MARIANNA REIS, "Urban (In)Formality And The Ambivalence Of Infrastructural Upgrade In Nazareth"

Nazareth, with a population of nearly 80,000, is the largest Palestinian city in Israel. But, if you ask local residents, Nazareth is more of an overgrown village: it is dense and overcrowded, suffers from widespread infrastructural disrepair, and has developed in spite of decades of government policies of non-planning in Arab communities, which lie at the margins of the Israeli state. Informality, therefore, is a key feature shaping Nazareth’s urban landscape, which likewise shapes residents’ identities and sense of belonging. On one hand, many Nazarenes fondly recall the efforts spearheaded by the Communist Party from the 1970s through the mid- 1990s to mobilize residents to collectively and informally build/repair local infrastructures in the face of state neglect, as an act of resistance. On the other hand, some neighborhoods in Nazareth have cultivated a different relationship to informality and place: refugees fleeing nearby villages that were depopulated and destroyed in 1948 built their own distinct neighborhoods on Nazareth’s margins with the hope that they would eventually return to their ancestral lands, which has created unstable commitments and feelings of belonging to the city. In recent years, the state has begun to intervene in the urban development of Israel’s Palestinian localities, in an attempt to incorporate local and municipal authorities into the formal and bureaucratic policies and practices of urban planning. My proposed paper, based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, seeks to explore the multiple narratives of urban informality, situated knowledge, belonging, and temporality in Nazareth that have emerged in response to the move towards formalizing urban planning processes in Israel’s Arab localities. From this, I aim to consider how these narratives shape ambivalent visions of Palestinian space and Palestinian urban futures.