it's just a 'smart city'
Why the Gaza Strip May Be the City of the Future
Urban life amid the Israel-Palestine conflict is defined by violence, surveillance and resource scarcity — conditions that, a new book warns, may soon be more widespread.
By Zach Mortice
September 26, 2021 at 9:01 PM
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-11-15/freeway-fighters-summit-signals-a-new-wave-of-us-highway-revolts
The complex intimacy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has turned the region into something of a proving ground for purpose-built surveillance technology that could be plugged into a future smart city. Indeed, Israeli companies are selling cybersecurity technology all over the world, including the U.S., where it’s used in a new training center in Baltimore.
Sebregondi sees Gaza as further along a continuum of ricocheting colonial violence: As states become more fragile and defensive and climate change adds layers of stress, inequalities skyrocket and people divide into camps. Where these two groups are anywhere near each other, the market for surveillance and control technology booms. Debates over the role of militarized police on the streets of U.S. cities and the rise of privacy-eroding public safety technology have collapsed the distance between Palestine and Pittsburgh.
“There is an extent to which Palestine becomes a sort of crystal [ball] of this particular future, within a very compacted and dense territory, [featuring] some of the most striking aspects of this splintering urbanism,” says Sebregondi. He describes the “boomerang effect of colonization,” where techniques to wield control over restive populations in distant countries eventually come home, as with the NSA’s experiments using the Iraq War to develop domestic surveillance programs.
It’s a cycle that’s eradicated distance, says Sharp, pulling Gazans and the rest of the world closer together, and bringing the front lines, already at their doorstep, into ours.
“These circulations of violence and containment,” he says, “come back to haunt us all.”