversity, is defined by Hosen, Nakamura, and Hamzah as follows: “a cumulative body of knowledge, practice and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relation of living beings (including humans)

Figure 57: Illustration of Knowledge-Practice-Belief Complex by Julia Watson and Wade Davis

162. Nadzirah Hosen, Hitoshi Nakamura, and Amran Hamzah, ‘Adaptation to Climate Change: Does Traditional Ecological Knowledge Hold the Key?’, Sustainability 12, no. 2 (2020): 676, https://doi.org/10.3390/su12020676.

163. Julia Watson and Wade Davis, Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, Taschen, (2020).

164. Samantha Chisholm Hatfield, ‘The Importance of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) When Examining Climate Change’, 2017, https://blog.ucsusa.org/science-blogger/the-importance-of-traditional-ecological-knowledge-tek-when-examining-climate-change/.

sive framework. Such a framework must build connections between specialities and locations to enable resilient, rural empowerment.

According to Mazin, founder of PIBS: “It is expected by the colonisers, what they want is to either ethnically cleans all the people or ethnically cleans part of the people and leave some to be endangered labourers rather than sovereign entities that can grow their own foods or have their own economy. That is not what the colonisers want, they want the native people disconnected from the land, disconnected from their heritage, disconnected from the ability to grow their own food. So obviously, it’s important that the natives counteract that… Our role as indigenous people is to reclaim this heritage, to protect it, when we do that, it is also a form of resistance”.165

social networks and cooperation through both formal workshops in TEK and informal spaces for community empowerment. Furthermore, all the organisations use traditional rural knowledge inextricably embedded into a sustainable connection and management of the local resources, both natural and manufactured.

Each typology is inextricably embedded into a holistic view of ecosystems, uniting socio-ecological resilience to empowerment and sustainable resource management. Through different frameworks and agendas, the case studies build on TEK to reimagine a connection to the land that is mutually beneficial between multiple species. When understood within the frame of resistance, each physical typology of sustainable management is more than its physical contribution to the land; each

As referred to by Mazin, but also developed at Sakiya and Om Slieman, there is a clear interconnection of food sovereignty, land, heritage, and economy. Understood through Fikret Berkes’s Knowledge-Practice-Belief Complex, each organisation enacts through all four of the interrelated levels of ecosystem management.

Grounded within a belief system of sustainability, emancipation, and resistance, each group prioritises

becomes an exploration of knowledge and a testbed of development for replication throughout the region. Each organisation contributes to an alternative future that questions the dominant development method, economic system, and exploitative relationship to resources.

165. Mazin Qumsiyeh, Interview by author, (2021).

54

Figure 58. PIBS’s community vegetable garden.

Stone Waste Construction This section focuses on one typology of TEK, earth construction, to explore whether an alternative use of resource management can be redeveloped within the region. In a critical analysis of different earth construction techniques, the section aims to understand the feasibility of integrating both traditional and modern earth-building typologies within a process of rural and quarry rehabilitation. The stone industry reveals a need for an alternative relationship between humans, architecture, and nature, one grounded in a shift in materiality.

Nevertheless, in the past decade, earth buildings have started to have a resurgence internationally168 but also locally in Palestine, such as with the NGO Jordan Valley Solidarity. However, despite its excellent material performance, earth architecture has a stigma of poverty due to its economic cost and aesthetic compared with modern materials; for example, an 80m2 house made of cement costs at least $16000, whereas a house constructed from local earth materials, of the same area, would roughly cost just $3000.169 However, if progressive design strategies can develop the material performance and aesthetics of traditional materials, there is potential for earth construction to be a vital component of sustainable development; environmental, social, and economic. Furthermore, local earth enables a fundamental shift in architecture’s relationship to extraction and ecological systems due to destruction and reconstruction being inscribed into the material’s lifecycle.

55

Earth construction is embedded in the local context, with Jericho and the Jordan Valley containing mudbrick construction dating to the eighth millennium BC (Figure 61). As stated by Mazin, “Clay was a significant construction material and object material, production for these things. Together with stone, they constituted 98% of the material used by the people of Palestine”.166 These traditional mud-brick buildings have a long life span and low environmental impact.167 However, with the modernisation brought by the British Mandate and Zionism, concrete,

cement, and steel took their place. Today, only a few Ottoman period earth buildings survive, with most left to disrepair (Figure 62).

166. Mazin Qumsiyeh, Interview by author, (2021).

167. Roberto Sabelli and Italo Celiento, ‘The Rehabilitation of Traditional Architecture in Jericho (Palestine)’, Restauro Archeologico, (2016), 80-97 Pages, https://doi.org/10.13128/RA-18445.

168. UNESCO, ‘Earthen Architecture in Today’s World’, (2012).

169. Maria Luisa Germanà and Bader Alatawneh, Reviving Earthen Architecture in Palestine: The Added Significances of the Building Sustainability and an Opportunity for the Future, (2016).

Figure 59. Earth wall at Om Sleiman.

Figure 60. Construction of the earth wall at Om Sleiman.

Figure 61. Earth construction, Tell es-Sultan. Jericho.

56

Figure 62. Earth construction, dilapidated Ottoman hotel. Jericho.

To understand the materiality and regional method of earth construction, I attended a two-day workshop at Om Sleiman. Figure 31 illustrates the process and technique taught at the workshop.

57

Earth construction has the site and community embedded into the process, which re-establishes an alternative relationship between society, architecture, and nature. The three materials (soil, water, and straw) are used in a process that constructs an architecture without detrimental waste, both in its construction and deconstruction. The construction process is a natural cycle in which materiality is temporarily shifted in form before it eventually shifts back into the land. This alternative circular lifecycle of materiality is a dramatic, political, social, and environmental departure from extractive stone quarrying. Connecting construction materials to their site of extraction severs the underpinning of the territorial control and dispossessions of periphery landscapes and communities to produce urban environments. Within the West Bank, this shift in materiality is a political tool of resistance that disconnects Palestinian reliance and dependence on Israel.

bour-intensive and time-consuming process. As a valuable tool to establish social networks and community empowerment, there is an issue of feasibility regarding both plausibility of scale and social stigma. However, if understood within the research established throughout this thesis, stone waste becomes an attractive and significant tool to reimagine and develop earth construction into a contemporary material. As highlighted, stone waste, particularly stone dust, is toxic and abundant throughout the landscape and stone production cycle. If feasible, the historical and local materials of stone and earth could be reimagined and industrialised into a modern material. This shift in materiality would look to not only work within nature’s limits and mitigate destruction, but also actively improve and renew the extractive landscape through material adaptation. Such a shift in materiality would establish an intersection of traditional resource management with industrial processes of fabrication, which would both inherently question the role of traditional labour-intensive earth construction and reject the contemporary extractive process devastating the local landscape and communities.

As demonstrated with the Om Sleiman workshop, using earth as a construction material requires a la-

Figure 63. Initial earth mix consistency: nearly dripping off hand but can draw a line on the palm.

Figure 64. Final earth mix consistency: compacts and retains shape.

Dig earth 20 cm below surface top to avoid vegetation growth within walls

8 Earth : 4 Water

5-7

Buckets of Straw

58

2

Waste

Buckets of Earth Mix

Compact within a wooden frame, nails on the columns to keep attached

Final Wall

Figure 65. Earth construction process.

59

Figure 66. Using a cement mixer to combine the initial earth and water mixture.

60

Figure 67. Filtering initial earth water mixture from stones with metal meshes.

A video interview and a site visit to BC Materials in Brussels were conducted to understand the feasibility and contemporary use of earth and stone waste construction. A pioneer in material development and earth construction, BC Materials has worked on projects such as De Gouden Liniaal’s esteemed twelve-metrehigh rammed earth watchtower in Negenoord. When I visited, BC Materials was working on two projects in research and development that focus on quarrying waste as a construction material. One project considered stone waste rammed earth in collaboration with Assemble and Atelier LUMA (Figure 71). The other project focused on compressed blocks for an extension to the Gent Design Museum (Figure 70) in collaboration with Carmody Groarke, TRANS and RE-ST.

61

Anton Maertens, Business Developer at BC Materials, stated that the use of waste in the Palestinian context has the potential and feasibility for rammed earth and compressed blocks. Furthermore, he emphasised the flexibility of both materials: “Quarry or constructing waste of a site mixed with excavated earth, for example like clay and sand, could be mixed together and become a rammed earth mix, become a brick, a wall, a floor, a bar, furniture piece, whatever you can imagine”.170 However, it is critical to note that BC Materials have not fully lab tested or certified any stone quarry materials, so the abrasion and durability of the material are not certain. Maertens did note that the MPa (ultimate tensile strength in megapascals) is slightly lower compared with traditional earth construction, but “it does not really matter because it only really matters if the purpose of the rammed earth is to structurally go very high”.171 With rammed earth and compressed blocks from quarry waste being feasible within the context, scalability and impact become crucial in the material development. Rammed earth is particularly appropriate for small builds, such as at Om Sleiman, due to its low cost in machinery and intensive use of labour. However, to impact the stone industry’s waste, compressed-earth blocks are the more viable material direction. The compressed block process has a more expensive upfront cost than rammed earth due to being hydraulically pressed, but if used, one press, such as the production line at BC Materials, can produce up to 4,000 bricks (14 x 28 x 9cm) a day. This revalorising and reimagination of waste can have substantial positive repercussions,

Figure 68. Factory Site BC Materials. Brussels.

both physically in architecture through better temperature and humidity regulation, and politically throughout the material’s lifecycle, producing social, environmental, and economic benefits.

