Powers, Identities, Ideologies

Cities are never shaped by design alone. Streets, transit lines, walls, housing developments, borders, and public spaces all reflect the powers, identities, and ideologies of the societies that build them.

Few places make this relationship more visible than Israel, the Palestinian territories, and Jordan. During travel through the region, I became interested not in trying to resolve its political conflicts – something far beyond the scope of an urban-planning essay – but in understanding how those conflicts are expressed physically.

A border can be a line on a map, a wall, a checkpoint, a road, or a transit route. A new neighborhood can represent economic development to one community and territorial change to another. Even something as ordinary as a light-rail line can simultaneously connect people and symbolize division.

Infrastructure is rarely neutral.

JERUSALEM LIGHT RAIL

Jerusalem offers perhaps the clearest example.

The city has been physically divided, unified, expanded, fortified, and rebuilt for thousands of years. Its contemporary geography remains shaped by competing national, religious, and political claims, particularly in East Jerusalem and the surrounding West Bank.

Walls and barriers are one physical manifestation of this conflict. Israel has described the separation barrier and associated checkpoints as security measures, while Palestinians and critics emphasize the restrictions they impose on mobility, access to employment, services, land, and economic activity.

Whatever one’s political perspective, the planning implications are unmistakable: infrastructure that increases security or control for one population can simultaneously restrict movement for another.

The same tension can be seen in the Jerusalem Light Rail.

The system crosses parts of West and East Jerusalem and is used by Jewish and Arab residents. Announcements are made in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, making the system an unusually visible shared public space in a deeply contested city.

At the same time, its geography is political. Portions of the line connect areas of East Jerusalem with the rest of the city, and critics have viewed the route as reinforcing Israeli control over territory Palestinians envision as part of a future state.

This creates an interesting transportation paradox.

A rail line is designed to overcome distance. It connects neighborhoods, provides mobility, and allows people to share a common transportation system. Yet the same infrastructure can also reinforce political geography.

The Jerusalem Light Rail therefore both connects and divides.

That tension is central to urban planning. Transportation does not simply move people through cities; it changes relationships among neighborhoods, markets, governments, and communities.

KIBBUTZIM

Another distinctive element of Israeli planning is the kibbutz.

Kibbutzim emerged from the Zionist movement and combined agriculture, collective living, community institutions, and national development. Early communities were strongly influenced by socialist and utopian ideals: residents worked collectively, property was shared, and settlement design reflected an emphasis on communal life.

They are particularly interesting from a planning perspective because their physical form was closely connected to ideology.

In researching kibbutzim, I came across Architecture and Utopia: The Israeli Experiment, which examines the relationship between settlement design and the social ideals of the communities that created them.

The connection between geometry and utopian planning is hardly unique to Israel. Throughout history, planners and political leaders have used circles, grids, axes, squares, and other idealized forms to express ideas about order and society.

The physical environment becomes a representation of how people believe society should function.

But communities are not static.

Over time, many kibbutzim changed substantially. Collective ownership arrangements were modified, residents gained more private property and individual economic independence, and many people began commuting elsewhere for work.

Their physical and economic structure therefore evolved alongside Israeli society.

This illustrates one of the inherent problems of utopian planning: the plan may be fixed, but society is not.

There is another important dimension that cannot be understood simply by looking at settlement plans from above.

Kibbutzim also exist within the larger Israeli-Palestinian geography.

Some communities are located close to Gaza, the West Bank, or international borders. Their planning therefore includes not only homes, farms, civic facilities, and industry but also security infrastructure.

Looking only at the internal design of such a settlement can obscure this larger context.

A diagram might show a carefully planned community surrounded by agricultural land. Zoom outward, however, and borders, neighboring communities, military infrastructure, roads, checkpoints, and other geopolitical realities become visible.

That is an important planning lesson in itself:

Scale changes the story.

A site plan may appear logical when viewed alone, while the regional map reveals a much more complicated reality.

A COMPARISON: KIRYAS JOEL

The relationship between ideology and settlement design is not unique to Israel.

Kiryas Joel, New York, provides a very different example of a community whose physical development is strongly shaped by collective identity.

The village was established by Satmar Hasidic Jews seeking a place where they could maintain a distinctive religious and cultural community. Rapid population growth subsequently produced dense housing, new institutions, commercial activity, and recurring debates over expansion into surrounding areas.

The comparison with kibbutzim should not be pushed too far – their histories, politics, religions, and economic structures are very different.

But both demonstrate how communities can use the built environment to reinforce identity.

Planning questions that might otherwise appear technical – housing density, annexation, schools, public facilities, transportation, and land ownership – become inseparable from questions about community, culture, political power, and belonging.

That is precisely why planning can become so contentious.

