Cities 34 (2013) 617

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Agambens urbanism of exception: Jerusalems border mechanics and

biopolitical strongholds
Camillo Boano , Ricardo Martn
Development Planning Unit, Bartlett School of Built Environment, University College London, 34 Tavistock Square, London WC1H 9EZ, UK

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Grounded in Agambens spatial ontology, this paper analyses complex urban conditions in the West Bank,
Available online 4 July 2012 extracting phenomena of contested border zones that act as a microcosm of contemporary urban reality.
Repositioning Agambens spatial exception at the urban scale, the argument is made for expanding from
Keywords: an isolated camp instrumentalism into a sustained analytical apparatus that goes, possibly, beyond the
Agamben nested borders and biopolitical territorialisation of the case study. By looking at the capacity of Agam-
Nomos bens discourse to enhance the study of urban phenomena, we suggest the possibility of visualising an
Camp
urbanism of exception through a categorisation of elds of tension, hinting at the numerous forces acting
West Bank
Border
on space beyond physical structures. This framework, far from being normative and over-comprehensive,
Wall attempts to open possible paths of interpretation about exceptionality, conceiving the city of exception as
Jerusalem the ulterior vantage point that oversees its evolution from a sovereign mechanism to a spatial materiali-
sation. By applying this analysis on Jerusalem it becomes clear that far from being a linear or gradual
sequence, or acting just as bi-dimensional borders, spaces of exception in the city are like the city itself:
multiple, parallel, crosscutting and relentless.
2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction: Agamben, Jerusalem and (de)constructed
exception
In Kafkas The Trial (1994), the protagonist K. and a priest dis-
cuss the meaning of a parable named Outside the Law, where a
man waits in vain to gain access to the gates of Law, until his inev-
itable death. After the priest engages in numerous interpretations
of its meaning, it becomes evident that he overturns every appar-
ent solution, leaving the nature of the parable and their discussion
inconclusive at best. The innitely regressive argumentation feeds
an open-ended discussion evidencing that power (be it law, state,
territory) is essentially invisible but relentlessly machinating
everything within its grasp, enforcing individuals liminal position
in space while circumventing their will. Kafka goes around the
existential quest for spatial apprehension: what means to be in
or out, who decides what is inside and what remains outside,
where the perpetual exception of not being able to cross the bor-
der, and not understanding why, remains the characters personal
doom.
Starting from such a quintessential Kafkian paradox, this paper
represents an effort to extract basic principles pertaining to urban
border conditions in contexts of exception, suggesting a framework
that examines how border dynamics can be funnelled from a
wider, theoretical interpretation into the particularities of a spe-
cic locale: Jerusalem and the West Bank. The work of Giorgio
Agamben particularly his observations on the state of exception
and the ideological foundation of biopolitics outlines a spatial
approach to understanding the ulterior urban dynamics of con-
tested spaces and territorial partitioning. While acknowledging
the inherent risk in describing the complex, nested and sensitive
topologies of Jerusalem and the West Bank, this paper uses the
areas unique spatial qualities as the guiding case-study, shaping
a larger framework composed by the elements and mechanics that
induce urban environments along the path of exception without
proposing a blanket application in the paradigmatic case of
Jerusalem.
In State of Exception, Agambens third volume in the works
known as the Homo Sacer series,1 the author makes the paradoxical
assertion that today the state of exception is the rule while elaborat-
ing a theoretical template for the existence of a realm of human
activity not subject to the rule of law. The legal production of the
state of exception appears as an ongoing imperative to colonise life
itself, signalling the dissolution of meaningful political action as well
as the relentless qualication of subjects independent of the
common application of the law, which in the state of exception is

1
This series is comprised of Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life (1998),
Corresponding author. Remnant of Auschwitz: The witness and the archive (2002), The kingdom and the glory:
E-mail addresses: c.boano@ucl.ac.uk (C. Boano), rmarten@racsa.co.cr (R. Martn). For a theological genealogy of economy and government (2011).

0264-2751/$ - see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2012.06.010
 C. Boano, R. Martn / Cities 34 (2013) 617
rendered null. Furthermore, Agamben stresses that, with time, this
realm of lawlessness has become spatialised through the gure of
the camp, highlighting the inherent spatial qualities that are bred
from exception. Following Carl Schmitts dictum, there are no polit-
ical ideas without spatial referent, just as there are no spatial princi-
ples (or spaces) without corresponding political ideas (2005, p. 1),
the relation of space and politics refracted by exceptionality can help
ground Agambens work on biopolitics (1998, p. 126), the sover-
eignty of exception and the nomos, into current urban border dis-
courses and more broadly into urbanism, exposing the inherent
political character of space (Lefebvre, 1991). This opens the possibil-
ity of discussing Agambens work in the larger, blurred scale of the
metropolis and the urban, precisely because this amplitude suggests
a modality transcending the angularity of xed places and spaces,
laying a foundation for the disarrayed relationships between power
enforcement, urban environments and citizens as a whole, not as
isolated territories or axioms.
While specic spaces in Jerusalem can be interpreted through
Agamben, the challenge is to explore the facets of exception
according to the irregular beats of regional urban development.
As Kliot and Mansfeld (1999) describe, this requires an under-
standing of the urban partition bred from conict and segregation.
Weizman (2007) vividly describes a hollow land and vertical geo-
politics as the territorial specicity of the West Bank. In his
description, the urbanism of warfare that assassinated the city
of Jerusalem (De Cauter, 2009, p. 30), shapes the essence of an
overall system comprising a dispersal of fortress-like environ-
ments, enormous concrete barriers guarded by watchtowers,
manned by machine-gun crews, connected by special routes and
bypass roads, military convoys, patrols and checkpoints, all form-
ing a complex multiple space (Boano, 2010, 2011). For this pur-
pose, Agamben serves as a compass to navigate the dynamics of
Jerusalem, and by extension, the West Bank. These are fringes in
which theoretical foundation and spatial setting combine to pro-
duce a new perspective on a city already rendering a paradigm
shift in architectural and urban discourse.