As highlighted throughout this thesis, materials have an embodied political position bound into their creation, distribution, and lifecycle. To define a new material, one must recognise its inherent political, social, economic, and territorial implications. With this acknowledgement, compressed stone waste blocks must be embedded within a holistic TEK framework of interrelated levels of ecosystem management. This conceptual transition enables an ontological shift in nature-architecture relations that moves beyond mitigating architecture’s impact on ecosystems and seeks to design spaces that work through systems of nature, enabling an emphasis on designing through time, mobility, and process. However, such a shift in materiality must exist within a regional transition of landscape management that enables landscape and sustainable land use to become key economic and cultural spaces of resistance.

170. Anton Maertens, Interview by author, 2021.

171. Ibid

Figure 69. Factory Site BC Materials. Brussels.

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Figure 70. Compressed stone waste blocks, image by BC Materials and Studies.

Figure 71. Stone waste rammed earth, image by BC Materials and Studies.

Landscape Transition

grassroots, rural involvement and transformed development into an elite and bureaucratic practice. This shift

This final section demonstrates why compressed stone

and rearranging of priorities further accentuated the

waste blocks must be interconnected to sustainable land

decline of agriculture’s contribution to GDP, from more

practices, enabling a regional landscape transition. The

than half in 1967 177 to 13.3 percent in 1994178 and below

following section argues for food sovereignty and con-

4 percent in 2019.179

servation land use methods to be stitched into a process of a declining quarrying industry. Concluding the thesis,

Today, there is a resurgence in agriculture cooperatives,

the final section imagines a hypothetical spatial inter-

with 240 currently operating in the West Bank.180 Based

vention, which connects all the research and reinforces

on food regime analysis, rural cooperatives understand

the importance of rural development.

food’s political economy and ecology by focusing on production and consumption within the specific his-

Palestinian farmers have long been on the front line of

torical and power relations – geopolitical, economic,

the resistance movement in Palestine.

Nevertheless,

social, and ecological. These cooperatives and environ-

since the British Mandate, the agrarian periphery’s ex-

mental organisations highlight alternative resistant de-

ploitation has facilitated centralising power into the

velopment strategies that are integral to any sustainable

urban.173 As a result, the West Bank has become a set-

quarry transition. Furthermore, developing through an

tler-colonial market economy dependent on and captive

assertion of human and environmental rights, coopera-

by Israel, with Israeli exports to the Palestinian markets

tives are built on principles of solidarity, social justice,

estimated at $3 billion annually.

172

However, as the case

social cohesion, and redistribution of resources. Thus,

studies demonstrate, an alternative form of development

this approach establishes a vision of change instead of

is possible, one deeply rooted in Palestine’s resistance

compliance and submission to the existing reality.

174

through a critical understanding of the region’s land and ecology.

Om Sleiman, Sakiya, and PIBS demonstrate how sustain-

63

able organisations reclaim their landscape through emThe culture of cooperative action as resistance has its

bodied land and resource management practices. From

roots within the first Palestinian Intifada (1987–1993).

small acts of water and food recycling (aquaponic and bi-

With a system of popular committees, a spirit of coop-

ogas systems) to the creative reuse of materials for struc-

erative and volunteer action largely eliminated individu-

tures and architecture (plastic bottles, palm leaves or clay

alism and factionalism.

Of particular importance were

pots; Figures 72–73), the organisations have found, in

agriculture and women cooperatives, which represented

sustainable techniques and relations to landscape, an

years of learning regarding how to organise production

alternative to dependency on Israel or international aid.

collectively based on principles of the traditional econ-

TEK is interconnected with modern and creative uses of

omy called al”o’neh (cooperation).

resources and land use management to develop and ex-

175

176

Nevertheless, the

Oslo Accords enabled the structural de-linking from

plore appropriate typologies for an alternative future.

172. Hiba Al-Jabeihi, ‘“Protecting Our Lands and Supporting Our Farmers”’, Journal Für Entwicklungspolitik, (2018) 173. Ayman AbdulMajeed, ‘Conceptual and Methodological Approaches to Reading the Realm of Cooperatives in Occupied Palestine’, Journal Für Entwicklungspolitik, (2018), 35–61.

174. Al-Jabeihi, ‘“Protecting Our Lands and Supporting Our Farmers”’.

175. AbdulMajeed, ‘Conceptual and Methodological Approaches to Reading the Realm of Cooperatives in Occupied Palestine’.

176. Eileen Kuttab, ‘Alternative Development: A Response to Neo-Liberal De-Development from a Gender Perspective’, Journal Für Entwicklungspolitik, (2018), 62–90.

177. Krieger, ‘Nurturing Alternative Development: Agricultural Cooperatives in Palestine’.

178. Salzmann, ‘A Food Regime’s Perspective on Palestine: Neoliberalism and the Question of Land and Food Sovereignty within the Context of Occupation’.

179. The World Bank, ‘Agriculture, Forestry, and Fishing, Value Added (% of GDP)’.

180. Krieger, ‘Nurturing Alternative Development: Agricultural Cooperatives in Palestine’.

Figure 72. Plant nursery building clad in plastic bottles.

64

Figure 73. Bird watching hut clad in palm leaves.

aphor for the landscape, the dry-stone terrace walls, known as sanasel, are found across the entire West Bank (Figure 74). Neither confined nor bounded, the terraces curve along valley contours and embody a long-lasting relationship between humans and nature; namely, the control of water and soil. Vital for water management and soil fertility, these thick stone terraces let water slowly permeate through the landscape. However, with the slow degradation of the rural, stones become scattered and walls deteriorate due to the lack of historical, incremental upkeep (Figure 75-76). A vital element for the slow rehabilitation of depreciated land, dry-stone terrace walls highlight the potential for constructing space through ecological systems. By redefining construction as a continual process that works through nature, it becomes possible to create a productive and sustainable landscape for human and nonhuman enrichment.

181. Anonymous, Interview with volunteer by author (2021).

65

Central to a landscape shift in material extraction and land use is that they must reside in the networks and alliances that facilitate and share knowledge and labour.

From the transnational to the local, each organisation integrated the local community, context, and knowledge within an international community of solidarity.

Despite their physical and infrastructural constraints, Om Sleiman, Sakiya, and PIBS continually strive to bridge connections through inclusive physical spaces and extensive virtual resources. This multidimensional strategy of development, which asserts rights through the principles of cooperation, shared knowledge, and resources, enables an alternative path to normalisation. By building on daily praxis, the organisations offer people autonomous power and the ability to build independent pockets of resistant economies and social structures. Furthermore, beyond enabling a resistant economy, rural and sustainable development also enables an environment that benefits Palestinian’s connection and wellbeing with the land. One volunteer said, “On Sleiman farm is heeling. It is helping me with my traumas. I want to be there all the time”.181 Physically underlying and connecting each organisation lies the stepped terrace. A key typology and met-

Figure 74. Battir sansel terraces.

Figure 75. Deteriorated sansel terraces. Sakiya 66

Figure 76. Lidar scan of crumbling sansel terrace. Sakiya

(2017).

183. Anonymous, Interview with volunteer by author (2021).

184. Anonymous. Interview with Om Sleiman volunteer by author (2021).

185. Anonymous. Interview with PIBS volunteer by author (2021).

Figure 77. Kinship and pattern of land distribution around a village, by Suad Amiry and Riwaq.

son Sea ive Ol

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G AU

B

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JUN

JUL

JAN

Ha rve st &

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Grapes & Fig

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67

tion, Peasant Architecture in Palestine: Space, Kinship and Gender

DE

In Chapters 1 and 2, the highlands between Bani Na’im and Si’ir (Figures 14–28) were described as a significant rural rehabilitation site. Based on all the research in this thesis, this final section visually tries to map and speculate one typology of rural development. With a speculative design for a Centre of Stone and Biodiversity, this approach seeks to connect sustainable landscape practices, a compressed-earth waste-manufacturing centre, and a centre for biodiversity research and edu-

182. Suad Amiry and Riwaq--Centre for Architectural Conserva-

R

Agriculture and conservation organisations have highlighted essential methods of rural quarry rehabilitation through alternatives to contemporary normalisation.

Nevertheless, all the organisations in this study mentioned issues of engagement and the scale of interaction involving the local Palestinian communities, citing a range of influences from neoliberalism and consumerism183 to the perception of agricultural volunteering as very uncool,184 or institutions such as Bethlehem University side-lining the importance of conservation.185 Each organisation has adapted to the decline of community engagement since the first intifada through different strategies, but all understood education and children as central to future participation and development. Therefore, there must be an economic and educational component for any feasible quarry transition.

Waste-earth bricks must integrate a shift of industry that connects ecological development and systems with a financially viable and educational production strategy.

cation. As stipulated by the Union of Stone and Marble Industry, the project will centralise the region’s quarrying industry, enabling the project to become a catalyst for a regional transition towards sustainable job creation and land reform. Furthermore, taking a territorial and ecological approach, the development builds on conservation and agricultural land use methodologies to enable a resilient rural centre that connects daily practices of interconnected resource management to the improvement of the nonhuman (soil, seeds, plants) and the preservation of local knowledge. Figures 81–91 demonstrate hypothetic spatial arrangements; however, it is critical to acknowledge that any sustainable development would be constructed within a holistic socio-ecological system over a long process of adaptation.

