80 – Spatial Planning in Israel/Palestine and the Gaza War

Prof. Oren Yiftachel

Prof. (Emeritus) Yiftachel teaches political geography and urban planning at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and holds the Hurst Chair for Urban Studies. Yiftachel is an honorary professor at the University of London: UCL.

His recent books include “TheoriSE: Debating the southern turn in urban studies” (2023, ACC Capetown); “Land and Power: Israel/Palestine from Ethnocracy to Creeping Apartheid” (2021, Resling, Tel Aviv); “Emptied Lands: the Legal Geography of Negev Bedouins” (2018) with Sandy Kedar and Ahmad Amara; Stanford); “Indigenous (In)Justice” (2014) with Ahmad Amara and Ismael Abu-Sa’ad; Harvard). Yiftachel is an adjunct professor at UCL, London, and a visiting professor at the Milano Politecnico. 

Yiftachel is a leading activist in human rights and social justice organizations, including a founding board member of ‘Adva’ (center for social equality) and chair of ‘Btselem’ – (monitoring human rights in the Occupied Palestinians Territories); He has worked as a planner for the unrecognized Bedouin communities, and recently a co-founder of the Palestinian-Israeli peace movement – ‘A Land for All’ – working to establish an Israeli-Palestinian confederation.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oren-yiftachel-2a6a079/

Twitter/X: https://x.com/OrenYiftachel

Orwa Switat

He is an urban planning scholar, practitioner, and activist with degrees in Philosophy, Political Science, and Urban and Regional Planning, focusing on state-minority relations in planning and the status of groups in cities. Since September 2024, he has been a Fellow at the Divinity School at Harvard University. Since September 2023, he has been a visiting scholar at the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University. Before this, he was an associate researcher at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning. He advised municipal and governmental bodies in Israel on integrating Palestinian communities and minority groups within urban and regional planning.

Additionally, he consulted for organizations promoting spatial justice among minority communities. He worked with Human Rights and community empowerment organizations as a strategic and organizational consultant, a matter that is personally significant to him as a Palestinian Arab citizen of Israel. Furthermore, from 2019 to 2023, he was a member of Haifa’s municipal committee for historical building preservation, steering policies to embrace the city’s historical heritage, focusing on the Palestinian historical neighbourhoods.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/orwaswitat/

Mais Jafari

Mais is a landscape architect, urban planner, and author with international experience and research in the MENA region and Germany. She is currently a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Landscape Ecology and Landscape Planning, TU Dortmund University. She coordinated several international research projects, most recently the EU-Horizon 2020 project proGIreg (2018-2023) at the City of Dortmund. Her research focus on Nature-based solutions, transformation of public space, climate change and environmental planning, social innovation and the co-creation of green spaces.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maisjafari/

Markus Kip

Markus listens to many podcasts and founded the UPP with Ross as something to listen to himself. A failed musician, he was familiar enough with punkrock to set up the first episodes and has been enjoying doing it as a wonderful means to talk to fascinating people. A critical urban scholar trained in sociology and former homeless community organizer, Markus lives in Berlin, hangs out at the Georg-Simmel-Center of the Humboldt University and currently works as a postdoc at the collaborative research center “Structural Change of Property” at the University of Jena (academic website). 

Twitter/X: https://x.com/MetroKipster

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markus-kip-a5396123a/