Introduction: Theorizing the Production of Space in Times of Crisis

Over thirty years passed since the “spatial turn” in the humanities and the social sciences started to manifest itself, bringing with it a growing understanding that social change cannot be satisfactorily explained without a consideration of the spatial components of social life, and of the ways in which those change over time. The recognition that “social and cultural life do not happen on the head of a pin but are thoroughly spatial” opened the way for fruitful transdisciplinary enquiries in which historians, too, are taking part. ¹ Since then, the works of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Edward Soja, Michel de Cetreau, David Harvey, and Doreen Massey, to name but a few, generated new research perspectives. These, in their turn, impacted some of the major historiographical debates regarding the relationship between space, society, and culture. ² This is not to say, as noted by Paul Stock, that the study of the past was not “saturated with spatialized concepts” prior to the arrival of the spatial turn. ³ What, then, was the novelty inherent in such a turn? Historian Jo Guldi reminds us that the field of humanities has undergone several “turns” since the mid twentieth century: a quantitative turn in history in the 1960s, a linguistic and cultural turn of the 1980s in history and literature, and even more recently an animal turn. An important point which she makes is that “beyond the academy, to turn implies retrospection, a process of stopping in the road and glancing backwards at the way by which one has come.” ⁴ This definition strikes us as highly appropriate for the conceptualization of academic turns as well, since more often than not it is not a new, previously unexplored field or subject of inquiry which a “turn” brings into focus. Rather, a turn is that moment in time in which we, as historians, reconsider the road already traveled through a modified lens.

In the past two decades, it seems that the spatial turn brought in its wake two readjustments of the historical lens: the first, and most widespread, had to do with the ways in which we analyze and visualize space and spatial change over time. The second had to do with explicitly turning space into the subject of our inquiry. One of the first historians to systematically explore the potential of these shifts within the historical discipline was Richard White, an environmental historian and the director of the “Spatial History Project” at Stanford University. In a 2010 intervention, White singled out GIS (Geographic Information System) platforms as particularly well-equipped to explore dynamic processes in motion, juxtapose representations of space for analysis, and emphasized the need to explore “patterns of movement and transformation in the past.” ⁵ Just as important was White’s extensive reference to the writings of the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre and his three-dimensional model of spatial analysis.

The current special issue emerged out of our need, as researchers working on twentieth-century history, to find a framework that will allow us to detect and contextualize spatial changes over time: a framework which focuses on space as a subject of historical inquiry and as continuously producing varied forms of power relations, and not simply containing or reflecting them. The articles within this special issue focus on the relationship between space and the concept of crisis. Its contributors raise two interrelated questions: How do different forms of spatial analysis add to our understanding of crises as multifaceted, historically grounded phenomena? What practices characterize the conceptualization, planning, and inhabiting of space under extreme and rapidly changing conditions? The five articles which follow examine the dialogue between politicians, architects, urban planners, and the users of space within different ideological contexts and under different types of regimes throughout the twentieth century: Britain during the Great War; Italy during the early years of the Fascist regime; Nazi Germany during the Second World War; Spain under the Franco regime; and Israel during the prolonged Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Our preliminary assumption was that periods of armed conflict, or of acute political or socio-economic upheaval, would call for the reconceptualization and reorganization of space and of spatial practices. Initially, therefore, our respective research focused on raptures in the representation of space and spatial practices. As we soon found out, however, even in cases of major shifts in the underlying cultural, moral and ideological belief systems, spatial logics, and practices could persist over time. Identifying and explaining continuities, therefore, became just as important than locating ruptures. In view of this, the articles which follow examine the ways in which space is produced by focusing on the different agents of spatial production; the platforms for the debate and dissemination of spatial logics; and the ways in which individual and collective ways of experiencing space are articulated and translated into planning policies and counter policies.

