Digital displaceability in the settler-colonial city: The case of Musrara in western Jerusalem

Abstract

This article examines the correlations between top-down digital transformations in urban space and the contemporary conditions of displaceability. Using a case study of the Musrara neighborhood of Jerusalem, it analyzes the construction of a digital entrepreneurial “quarter” by historicizing the spatial and material conditions within which it emerged. In contrast to the hegemonic discourse propagated by city officials and tech companies, which describes the emergence of digital innovation as a watershed moment in the socio-economic development of the city, my analysis situates this event within the structures of the Israeli settler-colonial regime, and as the latest iteration in a genealogy of displacement. The specific history of settler-colonial displacement in Musrara is constituted by the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinian community, and the construction of a no-man’s-land, an urban frontier characterized by state abandonment and absence. I show how the spatial conditions materialized by the no-man’s-land were instrumental in the social marginalization of the Mizrahi Jews who populated Musrara after 1948 and became ingrained in the development of the neighborhood till this very day. On this basis, I argue that the turning of Musrara into a digital entrepreneurial “quarter” creates conditions of displaceability, which are shaped by similar patterns of abandonment and absence and mediated by the new actors and discourses of the tech hegemony.