Critical to understanding Jerusalems border administration and
mechanics is an underlying territorial discourse, the vertical impo-
sition of place-making in Jerusalem, where spatiality is dened by
those in power, capable of enforcing decisions over others (Rosen &
Shlay, 2010) and exposing how urban form is mutated by biopoli-
tics. Even more telling is the ongoing fabrication of a particular lan-
guage related to the border, its signicance, and the inescapable
burden this gment of contestation generates as it lingers, tran-
scending its physical context into a global paradigm. The intense
battles over spatial divisions in this city foreshadow what Agam-
ben calls the maximum tension between naturally opposing forces:
those that institute and make against those that deactivate and de-
pose, with the threat that they become indiscernible (2005, p. 87).
There is a sensation that whatever the outcome in the West
Bank, a template of exception is being manufactured in real time,
one that indicates a tendency towards extreme responses in both
the social and spatial realms.
Despite some recent attempts in literature (Schinkel & van den
Berg, 2011), Agambens spatial exception and its territoriality have
yet to be fully developed at the urban scale, expanding from iso-
lated camp instrumentalism into an integrated analytical appara-
tus. So far, case specicity has been conducive to link the state of
exception with clear-cut physical environments. However, it is at
the larger scale where these elements have been more difcult to
measure and interpret. A city like Jerusalem possesses a multiplic-
ity of nested spaces of exception, with various degrees of clarity
and operation, blending into each other and expanding both histor-
ically and spatially in the peculiar topology of the West Bank
(Piquard & Swenarton, 2011; Pullan, 2011; Segal & Weizman,
2003; Long, 2011), where the geographical anxiety and uncertainty
7
of occupation becomes a process rather than an event (Smith,
2011; Weizman, 2007).
This paper discusses over three main sections the possibility of
framing an urbanism of exception in Jerusalems context, according
to Agambens perspective on exceptionality, with the ultimate pur-
pose of extracting a framework of analysis that could be further
used to study other contexts. We acknowledge that the nature of
this deconstruction will highlight the structure of the paper and
its centrality about Jerusalem and Agambens position on the state
of exception. Certainly, structuralising Agambenian thought is
challenging but necessary: the modern problem lying behind de-
bates around structuralism are for Agamben, ancient problems
dealing with the difcult task of conceiving precisely the original
structure of the work of arts (de la Durantaye, 2009, p. 40). The
rst section offers a critical reading of border conditions through
the lens of Agambens works, particularly through the evolution
of the camp and its limits towards a territorial practice of biopol-
itics. The second section examines the intricacies of Jerusalem,
looking at the tools and conditions that have shaped in practice
the principles of exclusion and control. Finally, this context will
feed into an interpretative framework, which intends to illustrate
urban border mechanics dened by principles of a constant state
of exception: a series of tensions that materialise in the urban
realm. Stemming from previous work on urban complexity and
the relevance of Agambens spatiality (Boano & Floris, 2005; Boano,
2011), this framework can further contribute to debate an urban-
ism of exception, not as a case-specic condition, but as an open-
source meta framework that depicts how cities are producing
and reproducing themselves through a reconguration of topogra-
phies that include different perceptions and agencies. In doing so
the paper aims to contribute to the debate over urban borders as
states of exception, whose meaning lies both on the lines of
signication created from exception and in the poch spaces
inbetween.
Nested borders and biopolitical territorialisation
The process of arriving to Jerusalem is anchored in a twofold
scenario, dependent on the border being crossed. Regular travel
from Israel or other countries ends in a conventional sequence of
migratory steps, however, access from the West Bank is possible
only after the usual aesthetic rituals of control, welcoming the vis-
itor into a sophisticated landscape of limes, fences and checkpoints,
where everyday life is fragmented and nested in reductive, con-
tained stages. There is, of course, an emotional conict when look-
ing and experiencing this: the production and reproduction of
these processes of extreme control suggest a growing template
that has spilled out of the border into, possibly, a majority of the
West Banks frontier landscape, an intensely strained dialogue be-
tween land and the parameters that contain it (Fig. 1). The com-
plexly layered narratives and plethora of contested spaces and
territories have resulted in an urban archipelago that is simulta-
neously fascinating and frightening, clear in its vision yet obscure
in its pattern, rich and wretched, beautiful and revolting. And for
that reason Jerusalem is, beyond the impact of its social articula-
tion mechanics, the ground of an urban composition of its own
order.
Along Jerusalems border with the West Bank, contests over
space are not merely conicts between exchange value and use va-
lue, productive capital and collective consumption, but rather a
quest over ethno-national identity, sovereignty and what Agamben
denes as the sacred. As Yiftachel (2006) suggests, ethnocratic
models promote borders in a constant state of ux, easing the path
for equally unstable land measures, where territorial citizenship is
lost to the social power of governing ethnicities. It is a contestation
8 C. Boano, R. Martn / Cities 34 (2013) 617

Fig. 1. Paradoxical urban fragmentation in At Tur, Jerusalem (Boano, 2008).

on the recognition of the other in a Foucaultian sense or, as pointed
by Gazit (2010), a paradoxical condition where boundaries simul-
taneously include and exclude (Fig. 2). Boundary-making is a dia-
lectical process between self and other, not only based on a
continuous process of reclaiming natural and altered landscapes,
but also entailing a reorganisation of the discursive eld according
to the imperative or normalisation: as Samman (2006, p. 213) pos-
its: The Wall that runs through Jerusalem is not simply erected on
a naturally marked border, but is itself constructed in order to nat-
uralise an otherwise articial division.
Theoretical discourse can run the risk of describing ontologi-
cally and infer absolutes, and Agambens perspective is not enough
to characterise the realities of the West Bank. Certainly the Wall/
Separation Barrier is more than just a xed partitioning, both gu-
ratively and literally, given its evolving signicance in the various
narrative semantics that try to explain it, as well as the physical
adaptations it has suffered over the years in response to political
pressures and territorial evaluations. Along with the other
mechanics that suffuse the border (checkpoints, wires, cameras,
etc.), the Wall is part of the constant transformation that such a
place of exception receives from agency and participation
(restricted and permitted), a reminder of how spatial typologies
and social tensions contribute to shape an urbanism of exception.