Planners conceive minutely structured plans that are intended to produce new spatial realities in line with prevailing ideological concerns. Through the logics of functionalism and of segregation, such plans often operate to ensure that certain populations are brought closer to the centers of production of economic, political, and symbolic capital, while others are kept away. The implementation of these plans is often accompanied by an unusual degree of enforcement and surveillance. However, even in the most tightly controlled environment (such as the case of pre-conceived ghettos, internment camps or factory towns), lived space—or social space—is never identical to the conceived space of the plans. And even when segregation is successfully enforced, alienation is never complete. The contributions to this special issue explore the tension between the ways in which space is planned and represented and the ways in which it is being used. They do so by reflecting on categories such as scale, place, and territory, and on the construction of spatial dichotomies such as center versus periphery and urban versus rural.

A further goal of this special issue is to consider the sources employed by historians to study the production of space over time. While we recognize that historical events and processes are all emplaced, tracing processes of emplacement in historical sources is a complex task. State, regional, and local legislation; press reports; professional publications; and exhibitions, all constitute essential and (relatively) accessible sources for historians. Less traditional, but no less important sources include construction and infrastructure plans of varying scales, aerial and other types of photographs of divergent spatial units, and interior and exterior design models; these are but a few examples of sources which historians need to meaningfully engage with when attempting to understand the progression from ideal, spatial representations to spatial practices and material reality. Finally, oral histories and ego documents shed light on the experiences of using and appropriating space. It is only through a combined analysis of these different types of materials that one can trace the dominant paradigms for thinking about space in a given period; the ways in which they emerge; the ways in which space is classified and divided; and the mutual relationship between the construction of space and of socio-cultural identifications.

In considering these issues in relation to each of the critical periods with which this special issue is concerned, we chose to employ Henri Lefebvre’s analytical framework. Lefebvre’s framework as we show not only provides us with adequate spatial conceptualization, but also enables us to consider more systematically the necessary sources for historicizing the production of space. The introduction to this volume is therefore divided into three sections: the first will briefly introduce Henri Lefebvre’s framework for the analysis of the production of space, while touching on the relationship between space and additional key concepts, such as territory, scale, spatial appropriation, and alienation. The second section explores the concept of crisis in general terms, specifically in relation to space. The final section introduces the case studies presented in the volume and the authors’ use of sources for the historical analysis of space.

***

Curiously, space is a stranger to customary political reflection. Political thought and the representations which it elaborates remain “up in the air,” with only an abstract relation with the soil and even the national territory [. . .]. Space belongs to the geographers in the academic division of labor. But then it reintroduces itself subversively through the effects of peripheries, the margins, the regions, the villages and local communities long abandoned, neglected, even abased through centralizing state-power. ⁶

The above citation is taken from Henri Lefebvre’s On the State (De l’Étate). It reflects the importance of spatial analysis to any discussion on the formation and consolidation of power relations within modern states. At the time in which Lefebvre wrote these words, they also reflected a difficulty to engage with space, as a meaningful analytical category, within most disciplines. However, the ideas of Henri Lefebvre are currently experiencing a revival in the fields of urban studies, political geography, cultural studies, and history. ⁷ Of these, the best known is his conceptual triad of spatial practices, representations of space, and the space of representations. In his 1974 essay, The Production of Space, Lefebvre developed his theory of space as produced on three levels: The level of spatial practices (which assign the functions of production and of reproduction to particular locations with specific spatial characteristics), the level of representations of space (that “order” and legitimize the allocation of space and the construction of spatial practices through academic and/or professional discourses), and the level of representational space (of lived space which also embodies the complex symbolism of its users). ⁸

In reality, the separation between the first two levels of analysis is less clear than might seem at first glance. Furthermore, neither spatial representations nor spatial practices are produced coherently by unitary, all-powerful actors. As research in the fields of political geography, history, and sociology demonstrates, more often than not conflicting spatial representations and practices coexist. And even when spatial representations seem to attain a level of internal coherence, they might come into conflict with existing spatial practices. Despite these reservations, the usefulness of Lefebvre’s conceptual triad is to be found in relation to two points in particular: It directs us toward the relevant sources for tracing each of the three aspects of spatial production (those produced by politicians, ideologists, planners, construction entities, inhabitants). It also emphasizes the fact that the experience of inhabiting—of generating the “space of representations”—is a dialectical process conditioned by the ways in which the users of space experience sets of spatial representations and practices, which quite often they did not create and might not even be fully aware of or in agreement with.