MA

The interrelationship of manateers (watchtowers) and sanasel terraces is an integral and defining architectural feature of rural Palestine. The buildings are typically small, circular in plan, and consist of a single room built with dry-stone walls up to 1m thick (Figures 79-80).182 Sanasels and manateers highlight how Palestine’s historical relationship between space/architecture and nature/landscape can become a critical lesson for future sustainable development. Rural space was divided and sequenced in time and movement of space through the fragmentation of ownership of space stretching vertically across multiple terraces (Figure 77) to the cycle of six seasons and periodical access to water resources (Figure 78). Space was conceptualised within a dynamic and holistic socio-ecological system that emphasised and was designed through time and natural cycles of destruction, renewal, and adaptation.

Neither fixed nor fetishised for aesthetic abstraction, these structures are now a fragment of memory between the ever-expanding concrete settlements.

Figure 78. Seasonal divisions of the year.

Figure 79. Manateer on the outskirts of Bethlehem.

68

Figure 80. Lidar scan of manateer on the outskirts of Bethlehem.

69

Spatial Implementations

Figure 81. Proposed site of development and surrounding land use for the Centre of Stone and Biodiversity.

Proposed boundary of the Centre of Stone and Biodiversity

70

Figure 82. Proposed boundary of the Centre of Stone and Biodiversity.

Nazareth

Centre for Cultural Heritage Preservation (CCHP) Hebron Rehabilitation Committee (HRC)

AAU Anastas Stockholm

Decolonizing Architecture Art Research (DAAR)

London

Palestine Regeneration Team (PART)

Palestinian Federation of Industries (PFI) Office of the Quartet Representative (OQR)

Architecture

Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS)

Ministry of National Economy (MoNE)

Palestine Standards Institute (PSI)

Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE)

Federation of Palestinian Chambers of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture (FPCCIA)

Ministry of Finance and Planning (MoFP)

Palestine Trade Centre (PalTrade)

Environmental Quality Authority (EQA)

Business/Trade

Ministry of Agriculture (MOA)

Tel Aviv

Sakiya

Nature Palestine Society

Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities (MoTA) Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage (DACH) Policy

Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) Palestinian Center for Rapprochement between Peoples (PCR)

Ministry of Planning and Administrative Development (MoPAD)

Palestine Wildlife Society (PWLS)

71

Environmental Education Centre (EEC)

Al-Haq

International Peace and Cooperation Center (IPCC)

RIWAQ

UNRWA Mahmiyat B'Tselem

Palestine Heirloom Seed Library

Applied Research Institute Jerusalem (ARIJ)

Environmental USA

Yesh Din

Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS)

Human Rights / Research

Union of Stone and Marble (USM)

Hebron District Council Si'ir Ash Shuyukh

Abraham Path Initiative (API)

Bani Na'im

SITE USB Core Team Members

Palestinian Heritage Trail (PHT) Siraj Centre Riwaq Walks

Zochot

Councils

Palestine Polytechnic University (PPU), Marble & Stone Center

Network for Experiential Palestinian Tourism Organizations (NEPTO) Hike

Figure 83. The proposed Centre for Union of Stone and Biodiversity will bridge and collaborate with the diverse actors within the region. There will be seven working groups: architecture, human rights, hiking, environment, business, local councils, and policy.

Area m2 Factory: 7,000 Sludge Recycling: 2,000 Prototype Lab: 5,000 Testing Lab: 500 Show Rooms: 200 Library: 400 Lobby: 100 Canteen: 250 Serive Rooms and storage 250 Meeting Rooms: 100 Training Rooms (4): 200 Conference Hall: 200 Natural History Museum: 1,000 Offices: 150 T - Toilets (4): 100m2

72

Figure 84. A proposed building layout for the Centre of Stone and Biodiversity, which interconnects a compressed stone waste block factory and centre for biodiversity research and education.

73

Figure 85. A proposed landscape surrounding the Centre of Stone and Biodiversity, situating the building within a gradual landscape shift that rehabilitates the surrounding quarry sites into sites for biodiversity, production, urban recovery and alternative energy.

Quarries Needing Rehabilitation

74

Alternative Energy Production (Solar Panels, Wind Farms)

Urban Recovery (Parks, Sports and Cultural Facilities)

Productive Recovery (Agriculture, Forestry, Irrigation)

Nature Reserves / Natural Usage Areas (Conservation - Biodiversity/Soil/Water)

Figure 86. The wider landscape between Bani Nai’im and Si’ir is integrated within a process of rehabilitation, using the typologies developed within the Centre of

Stone and Biodiversity.

Test Sites

75

Figure 87. A design iteration investigating the use of carving into the quarry sites to create follies that are integrated within the landscape.

Figure 88. An exploration of structures that are cast within the earth.

76

Figure 89. A design iteration exploring the integration of routes and follies intertwined within a quarry site.

77

Figure 90. A proposed hike from the villages Bani Nai’im to Si’ir that goes through the Centre of Stone and Biodiversity and promotes access to the surrounding rehabilitated quarry landscape.

78

Figure 91. A more extensive hike between Hebron and Bethlehem that takes the lessons and designs from the Centre of Stone and Biodiversity and tries to replicate within and connect to the broader highland region.

Conclusion This thesis demonstrated how construction materials are bound up with regional power dynamics. Material accumulation is interconnected with spatial control, as rural environments facilitate – and bearing the burden of – urban development. The West Bank serves as a potent example of how materials are employed within structures of inequality and control, demonstrating the connection between human and natural exploitation.

Resource extraction is one area that can be critiqued regarding the exploitative dynamics of the global capitalist system and its relationships with racial oppression and imperial domination.

79

Through a critical cartography of ‘Jerusalem Stone’, this thesis highlighted the compounding relationship between social and physical environments. By critiquing prevailing discourses surrounding the West Bank’s dominant development methods, discourses that overlook Israeli–Palestinian power relations, the first chapter demonstrated the processes creating and sustaining rural de-development, positioning this system as a central tool of a settler-colonial occupation.

The framework of slow violence illustrated how the quarry industry leaves Palestinians with little choice other than to sacrifice their health, community, and land for Israel’s gain. This system of territoriality and waste management drives a reinforcing cycle of dispossession and clearly illustrates the need for international environmentalism to recognise the inherent relationship between colonialism, climate change, and conservation politics.

Drawing on this critique, Chapter 3’s use of TEK and sustainable case studies provided alternative forms of development in the region that redefine human and nature relations within a process of rural and quarry rehabilitation. Through ethical production and consumption, access to and control over resources, the cooperatives and environmental organisations assert rights through the principles of cooperation, shared knowledge, social cohesion, and social justice, establishing a vision of change instead of compliance and submission to the existing reality of normalisation. All the case studies demonstrated a clear alternative for future development within the region. The final spec-

ulative images drew on the case studies and spatialy explore the vital importance of sustainable rural development for Palestinian resistance and how such a shift in land use could physically manifest.

This thesis offers key lessons for future academic enquiry and the construction industry itself. By critiquing dominant visual narratives of the occupation, emphasising events and infrastructure, this thesis offers alternative representations of the ongoing structural, reinforcing exploitation of Palestinians that is low in instant spectacle but high in impact through long-term effects. For the construction industry, this research highlights the embodied political position bound into the creation, distribution, and lifecycle of construction materials. With the industry increasingly coming to terms with its environmental consequences and as it tries to adapt to climate change, it is imperative to understand the structural violence of materials in any future, equitable change in materiality.

Learning from Palestinians and their relationship with the landscape offers the region a holistic view of ecosystems that unites socio-ecological resilience with empowerment and sustainable resource management.

By building on daily praxis, the typologies researched revealed an ontological shift in nature-architecture relations that moves beyond mitigating architecture’s impact on ecosystems and looks towards designing spaces that work through systems of nature. Therefore, it is possible to emphasise designing through time, mobility, and process to establish pockets of resistant economies and social structures, both within the region and across different geographical scales.

Figure 92. Quarry in Si’ir.

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Figure 93. Aviary at PIBS.

Appendix Economic Indicators [1] - (‘Stones and Marble: Sector Export Strategy 20142018’. 1 [2] - Ross (2019). 38 [3] - Ross (2019). 38 [4] - Stone & Marble in Palestine; Developing a Strategy for the Future (2011). 8 [5] - Stone & Marble in Palestine; Developing a Strategy for the Future (2011). 8 [6] - Ross (2019). 38 [7] - Stones and Marble: Sector Export Strategy 20142018 (2014). 6 [8] - Stones and Marble: Sector Export Strategy 20142018 (2014). 6 [9] - Stones and Marble: Sector Export Strategy 20142018 (2014). 6 [10] - Ihsheish and Falah (2018). 4 [11] - Abdallah and De Leeuw (2020). 4

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Figure 41.

[1]

[1]

[1] [1] [1]

[1] [1] [1]

[2] [2] [2] [2]

[2]

[2]

[2]

[2] [2]

[1] - Papantonopoulos et al. (2007) [2] - Salem (2021)

[2]

Figure 35.

