Ricardo Marten

The establishment of effective linkages between institutional urban planning and disaster risk strategies remains a challenge for formal governance structures. For governments at all administrative scales, disaster resilience planning has required systemic capacities that rely on structures of governance, humanitarian frameworks, and budgetary capaci­ ties. However, with growing urbanization trends, humanitarian responses and Disaster Risk Management (DRM) frameworks have had to adapt their operations in contexts with high population density, complex infrastructure systems, informal dynamics, and a broad­ er range of actors. Urban areas concentrate an array of different groups with the capabil­ ity of contributing to urban responses and strategies to cope with disaster effects, includ­ ing community groups, government agencies, international organizations and humanitari­ an practitioners. In addition, cities have running planning structures that support their administration and spatial organization, with instruments that supply constant informa­ tion about population characteristics, infrastructure capacity and potential weaknesses. Processes and data ascribed to urban planning can provide vital knowledge to natural hazard governance frameworks, from technical resources to conceptual approaches to­ wards spatial analysis. Authorities managing risk could improve their strategic objectives if they could access and integrate urban planning information. Furthermore, a collabora­ tive hazard governance can provide equity to multiple urban actors that are usually left out of institutional DRM, including nongovernmental organizations, academia, and com­ munity groups. Traditional top-down models can operate in parallel with horizontal arrangements, giving voice to groups with limited access to political platforms but who are knowledgeable on urban space and social codes. Their still limited recognition is evi­ dence that there is still a disconnect between the intentions of global frameworks for in­ clusive governance, and the co-production of an urban planning designed for inclusive re­ silience.

Grounded in Agamben’s spatial ontology, this paper analyses complex urban conditions in the West Bank,
extracting phenomena of contested border zones that act as a microcosm of contemporary urban reality.
Repositioning Agamben’s spatial exception at the urban scale, the argument is made for expanding from
an isolated camp instrumentalism into a sustained analytical apparatus that goes, possibly, beyond the
nested borders and biopolitical territorialisation of the case study. By looking at the capacity of Agamben’s
discourse to enhance the study of urban phenomena, we suggest the possibility of visualising an
urbanism of exception through a categorisation of fields of tension, hinting at the numerous forces acting
on space beyond physical structures. This framework, far from being normative and over-comprehensive,
attempts to open possible paths of interpretation about exceptionality, conceiving the city of exception as
the ulterior vantage point that oversees its evolution from a sovereign mechanism to a spatial materialisation.
By applying this analysis on Jerusalem it becomes clear that far from being a linear or gradual
sequence, or acting just as bi-dimensional borders, spaces of exception in the city are like the city itself:
multiple, parallel, crosscutting and relentless.