Manipulation of landscape as an Exercise of Unfair Power: the Case of Qalqiliya in the Occupied Palestine

Planning, as emphasized by planning theories, is supposed to contribute to the progress of mankind through always developing policies, regulations, methods, and concepts, to support the welfare of individuals and their communities. Therefore, themes such as ethic of planning and the issue of just city have been discussed intensively in planning theories and the main dominated question is: what is the good planning? Many planning theorists answer this question by addressing various types of planning such as collaborative, deliberative, radical planning and so on as good tools to achieve progress and prosperity. However, Palestine is a case where the contradiction between theory and practice is obvious, because planning is used as an oppressive tool and not as a progressive one. No sign is needed to indicate well-developed Jewish colonies’ urban spaces from neglected built-up environment inhabited by people of Palestine; that specific difference reveals that planning may have the role in changing place identity, and demography of the land. In this sense, planning is often incomplete and misleading, advancing the interest and agenda of the occupiers at the expense of those who have been occupied. Planning is a ‘double-edged weapon’; on one side it can be a progressive tool, while on the other hand it can be a tool for repression, consolidating fragmentation and control on a group of people. Consequently, the landscape of Palestine is constantly being changed by means of planning, including new fabricated laws used as pretext of land confiscation. In addition, the occupying power deploys the model of exception (emptiness of laws and suspension of norms) to produce urban and regional confinements (prisons) in which people of Palestine experience land confiscation, restriction of movement, and exclusion from their private lands. This transformation results in disorder of spatialization process that led to a clear gap between spaces of oppressor and oppressed, exploiter and exploited, and occupier and occupied. This thesis focuses on the transformation of the landscape of Palestine starting from the British occupation in 1917, highlighting the role of planning and laws as instruments of this transformation. This study approaches the spatial knowledge specifically landscape planning as a way of control rather than an aesthetic improvement, and also it criticizes frameworks and domains such as (laws invented by the occupation) which are used to neutralize and normalize the landscape of control. This thesis offers both conceptual and empirical contributions about the way in which the landscape can be manipulated to have the role of exercise unfair and illegitimate power.