To understand the relationship between the production of space, the constitution of power relations and the emergence of different practices of resistance it is useful to examine the way in which Lefebvre employed throughout his wirings other key concepts, mainly those of everyday life, alienation, domination, and appropriation. Everyday life was characterized by Lefebvre as unspecialized and spontaneous by nature. It was viewed as the basis for the formation of social bonds and therefore as a potential arena of subversion and resistance. In direct relation to everyday life, Lefebvre also discussed the concept of alienation. Unlike earlier Marxist writers, for Lefebvre the term did not have exclusive economic connotations, but rather referred to the one’s inability to grasp and to think of the “other,” an inability that resulted from the fragmented nature of modern life. ⁹ While viewing traditional everyday life as mostly based on the principle of non-separation (of functions, spaces, generations, genders, etc.). Lefebvre pointed to the tendency of modern everyday life to become more and more fragmented and therefore also highly alienated. He viewed alienation as a historically grounded process that resulted from the tendency toward separation (culminating in social phenomena such as the division of labor and specialization of the spheres of human activity) and abstraction (resulting in the stripping off of human action from substance in favor of signs and symbols).

Lefebvre’s work shifted the traditional focus of Marxist analysis from the working-class to the more general category of the users of space. As Teresa Hoskins noted, the assertion that power relations concern also built space opened the way for an extension of the concept of alienation itself: If the production of space may be carried out away from the sphere of influence of the users and independently of them, then alienation may also occur between individuals and their environment. ¹⁰ To explain how exactly this process takes place, Lefebvre called into use the notions of “domination” and “appropriation.” According to him, a space dominated is one transformed by technology, which introduces onto it new forms of use, closing, sterilizing, and emptying it in the process. ¹¹ But space should also be viewed as a work (oeuvre) produced by different (and at times contradicting) processes of inhabiting. This production, in line with the needs of those inhabiting space, was viewed by Lefebvre as the embodiment of appropriation. Looked at from this perspective, segregation, which is a central attribute of social and political life as described by all five contributions in this is special issue, is directly tied to the concept of domination. Segregation denotes the unequal distribution of social groups in urban space, which in its turn often bars individuals and groups from gaining equal access to collective infrastructures, education facilities, and the labor market. As such it is generally considered negatively by those who strive for social mobility and integration. ¹² But segregation, as defined by the Chicago School, also refers to the tendency of individuals and social groups who share a common life vision and needs to aggregate in space. ¹³ In other words, segregation can function as a mechanism which separates different social groups, but it can also enhance community formation and as such serve a stepping stone toward processes of spatial appropriation (see, e.g., Mond Havardi and Ofer in this special issue). ¹⁴

Lefebvre’s writings not only signal three levels of spatial analysis, they also point to three spatial scales which such an analysis must take into consideration: A private realm (that includes a family’s living space as well as entrances, thresholds and reception areas); an interim level (made up of avenues and squares, medium size thoroughfares and the passageways leading to the houses); and finally, a global level (divided into spaces open to the public and closed institutional spaces). In the introduction to the Urban Revolution, Neil Smith notes in relation to Lefebvre scaler division that

[. . .] in contemporary parlance this [synchronic distinction between the “global,” “mixed” and “private” levels of society] represents a halting effort at what might now be called “politics of scale,” but Lefebvre’s reluctance, in deference to the openness of space, to allow this production of “levels” to crystallize into anything approaching coherent spatial entities forecloses our understanding of the political processes by which social assumptions are written unto the scaled cartography of everyday places. ¹⁵

While Smith might be right in his criticism regarding the clarity of Lefebvre’s scalar categories, we do feel that this scalar division is useful from a historical perspective: first, because it signals out concrete focal points for investigation and differentiates actors and materials for the investigation of production, appropriation, and domination of private spaces from those employed for the investigation of intermediary and public ones; second, because the very division highlights the potential for contradiction or opposition between different scales of practice and representation. A central question raised in this regard deals, for example, with the conditions that enable oppositional spatial practices that emerge within private and intermediate communal spaces to be translated into civic and political resistance within global spaces of the city. This question is of special importance since it is all too easy to assume a direct link between the act of personal and communal resistance (such as taking control over land in opposition to the spatial practices of the regime, evading surveillance regimes, etc.) and the ability of individuals and social groups to claim their right to urban, public or institutional spaces. Such a link, however, is not a straightforward one. Indeed, the creation of “counter-spaces” that cater to the needs of individuals and their communities might be empowering in some ways, but the production of such spaces does not immediately or directly lead to a questioning of existing economic and political power relations. In this regard, it is important to understand the relationship between the production of space and that of territory.

