Participatory Art in Kufr Bir'im: Fissures for Suppressed Histories

Author(s): Irit Carmon Popper and Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

Source: Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and
Criticism , Vol. 15, No. 1 (Summer 2018), pp. 31-43
Published by: University of Minnesota Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/futuante.15.1.0031

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Figure 1. The ruins of the Palestinian village Kufr Bir‘im in Bar’am National Park, 2016. Photograph by Lianne Silverman.

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Irit Carmon Popper and
Alona Nitzan-Shiftan Participatory Art in Kufr Bir‘im
Fissures for Suppressed Histories

Introduction
Bar’am is a national park set in the scenic Galilee Mountains
only four kilometers from Israel’s northern border with
Lebanon. It contains both the remains of an ancient synagogue
and the ruins of the Palestinian village Kufr Bir‘im, depopulated
in 1948 to create a “security belt” along the border. The archi-
tecture of the ancient synagogue has been restored and its site
transformed into an archeological park symbolizing the Jewish
roots in antiquity. By contrast, the remains of the Palestinian
village are neglected, and its houses and alleys are falling into
ruins (Figure 1).
The present study examines how the Palestinian descen-
dants of the displaced villagers struggle for their undermined
heritage. Since the power of this struggle is predicated on their
strength as a community, we analyze their activism as a mode
of participatory art, and examine its meaning in light of recent
preservation theory. In the context of an intractable national
conflict, we further argue, such participatory action opens ven-
ues to discuss preservation as an act of civil rights.
Scholars have studied the village through the lenses of
anthropology, sociology, political science, and art history.1
Alternatively, we offer to analyze its story through a concep-
tual framework that brings together contemporary art and new
trends in preservation — two fields that have been broadening
their horizons and reconstituting each other by responding to
the communal values of heritage. Specifically, we explore the
struggle of the uprooted community of Kufr Bir‘im through a
series of site-specific participatory art interventions by a mem-
ber of the community, artist and architect Hanna Farah Kufr
Bir‘im, together with his Jewish Israeli wife, artist Hila Lulu Lin
Farah Kufr Bir‘im. Both have recently added the village name to
their original last name.2 Their work provokes the failure to ma-
terialize the verdict of Israel’s supreme court that grant them
the right of return to the village. This verdict, however, has not
affected the Israeli polarized treatment of the site.3
The Bar’am National Park serves as an example for the
clash of two opposing conceptions of claiming heritage. On the
one hand, a state utilizing its institutional power to concretize
its national narrative in space, and thereby to forge a dominant
Future Anterior
Volume XV, Number 1 form of collective memory; on the other hand, a subordinate
Summer 2018 group seeking fissures between different state institutions in

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Figure 2. The preserved synagogue charge of the site in order to preserve and perpetuate their
in Bar’am National Park, 2016.
embodied memories. Our research focuses on a work of art that
Photograph by Lianne Silverman.
claims a subaltern history and thus assumes the mandate of
preservation. Such an alternative mode of preservation under-
mines the supremacy of the top-down national heritage that
the state imposed on the park (Figure 2).

Historical Background
Kufr Bir‘im’s name is probably derived from the Canaanite
name periyam, meaning “abundant with fruit.” Late nineteenth-
century sources describe it as a stone-built village, surrounded
by gardens, vineyards, and olive plantations. It was also an
archeological site with remains of olive presses, synagogues,
tombs, and cisterns. Records date Jewish settlement in the site
back to the Roman period and Maronite Christian settlement
back to the Middle Ages. During the British Mandate in Pales-
tine (1920–48), an estimated one thousand Christians lived in
the village.4
The war of 1948 and its aftermath transformed this physi-
cal and human landscape. It culminated in the declaration of
the State of Israel, which symbolized the Nakba (catastrophe)
for the Palestinians. It involved the depopulation and destruc-
tion of more than four hundred Arab towns and villages, with
an estimated 700,000 Palestinians either fleeing the fighting
or deported by the force of Israeli arms.5
The former villagers of Kufr Bir‘im and the neighboring
Iqrit, whose descendants are involved in a similar struggle,

