Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

In this paper we integrate a theoretical theme with a description of idiographic reality in the Israeli Negev. First we argue that roads, routes, paths and the like are places in the full sense of this term, as are settlements; they are spaces that people tend to load with meanings and significance. Although this argument may sound trivial to the popular ear, it somehow undermines the instrumentalist and technologist bias which have characterized the traditional scientific geographic discourse of roads as spatial entities. We demonstrate this theoretical argument by exploring several layers of meanings that have been constructed by the Arab-Bedouin who reside along Road 31 in the Negev region. Images, memories, emotions and concepts– all are entwined by Road 31 in Bedouin’s sense of place drawing a mental range whose poles are; death, disaster, and discrimination at one edge and social encounters and sense of history, continuation and belonging at the other. A $0.5 billion reconstruction project has recently changed Road 31’s landscape while deepening ethnic exclusion in the region.