Stuart Elden and Neil Brenner pointed to the ways in which Lefebvre’s work On the State contributes to unmasking what geographer John Agnew defined as the “territorial trap.” ¹⁶ Agnew coined the concept in reference to our tendency to ignore the State’s efforts to mask and normalize through its territorial form its own transformative effects upon socio-spatial relations. Brenner and Elden, in line with Lefebvre, define “territory” as representing “an historically specific political form of (produced) space.” ¹⁷ According to them,

Lefebvre‘s diverse writings on state spatial development from the 1970s reveal his profound interest, for instance, in the place-specific, scalar and networked dimensions of the state apparatus; he also underscores the modern state‘s pervasive role in shaping and reshaping places, inter-place relations, inter-scalar hierarchies, and various sorts of networks, for instance of commerce and communication, as well as human/nature relations. ¹⁸

In this respect, and while most of us tend to identify territory with bounded space, Lefebvre’s analysis is more attuned to the strategies which aim to achieve control over space (and through it primarily over people) than to the formal boundaries which such strategies attempt to generate. The critical periods which the articles in this special section analyze are all characterized to some extent by the weakening or breaking down of established mechanisms of control, and by a crisis of the representations which legitimize them. The weakening or breaking down of territorial and spatial practices, as we show, is part and parcel of the very notion of crisis. In much the same way, therefore, the efforts to “negotiate crisis” cannot be fully understood without asking how did the different actors involved attempt to restore “spatial coherence.”

***

Hallie Eustace Miles from London’s Chandos Street did not study history or geography and did not try to conceptualize “crisis,” not to mention “crisis with spatial expressions.” However, she had no problem identifying one. She started writing her diary on August 1, 1914, a few days before Britain joined the First World War, to “keep a daily record [. . .] of all that happens in this ‘time of trouble,’” as she probably paraphrased “crisis.” And already on August 4, the first day of the war in Britain, she noticed that “we [. . .] seem to be in a new world” and that “everything seems to have changed! It is like an altogether new London.” ¹⁹ From a mere physical point of view, the city did not yet change, but Eustace Miles felt within her the effects of the global crisis, the First World War, upon the urban space.

How can we define “crisis” from a spatial prism? It can be a lesser challenge to do so by resorting to a legal definition, by considering a “state of emergency” as an implementation of power during a crisis. This juridical approach inherently contains a reference to space, because a “state of emergency” means the power of the sovereign to withhold civil rights or apply exceptional policies within a clearly bounded unit: the State. The German political theorist and prominent member of the Nazi party, Carl Schmitt, even viewed the emergency rules—“Ausnahmezustand,” or “State of Exception”—as a validation of the sovereign’s sovereignty. ²⁰ This legal definition of “crisis” intrinsically refers to space and fits the above-mentioned definition of territoriality. However, it does not fully encompass the spatial aspects of “crisis.”

Along with the legal definition, it is also possible to define “crisis” by using Political Science terminology, which usually refers to crisis as an administrative or managerial problem, with more than a touch of capitalistic approach. There is also the technical-medical approach to the concept of crisis, which was probably the origin for the spreading of the word “crisis” in the modern European languages. ²¹ These sorts of definitions, however, might fall short in the attempt to conceptualize crisis as part of an spatial history, because they do not take into consideration the gentle interactions between people, other people, and their surrounding spaces, and because they disregard the entire field of Human Geography and the study of Emotional Geography. Our goal, therefore, is to reach a definition which will express Eustace Miles’s impressions and comprehensions when she was writing about “an altogether new London.”

