The architecture of dispossession

On the dark side of architecture and art in transforming original spaces and displacing people

Bibliographic Data

ID7153128
AuthorsY Jabareen (0000-0002-0858-9994, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume43
Issue1
Pages58-76
Publication date2025-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning C Politics and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2399-6544 • E-ISSN: 2399-6552
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/23996544241259312
OpenAlexW4399560064
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited29

This paper interrogates and problematizes the intimate role of architecture in the dispossession and displacement of people. It explores the case of Ayn Hawd, a dispossessed Palestinian village that was transformed into an Israeli Artists colony in 1951. It found that architecture is deeply involved in executing, facilitating, legitimizing, and aestheticizing the violent act of dispossessing people. I theorize this as architecture of dispossession, a coherent aesthetic, economic, and political regime of practices, in which a social reality is manipulated and transformed spatially to construct a new, spectacular and imaginary, reality in the dispossessed space. The architecture of dispossession involves three distinct yet interrelated logics: political, economic, and aesthetic. The logic of accumulation by dispossession involves the seizure of the dispossessed’s property as assets used for the purpose of profit. It can take place in various ways, including privatization, the commodification of cultural forms, and dispossession. The logic of the exclusion of presence focuses on both the actual exclusion of a group of persons and the subjective or “existential” effects, intended or not, on the dispossessed, experienced as a loss not just of property and belonging but of their identity, form of life, or “being” as such; a kind of existential or ontological negation. Finally, an aesthetic logic of dispossession is a use of art and architecture to describe the dispossession in ways that legitimize it by representing or dissimulating it so that it can be advertised and appreciated as something more and other than the violence it involves. There is an important role for architectural criticism in showing not only that some population has been excluded, but how this is rationalized and legitimated in the ways the new forms and uses are constructed, described, represented, or advertised

Aesthetics · Art · Commodification · Economy · Existentialism · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Imaginary · Visual arts · Law · Middle East Politics and Society · Psychology · Public Spaces through Art · Urban Planning and Governance · Architecture

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