links between socio-economics, politics and planning makes the situation in Israel of far more than local interest. Analysing, researching and achieving solutions in Israel will therefore provide lessons for many other countries.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is characterised by a territorial stranglehold that carves the country into a tortured web of settlements, strips, banks, unrecognised villages, demarcation lines, fences and no man’s lands. All of these constitute a chaotic chain reaction based on the meltdown of territorial segregation.

FAST, the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory, takes architecture and planning as the basis for a strategy to overcome the conflict of causality, finding methods to expose the abuses of planning and to implement the legal and the practical, localising an agenda beyond feeble, fancy and formless architecture research, mapping and design.

By elucidating the situation in Israel through a single case study, and involving national and international multidisciplinary networks in finding an alternative solution, we hope to create a pilot project format that can be used in other places, both in Israel and around the world.

Israel

Israel is one country, with two systems.

One system is being built[1] based on Zionist[2] ideology: it seeks to increase its territorial agenda and mandate. The other system meanwhile is being destroyed, erased from the map.

These systems exist, manifest and operate through borders, checkpoints, demolition, and through the machinery of recognition and unrecognition.

The conflict has had, and continues to have, an extreme and direct effect on the shape of the territory.  In the early years of the state’s existence, more than 500 Palestinian villages and cities were destroyed, and over 800 new Jewish cities, villages and other types of settlement were founded.

By the 1960s, the state had confiscated or otherwise acquired 93% of the country.[3] While more then five million Jewish people from all over the world found a new home in Israel, over 600,000 Palestinians became refugees. Effectively, the State of Israel had simply been established on top of another one, leading to a territorial and cultural cover-up, and an inevitable territorial battle, not only in Gaza and the West Bank, but also within the formal 1967 borders of Israel[4].

For the Palestinians who remained in Israel, Israeli land policy now often denied their right to a home, by confiscating their land, refusing building permits, and refusing to acknowledge existing settlements. The so-called ‘unrecognised villages’ come into existence through a top-down strategy of dislocation, derooting, institutionalised temporality, non-existence, denial and repression, and the bottom-up strategy of closeness, proximity, community and promise.

This forced interplay has a strong impact on human behaviour and fundamentally affects the basic elements of life - shelter, access, culture and recognition – on both personal and community levels. A forced departure, under the guise of security and temporality, becomes highly problematic when we realise that it is actually a strategy (or a solution) for separating people from their land, rights and sense of community.

Separations, walls, and fortifications can have different shapes, colours, textures, and dimensions. They can create situations, events, programmes and conditions. As architects and planners, we understand the way our professional tools are being used as weapons, borrowed for the development of seams that tear apart our country and install isolated islands of seamless identity. Agricultural fields, national parks, cities, gardens, military areas, cultural programmes, farms, roads, infrastructure and services, trees, acoustic walls, industrial parks – any aspect of the landscape can be turned into an element of fortification (serving as protection, defence, or weapon), or can become a separating wall between the two different systems and population groups: Palestinians and Israelis.

Confronted with a scattered territory, we cannot undo what is done, turn back the clock, and restore a (fictive) borderless condition. We can’t and don’t pretend that nothing has happened – or is still happening, or will happen. What we can ask is to undo the separation, and to uphold equality as a condition and consequence of respect. Analysing the contemporary condition, we can’t deny that we are confronted with a territory that has multiple faces, the official and the unofficial, the recognised and the unrecognised, the myth and the reality, the causes and the effects.

To bring the pieces together, one can use many strategies: welding, symbiosis, parasitism, bonding, connecting, linking, adhering, fixing, or solidifying. Actually, the means are not important, only the end, which is seamlessness. Separation turns seamless when we erase disruptive borders, whether these are architectures, cities, walls, fences, ditches, checkpoints, mentalities, politics or strategies. Not that these aren’t necessary, but their current implementation intends to occupy and intimidate, not to cultivate and liberate. It leads to a state in which continuity is the paradoxical key-concept: continuity in place, access, location, culture, memory, time and evolution. Out of that continuity, discontinuity is politically and mentally carved, stripped, eliminated and erased, paving the way to embody the same discontinuity both territorially and physically.

As architects and planners making plans, masterplans, spaces, and buildings, and giving shape to people’s (living) environments, we find ourselves as major players, or master puppets of political planning, in this territorial conflict. We find ourselves in situations in which governmental bodies abuse plans and masterplans to promote ideological agendas, through which human rights are violated. We find ourselves fighting to provide better living conditions for the inhabitants of our country, better services, homes, infrastructures, and economical development; fighting to provide present and future sustainability to the different population groups and communities.