In her attempt to explore the semantics of “crisis,” Lin Chalozin-Dovrat posed a basic question. “‘Crisis’ is a frequently used term, and it often expresses a general sentiment toward our contemporaneous world,” she noted. “But when we describe our times in terms of crises, what exactly do we want to say? What does ‘crisis’ mean? [. . .] ‘crisis’ and its counterparts are often used loosely, they appear in the most varied contexts and do not seem to have a stable signified.” ²² Antoon de Rycker and Zuraidah Mohd Don, while agreeing there is no one universally accepted definition of “crisis,” did try to meta-analyze existing definitions from various fields of research, which resulted in several common elements, among them: “negative,” “recurring,” “poses a significant threat to survival,” “disrupts an existing order,” “upsets an existing internal equilibrium,” “unpredictable but not unexpected,” “requiring important decisions,” and “may be accompanied by distress.” ²³ This is hardly a solid definition, nor does it try to be, but it does contain some elements which can be useful for our purposes: disruption and mismatches between needs, expectations, and deliverables. “Crises [are] disruptive events that require immediate recovery,” ²⁴ de Rycker pointed, and J.B. Shank referred to the historical use of the notion of crisis as “a moment of intense disruption that precedes a decisive transformation.” ²⁵ Both of them did not aim to provide a definition for “crisis,” but the usages of disruption and expectations in a historical context can suit our discussion about production of space in times of crisis.

Despite the fact that the current special issue constitutes part of the Journal of Urban History, it is important to note that our view of the concept of crisis goes well beyond the boundaries of urban space itself. A point which almost all of the articles in this section make is that both the “urban” and the “rural” are defined in relation to both quantifiable criteria (the size of territory, density of the population, available services, etc.) and subjective perceptions. In modern history, rather than two dichotomous modules of existence and planning, the rural and the urban can be viewed more and more as existing along a continuum and in relation to each other. A spatial crisis—or a crisis with spatial expressions—can be defined as a disruption in the general flow of space, whether urban or rural. This, of course, can be viewed in subjective terms: different people produce different spaces, therefore what is perceived to be an “adequate” flow for some can be considered as a disruption or mismatch of needs and deliverables for the other. One person’s natural order can easily be another persons’ crisis, and vice versa.

The disruption in the general flow can result from an external event that forces on a given spatial unit and its inhabitants what could be termed a glocal change: a change that is a local manifestation of a larger global change or occurrence. Or in the words of sociologist Saskia Sassen, a situation “where a multiplicity of globalization processes assume concrete, localized forms.” ²⁶ It should be noted, though, that not all global crises are the same: a world war creates different local crises than climate change, and autocratic regimes or economic reforms affect cities and countryside in different ways, While all of these can create for some people a feeling of disruption in what is perceived to be the regular or natural movement of the urban space, the local manifestations of the global crisis on the local space can vary. In some cases, a large crisis, such as war, can be distilled into a smaller place—when the fighting is characterized, felt, and perceived in one city or region in a different way (see Halevy in this special issue). In other cases, a global or national crisis can cause altogether new crises in a smaller geographical space—for example, world war that creates an employment crisis in a city, or a climate crisis that forces people to abandon some areas of the country.

This disruption, which might seem to be an amorphic concept, can also be felt in a very physical form—when the core of the crisis is a mismatch between needs, expectations, and deliverables, a gap between the needs of the people and the infrastructures and solutions provided. This sort of prism at the idea of a crisis breaks down the feeling of disruption into an assemblage of comparing lists: the number of houses, apartments, and rooms against the amounts of permanent residents and daily workers; the condition of the sewage system, the number of schools and convenience store and the width of the roads against the population’s growth rate and its treatment by the regime; and the number buses, underground lines and bike paths against the economic processes and the changes in the labor marker or employment preferences. When urban space, as a physical or imagined embodiment of “the state,” cannot supply the needed services and infrastructures, it fails to achieve its expectations from the city’s inhabitants, its purpose of being, its raison d’être. Regardless whether it can be explained or not, the outcome of the misfit between peoples and physical infrastructures results in a feeling of undermining the general flow of the lived space, and a disruption.