These nested borders are not the negative of the city that lies
beyond, but instead a part of its currency, a resultant form bred
from camp-like areas and the weight of biopolitical practice.
The camp is a central element in understanding how Agambens
work has reached elds dealing with space and exception. Explain-
ing its topology and articulation within the city, though, remains
challenging, where its unit-like quality encapsulates extra-territo-
rialisation, appropriated sovereignty, suspension of the law, and
multiple transgressions on human rights in a xed, contained
space. Urban spaces of exception are harder to single-out, because
they are imbued with other signs and meanings intrinsic to urban

Fig. 2. The Separation Barrier in Ar Ram, between Jerusalem and Ramallah (Boano, 2008).
 C. Boano, R. Martn / Cities 34 (2013) 617
environments that cloud clear, isolated images. In cities, the space
of exception is continuously responding, adapting and re-organ-
ising functions of its adjacent environments; it is not segregated
in absolute terms but instead shapes itself as part of the constant
retaliation of contested spaces. The city of exception is a response
to the ingrained violence that emanates from such dynamics, the
non-linear and multi-scalar emergence of spatial conicts between
the factions that shape geographies. Similarly, it results from a ser-
ies of tensions that cover multiple spectrums of both scale and
physicality, with varying degrees of clarity and apprehension.
When compounded with the Foucaultian (1979) notions of
power and knowledge, as well as Deleuze and Guattaris (1987)
explanation on the modern tensions of contested space, Agamben
openly admits that exception has transcended the camp, and fol-
lowing its own principle of operation, has extracted itself out into
the open landscape (Agamben, 2005, p. 18; Giaccaria & Minca,
2011). There is a wide potential in seeing the articulation of camps,
together with the logic behind them, as a preguration of excep-
tionality into a wider lens describing the urban realm, where
archipelagos (Petti, 2005, 2007; Smith, 2011) and enclaves are
understood beyond their grounded uniqueness, instead inserted
into the vast, shifting mechanics that biopolitics and deterritorial-
isation infuse to the multi-scalar compound that is the metropoli-
tan landscape. Modern society has extrapolated exceptionality
beyond static units, extending into larger albeit diffuse territories,
that tend to morph into boundless, geographically politicised are-
nas. Under this light, Agambens state of exception and the implicit
effects it has over the human condition can be re-tooled as a true
navigation device that can help explain the emergence of the ulti-
mate space of exception in Jerusalem, as the containing dispositif
that subjects the individuals living in them (Agamben, 2009b,
2009c).
Spatial-driven approaches derived from the gure of the camp
shed light on its wide interpretation, such as refugee/humanitarian
camps (Arif, 2008; Boano, 2011), detention areas (De Larrinaga &
Doucet, 2008; Neal, 2006), squatter settlements (AlSayaad & Roy,
2006) and, at a larger dimension, the state of alarm (Diken & Bagge
Laustsen, 2005). Authors who have approached the question of
spatiality and sovereignty have also turned to Agamben (Ek,
2006; Gregory, 2006, 2007; Minca, 2005, 2006; Szczepanikova,
2005; Giaccaria & Minca, 2011), centred upon what he identies
as the central relationship between the sovereign and their citi-
zens. However, Agambens representation of the space of exception
in the camp should not necessarily be restricted to a spatial cate-
gory per se, but as a dynamic of power that materialises in space
(AlSayaad & Roy, 2006, p. 18). Reducing its status as a mere oppo-
sition of the camp (as exception) against the city (as norm) mis-
judges their relationship as being vertical and locational, when
instead it is irrevocably conjoined and political: In being stuck
in this dualistic understanding of camp versus nation-state or city,
a rigid hierarchy is constructed in which the agency of displaced
people is not taken into account, nor is the possibility of uidity
of relationships, spatial or political, recognised (Sanyal, 2011, p.
880).
Any understanding of the camp needs layering out to the
fringes, borders and thresholds that assimilate it. Modern geopolit-
ical dynamics, heavily consumed in the fears of terrorist attacks,
have made borders active tools of protection and reclusion, the
central feature of the architecture of global politics (Vaughan
Williams, 2009, p. 3). Border conditions become visible when ter-
ritorial strips are formed, either as an in-between space along di-
vided entities or as linear areas of separation within a continuous
territory (Rumford, 2010; Van Schendel, 2005; Kaiser & Nikiforova,
2006); they are crucially important spaces because the narratives
that legitimate sovereign power are predicated on claiming tight
linkages between the territory, the people, and the State (De Caroli,
9
2007; Murphy, 1996; Rael, 2011). Although the border represents
the margins of the sovereigns authority, it is not marginal to it; in-
stead, the performance of sovereignty at the border creates, repro-
duces, and expands the claim to authority over that territory. But
the border also acquires a territorial character of its own: when
highly contested and dynamic, it becomes a third space (Soja,
1996; Luke & Luke, 1999, Cenzatti, 2008), with its own spatial or-
der and a cultural deformation of sorts, in a constant search for
dening its position amongst inside and outside, the liminality be-
tween ourselves and others (Bhabha, 1988; Zanini, 1997). Recent
border studies have shown that borders are anything but clear
and simple lines of division (ODowd, 2010; Amoore & Hall,
2009; Jones, 2009; Doty, 2011). They become sequences of com-
plex layered territories and objects divided by often blurred, uncer-
tain and uctuating boundaries, ltering and allowing for selective
trespassing (Cruz, 2010) and edge manifestations (Bloomer, 2010)
and conditions for the camp to be manifested and, in specic cases,
instrumental for the execution of biopolitical power.
Biopolitics originates from Foucaults awareness of political
practice of the control of life thought a strategic coordination of
the multiplicity of forces that make up life or living beings
(Foucault, 2003, 2008, pp. 1516). For him, Power would no long-
er be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate
domination was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it
would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at
the level of life itself (Foucault 1978, pp. 142143). Biopolitics is
thus politics of bare life, or administrating, regulating, calculating,
and managing the life of the population of classifying, qualifying,
categorising, and ranking (Braun, 2007, p. 10). This shapes Agam-
bens perspective, for which biopolitics is an essential condition for
the state of exception and the politization of human life. Foucault
does make a distinction on the signicance of the body as some
sort of unit of currency, the primary resource of both production
and punishment. The body is understood as the raw material of
society, deprived of particularities other than those that matter
for the systems of control: birthplace and origin. This nakedness
of the body (without attached values beyond the physical) is what
Agamben denes as bare life, a humanity deprived of material
attributes, a status of being that is gradually left outside the limits
of an established normality (Agamben, 1998). Bare life is the ex-
change rate of exceptionality. A political apparatus in need of an
institutionalised enforcement of the population is, then, sure to
classify, distinguish and stigmatize, because it is consequential to
the logic of power. Agambens theoretical construction suggests
that the signicance of post-war vocabulary (i.e. eugenics, ethnic
cleansing, concentration, etc.) has evolved nominally but remains
effective in practice. For example, Arendts analysis on sovereign
lawlessness and Foucaults revisionism of governmental systems
of punishment, to which he frequently makes reference, infuses
21st Century biopolitics. However, as Diken and Bagge Laustsen
(2005) point, Agamben is careful to differentiate the biopolitics
of the present with, say, the apex of bare-life abuse during the
holocaust. Todays strategies of control are more subtle, intricately
woven in the structures of provision and regulation as well as into
individuals themselves.
These strategies come across as relentless yet linear, biased yet
regularized, aided by the multiple subterfuges that modernitys
chest box can supply: international agreements, technology, design
and regulatory frameworks. Intently, these work as components of
the global machinery that articulates and executes states of excep-
tion. The sophistication of contemporary biopolitics is, thus, pro-
portional to the advances of such machinery, primarily for its
transcendence in modern development, politics and production
of space. The body, or biotype, becomes an articulating discourse,
the subject of enforcement and the enforcement itself. Evidently,
during this process, what begins as an ideological, political tool
10 C. Boano, R. Martn / Cities 34 (2013) 617
eventually translates into space. Taking a Hobbesian perspective,
the accumulation of these units, of these bodies, creates clusters
or common masses, distinct leviathans that intercede in the realms
of thought and space. And it is this mass composed of common bios
what shapes the exception, physically building an area or a dimen-
sion lled with political signicance.
Several sections of Jerusalem embody these new metropolitan
tensions between power and individuals: for all the apparent clar-
ity of the camp, the systematic inclusion of excluded spaces into
the urban fabric produces an antagonistic production of cities
(Petti, 2005), where the binding thread lies in the visibility of
power enforcement, and in the fragmentation of that verticality
into a plethora of symptoms of exception. Agamben explains that
the occurrence of the camp comes from a deviation in the classic
structure assigned to the nation-state: land, order and birth. By
altering the relation between these three pillars, the camp
produces a new language where territory (land) and sovereignty
(order) are subjected to the spatialization of biopolitics. The pro-
duction of borders that consumes Jerusalem and the West Bank
is nothing short of widespread urban exceptionality, a place where
the traditional nation-state is broken and a city of exception is
bursting through the cracks. The gure below (Fig. 3) is not aiming
to freeze or simplify the emergence of the camp and exception
nor trying to produce a structural tool. Rather, it suggests a visual-
isation of the grand dynamics that shape, in the case of Jerusalem,
the production of a city inuenced by multiple forms of exception,
channelling the components of Nation/State to the irreducibility of
bare life where land and territory (Elden, 2010, 2011) are central
facets of such topology.
From line to wall: the border as the exclusion paradigm
Divided in 1948, Jerusalem represents both the epitome of par-
titioned cities, as well as a very unique one: at the centre of spiri-
tual life, religious strife as well as collective sentiment, yearning,
and hysteria (Shlay & Rosen, 2010). For Saer (2001, p. 136) there
is probably no other city in the world where the cultural
Fig. 3. Jerusalems (de)constructed space of exception (Boano and Martnes in
2011).
dimension of conict, meaning inclusive systems of belief shaping
ways of perceiving and acting in the world, has such direct and
pervasive impact on its life and times. Moreover, it all hinges on
a fundamentally spatial struggle, making it a unique space appara-
tus where a complex interaction of historical, religious, cultural,
and political factors has, over time, produced an unusual city of
enormous signicance (Friedland & Hecht, 1996). As Gazit (2010)
suggests, Jerusalem might serve as a prototype for a mixed city,
an urban situation in which two rival national communities
occupies the same urban jurisdiction (Yacobi & Yiftachel, 2003).
Between 1948 and 1967, the city was divided between Israel and
Jordan. After the Six-Day War (1967), Jerusalem was reunied un-
der Israeli sovereignty and its Palestinian inhabitants received the
status of local residents, even though they did not acquire an Israeli
citizenship. Being a frontier city, it is not only compressed between
the Israeli-Jewish and the Palestinian-Arab national spaces, but a
spatial segregation also exists within the Jewish districts of the city
where the ultra-orthodox populations live in segregated social
enclaves and in distinct neighbourhoods (Pullan, Misselwitz,
Nasrallah, & Yacobi, 2007; Rosen & Razin, 2008) which ensure a
traditional lifestyle with limited exposure of members of the com-
munity to Western secular society (Hasson, 2002).
The Green Line (a line initially drawn in green ink on a map)
represents the armistice or ceasere boundaries following the
end of the 1948 Arab Israeli War, which, between 1949 and
1967, dened the boundaries of Israel. After the 1967 Six Day
War, Israel captured large territories outside the Green Line to-
wards its western portion. The post-1967 development of different
parts of these captured territories has shifted and rendered unsta-
ble perceptions of the Green Line and has wreaked havoc with pre-
vailing conceptions over what constitutes the bounded city of
Jerusalem. Its location per se has never been ofcially altered. Is-
rael attempted gradually to shift the Green Line in the Jerusalem
region through a process of claimed legal annexation or unica-
tion. As Shlay and Rosen (2010) argue, such process of inclusive
exclusion happened in three specic periods: (1) a period of uni-
cation of Jerusalem (19671987), (2) a period dened by Intifada,
fragmentation, no go zones, and a divided Jerusalem (1987
2003), and (3) a period (from 2003 to the present) dened by the
second Intifada, construction of the security barrier/wall, and the
creation of the Jerusalem envelope. The length and the scope of
the paper would not allow us to depict the historical transitions
brilliantly complied by Shlay and Rosen (2010) and others
(Masselwitz & Rieniets, 2006; Saer, 2001; Wasserstein, 2001); in-
stead, we aim our focus at the construction of the West Bank Wall
as the most interesting operative device to better understand and
analyse Agambens speculation on a genuine space of exception:
a sovereign act of land appropriation and delimitation produced
via a strategy of inclusive exclusion (Fig. 4).
The design of the Wall was to encompass all of Israel, as an
operational mechanism to reduce the number of terrorist attacks
(Gelbman & Keinan, 2007; Kliot & Charney, 2006) and thus aiming
to increase security. However, the impact of the wall is clearly
much broader than safety (Brooks, Khamaisi, Nasrallah, Hidmi &
Wary, 2009). Its effects have been social, economic, and, of course,
geopolitical. The largest effects have been felt in Jerusalem. This
original spatialisation, to use Schmitts words (Schmitt, 2003) is
a boundary construction that literally concretizes and spatialises
Israels political idea, rhetorically in the name of security. The Wall
establishes, over 723 planned kilometres,2 what areas to void
around the optimal borders and represents a contested social and
legislative endzone, 8 m tall of concrete still presented as a
2
Of these 723 km, around 36% of them have yet to begin construction (BTselem,
2010).
 C. Boano, R. Martn / Cities 34 (2013) 617
Fig. 4. The separation Wall between Israel and the West Bank, photographed near Checkpoint 300 (Bethlehem/Jerusalem Area) on Palestinian Side; an unmistakable and
powerful device of spatial segregation brutally materialised through concrete forms (Boano and Martens in 2011).
temporary measure: [The Wall] is also part of a regime of walling
that pervades almost every interaction between Palestinian and
Israelis, expressed in discriminatory property regulations, in restric-
tions on marriage between Palestinians and Israelis, and those in the
territories, in the semi-permeable membrane of withheld employ-
ment, in oating bubbles of armed and dangerous sovereignty, and
in the permanent mobility of all these boundaries (Sorkin, 2005;
Rael, 2011). The Wall was ultimately built through the heart of East
Jerusalem, already covering a distance of 78 km, leaving Al Quds Uni-
versity, the neighbourhood Abu Dis, and the Jerusalem Palestinian
Parliament on the other side of the wall, and affecting at least 250
thousand people in East Jerusalem alone (BTselem, 2010, 2012).
Most of the Jerusalem satellite settlements, all Jerusalems new
neighbourhoods built on former West Bank land, and much of East
Jerusalem adjacent to the Old City remained inside the new tangible
boundary outside the normal order (Agamben, 1998, p. 169). By
delineating these series of strongholds where the inclusion/exclu-
sion of human life dictates the spatial frontier, and by ingraining
them into the territorial routine, the syntax of disciplinary power
along these points (the Wall, the checkpoints, the barbed wire,
etc.) narrate the becoming of a social and cultural marking zone
where it is no longer possible to tell order from exception (Fig. 5).
Precisely at the core of Agambens discourse, when politics suspend
order to generate new ordering consequences, and citizens are put
on hold, uncertain and reclassied, enacting enforcers like the Wall
make of the West Bank an impenetrable stronghold of neither chaos
or normality, but a political condition without any distinctions be-
tween them. Hence, the Foucaultian deviance loses its contrast to
normality into a grey area, a zone of indistinction between outside
and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit, in which the very con-
cepts of subjective right and juridical protection no longer make any
sense (Agamben, 1998, p. 170).
The Wall constitutes the clashing materialisation, on one side, of
a dystopian border condition that evokes of the abnormality expe-
rienced on the everyday Palestinian time and space; and on the
other, an asymmetric monumentality that advertises and brands it-
self as the utopia of total security. The Wall has appropriated
through conscation as much as 16% of the area of the West Bank,3
which means the end of the unied city as initially conceived in 1967
and marking the return of Jerusalem to a frontier city status (Pullan,
2004, 2011). It is important to note that most of the Palestinian
neighbourhoods that have remained east of the fence were never part
of the city unied under Israeli law in 1967, and thus not receiving
3
The amount of land inside the West Bank that Israel will annex in constructing
the barrier remains a bone of contention; the Israeli government has cited the gure
of 7%, BTselem 10%, but both are agreed that the barrier will enclose the main blocs of
Jewish settlements adjacent to the old Green Line (see Shlay & Rosen, 2010; BTselem,
2010).
11
municipal services. Remaining integral part of the West Bank,
whether Palestinian neighbourhoods annexed in 1967 and remained
west to the Wall, still receive services from Jerusalem municipality
(Shlay & Rosen, 2010; BTselem, 2010, 2012). The Walls trajectory
hardly ever aligns with the actual border Green Line, shifting the
Green Line once again, providing the contours of what is known as
the Jerusalem Envelope. As opposed to modern uncontested metro-
politan regions that are based on economic and social integration,
the Jerusalem Envelope constructs an induced metro-region.
The physical barrier reinforces the annexation of Jewish East
Jerusalem neighbourhoods, physically and psychologically incor-
porating into Israel the newly established Jewish satellite suburbs
in the West Bank, while disconnecting East Jerusalem from its Pal-
estinian hinterland (Shlay & Rosen, 2010). Complementary to Is-
raels attempts to facilitate expansion are ongoing attempts to
contain Palestinian growth and alter the social composition of East
Jerusalem. Forces that move Palestinians around East Jerusalem,
either from one neighbourhood to another, or out of East Jerusalem
altogether, include: land expropriation, discriminatory zoning reg-
ulations, intentional absence of plans for Palestinian areas,
obstructing development, rules governing residency requirements
and the acquisition and attainment of identity cards, demolition,
and transfer of property from Palestinians to Israelis (Bollens,
1998; Chesin, Hutman, & Melame, 1999; Kaminker, 1997; Klein,
2008). Although Israel annexed a large area of the West Bank to
East Jerusalem, for years the municipal border was meaningless:
new streets were built on both sides, with schools, health services,
and other institutions serving all residents of the area. The con-
struction of the Separation Barrier along the municipalitys border
ruined the fabric of life that had developed and severely violated
the human rights of residents of the neighbourhoods surrounding
the city. Thus, East Jerusalem residents who live to the east of
the Barrier, as well as other Palestinians holding permits to enter
East Jerusalem, are permitted to enter the city via just three of
the 16 checkpoints located along the Barrier (Fig. 6). They may only
enter on foot. The entry permits are voided whenever there is a
general closure, which is generally declared on Jewish holidays
and following security warnings (BTselem, 2010, p. 30).
Controlling through redistribution of population, and its pro-
ductive soil (Schmitt, 2005, p. 6) showed how the sovereign is
who controls the exception, creating a border condition beyond
the law and through the law (Legg, 2011, p. 6). It is control and
political enforcement articulated into space (Minca, 2011), not as
a static piece of infrastructure but as a contentious process of ur-
ban radicalisation, which nurtures from its permanent state of ux
and from the alteration of human relations into extreme fear, hate
and intolerance, the anatomy of urban terror (Savitch, 2005). From
an urban design perspective, the separation Wall is an apparatus
of military urbanism (Leclair-Paquet & Boano, 2012) and its
12 C. Boano, R. Martn / Cities 34 (2013) 617

Fig. 5. The separation Wall between Israel and the West Bank, photographed near Checkpoint 3000 (Bethlehem / Jerusalem Area) on Palestinian Side; an unmistakable and
powerful device of spatial segregation brutally materialized through concrete forms, Benjamin Leclair-Paquet, 2010.

Fig. 6. Bypass road in the greater Bethlehem area; a clear physical manifestation of a spatial segregative system existing within the West Bank. These roads that can only be
used by those traveling in cars identied with Israeli license plates (and with no Palestinian passengers) can effectively cut through the Occupied territories thanks to a road
networked controlled by Israel; effectively embodying extraterritorial networks in a foreign space. Benjamin Leclair-Paquet, 2010.).
 C. Boano, R. Martn / Cities 34 (2013) 617
construction represents a non-static geometrical variable, despite
its colossal volumetric monumentality. According to gures re-
leased by the Israeli human rights organisation, BTselem, the total
length of the fence will be 723 km, of which 85% of which runs in-
side the West Bank, surrounds large settlements such as Maale
Adummim and Ariel. Upon completion, 9.5% of the West Bank, con-
taining 60 settlements, will lie west of the Barrier. Not only does
the barrier surround existing settlements, but in at least 12 places
it was built hundreds, even thousands, of metres from the
settlement, encircling additional lands in accordance with the set-
tlements expansion plans (BTselem, 2010, p. 30). This is the prod-
uct of an environment that encourages an urbanism of exclusion
through dispersion, where measures become selective and adapt-
able, less and less anchored in specic points, but spreading out
sovereignty through what is essentially unlocalisable.
Framing an urbanism of exception
Agamben, evoking Foucault, suggests the basis for the constitu-
tion of extreme spatial organisation in modern metropolis is
founded on the principles of exclusion and control,4 albeit in a
blended modality (Agamben, 2009a, 2009c). Phenomena alternate
between assimilating the leprosy (exclusion) and the plague (con-
trol) at the same time, a modication of how governmentality pic-
tures the relation of a city with their inhabitants, and in the
process conceiving a politically charged urban charter where the
modern metropolis lives in a heightened state of calculated confu-
sion (Huxley, 2007). Our contribution sets to argue that Agambens
theory can support more than an identication of spaces of excep-
tion (like the sectors constrained by the Wall) and, instead, explain
them within a larger panorama, where these spaces become not just
a symptom to be catalogued but also a systemic representation with
a high proximity to the reach of urbanism.
By looking at the capacity of Agambens discourse to enhance
the study of urban phenomena, we try to understand the principles
that sustain it, while suggesting the possibility to visualise an
urbanism of exception through a categorisation of elds of tension.
The possibility to link the state of emergency with the systematic
establishment of exclusion and control in the production of cities
should at least trigger a deeper review on the processes of borders
and the built environment. The combination of existing studies on
spaces dened by their relation to borders (such as Alsayyad &
Roys Medieval Modernity (2006), Vasudevan, McfarLane, & Jeffreys
Spaces of enclosure (2008), and Multiplicitys Border device(s)
(2004)) into an expanded framework, should weave Agambens
construction of exceptionality together with the realities of a case
study. Determining these tensions is fundamental to bridge theo-
retical domains with specic socio-spatial elements, those that in
conjunction materialise the characteristics of the space exception
into the urban fabric of the city.
The gure below (Fig. 7) maps these ve tensions in the context
of Jerusalem as a border city, the result of the previous domain of
analysis regarding the state of exception and its spatial product;
the tensions then ground the threads that generate active pro-
cesses in the border conict so far described (amongst several
others, ethnocratic citizenships, the camp, regulated access check-
points, etc.). These processes, in combination, begin to build the
spaces, areas and grounds of exceptionality at the urban setting,
materialising the abstraction of exception into operational devices.
4
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1979) describes how the two paradigms of
urban control during the middle ages stemmed from disease. On one hand, the
extreme measures of control in the city against the plague, through partitions,
inspections and continuous registrations; and on the other, the measures of exclusion
against lepers trying to enter the city, through borders and protection from the
outside.
13
And thus the city acquires a distinct character, a transformative se-
quence of ideological and political agency inuencing the shape of
Jerusalem, crosscutting from the national level, where Israels sov-
ereignty is permanently at stake, to the personal level, which re-
duces a specic otherness, a specic individual to a biopolitical
gure.
(a) Authority: The state of exception has evolved into a splinter
of forms and meshes, shaping accordingly to the require-
ments of the ruling bodies that produce them. It is this
new identication what takes a central role in our under-
standing of the urban as a subtext of the language of power
and authority. In Jerusalem, it clearly stems from vertical
political processes infused with military purposes, what
Leclair-Paquet and Boano thoroughly describes as a toolkit
for military urbanism that through design and legislative
control (. . .) have come to affect nearly all aspects of society
by outstandingly reforming the current urban condition
(2012, p. 14).
(b) Production: Gradually, power enforcement is tangible spa-
tially and economically, producing the dynamics of excep-
tion. For example, the proliferation of Israeli settlements
on hilltops, which Segal and Weizman attribute as a parallel
surveillance urban system (2003, p. 86) functioning as the
inverted mirror of the Palestine camps below. Similarly,
the control of access to goods and resources to the enclosed
civilians turn these special spaces of enclosure into carceral
geographies (Smith, 2011) where the occupation represents
a direct physical and economic strangulation (Smith, 2011,
p. 324) that suppresses access to goods, harvest lands and
water sources, that are readily available to civilians outside
enclosure.
(c) Exclusion: The camps diffuse character makes exclusion
more than an inside/outside relation. At the heart of biopo-
litical discourses, the separation of land to divide and dis-
connect people enables the capacity to take over any form
of lives and rules and subject them to the lawlessness sce-
nario of the camp and exception: the hidden matrix of
the politics in which we are still living, and it is this struc-
ture of the camp that we must learn to recognise in all its
metamorphoses. (Agamben, 1998, p. 175).
(d) Such production of extreme spatial articulation thought an
inherent dispersal siege beyond being one of the most effec-
tive and destructive means of control can be seen as well as
corrective technologies that operate with what Kotef and
Amir (2011) the imaginary line manifested at checkpoints.
The imaginary line is both a component within, and an
emblem of a mode of control. It is a line that delimits the
permitted movement of Palestinians within the space of
the checkpoint, yet a line, which exists only in the minds
of the soldiers standing in front of them. As such, the imag-
inary line is a technique and a symbol of a particular form of
controlling a given space, which not only relies on control-
ling the rules applying to this space, but, even more impor-
tantly, on controlling the knowledge of those rules (Kotef
and Amir (2011), p. 58).
(e) Iconicity: The projects and forms that symbolise the strate-
gized vision of the city gradually become the cultural memes
of image and representation. In the case of Jerusalem, the
Wall has become a symbol on its own right, albeit a repre-
sentational shortcut that underscores the true complexity
lying behind it. The momunentality of the Wall, its imma-
nence and its transformation into a permanent structure
become the culmination of the technologies of power
(Elden, 2003, p. 245). However, it is the imaginary line
(Kotef & Amir, 2011) what truly limits the city of exception,
14 C. Boano, R. Martn / Cities 34 (2013) 617
Fig. 7. Palestinian road between Bethlehem and Ramallah; new road under construction as an alternative to the traditional route through Jerusalem no longer accessible to
Palestinians, unable to enter the contested city. Spiraling through steep roads carved into narrow navigable passages, the journey that did not take longer than thirty minutes
now requires just about two hours. Benjamin Leclair-Paquet, 2010.
a component and an emblem of a mode of control that
delimits the permitted movement of Palestinians within
the space of the checkpoint, yet a line, which exists only in
the minds of the soldiers standing in front of them. As such,
the imaginary line is a technique and a symbol of a particu-
lar form of controlling a given space, which not only relies on
controlling the rules applying to this space, but, even more
importantly, on controlling the knowledge of those rules
(Kotef & Amir, 2011, p. 58).
(f) Identity: As described, the sequence of tensions has gone
from the large-scale authority dimension, to nally arrive
at the individual. Fundamentally, the need of dominance
produces a dissonance of citizenshipsin this case the
ethnocracy described by Yiftachel (2006)either by class,
gender, race or ethnicity that unevenly produces constella-
tions, spatialities and subjectivities (Vasudevan et al., 2008,
pp. 34). These forces, which lead to cataloguing and human
labelling, materialise into spatial forms as well as social
relations between groups, but more importantly consolidate
a biopolitical consolidation into urban life. The body is
understood as the raw material, deprived of particularities
other than those that matter for the systems of control:
birthplace and origin. This nakedness of the body (without
attached values beyond the physical) is what Agamben
denes as bare life, a humanity deprived of material
attributes, a status of being that is gradually left outside
the limits of an established normality (Agamben, 1998). Bare
life, thus, becomes the exchange rate of exceptionality.
By building a series of relations extracted from existing con-
cepts, there is a resulting meta-analytical framework that can then
be adapted to specic case studies and locales. This framework
does not intend to be an over-comprehensive tool that explains
and covers the spaces of exception; however, there are trends that
show possible paths of interpretations, and these have been organ-
ised accordingly. What stands out, though, is that the city of excep-
tion is a valid concept, a conceptual vantage point to understand
the evolution of the state of exception from a sovereign mechanism
to a spatial materialisation (Fig. 8).
In the case of Jerusalem, we face a city of antagonisms exacer-
bated by extreme measures of control in specic areas, where
the nuances of urban articulations and continuity are brought to
an arresting halt. For all the complex assemblage of walls, settle-
ments, and checkpoints, it is the systematic alteration of border
spatialities and agreements, the shifting of security measures,
and a perpetually uctuating state of alarm into the urban fabric,
what produces a completely distorted production of the urban,
where the binding thread lies in the visibility of power enforce-
ment, and in the fragmentation of that verticality into a plethora
of abstract symptoms of exception. Exclusion and control become
transxed and oscillating, drawing new lines and meanings into
the layouts of the urban frontier; as in Foucaults metaphor, the
plague and the lepers are controlled and excluded simultaneously.
From borders to a series of lethal Mbius strips
When artist Francis Als took, in 2005, a dripping can with
green paint to signal and mark the 1948 Green Line across the city,
he exposed the inherent difculty of reading borders (the original
treaty lines were traced with a thick green pen over a map, and if
scaled in reality they would be hundreds of feed wide). His perfor-
mance served as a reminder that lines are just a geometrical repre-
sentation, without width or depth, just the tracing of an illusory
and, many times, arbitrary ow. And yet, by the same token, the
 C. Boano, R. Martn / Cities 34 (2013) 617
Fig. 8. Tensions of exception for the Jerusalem case (authors, 2011) and the diagram refer to the fact that it has been re-design from Boano and Martens in 2011 (the authors).
imposition of lines and ows is what fractures the Palestinian
lands from the Israeli, where myriad thicknesses are materialised
in the shape of walls, barriers, barren lands and more. It is spatial
warfare operating under the complacency of manipulated scale.
Just as there are contestations at the national level (kilometres of
bordering lands), which tackle ideals of nation and sovereignty in
international forums, there are micro-scale conicts at the city le-
vel, spots of specic action that build onto the larger theme of
inclusion/exclusion. And at the core, Jerusalem synthesises myriad
phenomena, a multi-layered city of almost unbearable cultural
gravitas, simultaneously an ontological blender and a ltering de-
vice, a city strained at its borders, which are continually reclaimed,
built, imposed and deducted on the grounds of a relentless applica-
tion of exception.
While acknowledging the multiple literatures on borders and
the contested case of West Bank, some of them included in this pa-
per, we are aware that Jerusalems case needs to be approached
with caution. It seems evident that its case puts at the forefront
how the border is the antithetical political space, which could be
conceived as a space of ow in its elastic and shifting geography,
a boundless limit zone that could never be represented by drawing
static lines at the risk of simplifying its spatiality and its thickness
attempts that Petti, Hilal, and Weizman (2010) recently made in
their highly provocative and interesting exhibition The red Castle
and the Lawless Line, which successfully complements the debate
about enriching an architectural political vision for the area. Like
the two sides of the Mbius strip, in any point along its length what
seems to be happening is that both the camp and the polis become
visible poles of antinomy where the ambivalent logic of inclusive,
biopolitical exclusion portray a neither leave nor enter logic. As
biopolitics begins its work of normalisation, the polis and the camp
align and the no-mans land that separates them disappears.
15
This current disappearance is what Agamben diagnoses the
state in which we live as characterised, legally and politically by
an extensive state of exception that threatens the entire globe. A
dangerous state of affairs since governments and states can claim
to possess an ultimate yardstick in the name of security, private
interests and individuality possibly rendering effective and evident
a dehumanization in the name of the law with the consequences
that life is reduced to a bare life stripped of every virtue and then
banished in a border zone, in a liminal threshold caught in the sov-
ereign ban. This process of exclusion constitutes the concealed
foundation of sovereignty weather exception becomes the rule.
Agamben dictum of what cannot be included in any way is in-
cluded in the form of exception [. . .] The exception is what cannot
be included in the whole of which it is a member and cannot be a
member of the whole in which is always already included (Agam-
ben, 1998, pp. 2425). The Homo Sacers alarming analysis of the
contemporary political situation, in which Foucaults notion of bio-
politics plays an important role shows that power in its traditional
form as territorial sovereignty, denes itself as the right over life
and death. This right is asymmetrical: the right to kill is more
important than the right to let people live (Foucault, 2007).
In that respect, borders and its physical manifestations in Jerusa-
lem and West Bank rendered evident such shift: when sovereign
power progressively transformed into biopower, the care for the life
and health of subjects became increasingly important in the mech-
anisms and calculations of states. This prevention through deter-
rence and immobilization, performed by the Separation Barrier/
Wall and Jerusalems urban borders in their different materialities,
illustrates an instance in which biopower inoperative in construct-
ing/reconstructing the very population that is the subject of govern-
ment. This, of course, entails the delineation of those who are not
the population, the waste, and this is where we nd spaces of
16 C. Boano, R. Martn / Cities 34 (2013) 617
exception and bare life. However, while prevention through deter-
rence and connements did and continues to create spaces in which
human beings may be reduced to bare life and killed without con-
sequence, these spaces only create conditions of possibility for
the emergence of the urban Homo Sacer. Agambens perspective
can hence be made fruitful in critical research on urban policies.
It involves a connection between politics, law and the production
of spacea triangle in which the construction of the human subject
is situated (Bialasiewicz & Minca, 2010). The urban Homo Sacer be-
comes, thus the paradigm of an exceptional production of space by
decreea member of a largely waste, invisible, poor marginalized
subpopulation whose rights are potentially suspended.
Despite the logical limits of this paper, we felt that any debate
on urban border could not ignore the intricacies of the Jerusalem
scenario, where the principles of exclusion have been moulded into
practice, and where spatial topologies, such as the Wall, have
brought an active dispositive of forces with the capacity to capture,
orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures,
behaviours, opinions, and discourses of living beings. Such a para-
digmatic case, when analysed under Agambens spatiology, be-
comes an effective interpretative framework to illustrate urban
border mechanics under a constant state of exception and a serial
of tensions that materialise into the urban realm. Finally, all this
outlines the urban potentials of Agambens work, hopefully calling
for more empirical and theoretical efforts, not only on the dehu-
manizing aspect of architectural dispositive, the ban and exception,
but also on the multiplicity of strategies that can contest them.
Ultimately, it seems, Agambens alternative is not about the
destruction of the dispositives of exception, but in rendering them
inoperative by liberating that which has been separated by them:
profaning the very mechanics of the Mbius strip.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Benjamin Leclair-Paquet who allowed
us to use some of his recent pictures taken in West Bank during
the summer of 2010. His iconographic material enriched our work
and stimulated the reection on the spatialities of Jerusalem, In
addition we would like to thanks the two anonymous reviewer
who gave useful comments and feedbacks which helped to create
a robust argument and Andrew Wade for editorial suggestions.
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