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 include both refugees and IDPs (internally displaced persons).
Legally, their story is unique in that they belong to a small
group of Arab citizens of Israel whose right of return has been
recognized by the state, and who have been continually strug-
gling for its exercise in Israeli courts.6 Initially, the evacuation
order issued during the 1948 war was based on security rea-
sons and was justified in terms of a temporary military neces-
sity to evacuate a narrow strip of land along the border so long
as the fighting continued. The military promised to let the vil-
lagers return in fifteen days; this promise has been on hold for
the last seventy years. In 1950, the abandoned site was used
by Jewish migrants as a temporary settlement, until Kibbutz
Bar’am was founded in 1953 on the village’s lands. In 1951, the
Israeli High Court of Justice permitted the residents to return,
but two years later the Israeli Air Force bombed and destroyed
their village, except for the church and bell tower. Formally, the
debate over the future of the village and its residents was never
concluded and no one took responsibility for its destruction.
The eventual decision to designate the site a “closed military
area” was not motivated (only) by security requirements but
by the fear that any return would be construed by the entire
Palestinian refugee community as a precedent.7
A third player entered the legal-military dispute in 1966 in
order to further Judaize the country by embodying its national
narrative in space. The National Park Authority (NPA) prepared a
master plan for a national park around the ancient synagogue
it had restored, and surrounded it by a nature reserve that
included the closed military area.8 The National Parks Law au-
thorized the NPA’s board to determine the historical, national,
and touristic values that justify the grounds for establishing
national parks, and thus made the sites vulnerable to political
appropriations.
This third agent, the NPA, negotiated the tension between
the legal and military constituencies. Had all three agents
reached consensus, the site could have been preserved
according to the demands of the Jewish national narrative.
However, the complexity of this contested site repeatedly
prevented such consensus, and the Palestinian ruins within
the park stand for a different narrative that unsettles the seem-
ingly pacified antiquities that represent its ancient Jewish and
otherwise non-Palestinian heritage (Figure 3).

The Communal Struggle

The Maronite Palestinian agency relies on an elite community
that since 1948 has been struggling on two fronts: the “exter-
nal front” among decision-makers, courts, and media, and the
“internal front” of the community itself, with a large variety
of ongoing artistic and social activities conducted in situ,

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Figure 3. Bar’am National Park including religious ceremonies, camps, and individual initia-
expansion plan no. 20299, based on
tives. The activities on both fronts are led voluntarily by the
the original plan (Nature and Parks
Authority) [1966/2015] (Planning second, third, and fourth generation of the village descendants
Administration of the Ministry of and have achieved limited results that are quite unique in the
Finance, State of Israel Website),
(http://mavat.moin.gov.il/MavatPS uneasy landscape of the relations between Israeli authorities
/Forms/SV4.aspx?tid=4). and Palestinian IDPs. For example, since 1967 the descendants
have been allowed to bury their dead in the village cemetery.
In 1972, they were permitted to renovate the church and hold
religious rituals, including weddings.9
In 1982, the descendants established the Al-Awda (return)
Movement that regularly organizes summer camps for children
and volunteer working camps on site. Every year young descen-
dants, who live in other parts of the country, gather hundreds
of children for one week, and offer them the opportunity to live
together in the ruined village. Elderly descendants guide them
in play, storytelling, and creative activities. In this full-fledged
community education project, art plays an important role.
In the annual working camps, a group of young volunteers
stay on site and, with the help of an elderly handyman, restore
and rebuild the church and its surroundings, clear the village
paths, and prevent further building collapse. We suggest that
these activities articulate two modes of preservation: the

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Figure 4. Preservation of the church and working camps deal with the tangible heritage, whereas the
its surroundings by the descendants of
summer camps deal with the intangible heritage of the villagers
Kufr Bir‘im, 2016. Photograph by Lianne
Silverman. (Figure 4).

