Ramallah has been expanding rapidly over the past few decades and particularly in the last 10 years. Immigration (especially from the north of the West Bank) is making this city more and more populous and even causing social tensions at times. Recently there have been several incidences of prejudice towards people from the north, particularly Jenin. The prejudice slur "Thai" has been used to insult northern people and the government moved quick to ban this word and punish anyone who uses it in a discriminatory form. The word Thai has nothing to do with Thai people per se, however it's referencing Thai people's immigration to other Asian countries in search for work, often earning very low wages. Immigration from the north has angered people as this has caused an increase in the supply of low-wage labour, which affects people's earnings.
The property development sector is now capitalising on the increase in housing demand and are building at will, with minimum regulation and scrutiny as to what is being built. Of course that's an exaggeration, there are probably procedures for acquiring permits and planning permission etc., but what is actually happening in my opinion is sporadic construction of buildings with an indifference to the look and feel of the city's built environment.
I figured I can make use of my dad's SLR and take some pictures to illustrate my thoughts. I was actually a bit surprised because some of the pictures don't really make the buildings look that bad. In fact from a distance the buildings look nice.
But I'm more concerned about what things look like on the neighbourhood level. If you drive around the Al-Tireh suburb (one of the areas subject to massive urban expansion) you start to notice how buildings are crammed next to each other like a Sim City fail.
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| NYC? |
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| Property developer advertising their 4th housing project |
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| Hotel built right in front of a house |
The picture above shows a once empty valley in front of my house (where in the past you could spot deer). The 5-6 buildings you see in the front literally appeared over the past 10 years.
Maybe I'm sounding hyper-critical and reactionary as I moan about all the new buildings. It is true that the West Bank has limited land to build on, and there is only so much construction skills and quality available. But surely some sort of coordination between property developers could be facilitated to make the built environment look more appealing, and I don't think that's being too idealistic. Even taking into consideration that there aren't many resources at the disposal of developers, individual buildings still aren't the problem. There are some very nice buildings that are well built like the ones in the two pictures below, this further supports my point that the problem lies in planning and coordination.
A couple of weeks ago I came across a possible solution to some of the problems faced by property development in the West Bank: Rawabi. Rawabi (http://www.rawabi.ps/index.php), currently under construction, is set to be the first Palestinian planned-city, consisting of 10,000 homes with a population of 40,000 people. It will also have schools, hospitals, and shopping centres. I visited the construction site with my family a few weeks ago and we were given a demonstration about the development.
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| http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/130703232412-rawabi-park-story-top.jpg |
I can see why Rawabi looks appealing, it's offering affordable housing developed in conjunction with the internationally acclaimed Qatari Diar real estate company. It's considered a public-private partnership but is funded almost exclusively by private investors. According to the Rawabi website the master plan includes feedback from "months of surveys and focus groups among targeted homeowner groups". The project also aims to be environmentally responsible. This of course is a step up from the current practice of property development.
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| Construction site |
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| Rawabi visitors centre |
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| Model |
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| Model |
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| Model building |
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| Model mosque |
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| Model |
Despite the novelty and perhaps progressiveness of the Rawabi project it still felt eery to me. Bizarrely, it was *too* planned. I think the development has good intentions, but I think there's a fine line between good planning and outright commodification of people's lives. I think Rawabi objectifies the meaning of neighbourhood by saying on its website "the city is comprised of 23 neighborhoods...Each neighborhood will have a unique name and a special identity". For me, neighbourhoods cannot be preset and certainly cannot be bounded. What's also annoying is the objectification of the meaning of culture via the The Rawabi Cultural Center, which is set to be the nexus of culture in Rawabi. Is this supposed to mean culture is produced and spit out of a building every now and then? Finally Rawabi is relatively far from Ramallah, the closest major city. This might be a problem for mobility in the area.
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| Video demonstration of Rawabi...Life as a commodity |
Again I admit that I'm being hyper-critical, I do hope that the project is a success as there is a lot of money being invested in it. Maybe planned cities might turn out to be a good solution given the geography and politics in the region. But for me personally I don't see Rawabi as the best alternative for the current practice of property development, not least because I simply don't like how it looks. What's more, planned cities have not been a major success internationally, see for example Peterborough or Northampton. One things's for sure, I won't be putting a downpayment on an apartment in Rawabi!
How does Chris Karam feel about Rawabi almost two years later now that it is open for residents?
ReplyDeleteI have recently visited Rawabi after having last been there 2 years ago and I do have some revisions in my post that I’d like to make. I think I have not given Rawabi enough credit for it’s concept and urban design, it is very much resemblant of an urban planning movement i’m very fond of, New Urbanism, in the sense that it is a high-density development that has good pedestrian access and transit routes. My favorite feature of Rawabi’s design is the scale and the clever use of the land’s topography. Certain streets give you the impression that you are walking alongside low-rise 5 storey buildings, when in reality those buildings are actually 15 storeys high but have been relegated by the land’s cascading topography, so that only the top 5 storeys are visible to the pedestrian. It is very well planned and its design is human scaled, this is all good news and I can’t but give the concept of Rawabi full credit for its achievement.
ReplyDeleteMy reservations on Rawabi are however mostly political. Quality urban design and city planning can be commodified and reduced to nothing more than a product. To be completely cynical, you can view master planning as a tool used by property developers to make building 60 medium rise towers in bulk in a consolidated space a profitable venture. Building 60 buildings in 60 different plots is simply not as easy and is probably less profitable for a property developer. So you can say that Rawabi rode the wave of New Urbanism in an effort to capitalise on a profitable property development venture.
What I just mentioned is the worst case scenario of what Rawabi is about, the best case scenario is that Rawabi’s attempt to alleviate urban and housing problems in the West Bank is tangential. Sure, satellite cities might be a good thing, there’s a limit to the densities you can achieve in cities and the need to move out of the city in a smart way is necessary. But wouldn't a well-funded and researched Greater Ramallah spatial plan have been a better starting point? If Rawabi’s intentions were truly egalitarian then the real project for a better urban Palestine should have started with old-school urban planning, not urban design. Imagine how good it would be to have a clear and comprehensive land use plan of Ramallah and its surrounding villages along with a transport plan that attempts to connect the rural areas with the city center. A well planned and designed satellite city means nothing if it’s not part of a wider land use and function plan. I would have liked to see money poured into a long term urban planning government division that oversees the implementation of a spatial plan in the Greater Ramallah area. This doesn’t mean that there isn't any room for Rawabi; it can fit right into the spatial plan but only after the spatial plan is actually made. The spatial plan would have laid the foundations for property developers to build responsibly and rationally to avoid tunnel-vision development; Rawabi just skipped the line.
So all in all I think the urban design in Rawabi is excellent but I will not accept it as the trailblazer for the West Bank’s urban problems.
Unfortunately, this expansion (which is great) comes at the expense of the aesthetic value of the city. This is happening in all Palestinian cities by the way.
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