Another important characteristic of a crisis, as shown by all articles in this section, is that it has a life cycle. It can start abruptly, an “unpredictable but not unexpected” way, as noted by de Rycker and Mohd Don, or it can be a predicted and expected process—as in the case of Eustace Miles, who wrote in her diary that “the air is full of whispers of coming trouble” several days before she identified her city as “an altogether new London.” ²⁷ What is more interesting is what happens to the crisis after it starts to manifest itself, or after what is perceived to be its opening point: does it necessarily have an endpoint? or does it perpetuate within the urban space, becomes part of the new “normality” in the city? Wars usually come to an end, economic turbulences tend to calm down, and dictatorships sometimes fall—but because space is not merely the background for the historical events but rather an important part of it, the effects of those various sorts of crises upon it deserves a special attention. It is fair to assume that no crisis is solved without leaving its mark. And because of that, from a spatial perspective, it can be concluded that the crisis never ends: it always leaves a metaphorical scar in space, a lieu de mémoire for a war that is no longer fought, and thus creates a new normality—and a new general flow.

***

In the first article in this special section, “The Housing Project of Well Hall Garden Suburb and the Production of Spaces in First World War Britain,” Assaf Mond Havardi discusses a glocal manifestation of the global Great War through the story of the very local housing crisis in London, and specifically in the area of the fast-growing munition factory, the Royal Woolwich Arsenal. The decision to build a new housing project in Woolwich for the munition workers was not only exceptional in terms of the war economy—the vast majority of the building plans across Britain were not promoted during the war—but it was also an attempt to solve the local housing crisis, which was augmented by the war and a building of a new space during the time of crisis and for the time of crisis.

First, Mond Havardi looks at the architectural ideology of those who hastily planned and built the Well Hall Garden Suburb—mostly known today as Progress Estate—and their aims for this housing project. Then, he uses a personal diary of a 14-year-old girl who lived with her parents and siblings at the estate to present the way this urban space was used by its inhabitants. By examining the ways in which the space was planned by its architect and used by its dwellers—in a time of a global war and local housing shortage, with only one year separating the planning and the usage—Mond Havardi presents a unique case study for production of space in times of crisis, and a closer look at the importance of the width of the roads and the route of the tram, along with the lacking social frameworks and the distance from the local grocery stores, to the understanding of this produced space.

At the end, Mond Havardi shows how the orientation of the movement in Progress Estate toward the munition factory, the great symbol of the war and the employer of most of the adults in this housing project, was the key factor that shaped the main characteristics of the space that was produced.

Antonio Barocci’s article, “The Geography of Surveillance: Spatial and Temporal Patterning of Police Surveillance following Arrest in the First Years of the Special Tribunal in Fascist Italy, 1925-1928,” focuses on a key aspect in the consolidation of the Mussolini regime. Barocci discusses the nature and scope of long-term surveillance mechanisms under the dictatorship. To examine the workings of the Tribunale Speciale per la Difesa dello Stato and their methods of monitoring those who were suspected of being enemies of the state, Barocci combines methodologies from the fields of both geography and history. Employing HGIS (Historical Geographical Information System), the author correlates spatial and temporal information, which is then visualized and analyzed through the use of graphs, tables, and maps. The article focuses on the early years of the regime (1926-1928), during which fascists acted rapidly to consolidate their power and suppress their opposition without yet thoroughly changing or reorganizing the existing criminal justice system. As it demonstrates, historicizing the development of the fascist surveillance system greatly contributes to our understanding of the regime’s development. Since surveillance constituted one of the mechanisms through which the regime hoped to exercise its control over civil population within bounded space, the extent of its success or failure sheds light on the processes through which fascist territory was produced.

As the article shows, widespread surveillance was a central attribute of the fascist regime in Italy from its inception. It functioned not only as a weapon against the State’s enemies, but also as a preemptive form of control and repression vis-à-vis the entire Italian populations. As Barocci indicates, citizens were surveilled regardless of the crimes they committed or whether they were eventually convicted or found innocent. An examination of the tribunals’ work raises questions for further investigation regarding those spaces that were considered as essential and / or penetrable by the regime, and the spread of oppositional patterns. The article exhibits, for example, dense surveillance patterns in urban areas, specifically Turin-Genova, Florence-Bologna-Venice, and Milan. However, it also shows the regional expansion of surveillance from the industrial area of Milan, along the foothills line toward east, and to the border with the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, as well as in Calabria and Sicily. These findings point to the fact that surveillance, as a repressive procedure, was more widespread across fascist territory than was thought before. Was this the result of the existence of opposition networks that operated across the North—South and the urban—rural divide? Most probably. Although the article does not provide a clear answer to this question, it reflects the fact that in the eyes of the regime at least, the spatial practices needed to dominate the State’s territory were not necessarily aligned with the dominant representations of some spaces as “truly Italian” and supportive of the regime, and others that were not.