The Individual Struggle

The volunteers relentlessly worked as a group in order to
consolidate a common Bir‘imite identity that would keep alive
the evacuees’ struggle for return. At times, this commitment
becomes deeply personal. Many members of the second and
third generations, who were born outside the village, have
undertaken individual initiatives.10 These include a series
of site-specific art interventions conducted by Hanna and
Hila Lulu Lin Farah Kufr Bir‘im in the ruins of the Farah family
house, where Hanna’s father had been born and his great-
grandmother had died, although he himself never lived there.
The house was part of an extended family complex that had
originally been a rectangular stone house with arched windows
and entrances. Its roof was destroyed and the ceiling collapsed
on its floor, and subsequently, due to the forces of nature and
to ongoing neglect, all walls eventually crumbled until noth-
ing was left except the arched entrance in the front — a silent
testimony to a silenced past.
The two artists met in the early 2000s and soon afterward
began conducting collaborative art interventions in-situ.
Hanna, born in Jish in 1960,11 graduated from the NB School
of Design in Haifa as an architect, but practiced primarily
within the visual arts. He presented his work in various local

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 and international exhibitions. One of his significant long-term
projects is Re: Form–A Model (2001–2002) — an architectural
plan to reconstruct the village, realized in a model, that simul-
taneously features the existing remains of the old village, and
new future structures that would grow out of them.12 Hanna’s
partner, Hila Lulu Lin, was born in Israel in 1964. She gradu-
ated from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem
and became a multidisciplinary artist who has exhibited and
received awards worldwide.
Since 2003 the work process of the two artists culminated
into a series of interventions. They titled their ongoing project
of art and research Sharnaqa (Arabic for cocoon). The project
followed three essential principles: site specificity, participa-
tion, and temporality. First, it treated the site as fundamental
to the artwork — in this case the depopulated village, its histori-
cal layers, and political complexities. Second, the perform-
ing participants on site (among them community members)
constituted the work and its meaning. These first two prin-
ciples helped tighten the bond between the descendants and
their place, and played a pivotal role in shaping the younger
generation’s commitment to the village as integral to, or even
constitutive of their identity.13 The third principle of temporal-
ity allowed the artists to deal with the legal restrictions of the
national park that prohibited any permanent construction and
demolition: each of the artworks was installed for no longer
than twenty-four hours. The artists treated the remains of the
house as a preserved material property that was charged with
suppressed meanings. Each of their art interventions trans-
formed the space of the ruined house through different modes
of action, materials, and textures, such as covering the floor
with red bowls and the windows with sugar cubes, or growing
anemones on its floor. The house in these works is the es-
sence; it is not only the site where a constantly changing action
is taking place but the material resource that is constituent and
integral to the artistic intervention.14
Each intervention deciphers a different aspect of the private
and public memories of the site; each reveals various gestures,
tools, practices and behaviors, relationships, and customs that
characterized everyday life in the village before 1948, as well
as thoughts and feelings related to the subsequent struggle.
Although at the end of each action the room re-assumes its
voided state, the actions leave traces and continue to evolve,
as a living tissue capable of healing itself and growing new
organs.15 In this manner, the artists offer an alternative to the
official practice of preservation and memorialization by adding
the intangible dimension of heritage to a site-in-conflict.
Two installations from the series are particularly effec-
tive in performing this alternative mode of preservation. In

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Figure 5. Hanna and Hila Lulu Lin Rainy Day (2003), the floor of the house was densely covered
Farah Kufr Bir‘im, Rainy Day, 2003,
with red bowls that could have served for traditional rainwater
site-specific installation, mixed media,
Kufr Bir‘im. Courtesy of the artists. harvesting. The uneven spreading of the bowls on the floor
followed the shape of the ceiling that had collapsed during the
IDF’s bombing. From a distance the visual effect was of a red
carpet, ready to honor the visitors or the landlords. At the same
time, however, it was clearly unstable — a carpet on which no
one could step, and metaphorically unsettling — a carpet of
blood flowing out of the house’s remains (Figure 5).
In Hosting (2004) the artists’ intervention combined
performance with a photographic installation. They arranged
stools around a traditional coffee table, inviting the visitors to
reenact a daily ritual of hospitality. Around the walls, they set
up poles with photographs of dead family members. The inner
space was thus dedicated to the living and the space around
it to the dead. It was an invitation to participate in a coffee
ceremony honoring the Farahs who had passed away.
The openings in the walls that mark the absent windows
were covered with “Arab cloth,” a textile similar to linen. The
artists stretched the textiles like flat curtains by sewing a series
of pockets at the lower part of each textile and inserting into
them weights out of stones from the ruined floor. The absent

