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This paper's core argument is that we should start creating theories that encompass different cities and include them in a more flexible and relational comparative framework. This must include a new urban terminology which does not continue the all-too-fashionable labelling of cities on a continuum between first world and third world, global North-West and South-East or as I emphasize below, including what have been labelled extremely contested cities in a more flexible and relational ordinary cities framework. To introduce such a comparative approach, I will examine Jerusalem and Stockholm via three contrastive and relational patterns: institutional segregation; urban violence; and non-governmental organization involvement in planning. In so doing, I point towards the necessity to open up research on extreme urban conflicts, suggesting that when assessing specific contextual patterns, those labelled as extremely contested cities (such as Jerusalem) share more similarities with other more ordinary cities (represented by Stockholm) than was previously perceived, often stemming from ethnic, racial and class conflicts revolving around issues of politics, culture and identity, among others.

Political geographers have recently renewed conversation on the spatialities of exclusionary neonationalism, surfacing in the form of right-wing political populism (Casaglia et al, 2020), Islamophobia (Koch and Vora, 2020) and neo-colonial relations (Avni, 2020). These insightful commentaries, however, are yet to address an important political-geographic dimension of the phenomenon: the growing schism between metropolitan and nationalist politics, which we conceptualize here as double polarization. The spatial and political consequences of this emergent dynamic, we contend, call for new articulations of urban political geography.

Jerusalem represents a rather exceptional urban case study because of its unique position as the global center of the three largest monotheistic religions since biblical times. Jerusalem is both a symbolic and tangible focal point in the Israeli Palestinian conflict and competing religious and political narratives have affected the city's development. In this brief text we attempt to capture some of the main themes in Jerusalem's planning history over the past century, navigating through the city towards its contemporary urban reality.

This article assesses how urban segregation and ethnic diversity in Stockholm have been shaped by spatial policy and migration trajectories over time. Much of the urban studies and planning literature defines segregation as a measure of residential mixing. In contrast, our research suggests that segregation could be understood as a lack of opportunities for interaction in public space. In the case of Stockholm, space syntax network analysis and the establishment of ethnicity as a statistical category suggest that despite the social infrastructure provided by the Swedish state, the city's specific spatial configuration alongside its policies of housing allocation have resulted in severe constraints on the potential for co-presence between new immigrants and the native Swedish population. Spatial analysis suggests that the city's public transport infrastructure is a contributory factor in maintaining separation between foreign-born and ethnic Swedes. Coupled with a high level of social deprivation amongst new immigrants, the result is a multi-dimensional spatial segregation process that persists amongst the second immigrant generation, reinforcing ethnic and socio-economic area-based housing segregation. We conclude that despite Swedens long-standing political vision of social integration, its capital is suffering from increasing ethnic spatial differentiation, which will most likely persist unless a greater consideration of spatial connectivity and an introduction of ethnic and racial equality data in policy and practice are brought to bear.

This article explores the role of planning in the deeply divided and politically polarized context of Jerusalem. The overall argument developed throughout the article is that the relation between planning and politics is a non-hierarchical set of interactions, negotiated within specific historical, geographical, legal and cultural contexts—in other words, orders don't come down from the politicians to be slavishly followed by planners. In this respect our findings, based on in-depth interviews with Israeli planners, suggest that the case of Jerusalem represents a particularly dramatic illustration of the fact that the function of planning expertise can only be understood in relation to the surrounding socio-political environment. Furthermore, contrary to conventional wisdom, planners in Jerusalem are not destined to either complicity or irrelevance in the face of political imperatives; planners' agency, however, does not simply reflect their mastery of specific professional knowledge and tools, but also their ability to act strategically in relation to the context in which they operate. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

AbstractThis article explores the role of planning in the deeply divided and politically polarized context of Jerusalem. The overall argument developed throughout the article is that the relation between planning and politics is a non‐hierarchical set of interactions, negotiated within specific historical, geographical, legal and cultural contexts—in other words, orders don't come down from the politicians to be slavishly followed by planners. In this respect our findings, based on in‐depth interviews with Israeli planners, suggest that the case of Jerusalem represents a particularly dramatic illustration of the fact that the function of planning expertise can only be understood in relation to the surrounding socio‐political environment. Furthermore, contrary to conventional wisdom, planners in Jerusalem are not destined to either complicity or irrelevance in the face of political imperatives; planners' agency, however, does not simply reflect their mastery of specific professional knowledge and tools, but also their ability to act strategically in relation to the context in which they operate.

Throughout history, cities have been the theatre of social and spatial struggles. The issue of urban protests, however, has not yet been investigated in detail in the light of the growing concern of the need to rethink urban studies, from theoretical and epistemic assumptions, to methodological issues. It is argued that the mobilisation of urban dissent in the so-called Arab Spring offers a good opportunity to develop a critical approach based on the observation of the nexus between an event (a punctual expression of dissent) and a site (the urban environment in which the former takes place). The goal is to avoid theoretical rigidities inherent to the assumptions about the intrinsic qualities of cities or social movements. The paper also aims at connecting different academic and disciplinary traditions across linguistic divides—and especially the Anglophone urban studies with the Francophone stream of city-focused political science and political sociology.