To Buy or Not to Be: Trespassing the Gated Community

Abstract

The emergence of gated communities in Israel/Palestine signals new modes of urban exclusion, which reshape previous forms of spatial distinction. Focusing on the ethnically “mixed town” of Jaffa, where an unprecedented number of such gated communities have been constructed in the past decade, this article interrogates the modus operandi of the Andromeda Hill project and Palestinian resistance to it. Conceptualized as a neoliberal mode of ethnogentrification, this gated community attempts to achieve the impossible task of positioning itself both within and without local lived space and inhabited time. Operating as a neo-orientalist simulacrum, such projects subvert, spatially and semiotically, the standard logic of urban representation and modernistic notions of segregation. The concept of spatial heteronomy is proposed to address such dialectic strategies of spatial orientationality—circumventing the contested local urban space and projected onto a mythological plane of Mediterranean fantasy.

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