Israeli Goverment Ministry of Defense

Ministry of Economy

Ministry of Energy

[2] Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories

Department for Quarries and Mines

Israeli Civil Administration

[1]

[4] The Natural Resources Administration

[3]

Palestine Goverment Natural Resources Department

Palestinian Water Authority

[5]

[6]

Palestinian Urban Development

Area C Quarries

Settlement Municipalities

Water

[12]

[7]

Palestinian Quarries

[11] [9]

[10]

Israeli Quarries

[8]

Exports

[17] Palestinian Quarries (Area C)

[15] [14]

[16]

Waste

[13]

Israeli Construction

[18] [19]

Palestinian Economy

Environmental Degradation

[21] [20]

Settlements

[22]

Israeli Industry

[23]

Palestinian Labour

[24]

[1] - Human Rights Watch (2016). 33 [2] - Abdallah and De Leeuw (2020). 26 [3] - Abdallah and De Leeuw (2020) 26 [4] - Human Rights Watch (2016). 37 [5] - Abdallah and De Leeuw (2020). 26 [6] - Human Rights Watch (2016). 35 [7] - Human Rights Watch (2016). 8 [8] - Ross (2019). 40 [9] - Abdallah and De Leeuw (2020). 37 [10] - Human Rights Watch (2016). 42 [11] - Abdallah and De Leeuw (2020). 26 [5] - ‘Stones and Marble: Sector Export Strategy 20142018’. 26 [13] - Human Rights Watch (2016). 20

[14] - ‘Stones and Marble: Sector Export Strategy 20142018’. 1 [15] - Ross (2019). 38 / Stones and Marble: Sector Export Strategy 2014-2018 (2014). 5 [16] - Human Rights Watch (2016). 45 [17] - Stone & Marble in Palestine; Developing a Strategy for the Future (2011). 15 [18] - Human Rights Watch (2016). 7 [19] - Ross (2019). 66 [20] - Human Rights Watch (2016). 9 [21] - Human Rights Watch (2016). 10 [22] - Abdallah and De Leeuw (2020). 12 [23] - Human Rights Watch (2016). 17 [24] - Abdallah and De Leeuw (2020). 17

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Israeli Economy

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List of Figures Front Cover: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 1: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 2: Maps by author (2021).

Figure 3: Map by author (2021).

Figure 4: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 5: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 6: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 7: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 8: Lidar scan by author (2021).

Figure 9: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 10: Map by author (2021).

Figure 11: Map by author (2021).

Figure 12: Map by author (2021).

Figure 13: Map by author (2021).

Figure 14: Map by author (2021).

Figure 15: Map by author (2021).

Figure 16: Map by author (2021).

Figure 17: Map by author (2021).

Figure 18: Map by author (2021).

Figure 19: Map by author (2021).

Figure 20: Map by author (2021).

Figure 21: Map by author (2021).

Figure 22: Map by author (2021).

Figure 23: Map by author (2021).

Figure 24: Map by author (2021).

Figure 25: Map by author (2021).

Figure 26: Map by author (2021).

Figure 27: Map by author (2021).

Figure 28: Map by author (2021).

Figure 29: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 30: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 31: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 32: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 33: Path of Capital Accumulation, by David Harvey, ‘Value in Motion’, New Left Review, no. 126 (2020).

Figure 34: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 35: Drawing by author (2021).

Figure 36: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 37: Map by author (2021). Data from Sentinel-Hub, https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/ eo-browser Figure 38: Drawing by author (2021).

Figure 39: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 40: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 41: Drawing by author (2021).

Figure 42: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 43: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 44: Map by author (2021).

Figure 45: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 46: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 47: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 48: Map by author (2021).

Figure 49: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 50: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 51: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 52: Map by author (2021).

Figure 53: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 54: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 55: Lidar scan by author (2021).

Figure 56: Lidar scan by author (2021).

Figure 57: Illustration of Knowledge-Practice-Belief Complex by Julia Watson and Wade Davis, Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism (2020) Figure 58: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 59: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 60: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 61: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 62: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 63: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 64: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 65: Drawing by author (2021).

Figure 66: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 67: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 68: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 69: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 70: Photograph by BC Materials and Studies, https://www.facebook.com/BCmateria/ photos/pcb.1247841042360177/12478406 75693547 , (2021).

Figure 71: By BC Materials and Studies, https:// www.instagram.com/p/CM2iNfEMUsR/ (2021).

Figure 72: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 73: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 74: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 75: Photograph by author (2021).

All GIS data is taken from GEOMOLG: Portal for Spatial Information in Palestine by the Ministry for Local Government.

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Figure 76: Lidar scan by author (2021).

Figure 77: Fragmentation of the ownership of land, by Suad Amiry and Riwaq, Centre for Architectural Conservation, Peasant Architecture in Palestine: Space, Kinship and Gender, 2017. 58 Figure 78: Drawing by author, information from Suad Amiry and Riwaq, Centre for Architectural Conservation, Peasant Architecture in Palestine: Space, Kinship and Gender, 2017. 56 Figure 79: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 80: Lidar scan by author (2021).

Figure 81: Map by author (2021).

Figure 82: Map by author (2021).

Figure 83: Drawing by author (2021).

Figure 84: Drawing by author (2021).

Figure 85: Drawing by author (2021).

Figure 86: Drawing by author (2021).

Figure 87: Drawing by author (2021).

Figure 88: Photograph and model by author (2021).

Figure 89: Lidar scan and model by author (2021).

Figure 90: Map by author (2021).

Figure 91: Map by author (2021).

Figure 92: Photograph by author (2021).

Figure 93: Photograph by author (2021).

Interview Transcripts Interviewee: Sahar Qawasmi Date: 18/01/2022

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Author: Please can you say what Sakiya is, and the aims for the organisation?

Sahar Qawasmi: Yeah, of course. You know, it’s been a little bit of an exploration for us to try to say what Sakiya is because it can be so many things and I don’t think we know how to put what it is in a few words, so we said that it is a pedagogical platform. It is an organisation working at the intersection at art, science and agriculture. It is a space to reconnect with nature, to de-learn, and to learn from nature as the measure, a place of inquiry and exploration and testing, and learning, and it’s a place to try to understand how we can organise yourselves through understanding how we can organise in nature and with nature. So understanding the ecosystem and the different relationships that are in that space, would allow us to then understand our relationship to ourselves, to nature, and to each other and hopefully finding places where we can experience life much closer to land, also to each other and hopefully without destruction, without consumerism, without private property. You know like having this abundance, and having this really prosperous and you know, celebratory way of being together without needing to destroy something in return.

Author: And I was also wondering, how would you think art is placed within this exploration and what is the role of art for the institution?

Sahar Qawasmi: Yeah, I think that, if you look historically, I think art was part of everything we have done.

From building our homes to planting crops to being together. Art was very important; it was an instrumental way of living. You told stories, you created fictional characters about things you didn’t understand, you also thought about spirits and the spirit world because that way you could understand things that are beyond your feel and what you can sense and so all of these things that you actually needed to organise your life and to manage living, were art, you know. It was possible because imaginations were bigger, we could imagine much better than we can do now. Part of why it is important to be at Sakiya is to allow the possibility

to imagine. I think there is a crisis in imagination, in general in the world but very much in Palestine. and we feel stuck all the time, in this place, we cannot escape and I think it is because we lack this imagination and I think in the past it was easier to imagine because you can see beyond the, like what is very close to you, and that allows you to create things and think about things that were not necessarily, you know, very close to you.

So I don’t know if it is clear, but I think, why is art important? Its I think because we think that because of this crisis in imagination, we think artists can help us imagine and this is really important.

Author: So yeah, so you are talking about a lack of imagination, but I was just wondering, would you be able to develop upon other issues and prohibitions to the development of Sakiya what you have had? Like problems along the way and what is difficult for the organisation growing?

Sahar Qawasmi: You know there is problems more like infrastructural, like systems that govern the land where we are or the lands around us and that goes to political hegemony, you know. The Israeli occupation controls where we are and controls the settlements around us and threatens to confiscate lands all the time. And also, you have the encroachment of the development and hyper speculation of the lands, where we are at. It started on top of the hill where the city, the neighbouring city of Beitunia now, is coming over and taking lots of land on top of the hill and destroying the top of the hill, like the ecosystem on top. And then you have the city of Ramallah encroaching from the other side, so you have all of these systems of control that are threatening the ecosystem from all sides, all around us and that ultimately effects use, it effects the water, it effects the valleys, the ecosystems, natural corridors, the wildlife etc.

These are huge problems; we have pollution in general that also comes from all around.

Education is a big problem, our education, and that is why it is important that we have this site because our education completely disconnects us from nature.

We don’t learn anything about what’s in the land and what it is even. And so we come out to it looking at it as one blob of something that we don’t understand and this creates tension, and creates fear as well. Like people are afraid of nature, people are afraid of insects and animas etc. And there is also this feeling of, how do you say it when you think that you are better than

everything else?

Author: Yeah ok, yeah, I know what you mean, I am not sure of the word though.

everybody’s names and with the family, to prove ownership of the different plots and so that, private ownership started there.

Sahar Qawasmi: So, you know, like people come and they don’t think that destroying, or say killing an insect is a problem. Or destroying something or throwing garbage, it’s not a problem because we have this superiority.

Author: Ok, sure. I was just wondering, could you talk about if your difficulties getting say volunteers or interaction with the local communities from Ramallah or the local village. And has this been quite an issue of the development of it? And how you are looking to create connections to the lo0cal towns and villages?

Author: Do you think this superiority is one of the reasons why there is so much rubbish in the West Bank because it is one of things you notice instantly there, the amount of rubbish everywhere.

Author: Could you say how the ottoman law, you mentioned it when I was out there, how that has influenced Sakiya, in the development of Sakiya?