Ulrike Jureit’s article, titled “‘Blonde Provinzen’: National Socialist Territorial and Homogenization Policies and the Murderous Consequences of Their Failure,” analyzes the German occupation policy in Poland between the years 1939 and 1941. It focuses on the interplay between Nazi expulsion and resettlement plans and their chaotic and ultimately failed realization. Jureit’s spatial perspective compounds our understanding of the radicalization of the Nazi occupation process. Her basic hypothesis is not a new one: the transition to systematic mass murder was completed, she argues, at the historical moment when all other spatial and demographic practices failed. The central contribution of her article, however, lies in the framework which it offers for the spatial analysis this failure. While the author does not question the importance of the State-planning versus administrative-implementation paradigm, she claims that (a) both planning and implementation were more plural in nature than might appear, and (b) that focusing on a sole prism masks the consequences of a failure, which was therefore not sufficiently examined.

Indeed, it is tempting to view the eastern Polish territories as the perfect spatial planning laboratory in which it was possible to go beyond established administrative and spatial structures, existing legal arrangements, property relations, and demographic conditions. A laboratory in which any type of territorial and spatial representations could be easily translated into corresponding practices that would, in their turn, create a perfectly dominated space. This, however, was not the case. Under Nazism, Jureit claims, an array of professionals emerged (such as geographers and racial experts) that considered social space to be malleable in the most extreme fashion. However, the expansion of planning during the war gave rise to a multitude of settlement and forms of spatial reorganization. These relied heavily on an ideal representation of both space and territory as racially segregated racially. However, they were forced to take into consideration also the needs of a crisis-shaken industrial society and the constraints imposed by military objective and geopolitical considerations (such as those imposed by the German-Russian pact of August, 1939).

Even in the case where racial hygiene and segregation were viewed as the underlying principles of spatial and territorial planning, there was no corresponding agreement regarding the necessary practices, how they would be best carried out and by who. The resettlement and expulsion policies against Jews and Poles, as well as the recruitment of forced Polish labor for the Reich, were elemental components of the process of spatial homogenization practiced between 1939 and 1941. But even those were put under conflicting military and economic demands. The same was true for the resettlement of ethnic Germans. The Nazi agricultural and settlement program which was pursued by the Ministry for Food and Agriculture, for example, was based on the model of the peasant as the owner of the best “Germanic genetic material,” who was supposed to guide the “regeneration of German blood” and the “breeding of the German Volkskörper.” Heinrich Himmler, on the other hand, was not only concerned the resettlement of Aryan peasants, but with the expansion of the German national border to the east. Himmler’s prototype of a new settler, therefore, was not the ordinary farmer who would leave for the East because of an acute lack of space, but the armed wehrbauer who was aware of his military mission and his racial-biological qualities. Against the background of common but not systematized representations, and of partially conflicting practices, the article then shows how different populations maneuvered (with radically different degrees of autonomy) within a highly repressive, yet not entirely dominated social space.

Inbal Ofer’s article, titled “Spatial Crisis and the Experimental Production of Urban Space in Franco’s Spain: The History of Madrid’s Poblados Dirigidos,” deals with a moment in time in which spatial insufficiencies became the core reason and a defining feature of the crisis under investigation. The article analyzes the ideological reasoning, planning rationale and construction of controlled / satellite neighborhoods (poblados dirigidos) in the metropolitan area of Madrid during the 1950s and 1960s. Poblados dirigidos were compact and minutely planned barrios on which the Franco dictatorship hinged its hopes for re-directing urban growth and controlling informal urbanization. While some of these neighborhoods were designed as transitory solutions, others were viewed as more permanent entities. Most were built using the cheapest materials, included the smallest housing units possible’ and were designed as self-sufficient units, close, yet disconnected from the heart of the Spanish capital.

