Palestine Report Part 4 : Rawabi, the Architectural Prophecy of an Unequal Palestinian State - THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE
►https://thefunambulist.net/architectural-projects/palestine-report-part-4-rawabi-architectural-prophecy-unequal-palest
This article is the fourth installment of a series of five that operate as a report of my most recent stay in Palestine in July. While the three first parts were set up in Jerusalem-Al Quds, this fourth one is dedicated to a city that did not exist a few years ago. Situated in the West Bank between Nablus and Ramallah (see map at the end of this text), the new city of Rawabi materializes a sum of crucial questions about the present and the future of Palestine. Developed by the Bayti Real Investment Company, which is owned in partnership by the Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Company and the Palestinian company Massar International owned by charismatic Bashar Masri, the construction of Rawabi started in 2010 at the climax of the politics of development engaged by then Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, former economist for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Such developments have particularly changed the face of Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority in a deliberate indifference of the Israeli occupation and a consecration of the 1993 Oslo Accords. Furthermore, when it comes to these new neighborhoods built in the North of Ramallah (see the article “Constructing the Ramallah Bubble“) or Rawabi, it has become commonplace to compare their architectural aesthetics and their urban typology on top of hills (“rawabi” itself means “hills”) to the neighboring Israeli settlements — what I called in the past, an “architectural Stockholm syndrome.” As described by Tina Grandinetti in an article written for the second issue of The Funambulist Magazine, Suburban Geographies (Nov-Dec 2015)), the way architecture enforces the social segregation that a city like Rawabi produces is also manifest, and the many luxurious brands (Ferrari, Armani, Lacoste, Tommy Hilfinger, Mango, etc.) that ostensibly display “coming soon” signs on the storefront of their future stores in Rawabi, certainly contribute to it. Nevertheless, the questions that Rawabi triggers are too important to be dismissed by a superficial critique of it.
Très intéressant. La revue (▻https://thefunambulist.net/magazine) a l’air assez passionnante également.