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Figure 6. Hanna and Hila Lulu Lin Farah ceiling was covered with sheets of fabric that was used for
Kufr Bir‘im, Hosting, 2004, participatory
blankets. They stretched the ceiling with weights that they
site-specific installation, mixed media,
Kufr Bir‘im. Courtesy of the artists. made by filling loaves of bread with concrete cast, which were
hanging on the outer walls. They tied the blankets to the inner
walls with exposed ropes that seemed like extended arms
refusing to let go. On the cushion of each stool they placed
a stone from the village site that disturbed the invitation to
sit down. This act obliged the participants to choose whether
to displace the stone and re-place it in the ruins, sit with the
stone on their laps, or leave the stone on the stool and remain
standing. All three choices would force them to bear the heavy
burden of the displaced stone, whether physically or symboli-
cally (Figure 6).16

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 The artists adopt a participatory art practice by inviting
friends, family, and community members to participate in their
intervention by collaborating in its installation, dismantling,
and performing on site. Because the common denominator
is the presence of the body, the artists, as well as the partici-
pants, succeed in reviving and restoring their memories. The
room is enlivened by the flood of private memories, thereby en-
livening the village with collective memory.17 By accessing the
layered history of the site the artists thus offer an alternative
to hegemonic practices of conservation and memorialization —
their staged hospitality, rainwater collection, etc., rehearse
their intangible heritage.

Art as Preservation
The emphasis on participation, community, and activism that
we review in this paper belongs to the intellectual climate that
has developed since the 1990s and is shared by multiple and
interrelated fields. Here we suggest to look at the reciprocity
between contemporary art discourse and innovations in the
field of preservation. In contemporary art discourse the discus-
sion of “Esthétique Rélationnel” was introduced by Nicolas
Bourriaud to characterize artistic practice that promotes “the
realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than
the assertion of an independent symbolic space.”18 Relational
art has theoretically grounded various types of artistic prac-
tices that prevail in the last decades, such as participatory art,
community-based art, and socially engaged art projects. All
practices broaden the artistic toolbox to include a collaborative
dimension of social experience that facilitates a closer affinity
between art and life in a given space.
Ensuing theoretical debates have questioned the social-
political perspective of the relational aesthetics, and the gap
between symbolic and substantive values of these artworks.
Critics such as Claire Bishop sought in the practice of inter-
personal relationship a greater emphasis on social change
and political activism. She suggested the notion of “Rela-
tional Antagonism” to critically argue for the lack of essential
prerequisites that prevent the artwork from becoming a politi-
cal action (Figure 7).19
Related ideas have also affected the formal UNESCO
conventions and charters that have steered in recent years the
field of preservation, leading to radical changes within heritage
discourse and policy.20 As a result, the agenda of contemporary
preservationists leans toward locality, communal culture, and
sustainability, emphasizing the role of local communities in
preserving their cultural heritage.21 This includes the legitima-
tion of values such as participation by local communities. For

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Figure 7. Hanna and Hila Lulu Lin Farah example, UNESCO’s “Convention for the Safeguarding of the
Kufr Bir‘im, Hosting (detail), 2004,
Intangible Cultural Heritage” from 2003 recognizes
participatory site-specific installation,
mixed media, Kufr Bir‘im. Courtesy of
the artists. that communities, in particular indigenous communities,
[ . . . ] play an important role in the production, safeguard-
ing, maintenance and re-creation of the intangible cultural
heritage, thus helping to enrich cultural diversity and
human creativity.22

The present zeitgeist also motivates nongovernmental orga-

nizations (NGOs) and private agencies to expand the strict
traditional codes of the discipline to include social, communal
and cultural values in the context of intangible heritage.23
Moreover, we are currently witnessing emerging practices such
as “experimental preservation,” which is politically commit-
ted to deal with ignored and excluded objects considered
unworthy of preservation by official narratives.24 This expanded
concept allows, especially in sites of conflict, enactment of
radical forms of community countermemory while challenging
the limits of the preservation discourse and extending it toward
an interdisciplinary context.25

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 We studied the art interventions in Kufr Bir‘im in the con-
text of common tendencies within contemporary art and pres-
ervation practices. These interventions appear and disappear,
enact site-specific and participatory methods, and gather as a
result a larger group of social activists on site. The art practices
they put into action empower the struggle of Palestinian evacu-
ees. They succeed to identify the fissures in the Israeli heritage
policy, to unsettle its fixed boundaries, and to allow hidden
layers of intangible heritage to surface. Their impermanence
and nonrecurrence of their work are particularly effective in
cracking the peaceful appearance of the national park, without
violating its authoritative rules. In contested sites such art
as preservation assumes a civic role — it claims the history of
disadvantaged communities and preserves their heritage.

Biography
Irit Carmon Popper is an art curator, PhD candidate and Associate Lecturer at the
Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion IIT. Her research, supervised
by Alona Nitzan Shiftan, evokes new boundaries in the art and architecture histo-
riography discourse. She was awarded the Shlomo Glass & Phany Balaban-Glass
Fund Scholarship for Study and Research (2016) and the Abba Elhanani Prize for
an article on Architecture and Israeli Identity (2017). She graduated with a BA in
Philosophy and Art History and and an MA in Art History from The Hebrew Univer-
sity, Jerusalem, and an MA in Museology Studies from Tel Aviv University. Carmon
Popper participated in the 2016 international conference “Inheriting the City” by
the Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage, Birmingham, held in
Taipei and the 2017 CAA annual conference, New York.
Alona Nitzan-Shiftan is an associate professor at the Technion, where she heads
the Arenson Built Heritage Research Center. She received her PhD from MIT, and her
work has been sponsored by CASVA, Getty/UCLA, and the Frankel Institute at the
University of Michigan. Her research on the politics of architecture and heritage, on
architectural modernism in Israel, and on critical historiography has been widely
published. She was the president of the European Architectural History Network
(EAHN) and co-chairs its international conference on Histories in Conflict, in the
Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Her awards winning book Seizing Jerusalem: The
Architectures of Unilateral Unification was published by University of Minnesota
Press in 2017.

Notes
This paper is part of an ongoing doctoral research in the Faculty of Architecture and
Town Planning at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa. The research
is supported inter alia by the Social Hub Technion and Shlomo Glass & Phany
Balaban-Glass Fund.
1
Ilan Magat, Bir‘am–A Conscripted Community of Memory and the Maintenance of
Voice (Givat Haviva: Shared Society, 2000) [Hebrew]; Yael Guilat, “Between Gush
Halav and Bir’im, between Bar’am and Bir‘im: Questions of Place, Identity and
Memory,” paper presented at the Galilee as a Multicultural Space Conference,
Oranim, 2010 [Hebrew], http://www.academia.edu/7655268/ Yael_Guilat_2012
_Between_Gush_Halav_and_Birim_between_Baram_and_Birim_Questions_of
_Place_Identity_and_Memory_%D7%95n_Hebrew, accessed July 14, 2014; Ayelet
Zohar, “Bir‘im on Caves: Archive of Archives, Photo Essay + Epilogue,” Bezalel:
Journal of Visual and Material Culture 3 (2016), Special issue, Visual Activism, ed.
Dalia Markovich [Hebrew] http://journal.bezalel.ac.il/he /article/3688, accessed
May 25, 2016.
2
The privileging of the past also involves Hebraization of place names to reflect
their Biblical past, as in the case of Bir‘im-Bar’am. See Meron Benvenisti, “The
Hebrew Map,” in Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948,
trans. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000),
1–54; Noga Kadman, Erased from Space and Consciousness: Israel and the Depopu-
lated Palestinian of Villages of 1948 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).
3
See, for example, Jonathan Boyarin, Palestine and Jewish History: Criticism at

