People as environment: local environmental concerns and urban marginality in the Tel Aviv Metropolitan region

ABSTRACT

This article, at the intersection of urban anthropology and local environmental studies, offers a new and original perspective on the question of why low-income, marginalised urban communities might disregard local environmental concerns. Inspired by AbdouMaliq Simone’s [(2004). “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16 (3): 407–429.] seminal work on “people as infrastructure”, it proposes a new theoretical construct, “people as environment”, which sheds light on the processes whereby people perceive their urban environment primarily in relation to other people – while disregarding prominent environmental deprivations and risks. This conceptualisation is developed in two main dimensions: (1) People as environmental resource, referring to supportive social networks within marginalised urban settings, which help overcome (environmental) hardships; and (2) People as environmental threat, indicating the perception of “others” – most commonly, newcomers and “outsiders” – as hazards while downplaying the presence of actual environmental risks. This conceptualisation has been developed in relation to several research sites in the Tel Aviv metropolitan region characterised by ongoing urban marginality and environmental inequality. It is informed by a multimethod qualitative research on long-term residents’ concerns with their neighbourhood environment, which included street questionnaires, as well as focus groups in two lower-income neighbourhoods with a history of ethno-class discrimination. Our findings reveal that when long-term residents were asked about prominent environmental concerns, they generally ignored particular risks and, instead, evoked ideas about an idealised neighbourly past in contrast to a threatening present defined by “others” around them. Such recurring perceptions indicate both the theoretical significance and policy relevance of the people-as-environment concept.

KEYWORDS:

• People as environment
• environmental inequality
• environmental hazards
• urban marginality
• Mizrahi Jews
• Tel Aviv

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank first and foremost the participants of the focus groups in HaTikva and Morasha neighbourhoods for sharing with us their perceptions and stories. We also thank our students in the course Environmental Justice (2018) at the School of Sustainability, IDC Herzliya, who conducted street surveys and helped us study several neighborhoods around TAMR. Finally, we thank the reviewers and editor for their helpful comments on our original manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Place attachment, understood as an emotional bonding to a specific physical environment, is of course not limited to marginalized communities, and has been shown to be an important contextual variable for how individuals develop local environmental concerns (Vorkinn and Riese 2001).

2 In addition to HaTikva and Morasha, preliminary research was conducted in Yaffo D in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Pardes Katz and Givat Rokach in Bnei Brak, Yad HaTisha in Herzliya, and Ramat Eliyahu in Rishon LeZion.

3 The word “environment” in Hebrew (Sviva) could also mean area or setting. This, theoretically, could be one reason why respondents in our research tended to overlook “classic” environmental issues and narrated instead their social milieu. However, both our preliminary street questionnaires and subsequent focus group discussions mentioned specific environmental issues (e.g. availability of green space, concerns over pollution etc.).

4 Nearly 33,000 Asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea currently live in Israel (Population and Immigration Authority 2018). About 14,000 of them reside in south Tel Aviv, including HaTikva (Hotline for Refugees and Migrants in Israel 2019), but there is no formal data how many live in each neighbourhood.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation [grant number 1812/16] forthe project "Tel Aviv Mertropolitan Ecologies".

Notes on contributors

Tal Shamur

Tal Shamur is currently an ISEF Foundation International Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology, at the University of Cambridge. He holds a BA degree (magna cum laude) in sociology and anthropology and human services and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Haifa University. He also holds an MA degree in labor studies from Tel Aviv University. His work focuses on questions of belonging and identification within the urban sphere. His Book titled: Hope and Melancholy on an Urban Frontier: Ethnicity, Space and Gender in the Hatikva Neighborhood, Tel-Aviv was recently published in the University of Haifa press (2020, in Hebrew).

Nathan Marom

Nathan Marom is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Sustainability, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya. His research addresses urban planning, sustainability and resilience from a critical perspective of urban political ecology and informed by social theories of urban space and the environment. He was a Marie Curie post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development, UC Berkeley, where he studied how urban strategies in global South cities interact with urban inequality. He received a PhD from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University. His dissertation outlined Tel Aviv's planning history through the 20th century in relation to processes of socio-spatial distinction and division and was published as a monograph, “City of Concept: Planning Tel Aviv” (Hebrew).