**Author details**

Raed Najjar

**7. Conclusion**

236 Land Use - Assessing the Past, Envisioning the Future

The growing impact of the 3P concept in Jerusalem has created shocking realities on the ground. It has generated severe adverse impacts on Palestinian life. Since the illegal annexation of EJ in 1967, the Israeli regressive planning policies in EJ have been targeting the Palestinian presence via imposing complex spatial planning policies aiming largely at marginalizing the Palestinian communities, forming deprived spaces for the Arabs, and minimizing Palestinian demographic and cultural identities. Israel has effectively frozen most of the Palestinian vacant lands in EJ preventing therefore Palestinians from any kind of development there. Instead, these vacant lands are systematically, and illegally, confiscated for the purpose of constructing Jewish settlements, thus changing the physical Palestinian landscape, as well as altering the cultural identity of space and the demographic character of the city. According to the current Israeli regressive spatial planning policies, 74% of the total area of EJ is zones where Palestinians are not allowed to utilize for their basic or urgent development; of which 34% is expropriated lands thus deducted from Palestinian EJ lands and annexed, illegally, for the advantage of the Jewish population; 26% is unplanned, and therefore undeveloped areas, and 14% is green areas systematically subjected into future Israeli expropriation for the

It is evident how the Israeli regressive planning has forced Palestinians in EJ to suffer in satisfying their essential daily needs. The illegal expansion of Jewish settlements and the continuous spreading of inspection checkpoints (**Figure 11**) have damaged the social and urban profiles and shrunk the space available for Palestinians to live and work, and therefore has deepened a general feeling of insecurity. On contrary to international law, Israel constructed the Separation Wall to isolate Jerusalem from the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories severing therefore the city from its socio-economic support base. Thus, Palestinian neighborhoods in EJ have collectively faced sudden rupture of their social, environmental, cultural, and economic life aspects, that is, all the 4DSS dimensions are adversely impacted. Hence, Palestinians in EJ face definitively unsustainable mode of development. The role of politics in shaping architectural space in the Palestinian areas in EJ is underestimated relative to the significant effects it has over life aspects. The examination of the analytical spatial context reveals the extent to which politics and power were evident in producing divided urban forms, in the conflict areas. Indeed, "politics" has played a significant role in defining the

purpose of illegal construction of additional Jewish settlements.

**Figure 11.** Israeli check point at EJ northern entrance in Qalandia [author].

Address all correspondence to: raedfnajjar@gmail.com

Post-Doctoral Associate Researcher in Spatial Planning, Urbanism, and Sustainability, TU Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany
