Wadi Qaddum – resistive infrastructure

Wadi Qaddum, an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem shaped by decades of displacement, systemic neglect, and community-driven survival. The neighborhood’s spatial reality reflects a persistent tension between top-down Israeli planning policies—most notably the Eastern Ring Road—and bottom-up practices of resilience rooted in extended family networks (hamula), incremental construction, and informal systems of mutual aid. While the Ring Road is presented as a development project, it functions as a mechanism of fragmentation, confiscating land, demolishing homes, and dividing neighborhoods into disconnected enclaves. In doing so, it deepens socio-spatial inequalities and undermines the continuity of Palestinian urban life.
Against this backdrop, Wadi Qaddum demonstrates how informal infrastructure operates as a vital mechanism of survival and resistance. Families organize collective construction strategies, transform façades into hybrid spaces of commerce and dwelling, and contribute land for shared religious and communal uses. These practices generate a social infrastructure that sustains everyday life despite state neglect, and they embody a form of urban agency that challenges imposed planning logics.
The project proposes a planning framework rooted in bottom-up resilience. Instead of accepting the road as an elevated barrier, the intervention reclaims it as the missing ground necessary for the neighborhood’s growth. This act of taking over unfolds through ‘typologies of resistance’ housing expansion, vertical layering, the spread of nature, and climbing structures, each arising from moments of friction between imposed infrastructure and the local fabric
By foregrounding these intersections, the research reframes Wadi Qaddum not as a passive site of neglect but as an active space of resistance and empowerment. It argues for planning approaches that recognize and build upon informal urban practices, situating them as essential to both community survival and the pursuit of spatial justice.