21. Planning the City of Tomorrow in a Liberated Palestine

What does a city of hope look like when liberated people shape it? In Palestine, this question carries particular urgency. Recent international recognition of the State of Palestine has reopened a political horizon that had long been foreclosed. While liberation remains an ongoing struggle, this moment has created space to think seriously about the future: what
kind of city shall emerge when planning is exercised with sovereignty over land, resources, and access? This session responds to that by focusing on urban planning in a future liberated Palestine, shifting attention from crisis management and emergency reconstruction toward long-term urban visions rooted in justice and collective wellbeing. In this sense, hope becomes not a sentiment but a practical urban force that guides how future
cities are imagined and planned.

Palestinian cities have developed under imposed planning regimes, fragmented territories, and restricted control over land and infrastructure. A liberated future requires a different urban imagination and narrative—one in which planning is no longer a tool for containment or technocratic problem management, but a means of shaping cities that ensure secure
housing, equitable access to land, and inclusive urban life. The session asks how a liberated Palestinian city, as a city of hope, might recover and renew itself from neighbourhoods to metropolitan regions through planning decisions addressing housing, land distribution, mobility, and sustainability.

Central to this session are the right to dwell and the right to the land as foundations for a hopeful and dignified urban life. What planning frameworks can guarantee permanence, affordability, and dignity for residents, including returnees and marginalised groups? How can land be redistributed fairly and governed collectively after prolonged dispossession? What kinds of urban forms and institutional arrangements can ensure consistently inclusive access to infrastructure, public space, and services?

The session aims to create a discussion that engages with planning models, approaches, and concepts responsive to contexts emerging from long-term occupation and denied sovereignty, and that are rooted in a solid, critical understanding of the historical trajectories of urban development in Palestine. We particularly invite contributions that deal critically with
the lessons learned from post-Oslo and post-Fayyadist planning frameworks and use these experiences as a foundation for imagining alternative urban futures. Interventions may draw on comparative post-liberation and post-colonial contexts, critical planning theory,
participatory governance, cooperative housing, land system, or ecological urbanism, while remaining firmly grounded in Palestine’s specific political, spatial, and institutional realities.

By focusing on what a liberated city can provide for its citizens, this session aims to consolidate contributions into a special issue or edited collection that advances scholarly debate on post-liberation urban planning, housing, and land justice in Palestine.

Indicative Questions

• What does a city of hope demand from planners in practice?
• What planning models and theories are suitable for Palestinian cities after liberation?
• How can urban planning secure the right to housing and the right to the land?
• How can post-liberation cities challenge inherited planning logics and construct hopeful urban futures?

Language of presentations: English only.