41
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 the Borders of Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996);
Raz Kletter, Just Past? The Making of Israeli Archeology (London: Equinox, 2006);
Kadman, Erased from Space and Consciousness.
4
Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and De-
populated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies,
2006) 460–61; Remembering Kufr Bir‘im (booklet), ed. Omar Agbaria (Tel Aviv
Jaffa: Zochrot Association, 2010); Kufr Bir‘im Military Intelligence Village File, The
“Haganah” Archivean electronic file provided by Dr. Rona Sela, March 6, 2017.
5
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2004); Nihad Boqai and Ingrid Jaradat Gassner, Return-
ing to Kafr Bir‘im, trans. Khalil Touma and Simon Boas (Bethlehem: BADIL Resource
Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, 2006); Sarah Ozacky-Lazar,
“Iqrit and Bir‘im: The Full Story,” Skirot al Ha’aravim BaYesrael 10 (Giva’t Haviva:
Institute for Peace Studies, 1993) [Hebrew].
6
See Eyal Zisser, “The Maronites, Lebanon and the State of Israel: Early Contacts,”
Middle Eastern Studies 31, no. 4 (1995): 889–918.
7
William Dalrymple, “Kafr Bir‘im,” in Catastrophe Remembered: Palestine, Israel
and the Internal Refugees: Essays in Memory of Edward W. Said (1935–2003), ed.
Nur Massalha (New York: Zed Books, 2005), 171–75; Morris, The Birth of the Pales-
tinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 505–6; Norma Musih, Re:Form–A Model: Hanna
Farah Kufr Bir‘im, exhibition catalog, trans. Charles Kamen (Jaffa: Zochrot Gallery,
2011).
8
Architect Zeev Margalit, the NPA’s conservation director, initiated the Bar’am
National Park. Architect A. Dvir was the park’s planner. See Ozacky-Lazar, “Iqrit
and Bir’im.”
9
Boqai and Gassner, Returning to Kafr Bir‘im, 88–92.
10
Boqai and Gassner, 101.
11
Currently known also in its Hebraized form as Gush Halav, al-Jish is one of the
villages to which IDPs from Kufr Bir‘im were forced to move, and where many of their
descendants still live.
12
Musih, Re:Form–A Model.
13
Boqai, Returning to Kafr Bir‘im, 85.
14
Email correspondence with the artists, March 6, 2017.
15
Musih, Re:Form–A Model; Guilat, “Between Gush Halav and Bir’im.”
16
Zach Cohen, “The Forth Wall” (MA thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, 2012), 6.
17
Tal Ben Zvi, Sabra: Representations of the Nakba in Palestinian Art Created in
Israel (Tel Aviv: Resling-Art series, 2014), 190 [Hebrew]; Musih, Re:Form–A Model;
Guilat, “Between Gush Halav and Bir‘im.”
18
Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October, no. 110 (Fall
2004): 53–54, qtd. from Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses
du Réel, 2002), 14. See also Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction, Culture as Screen-
play: How Art Reprograms the World (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2002).
19
Bishop, “Antagonism,” 77–79. See also, for example, Bishop, Artificial Hells: Par-
ticipatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012); Hal Foster,
“Chat Rooms,” in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2006), 190–95; Boris Groys, “On Art Activism,” E-flux 56, 2014, http://www.e-flux
.com/journal/56/60343/on-art-activism/, accessed May 8, 2015; Miwon Kwon, One
Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2002).
20
For example, “Charter on the Built Vernacular Heritage” (1999) ICOMOS website,
http://openarchive.icomos.org/431/, accessed December 4, 2018; “Convention for
the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH)” (2003) UNESCO website,
https://ich.unesco.org/en/convention, accessed March 7, 2017; Convention on the
Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005), UNESCO
website, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001429/142919e.pdf, accessed
June 2, 2017.
21
Jukka Jokileto, A History of Architectural Conservation (New York: Routledge,
2017), 19, 303; Noha Nasser, “Planning for Urban Heritage Places: Reconciling, Con-
servation Tourism, and Sustainable Development,” Journal of Planning Literature 17,
no. 4 (2003): 467–69; Keren Metrany, “The ‘Listed Asset’ and Its Surroundings: The
Case of the Old City Center of Tel Aviv” (PhD diss., Bar-Ilan University, 2008), 16–24
[Hebrew].
22
“Text of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage,” UNESCO
website, Intangible Cultural Heritage, http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en
/convention, accessed March 7, 2017.
23
For example, REWAQ in Ramallah and DAAR in Beit Sahour are Palestinian NGOs
active in transforming concepts of architectural conservation and culture heritage to
community economic development based on resident participation.

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 24
Jorge Otero-Pailos, “Experimental Preservation,” Places Journal (September 2016):
2–3, https://placesjournal.org/article/experimental-preservation/, accessed
September 28, 2016.
25
See Otero-Pailos, Erik Fenstad Langdalen, and Thordis Arrhenius eds., Experimen-
tal Preservation, (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2015), 7–8; James Marston Fitch,
Historic Preservation: Curatorial Management of the Built World (New York: McGraw-
Hill Book Company, 1982).

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