Prof. Oren Yiftachel is a political and legal geographer and urban and regional planner. He holds the Lloyd Hurst Chair for Urban Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba.
Yiftachel is the founder and director of the Just City Lab, and a co-director of the BGUrban Lab.
Yiftachel studied in Australian and Israeli universities, and has served as visiting professors in universities in Australia, the US, UK, Italy, Germany, Brazil, India and South Africa.
Yiftachel is an honorary professor at the Geography Department and the Bartlett DPU, University College London.
Yiftachel has published 11 books and some 130 scholarly articles and chapters, translated into six languages. He is a regular contributor to public and social media.
Yiftachel is an activist in human rights and social justice organizations, including a founding board member of 'Adva' (center for social equality); the planner of the RCUV -- Regional Council of Unrecognized Bedouin Villages; and past Chair of 'Btselem' – (monitoring human rights in the Occupied Palestinians Territories); he is a co-founder of the Palestinian-Israeli peace movement – 'A Land for All".
.png)
The Just City Lab
The Just City Lab, headed by Prof. Oren Yiftachel, deals mainly with research on the interface between spatial and urban processes and theories and practices of social justice and decolonoization. The Lab's researchers work on diverse dimensions of the aspiration for a just society, including distributional, identity and procedural justice. The lab accommodates a multidisciplinary team of researchers, from geography, planning, law, history and the social, data and computing sciences. The lab conducts workshops, raises research funds and is involved in the scientific, policy and social discourses over the right to the city, focusing on minorities and marginalized groups.
The BGUrbanLab has recently launched a new project: "Digital Urban Citizenship". The project examines the consequences of recent digitalization of governance, services and resources on social relations, right to the city and urban citizenship. It focuses on conceptual and empirical investigation through what we term as D.I.E.P. impact, denoting four key dimensions: (a) Data and its accumulation, use and abuse; (b) Infrastructure – material and intellectual; (c) Economic-social transfer of resources and reshaping of group relations; (d) Politics of digital decisionmaking and resistance. Special focus is placed on analyzing societal digital transformation from the periphery inward, focusing in each dimension on digital gaps, bordering and patterns of power, mobility and marginalization.
The Digital City Project
The "Space and Power" Project
The multi-year project "Space and Power" at the JustCityLab examines from different angles the reciprocal relations between the production of space, identity and power relations, and the use of space for oppression, maintenance of the status-quo or progressive transformation. The theoretical framework draws from political geographic knowledge, urban studies and views the city as an emerging arena where colonial, national, capitalist and democratic forces intertwin in long-term struggles. The project contains a series of international, regional and local studies, which include, among other things, an examination of the impact of urban cultural policy on social resilience, the situation of settlers in decolonized regions of the world, and an analysis of the impact of digitalization on cities around the world, and in Beersheba.
The Urban Displacement Project
The "Urban Displaceability project" examines from different angles the growing threats to the right to the city, focusing housing, land, rights to services, mobility, community, resources and political participation. The research develops a new theoretical vocabulary around the issues of displacement and displaceability, drawing a range of global cities, while examining in depth the three metropolises in Israel - Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Beersheba. The 11 co-researchers examine diverse issues such as public and private housing, ownership versus renting, renewal versus suburbia, in a wide variety of cases. These include the struggle for synagogues control in development towns, public housing in Southern Jaffa, the middle-class displacement Givatayim, the impact of 'umbrella agreements'; exclusion of Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem from urban planning, and turning most of the Bedouins in the south into trespassers under constant threat of displacement.
The Global SouthEast Project
The "Global Southeast" Project focuses on insights, lessons and concepts arising from the massive urbanization processes taking place in the Global South and East, and their implications for cities in Israel/Palestine. The long-term work in this project focuses on theoretical and comparative developments, together with a group of researchers from India, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. The project also has imperial aspects, arising from research on cities in Eastern Europe, the Palestinian Territory and the countries of Africa and South Asia. The main focus is on the processes of creating the "gray space", urban indigeneity and coloniality, and resistance 'from below' among residents of informal spaces, transit neighborhood. Immigration and digitalization.