Sahar Qawasmi: I don’t know, how to say it directly, but the ottoman law, like with the ottomans it is when it first started to register lands in private ownership. So whatever land you had with your family, you had to register it because the ottomans were interested in collecting taxes. And to collect taxes, you had to register you land, so you started then dividing pieces of land into

Author: I have read a little bit on the Peasant Architecture by Suad Amiry and Riwaq that talks about it there.

Sahar Qawasmi: Yeah, there is other stuff as well. So, volunteers. You can’t think why we are there as well is because of, and why we are trying to create these connections is because of how the culture in Palestine now is concerned mostly with commercialism, like commodity, private ownership, higher education etc. And all of these things, like this culture of private ownership means that we need to have a bank loan most of the time. You can’t afford something on your own, so you have to have help from the bank etc. and so it’s harder now to have volunteers. Everybody has concerns and their little problems, and their debts to work around, and work for. Little by little. This was reinforced by the Palestinian Authority, before the Palestinian Authority, before the 90s, I remember very vividly living in the 80s and early 90s, before the PA started.

And the culture was so much around community and togetherness, liberation, and the land, and we worked together all the time. Volunteerism was very important, university students were very important in the culture and also organising around this culture of volunteer work, was very important to this culture. But today, students are maybe the most important consumerists.

University students, if you go to universities now, you see there are banks in the university, there are shops in the university, there are cafes that are expensive in the university. And you look at the students and you see that they are also concerned about what brands they are wearing, what cars they are driving etc. and this wasn’t the culture. So the culture of the Palestinian Authority

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Sahar Qawasmi: Of course. I think it is only one of the things, but there are so many different things. I think how land ownership is distributed because historically our common lands, the lands we had in common, together, that we cared for together, were cut down.

They were either stolen or occupied, or they became private property and everybody cares about their own little piece of land and this private property became so important after the Israeli occupation because you had to prove this land is mine so you had to hold on to what is yours. And then with the Palestinian Authority, it became even more important to Palestinians to have this private property because of very high speculation and lands cost so much money. And so you became concerned in this tiny little piece of land and you stop being, it stopped being something that we share. It’s not about public or common ownership of things. And because we always had the powers and control have always been enemies to us, we never were part of, the people ruling us were never the people who our us, you know. So it as always this type of anonymity with the authority and yeah that’s also a reason. I think there are so many different reasons.

Sahar Qawasmi: Yeah, you know, before we go onto that, I think you can find some information online about the ottoman land law, the British land law, and then the Israeli land law etc. etc. Like where the division of land became narrower and narrower and narrower.

brought this neoliberal culture into Palestine. Things have changed quite a bit and volunteerism became, you know, in very small pockets, in some cultures, in some areas that are, in some villages that are maybe hold onto feel of community of volunteerism. Communities that are directly under Israeli attack, where the community is more closer to each other, and they have activism, and protests, and work that they try to organise to, you know, counter Israeli attacks. But for everyone else, the Israeli occupation became a bit distant with the Palestinian Authority, because the Palestinian Authority now became in the middle, it came between us and the Israeli occupation. We don’t have this feeling of instant immediate threat of the occupation, we don’t have feel of the loss of freedom because we don’t know what freedom is. Because if you have a car or house, so you run after the freedom convinced that is freedom.

Now our freedom comes, having a car, having a cell phone, having an apartment, so that is freedom. You run after it. And, you know like, organising, being together, working together, is not part of that freedom.

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Author: Do you think the commodification has made people have less time, this neoliberalism, also part of it?

Sahar Qawasmi: Yeah, it is one of the symptoms. You have to be very, you know, work so much to be able to afford everything that you are spending on. But at the same time, there is a hype of course, you can probably find time of course. But it is not something that you are concerned about. If you have free time, you wouldn’t think, oh I have free time so that’s go work on a farm.

You know, you would spend it on a café, or watch TV, or be on Facebook or something. It’s different.

Author: Ok, thanks. I was just wondering if you could talk about the stone terraces and why they are important the landscape and how they are constructed?

Sahar Qawasmi: Yeah, so, you know, to be able to farm, you have to have straight lands. The highlands in Palestine the middle area is all hills, you had to create these terraces to be able to plant. So over thousands of years, our ancestors built these stone walls and there are so many stones right. So, you have to also clear the land from stones, you have to collect the stones and create these walls to hold the soil and have level lands to do agriculture. And so, by doing that you are creating also these areas where water can seep into

the hill, into the belly of the hill. Where all the artesian wells are, so you are also slowing the movement of the water, you are allowing to sit into the land, to water the land and the crops, to seep into the artesian wells that eventually come out at the springs. Lots of springs, like the highlands are full of springs and so stone walls are very important. Stone walls also create these microclimates, so the temperatures near them, inside them and behind them are different to the temperatures all around. They are cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. And because of that, they allow a lot of different creatures to have their lives within these stone walls. All kinds of snakes, scorpions, and snails, and other things, live in the stone walls. Also, different moss, and you know, different plants live in the stone walls. So yeah, they are very important architecturally and important for the water, the ecology, the ecosystem and also they act as these networks where, you know this is something that we are exploring with Nida, Nida is interested in working with these terraces and stone walls as these networks of information, and this is something that is maybe more artistic that she is exploring. But there is so much knowledge that can be learnt from just looking at the stone walls, trying to imagine what goes in it, like through the different layers of the stone wall. The stone wall could be sixty centimetres, could be one meter, it could be even more. It depends on its hight, depends on the soil behind it etc. there are so many different techniques. They are amazing, they fit together like puzzles, like, you know, to find the right stone and the right angle of the stone to put it at, so there is such an art that goes into building these stone walls to make them stand. And also caring for stone walls was a seasonal thing, like our ancestors, cared for stone walls, maintained them throughout the year, you know. Every time they say a stone, somehow escaped the stone wall, like a goat jumped on it or something etc. they would fix stone walls all the time.

Since we stopped fixing stone walls, we have soil erosion, we have roots of trees exposed, we have lots of problems, ecological problems because we don’t care for these stone walls anymore. At Sakiya we would like to make stone wall building as a constant activity, like doing this all the time, just building more and more stone walls.

Author: Great, thanks. I think that is all my questions.

Interviewee: Mazin Qumsiyeh Date: 10/11/2021 Mazin Qumsiyeh: In brief, I can tell you that I have very little knowledge about stone quarries. There has been work around these issues and environmental damaged caused. There is the building of new stone quarries requires environmental impact assessment, which is many times not even being done, or if it is, it is being done by engineering firms that don’t know anything about the environment. And they just look at the area and issue recommendations that are not really inline with our environmental needs and there is some corruption. This process was uncovered by an investigative report by one of my master students. Unfortunately in Arabic but I can send it to you and you can use google translate or something.

Author: Yeah. So, could I also ask you a few questions, can I ask you about the institute of sustainability and biodiversity.

Mazin Qumsiyeh: That we can tell you more about.

Mazin Qumsiyeh: Our vision like everybody else, I guess who works for the environmental issues, is sustainable human and natural communities. This vision of sustainability is not easy to get so our mission and goals try to get at that through areas like research, education, and conservation. In research we publish about two papers a month on various topics from ecosystem services to agriculture to biodiversity, conservation.

In-situ conservation, we have a museum, botanical gardens for environmental education and awareness.

We started to prepare from 2014 and we opened the institute in 2017 to the public, so we have not been here a long time, but we have managed to accomplish a lot and you can go on our website and read our annual reports. For example, you can read our 2020 annual report but, in a month, or two the 2021 report that is even more impressive. That is basically who we are. We are part of Bethlehem university technically, but we are also a national institute. We were intrusted recently to lead the effort to generate the biodiversity report to the convention of biological diversity, which is the fiveyear report. We were invited to lead the national biodi-

Author: So have you completed this report?

Mazin Qumsiyeh: the five-year report we completed, now we are working on the national strategy. The national strategy will be completed by August.

Author: Can I ask what the main prohibitors and difficulties for the development of the institute?

Mazin Qumsiyeh: The challenges for building such institutions everywhere, which are pretty obvious I think, financial constraints, human capacity constraints, others. But then you add to them, here in Palestine of course, that are situation is unique around the world, we have a colonial occupation, with Israeli still the one sovereign over us, and we have a government in Ramallah that represents the Israeli interests. That is a big challenge if you want. That adds to the challenges of doing such an institution. In a country like UK or Palestine or Kenya or Myanmar as so forth. There is the bureaucracy, the corruption, the political instability, the lack of freedom of movement. All these things that are. I have several report that I can send you.

Author: That would be very useful, thank you. And also, I saw on your website, the Turathna part of your website. That looks at the cultural heritage of the agrarian communities, and I was wondering if you could briefly explain why it is important for you to highlight the cultural heritage of farmers and farming within the region?

Mazin Qumsiyeh: Yeah, I mean in are situation, the colonial system being represented in this case as Zionism, is similar to any other colonial system. They are interested in disconnection people from their land, from their heritage, and stealing their land and natural resources and making the people forget their connectivity to their heritage and history. This is true of any colonial system, be it Europeans in North America or South America, or Southeast Asia or white Dutch and British colonizers in South Africa. They were interested in dismantling all aspects of cultural heritage of native

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Author: Could you state the goals of the institute of sustainability and biodiversity and the reasons behind setting it up?

versity strategy action plan. This is very very important.