To historicize the spatial crisis against which the construction of the poblados took place, the article employs Henri Lefebvre’s triangular conceptualization of representations of space, spatial practices and the space of representation. It also builds on the work of Stuart Elden and Neil Brenner regarding the concept of territory. The article uses the term “territory” as “an historically specific political form of (produced) space.” ²⁸ It demonstrates the extent to which the construction of poblados dirigidos in particular, constituted an interim step between a state of tolerance of urban informality (during the 1940s and early 1950s) and a new phase of local, regional, and national planning (starting in the early 1960s).

The construction of controlled neighborhoods also constituted an important step in the reconceptualization of the relationship between working-class populations and the Francoist city. From the perspective of the architects who designed them, these neighborhoods constituted a modernist experiment. An experiment that was to offer rapid, large-scale housing solutions under dire material constraints. In a country where a Civil War put an untimely end to experimentations with new construction materials, prefabrication techniques and the potential of social housing schemes, poblados dirigidos constituted an initial step in a renewed dialogue with the outside world. ²⁹

However, as the article shows, the constraints imposed on these visionary professionals by the Franco regime would turn the neighborhoods into unfinished projects. From the perspective of the future residents of these barrios (who were at times reluctant to surrender their informal shanty-homes in favor of the newly constructed apartments), they constituted work-in-progress in the worst sense of the expression. It would take over two decades of neighborhood mobilizations to make them fit basic residential needs. Poblados dirigidos and the minimal housing units which they offered constituted an improvement over the self-constructed houses which preceded them. In certain cases, however, the newly built neighborhoods and housing units undermined some of the inhabitants’ most basic definitions of well-being. Their continued imperfect existence would not only determine the future development of the city of Madrid itself, but also the struggle for urban renovation and civic mobilization for years to come.

This special issue comes to an end with Dotan Halevy’s article, “Fragmented Emergency: Sirens, Cell Phones, and Sonic Spatialization in Israel.” The scope of Halevy’s article covers more than a century of aerial raids that did not only bring the damages and fears of the war into the urban space, but also forced the introduction of sirens as an alarming mechanism and a new layer in the city’s soundscape. While Halevy goes back to the twentieth-century interwar period and to the sirens of the Second World War, his study focuses mainly on the usage of the sirens in the state of Israel as part of the twenty-first-century manifestation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The highly advanced technological system which isolates hundreds of different “alert zones” enables Halevy to examine two different—though sometimes overlapping—aspects of the modern production of Israeli space in times of crisis: the fragmentation of the space and the politicizing (and de-politicizing) of the crisis.

As Halevy shows, sirens functioned since their early days as devices for differentiating between spaces that should be alarmed and those that should not. In recent years, however, Israel has taken it to an unprecedented level, dividing the country into a emergency-zones and routine-zones using a high-resolution scale—and thus fragmentizing the space of the war, and deconstructing the danger of the Palestinian missiles from Gaza Strip into a collection of personal experiences, where one person can be hasten to take shelter by his Red Alert application while another person who lives just several hundred meters from him does not know anything about it. The result of such technological advancement is a dissolution of the space of war into hundreds and thousands of spaces, while moving at least some of them outside the realm of danger.

Along with the fragmentation of space, Halevy also points at the political and social aspects of this spatial change. When there were much fewer alert zones and the alert to the public was based upon a real siren (instead of an application), its implementation was more “democratic,” covering all parts of the Israeli society. Moreover, the fragmentation of the space changes the war from a political crisis demanding a political solution into a sporadic collection of isolated events which can be solved one by one on an individual basis. Thus, it created a status quo in which the Israeli society become tolerant to occasional rocket attacks—enhances an explicit political policy of “managing the conflict,” enable to de-politicize it. In that sense, this case study deserves its place as the final act of this special issue: when dealing with production of space in times of crisis, it shows how the produced space is in fact hundreds and thousands of different produced spaces with hundreds and thousands of crises, respectively.