We don’t want to take part in political arguments, we don’t propose a global solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we don’t plan to start peace treaties; but we do aim to expose injustice and to fight for equal planning solutions, equal services, and equal rights for all. We call for worldwide professional communities to participate in the creation of better plans, better masterplans and better solutions for places that have been neglected or harassed by governmental bodies.

To facilitate an extended environment for addressing these political and ideological conflicts, we must bring various disciplines into play: law, geography, journalism and the media, activism, and many others. We need to mobilise national and international public opinion and to create a public debate about the issue of human rights violations through planning.

If there’s a future for architecture and urbanism in this and similar apartheid-like situations, it will be one in which research, design and activism strive through jurisdiction for seamless territories and universal human rights.

Media and activism aren’t just tools for placing this line on the agenda, but can actually be used to localise the agenda within architecture and planning: an agenda that reads reality, and not its twisted interpretation.

Making the building process the epicenter of thought and action is not an attempt to introduce an arbitrary element of interpretation into a causal cultural relationship, but a method to explode and deepen this causality and explain its underlying agenda. Building is a tool used to obtain power, to suppress, deny, refuse, control, violate and destroy basic human rights - on both sides. Here, building is a weapon of mass destruction.

We aim at creating a pilot that can cope with the situation, and others like it, thereby reclaiming the tool, once intended to create culture and now used to erase it: the tool we call architecture and planning.

The pilot project

The story of Ein Hud, one of many unrecognised villages across the country (see map), is actually the story of two villages. Ein Hod and Ein Hud each represent a different reality and completely opposite living conditions. Together, they represent the history of the State of Israel as an embodiment of two parallel societies, or two parallel planning systems: one village in the process of being built, the other one in the process of being wiped off the map.

The Ein Hud story

Ein Hod is the biggest artists’ village in Israel. It was established at the beginning of the 1950s by a group of artists led by Marcel Janko. He had ‘found’ a Palestinian village with hundreds of years of history, a village that had been confiscated in 1948 by the Israeli military, its 900-odd villagers made refugees in a single stroke. The village was constructed in the ‘Islamic style’, composed of arched stone buildings. The Israelis renamed the place Ein Hod, the ‘place of beauty’. The new name, sounding almost exactly like its original name of Ein Hud, has a different meaning. So Israeli settlers changed the village’s identity, projecting onto it a reconnection to their ancient Mediterranean roots. It became their new home, and a symbol of a new ‘arts and crafts’ society. The Israeli government listed the village under the status of ‘community settlement’[5], a new term for a government-sponsored gated community. Such communities are established in strategic locations in order to promote Jewish presence in an area and prevent Palestinian ‘encroachment’ over public land. Ein Hud, the working Palestinian village, became Ein Hod, an exclusive gated community for artists.

While the new village was taking shape right on top of a confiscated one, the extended family of Palestinian Muhammad Mahmud Abu al Hayja fled from their homes in Ein Hud to their own land in the mountains, only 1.5 km away from their village. The family eventually lost all hope of returning to their old homes, so built new ones in their hiding place. They called the new village Ein Hud, after the old one. The new Ein Hud was an ‘unrecognised village’ (until February 2004), and its people classed as internal refugees. This meant that, for over 50 years, they lived without services, water, electricity, schools or medical care, struggling with the authorities day by day for their right to a home, for their right to exist. Finally, in February 2004, after years of continuous struggle, the government recognised the village – or rather 80 dunams (80,000 square metres) of it, a very insufficient area for its present existence and its future development.

With this act of recognition, the Israeli government imposed a masterplan on Ein Hud for the development of the village. The plan gives the village a total amount of land of 80 dunams or 80,000 square metres (1 dunam = 1,000 square metres), an area it has already outgrown. Of this, 13 dunams  (13,000 square metres) in the village centre is considered a ‘military area’, so cannot be developed at all.

Today, Ein Hud has 207 inhabitants and is part of the Hof Hakarmel jurisdiction area. This jurisdiction area enjoys an average area per person of 6 dunams (6,000 square metres), while Ein Hud was awarded 0.36 dunams (360 square metres) per person in the plan – about one-twentieth of the average allocation. The designated area for the development of public spaces, open spaces and commerce is already occupied by homes that automatically become illegal with the approval of the masterplan and may be demolished; if they are not demolished, the village has no space for the aforementioned activities. The masterplan doesn’t take into consideration large parts of the village; it leaves no space for future expansion, demographic growth, economic development, or future sustainability. Through the switch from unrecognised to recognised, the imposed masterplan pushes the village further into a straitjacket of political planning.