The national strategy and action plan is a strategy that will guide the Palestinian state and Palestinian NGOs and academia and everyone else in how to manage our environment, including things like stone quarries and environmental impact assessments and all this.

people and indigenous people, [and] communities etc.

So our role as indigenous people is to reclaim this heritage, to protect it, when we do that, it is also a form of resistance.

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Author: So as an institute do you work with agricultural cooperatives within the region?

built near farmlands, where during the seasons where they need to plant or seasons when they need to harvest, they go and stay in them. It is part of our culture, we go to those things and see them and take care of our land.

We stay in these small house for a few days, sometimes weeks, for the harvest season, like olive harvest season.

And this is part of the Palestinian culture and heritage.

Israel has demolished a lot of those, they have taken over a lot of the land of the Palestinians.

Mazin Qumsiyeh: Yes, we have many, many projects that involve farmers, impowering farmers, helping them with permiculture, helping provide seedlings, knowledge to them, integrated pest control, biological pest control, things like that. This is what we do on a regular basis. Plus, at our own garden here, at the museum there are around 12 dunams, about four acres. This land here is used as a model land with permaculture as number of modules for education, for the environmental conservation, for compost, for recycling, for aquaponics system, aquaculture systems, permaculture, hügelkultur, biogas, all of these models are in our garden. Visitors to the museum or botanical garden, weather the visitors are farmers or aspiring farmers or even people who have a small garden next to the house. They all learn how to do things that enhance and increase the greenery around themselves, increase production, food sovereignty. Even around houses that are now, some even in refugee camps are now growing vegetables on their rooftops. Things like that.

Mazin Qumsiyeh: Palestinians still use what they can.

That’s just take an example, before 1967, here in the West Bank, 70% of the economy was dependent on agriculture, now 5% is dependent on agriculture. Why is that? Israel took the land, took the water, took our ability to move and reach whatever land we still own because of lack of freedom of movement etc. And so that is basically why we don’t have much agriculture left.

There has been a lot of destruction but there has also been a tenacity of some people who hang on to what is left to the land and collect water and do other things that are conceived as illegal by Israel. For example, you cannot build a water well or collect rainwater in Area C, you are not allowed to do that. And before 1993, in all areas of the West Bank, you were not allowed to collect rainwater.

Author: Yes, it is very interesting work. I was wondering if you could please elaborate on why,it is important for Palestinians to grow their own food and have food sovereignty?

Author: Obviously water is a very big issue, I was wondering what water techniques you use at the institute and what water techniques do you recommend to farmers within the area?

Mazin Qumsiyeh: Because again it is expected from the colonizers, what they want is to either ethnically cleans all the people or ethnically cleans part of the people and leave some to be endangered labourers rather than sovereign entities that can grow their own foods or have their own economy. That is not what the colonizers want, they want the native people disconnected from the land, disconnected from their heritage, disconnected from the ability to grow their own food. So obviously it’s important that the natives counteract that.

Author: That is true. And when I have been reading, I have been reading about the Manatir buildings, the watchtowers.

Mazin Qumsiyeh: There are a number of tools for water harvesting, from rainwater, from rooftops, from roads, from slopes, it is possible. The second thing is to make sure you don’t lose the water, so that involves things like hügelkultur, or simply even making ditches in the land that redistributes water to the lands so that in the rainy season, the land retains more of its moisture. These are things that can be done, and we teach farmers how to do, we show them, many of them. The old farmers, they know these techniques, the new farmers or farmers that left the land for a long time and their children come to plant it. They have forgotten these techniques, so we try to revive and resuscitate those old methodologies of ensuring we don’t lose water.

Mazin Qumsiyeh: Yes, the small stone houses that are

Author: And are there any methods of land you recom-

Author: Do you know if many are still used?

mend, to promote biodiversity and sustainability that isn’t agriculture?

Mazin Qumsiyeh: My grandfather was a farmer, he never produced waste, he used everything he needed for him and his family from this land what was not more than five acres that he had. It is possible to do that, and we know that it’s doable. People can live off the land instead of this industrial agriculture and dependent on using pesticides and insecticides etc. that are devastating for the environment. There are many tools that my grandfather and many generations of people have used over the course of 11,000 years of agriculture and history here in Palestine. One of them for example, is that you don’t remove all the wild plants that are around your garden. These provide corridors and they also enrich the soil because you have the different plants fixing different minerals etc. These are things that all people learnt by trial and error, that we now have a scientific basis for. So, we try to connect people’s history and heritage with the scientific basis of it and utility of this.

Mazin Qumsiyeh: In the remote villages that remain of course, Israel destroyed some 530 villages and towns and took all their land, Al-Masha or otherwise. This was the old system, the ottoman empire in the late 19th century, the so-called land reform laws when they insisted on land in names of people etc, and people avoided to do that. For the ottoman empire it was guided by two things to do this. Mostly related to their tax needs. They needed more taxes as a result because the empire was decaying, and they needed more money.

And then second reason they did this in Palestine was they were lobbied by the Zionist movement that wanted to be able to buy land. And when you have Al-Masha, it is difficult to buy land because no one really owns it.

Peoples know whose land is being cultivated and when.

So that is why the ottoman empire tried to change the law, there was not much compliance with it. So, there was a lot in 1947, a significant portion of the cultivated land was Al-Masha for the villages. Then 1948, of course, most of the land was taken, most of this land was stolen by the Zionists. And the people ethnically cleansed into refugee camps.

Mazin Qumsiyeh: Yes, some still do. A number of Palestinians who still practice the old ways have declined significantly. Most Palestinians are refugees or displaced people.

Author: Also, I was wondering, for the soil, do you know if there is much clay in the soil type, say between Bethlehem and Hebron?

Mazin Qumsiyeh: There are soil maps that show the distribution of red soils, clays, sandy areas, all of these things. Different types of soils are present everywhere, there are maps for them that show the distribution.

Author: That would be very useful, when I come to Palestine, maybe I can see them. Some building is done in earth construction as well, I was wondering if this was a common practice you know in rural Palestine?

Mazin Qumsiyeh: Most of the material used by villages were two types of material, either stone or clay.

The clay, they mixed it with straw, which interconnects it and then they bake it to make things like closets, to make things, even like beehives from this clay with straw and baked. Or make pottery or make other things. So yes, clay was a significant construction material and objects material, production for these things.

Together with stone, that constituted 98% of the material used by the people of Palestine. Up until of course the modernization that came with the British and then the Zionist system.

Author: Are there many examples of the clay buildings within Palestine today?

Mazin Qumsiyeh: If I go back 100 years for example, most of the houses in Jericho were built with clay. In Beit Sahour no, in Beit Sahour most of the houses were built with stones, without cement or clay or anything between the rocks. Beit Sahour is my village by the way.

So depending on the area, the construction material changed Author: Very useful. Thank you.

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Author: It sounds very important. Also, I wanted to ask about Al-Masha tenure, ottoman land tenure. I was wondering if this ownership model was still used in Palestine?

Author: So in any of the rural villages, do. You know if they still used this method of communal land ownership?

Interviewee: Yara Sharif Date: 04/10/2021

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Yara Shairf: The quarrying industry and exploitation of the land is not necessarily specific to the aspect of Palestine and Israel because we have a lot sites in the middle east and around the world where quarrying is an environmental disaster and is contributing to the destruction of the biodiversity and environment. And probably worth doing a slight comparison between this and say sites in Italy which share similar, and also Turkey, which share phenomena and cultural practices and has an impact on the environment. That means also that when you think about what measure you can take technically speaking, about how you can heal a quarry.

These measures of addressing a scar in the landscape, maybe similar between one region and another.

The aspect more unique to Palestine is the cultural aspect and the political aspect so its more the socio-political aspects that are very specific to Palestine that not there somewhere else and I think this is where the, I would say, I would argue, the originality of your research lies. I am in a context where there is segregation, I am in the context where landscape is being erased, I am in the context where not only is there an environmental crisis but there is an occupier and occupied, and there is an exploitation of the land buy the other. So even though these quarries are, happens to be operated, they actually. The market of all of this stone, happens to be in the occupier side and the occupied are the ones who are getting the exploitation of their land and their environment and health, a crisis is happening on the Palestinian side. Not many quarries are taking place in areas where Israeli built up areas are. So I think these are all aspects that you may want to pick on. Particularly in the area of Hebron and Bethlehem.

I don’t know if you read my PHD, there is also this cultural aspect of the stone being used as a cultural currency to route one into the land by this aspect of the holy stone. Every synagogue has to have Jerusalem holy stone, there is a bit of irony in that, in the sense that you are destroying landscape and nature in order to build another architecture that is destructive spatially speaking.

Author: Sorry, I was going to say I also feel like this narrative between Israel and Palestine also is sort of a metaphor for a larger narrative as well between the

global north and south. This relationship between extraction and exploitation. So, I think by focusing on the national scale, also talks about this larger international scale as well.

Yara Shairf: Yeah, I think this is very interesting and important. It is like exploitation on the expense of the other, basically. Yeah, so it is kind of, Ilia Suliman used an interesting term on his last film it must be paradise, called the Palestinianisation of the world. These type of disasters. This is a manifestation of a much global aspect, exploitation of nature and resources and inequality between communities. So that said, when you think about how you revitalise or conserve. Its one of our briefs this term in are MA or March, we are talking about the social ecology, not just the physical environment but this aspect of social ecology. An aspect that somebody called Guattari wrote about, called the three ecology, where we are talking about social, and mental and environmental. So we are not only talking about the environmental, we are also talking about the social.