People are rarely arguing only about a building.

They are often arguing about what the building represents.

RAWABI

The planned Palestinian city of Rawabi offers another fascinating example.

Developed by Palestinian businessman Bashar Masri and Massar International, Rawabi was conceived as a modern Palestinian city with housing, employment, commercial space, public institutions, and contemporary infrastructure.

I heard Masri discuss the project while I was a student at Tufts, and what interested me most was the extent to which the city represented more than real estate development.

Rawabi was also an exercise in nation-building.

Its architecture, street layout, public spaces, economic strategy, and marketing were all connected to ideas about Palestinian identity and a future Palestinian state.

The city also demonstrates how difficult it is to separate development from the larger political geography of the West Bank.

Under the arrangements created by the Oslo Accords, governance of the West Bank is divided among areas administered under different Israeli and Palestinian authorities. Although Rawabi was developed within an area administered by the Palestinian Authority, its construction depended on transportation routes, construction materials, utilities, water, permits, and other systems that crossed jurisdictions or required coordination with Israeli authorities.

Rawabi therefore illustrates a basic reality of metropolitan planning:

Political borders do not necessarily correspond with infrastructure systems.

Water networks, roads, labor markets, electrical systems, supply chains, and transportation corridors cross boundaries even when governments do not.

This makes infrastructure both a source of cooperation and a potential source of conflict.

Rawabi’s developers also sought to create a recognizable Palestinian urban identity. Local stone, commercial streets inspired by traditional marketplaces, public spaces, and contemporary infrastructure were combined in an effort to create a modern Palestinian city.

At the same time, critics questioned whether a master-planned, middle-class development could authentically represent Palestinian urbanism. Others criticized the project’s economic relationships with Israeli companies or compared its hilltop form with Israeli settlements.

Those debates are revealing.

They show that even architectural style can become political.

A street pattern, building material, landscape treatment, or hilltop location can be interpreted not only aesthetically but historically and nationally.

Yet Rawabi also demonstrates the potential of physical development to create institutions and economic capacity.

Housing, schools, businesses, utilities, streets, and public spaces are not an alternative to political resolution. But they are part of the physical foundation on which any functioning society depends.

From a planning perspective, Rawabi is therefore most useful not as evidence for one political argument or another, but as a case study in the relationship among economic development, infrastructure, governance, and identity.

EILAT & AQABA

The contrast between Eilat in Israel and Aqaba in Jordan provides another example of how borders shape cities.

The two cities sit only a short distance from each other at the northern end of the Gulf of Aqaba. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are also nearby.

Geographically, this is a remarkably compact region.

Politically, it is divided among four countries.

Eilat and Aqaba both function as tourism and port cities, yet they developed under different governments, planning systems, cultures, economies, and national identities.

Traveling between them makes the border visible in the urban landscape.

Hotels, roads, architecture, signage, development patterns, public spaces, and infrastructure all reflect different planning histories despite the cities sharing essentially the same geography and climate.

This is what makes international borders so interesting from an urban-planning perspective.

Nature does not recognize them.

Watersheds, ecosystems, transportation corridors, labor markets, and tourist regions often extend across them.

Governments do.

The result can be two very different cities sitting almost beside one another.

It raises an intriguing question: what would the region look like if transportation and economic planning were more interconnected across its borders?

CONCLUSION

The built environment is often discussed as though it were merely technical.

Where should the road go?

How tall should the buildings be?

Where should the train stop?

How should a neighborhood be laid out?

But none of these decisions exist in isolation.

They are shaped by property rights, security, religion, nationalism, economics, public participation, historical memory, environmental constraints, and political power.

Jerusalem’s light rail can provide mobility while also becoming part of a territorial debate.

A kibbutz can reflect collective ideals while simultaneously occupying a particular place within a contested regional geography.

Rawabi can function as a housing and economic-development project while also representing Palestinian identity and aspirations for statehood.

Eilat and Aqaba can sit beside the same sea while developing as parts of entirely different national systems.

In every case, planning is physical – but it is also social, economic, and political.

That does not mean planners determine history, nor that infrastructure alone can resolve political conflicts.

It means that the physical environment both reflects society and helps shape it.

Perhaps one day rail networks will more easily connect Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Amman, Aqaba, Eilat, and Palestinian cities. Such a system would not simply be an engineering project. Its routes, stations, borders, funding, governance, and accessibility would embody decisions about who is connected to whom and under what conditions.

Every infrastructure project asks these questions, even when they are less visible:

Who benefits?

Who bears the costs?

Who makes the decisions?

Who belongs?

Those are questions of power, identity, and ideology.

And they are also questions of planning.

Peace.

All photographs by Rayn Riel except map imagery.