The Palestinian unrecognised landscape isn’t inhabited by phantoms, but by 100,000 people living in over 40 different localities. These minority communities are currently denied the political, civil, economic and cultural rights that they should have according to international human rights principles. To raise this issue within the field of planning and architecture (for some villages the tools to keep the state of unrecognition pending, for others the sole recognition of their existence), work needs to be done to link community, national and international levels, insisting on equality, seamlessness and non-discrimination. Domestically, we need the implementation of international minority rights protection. At the same time, discussion is needed, to provide insight into the reality as found.

The competition

In order to show the Israeli Supreme Court that there are alternatives to Israeli State planning, which seems designed to deny the Palestinian population basic development opportunities, FAST organised an international architecture and planning competition for an alternative masterplan for the village of Ein Hud, burdened with its restrictive 80-dunam official plan.

The competition is the first stage of the ‘One Land Two Systems’ project, which aims to develop a model for use in other situations in Israel and elsewhere. There were 300 submissions from 30 different countries, each one outlining a sustainable and livable alternative for the Ein Hud, capable of being presented to the Supreme Court, in contrast to the Israeli government’s unworkable plan.

On 6th February 2005, the results were presented in Amsterdam, with jury member Aaron Betsky (Director of NAI. the Netherlands Architecture Institute) announcing the three winners in the project category. These were: An Existence of Exile, by Dalia Nachman-Farchi and Hezi Nachman-Farchi (Israel), Spatial Justice by Sabine Horlitz and Oliver Clemens (Germany), and Confluence by The AAA Team (France). The jury was impressed with the proposals, and considered that the three winning projects deserved to be further developed. To this end, FAST is organising a workshop in Ein Hud with the three winners, local experts and the community. “The competition results offer very good ideas for the future of our village and should be elaborated,” commented Muhammad Abu al Hayja, the grandson of the Abu al Hayja who founded the unrecognised village, and today the mayor of Ein Hud.

In addition to the project category, jury member Petra Blaisse (Director of Inside/Outside, Amsterdam) announced the results in the ideas category. Four honourable mentions were given: Ein Hud Underground by Clemens Huber (Austria), Connective Art, a study in seamless de-territorialisation by Shefali H. Sanghvi (USA), Realising Connexion by Marcel Perez Pirio, Team Supreme (USA), and Red-Blooded carpet by Christopher Perktold and Donat Aurel Gruecd (Austria).

The significance of the competition is far wider than the struggle for recognition and rights of the people of Ein Hud. The competition challenged professional planners, architects, geographers, artists, film makers, photographers, journalists, writers and others, as well as students, to use design and related tools in order to resolve conflicting territorial claims and (planning) cultures. Its aim is to develop a plan for a sustainable community, with new architectural solutions. 

We hope that the results of this project can be the model for other populations around the world facing neglect or harassment by state policy and planning institutions. While work will continue to develop the project and, in particular, flesh out the winning plans, we have already achieved considerable success in connecting the different disciplines of planning, politics, the media, and activism. In addition, we have succeeded in raising awareness of the issue internationally: for example, the engagement of the media and Dutch NGOs resulted in a parliamentary discussion in the Netherlands’ parliament about the situation of Ein Hud and Israel’s unrecognised villages.

Further information on the competition can be found at www.seamless-israel.org.

The conclusion

We are dealing with a situation in which the top-down planning regime is totally at odds with the grass-roots reality of unrecognised villages – and, in fact, with basic human rights.  When we examine the effect of these planning ideologies, procedures and politics on the daily existence of those who are forced to submit to them, it is clear that the current situation is not sustainable, and that to change it we need to initiate a debate, wake up an apparently sleeping national conscience, and reclaim a misused profession.

We can only reclaim it with an awareness created from reality, not from myth, and with positive action based on tools, methods, design, strategies and societies – as illustrated in the example of the One Land Two Systems competition.

In other words, the commitment to change must lead to action. Shouldn’t the discussion happen as reality unfolds, claiming concepts, designs and the right both to speak and to be taken seriously? Shouldn’t we trace the methods that lead to unrecognition and question their motives and effect? It might be possible to find freedom in innocence, but definitely not in ignorance, or self-imagined ignorance. Defeating, undermining, criticising this status quo happens if one moves the critique from a cultural, academic debate into a pragmatic, legal debate. The praxis of architecture and planning is the one that can inscribe reality, even if that reality incorporates the concept of unrecognition. Discussing the impact of architecture on human rights starts on a practical level, with moving clearly and decisively. An alternative masterplan for the unrecognised village of Ein Hud is an essential first step in this process.