I think, when you think about, what are the aspects that I want to consider when rehabilitating these sites, I need to think of the social aspect. Social aspects means how to also empower the community and make sure that these, this landscape, if heeled, if I am thinking of an intervention, can contribute to empowering the social networks there.

There is the aspect of the loss of the Palestinian rural landscape but it’s not only a visual image we are talking about it’s a whole lifestyle that we are talking about that is being lost and being replaced by the stone quarrying and cutting, which has an impact on our economy as Palestinians but it also has an impact on a sustainable social structure that used to reply on the fields. And there has kind of like being as Palestinians are own enemy by destroying the landscape because we are losing an important part of our identity but also the biodiversity that we have got. So I think it is just consider these aspect, there is also something you may want to pick on. Judy Price who is in artist did a PHD on the quarrying in Palestine Author: Yes, I have also been in contact with her.

Yara Shairf: Good. She has particularly looked at the workers and how there is a network between them and how they dwel these sights for long periods of time.

They bring their families so it is also a manifestation

of this clan network that operates in Palestine. It builds on a social structure that going on.

Author: Sorry, by specific, was it a specific economic part of society or a specific cultural part of society?

Author: I have also read Andrew Ross’s book, Stone Men. Can I ask you more specific questions about your work? Would that be ok?

Yara Shairf: I feel it was more of a geographical part.

Yara Shairf: Yes, sure.

Author: Ok, I was going to say, please could you explain why you think it is important to create alternative maps? And could you say how maps have influenced your design process?

Author: Yes that is very important, also, can I read a passage from your book, I just wanted to get some clarification. So this is from your Architectural Resistance, you say ‘the small scale, local and collective initiatives, mainly in agriculture, which spread across the whole West Bank and the Gaza strip after the first intifada have now unfortunately become dominated by a very specific, and indeed, small sector of society.’ And I was wondering what you meant by small sector of society?

Yara Shairf: The agriculture is being lost and a lot of agrarian society after the intifada and before that, far before that, when the golf opened up to the Arab world, lots of people left and people migrated to the Arab world but also after the Oslo Peace agreement happened, a lot of the land became confined into Area C. It did imply a loss of agriculture because people started to explore alternatives in terms of their economy and also because the land is inaccessible, which meant that the agrarian society became very limited and confined.

Yara Shairf: I actually don’t know the answer to this question. It is an important question. I don’t know if.

Al-Masha land still exists. As I understand, and I am not sure about this, I need to double check it. Is that every land that is Al-Masha was overtaken by the Israeli occupation. So I am not sure if have much of the Al-Masha land left. But it is something you need to double check.

Author: I have read that there still is some but it has been very hard to understand if how much is left.

Yara Shairf: I wouldn’t know. I don’t know if that relates, for instance, I wouldn’t know the answer. Probably someone who might give you this right information is Salman Abu Sitta, who is a historian. He is really great and probably he may give an insight into that.

The only reason where I think there may be Al-Masha land is because in historic centres in Palestine, are generally owned by so many owners because of the time so it could have been, some of these lands, and agricultural lands were unclaimed by the hundreds of owners, they become Al-Masha automatically, I don’t know.

But maybe there is an aspect here to check.

Author: I will contact him, thank you for the information. So, another point was when reading your bit for the RIBA for PART, I think you talk about Nassar’s research about the technical cultural devices for energy efficiency in hot climates and I was wondering if you thought there were any technical architectural focuses or sustainable designs within the West Bank that you think are of particular interest or importance?

Yara Shairf: The Bit Nassar was basically concentrating on was what he calls the invisible environmental practices, the invisible cultural practises, which he believes, best to get it from him, but the whole aspect of his research is there is a lot of architectural cultural practices

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Yara Shairf: Because this aspect of the alternative is important from the Palestinian perspective because it’s always the maps that relate to an occupied territory are always prepared by a more powerful entity or by the other and that other is always occupier or colonial and therefore, they always have an absent layer. Absent layers, they are never neutral, they always have a missing layer, a layer of the community and the everyday.

So having an alternative map, not only is the voice of the locals, it’s also the alternative to narrate something that is not being narrated otherwise. This is why it is very important to keep on thinking and reflecting on what Edward Said keeps talking about, this alternative map and alternative narrative exactly because maps are never neutral.

Author: Ok, thank you. Also, I have been trying to look into Al-Masha Tenure. I was wondering if you know how common of a practice it was today and if you think it is something important to be developed for the future?

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that may appear very invisible but they are very important indicator of sustainable environmental techniques that we build on. In the case of Palestine, as with the case for many hot countries, use of courtyards, the use of thick structural elements that becomes a means for passive heating and passive cooling. But also, simple practices in Palestine, I don’t know if you are familiar with the context, in most hot climates the idea of the siesta or sleeping on the roof, taking your shoes off when entering into a space. They are all very simple almost to the degree that they are invisible, but they all contribute in their accumulation towards a sustainable way of living. The practices of seasonal living, taking advantage of the south, taking advantage of the north, all of these are common practices that impact the way traditional Palestinian villages and the way the spatial formation happens to take place there. Also idea of the collective forms of living and not relying on consumerist approach of multiplying the kitchen and multiplying the guest house etc. The women’s space verses the men’s space. These all contribute towards sustainable techniques, the use of clay, the reliance of wind and water for cooling. All of these were part of the observations that we wanted to build on and thinking about conservation and rehabilitation.

Author: Great, thank you. One other point I wanted to bring up. So looking at the Palestinian Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability, are you still building their museum?

Yara Shairf: Yes, with Mazin you mean?

Author: Yeah.

Yara Shairf: The natural history museum.

Author: I was wondering what you thought the main prohibitors of conservation and agricultural development within the West Bank?

Yara Shairf: Accessibility to water and accessibility to our natural resources, it is a very important aspect really. Nothing to do with knowledge or advancement of technology because they are all there. It is more about a geographical and power relation and the limitation to using water. This is one of the major aspects.

Author: Yeah, thank you.

Yara Shairf: That is why when you were talking about

the quarries. I was thinking, maybe there is a subversive act also in the ways the quarries can be utilise in the sense that if Palestinians are not allowed , in order to the Oslo agreement, to dig water wells, and they get picked up if they dig water wells at a certain depth.

Could these quarries become a tool to store water in a way that can be used as a container for future redevelopment or future healing of the agricultural landscape.

Just a thought, it may not work. The most important aspect of you seeing the quarries is that can you should see it as a positive attributer to something, can you see it as an artefact that could assist to rebuilding the Palestinian landscape? Take advantage of it other rather than seeing it as an obstacle.

Author: That is definitely true.

Yara Shairf: And also building on initiatives that are happing in villages because particularly areas around Hebron, areas in Area C, there has been lots of amazing initiatives about creating photovoltaic systems and creating wind catchers that have been destroyed. Because there is a very clear aspect within the Palestinian resistance that one way of destroying the resistance is making sure that there is no technical advancement because it is well known that it is going to contribute towards the empowerment, socially and economically.

So when thinking about which aspects to build on, I think you need to keep stressing and emphasising the importance for this technical advancement that any intervention meets the aspiration of the community and it is not just something that is subtle, almost kind of, you don’t want to celebrate poverty. You want to build on human resources as well as nature.

Author: Yes, I don’t want to fetishize the past or poverty.

Yara Shairf: Yes of course.

Author: Thanks for that. Also, in your book you talked about Birzeit, they were creating trails to the agricultural terraces. I was wondering if this was successful and are the trails being used? Were there any prohibitors to creating these trails?

Yara Shairf: They are still there because there is not a lot of trips and initiatives that are taking place there so I don’t think they are being disappeared. The aims of these trails were not really to mark them and to say that

this is the only way to of doing it. It was more as an indicator to say this is one way of celebrating and connecting to the outer fields. And at the moment, there are a lot of initiatives that if I remember a few, there is one called Hiking Palestine, another interesting one to go olive picking or go watch towers. Weather they start from that trail or use that trail as an inspiration, they are ongoing and expanding. So again, it is more facilitating for something to happen than marking it as the only way. What happened in Birzeit was more about highlighting, pinpointing indicators to rethink the historic centre and expand the boundaries beyond just the municipality boundary.

Author: Yes I have read how many walking groups there are and when I was in Palestine I met people who were part of these walking groups. I am also interested in this connection of leisure to landscape and access to landscape through trails.

One final thing to think of and reflect on, the aspect of Israel claiming to be leading in agriculture and agriculture technologies, irrigation systems, a new recycling method, green water systems, gray water filtration etc. At the time there is a lot of contradiction about exploitation of landscape and how much the wall impacting the biodiversity and how many sites are being taken under the claim of protection of environment. It is a green skin for other things to happen, it is more about colonisation and taking control of the land. I think this is an aspect that you want to reflect on because it all has to do with the landscape.

Author: Yes true, it is a very important point. Thank so much.

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Yara Shairf: Also they are doing not only as leisure, they are doing it as a way for it not to be erased, this aspect of the presence. There is a psychological element of the absentee, marking our presence by being in the landscape, like what Sakiya is trying to do. These are all part of these trials and these journeys that are happening.

They are almost invisible because they are ephemeral, but it is their continuous action that makes the difference.

Interviewee: Anton Maertens Date: 15/10/2021

imagine that in some structural way is load bearing or not load bearing.

Anton Maertens: Maybe I can sketch a bit in general what we do and then do a bit deeper into some of the R&D projects that wea re doing and may be of concern or interest to you. And could be applied in Palestine hopefully or any other place. Just in general, as you know, we transform excavated earth into building materials. In Brussels alone, two million tons of excavated earth every year. We think that half of that could be used within for construction needs. We transform part of that stream into building materials such as clay plasters, compressed earth blocks and rammed earth.

I don’t know if you know a lot of details about different construction materials or the differences between the different materials. A compressed earth block is hydraulically pressed together, that is compacted by the strength of the machine. We stabilise with lime, but you don’t have to stabilise, with some areas it’s not necessary because there is not that much rain, or the blocks can just hold themselves.

Author: So you look at it instead of gravel, When you have been looking at the quarry waste? You still add sand and clay to the mixture?

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Author: Within Brussels, do you use lime in compressed bricks?

Anton Maertens: Yeah, if you add lime your bricks are a bit stronger so you can go to a ground floor plus two floors. We prefer lime over cement because we think cement is more co2 intensive and more difficult to separate. Lime is a bit more natural and can be technically relates to nature. You don’t need to use lime if you just need an inner wall and need a lot of thermal mass, especially in hot countries such as Palestine, it can be interesting that you just have the thermal mass within the building of earths that’s serving as a buffer for many fluctuations in temperatures.

Anton Maertens: For rammed earth it is sand, clay and gravel. In a kind of specific size. Usually, it is concrete gravel but you can also use brick gravel or marble gravel. It can be different sizes, different textures. The nice thing about rammed earth is that you always have a different aesthetic at the end of the line. Every floor, every wall always looks a bit different than the one two years ago. I think in warm, humid climates like the middle east, rammed earth is something you can really consider. One of the disadvantage of rammed earth is that it is very expensive in applying it but obviously manpower in some regions is cheaper than Belgium or the UK. Author: And also the thick thermal mass to thermally regulate works well in hot countries. Do you have many issues with shrinkage with rammed earth as it is drying out?

Anton Maertens: No, but earth dries a bit different depending on the season, so the season when you are building it is important. We usually do a test porotype, so we set up a piece, a rammed earth wall within a climate of a specific region and test it to see how it works under these kinds of circumstances. And if there is some shrinkage or a little shrinkage, that can help you in constructing the finals of the building. Because the test prototype has given you a lot of information about how the earth really impacts the surrounding environment and vice versa.

Author: If it is shrinking, do you add more clay?

We also have a rammed earth, based on clay, sand, and gravel from demolished buildings. This is a technique that is very useful, very, very humility regulating.

Can be used in a structural way if your walls are thick enough. For rammed earth, you really pour it, as you pour concrete. Instead of it becoming solid on its own like concrete does, you really have to ram it with a machine or by hand. And that sense, the quarry or the constructing waste of a site mixed with excavated earth, for example like clay and sand, could be mixed together and become a rammed earth mix, become a wall, a brick, a floor, a bar, furniture piece, whatever you can

Anton Maertens: No, the dimensioning from the beginning is pretty important, in that sense, we did a bar this week in s small city north of Brussels. There it is inside so it will dry faster than a piece outside. And a piece outside would always have to be protected from humidity. In that case, shrinkage is always something that you have to level with. Once you have started to do rammed earth walls, it is not as easy to correct or amend a lot of stuff afterwards. 7 After you have already done, so a prototype is very important to give you information on how the material changes and you can use

that type of information in general.

Author: The stone I am looking into is a pale limestone. Have you done experiment with different types of stone when you looked at stone waste?

Anton Maertens: We have to admit, we are working with Carmody Groarke and TRANS Architecture now, on a sand, lime block. Based on quarry waste but it is very experimental, we cannot say that much about it and what type of strength it reaches. It will be something that resist humidity. The blocks that we currently make, as you probably know, are not resistant to humidity and cannot be used for a façade wall and they are based on quarry waste but it is really. I have seen the blocks for now, they look pretty impressive, pretty good but we will have to test them to see what they can do.

Author: Are you also working with Assemble, is this the same project?

Author: How long will that be on for?

Anton Maertens: A few weeks I think. We are also making a rammed earth based on quarry waste and sand a clay from the local region so a really bespoke rammed earth, specifically for the Luma foundation. We are building it with Assemble, I think it is in construction already. I think the first tests of the rammed earth are pretty good.

Author: Would you be able to go into detail about how the project done for Luma is different to traditional rammed earth?

Anton Maertens: There is not much else to say, except

Author: I will continue researching into the clay and soil types out there. You still need to add sand, you can’t just use clay and stone waste?

Anton Maertens: Yeah, you need to kind of mix it specific types, and you can always test a bit how it takes.

But if you do tests on very small scales, you will see very quickly what holds and what doesn’t consolidate, and what you can ram or what you can’t ram. As you probably know, rammed earth always needs to be mixed a bit humidly, it has to be a bit wet and then you can try it out. But you can see what mixes work and what don’t, which would be too humid or not humid enough.

Author: Ok, it makes sense.

Anton Maertens: If the clay is very limey, then it has other chracterists and then you have t. mix less. For example, the first project we did in Burundi with typical African earth, which is a vey good earth to make compressed earth blocks. You don’t need to mix it with sand or any other because it really compresses well and dries well. And in that sense Every region usually has small degree of differences and textures, so you can build on the spot, but the mix will have to be right.

Sometimes you will have to mix a bit more of this and that to obtain the best results.

Author: Are you compressing with a pneumatic drill?

Anton Maertens: Yeah, for rammed earth, but you can also do in manually but it is very heavy if you have to do it all the time. If it is something structural for something like a wall you need a pneumatic drill or otherwise you will be doing it for weeks and months.

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Anton Maertens: No, it is a different project. The Luma project that we are doing with BC Architects and Assemble. I work for BC Materials, a spin off from BC Architects but obviously we work a lot together. But for Luma, we mainly make a clay plaster, both an acoustic plaster with poppies that are in it and it will be very acoustic. Then an acoustic algae plaster, and local sand of quarries, making a very nice texture that is going towards a blue and green. It is also very experimental, we don’t know what the abrasion will be, the durability will be in a few years, but it is a really nice look. It will also be on show at the Dutch design week, starting this weekend.

that the MPa is a bit lower but it doesn’t really matter because I only really matters if the purpose of the rammed earth is to structurally go very high. In that sense you can make a rammed earth based on a lot of different mixes depending on the purpose you have.

If you do a bar, it doesn’t really matter how high the MPa is, but if you are building a structure, I think the Moroccan protype for one of the biennales was a very high rammed earth apartment building and then obviously, structurally, you have to be absolutely sure that it can take the load in a sufficient way. Rammed earth and compressed block could be really interesting for your project, using the waste they produce in Palestine.

I don’t know what they have of excavated earth.

Author: Yeah, that makes sense. So have you done tests on the different stone materials?

Anton Maertens: We do some of the test for the building purpose, but usually for the earth, we test in labs.

We don’t have the correct equipment to do the tests on earth. We now have a standardised logistical line where we use always qualified earth to obtain the right qualified result because that is a bit different in the circular economy compared to the linear economy. If you work with reused materials or something considered waste, you still have to standardise your material. You cannot say everything will look a bit different and that is ok for the client. In that sense we always have to be sure that there is a qualified, well controlled stream of earth or linked to our production unit and that we can to a 99%-degree guarantee that it will have the same colour, texture and ability that we first promised the client.

Author: So you test the soil at multiple stages to see if there is consistency? When you are doing site analysis, do you test different parts of the site to see how much the soil changes?

Author: Ok, thanks. One last questing is the price difference between rammed earth and compressed earth bricks?

Anton Maertens: The price difference is quite big. If you are still thinking about your project in Palestine, the compressed earth blocks, the difference is that you have to have a machine, the machine has to be paid for and amortised over ten years or something like that.

Rammed earth you can do with a mixing machine that is cheaper than the brick machine, but the application rammed earth is more time and cost intensive than laying the bricks, which most brick layers can do. If you look at the European level, you will always say the rammed earth is more expensive than the compressed earth blocks. For if you look at other countries, say Morocco, Palestine or other countries, it is possible that rammed earth is not that expensive, or even less expensive that compressed earth blocks.

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Anton Maertens: Yep.

what would people prefer, being in a space full of formaldehyde, or in a space from earth that really comes from quite deep and that has never been touched by mankind so to speak, and that has better humidity regulation. I think the choice is pretty clear in that sense.

Author: Does it change a lot of a small area?

Anton Maertens: It can really depend on a few kilometres.

Author: Do you have many projects in Brussels?

Anton Maertens: Yes, defiantly, we sell to large construction companies but also to induvial clients who want to use Brussels earth as a material. Because is just a much healthier way of living and it is must better for the planet. It’s a real win-win revalorising the waste you have and that you can give back to the people and city where you are working.

Author: Is it difficult to insure the buildings or is that why you standardise the materials?

Anton Maertens: Yes, it is not a problem. Every private builder can choose what type of material they want to use on his own risk. But we can guarantee the safety of the materials, we follow the German label. All of our materials are qualified and guaranteed. We know earth is one of the healthiest materials, and in that sense,

Author: For the compressed earth block machines, do you know how much they can do a day?

Anton Maertens: The former machine can do 1,0001,200 but there are machines being developed that can do up to 4,000 a day.

Author: Ok, thanks.

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