Jonathan Rock Rokem

• BA(hons), MSc, PhD
• Associate Professor in Politics and Sustainability at Northeastern University London

This paper assesses ways in which urban segregation is shaped and transformed by Jerusalem’s public transport network, enhancing mobility and potential group encounters. We suggest that segregation should be understood as an issue of mobility and co-presence in public space, rather than the static residential-based segregation that continues to be...

These interventions in urban geopolitics recognise that it is timely to develop a research agenda that reinforces, broadens and regenerates this field, bridging the disciplines of political geography, urban studies, planning and architecture in renewed ways.

This paper assesses how spatial configurations shape and transform individual and collective forms of urban violence, suggesting that geographies of urban violence should be understood as an issue of mobility. We document and map violent events in Jerusalem, assessing the possible impact of street patterns: segmenting populations, linking populatio...

This article assesses how urban segregation and ethnic diversity in Stockholm have been shaped by spatial policy and migration trajectories over time. Much of the urban studies and planning literature defines segregation as a measure of residential mixing. In contrast, our research suggests that segregation could be understood as a lack of opportun...

“The MAPURBAN project led by academic researchers in collaboration with public authorities and local municipalities in Berlin, London and Stockholm has in this report summarised and contextualised place-specific knowledge. It is tailored for policy makers and practitioners working in the field of migration and urban planning allowing for a mutual l...

Cities and Multiple Nationalisms - Mapping Conceptual Territories Throughout history, cities and nations have hosted overwhelming political transformations. The 21st Century, however, appears to signal new directions given the rise of tensions between multiple forms of nationalism and the politics of cities (Yiftachel and Rokem 2021; Avni 2021; Ge...

This special issue explores geographies of peace in violently contested cities-cities where the socio-political order is contested by actors who use violence and repression to either challenge or reinforce the prevailing distribution of power and political, economic , and social control. The articles within the special issue theorise and explore wh...

The extent to which ‘geographies of encounter’ facilitate tolerance of diversity and difference has long been a source of debate in urban studies and human geography scholarship. However, to date this contestation has focused primarily on hyper-diverse cities in the global north-west. Adapting this debate to the volatile conditions of the nationall...

Political geographers have recently renewed conversation on the spatialities of exclusionary neonationalism, surfacing in the form of right-wing political populism (Casaglia et al, 2020), Islamophobia (Koch and Vora, 2020) and neo-colonial relations (Avni, 2020). These insightful commentaries, however, are yet to address an important political-geog...

Call for papers ----------- ----------- The Cities & Nationalism Symposium 2.0 – Comparing Conflicts Across Geopolitical Faultlines provides a platform to bring together researchers working at the forefront of urban studies, urban and political geography, architecture and planning to allow for a continued comparative exploration across regional...

Reading Reece Jones’s Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. 224 pages, Verso, New York and London (2017), p. £16.99 (hardback), ISBN: 9781784784713 - - Book Review Forum, Published online in Political Geography Journal - 6th January 2020 - access to published version: - - [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.102129] - This forum is...

This is a call for papers for a special issue on the topic of Urban peace and conflict – exploring geographies of hope and despair in violently contested cities. We invite contributions that theorise and explore where, how, when, and why urban conflict manifests itself as well as contributions that theorise and explore strategies and mechanisms tha...

Jerusalem represents a rather exceptional urban case study because of its unique position as the global center of the three largest monotheistic religions since biblical times. Jerusalem is both a symbolic and a tangible focal point in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; and competing religious and political narratives have affected its development....

Call for Papers RGS-IBG_2019 Conference, London, August 27-30 Urban Violence in Troubled Cities - Towards Comparative Geographies of Hope Session Conveners: Jonathan Rokem Rock, School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent (j.rock@kent.ac.uk) Emma Elfversson, Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University (emma.e...

This paper assesses how spatial configurations shape and transform individual and collective forms of urban violence, suggesting that geographies of urban violence should be understood as an issue of mobility. We document and map violent events in Jerusalem, assessing the possible impact of street patterns: segmenting populations, linking populatio...

This article explores the role of planning in the deeply divided and politically polarized context of Jerusalem. The overall argument developed throughout the article is that the relation between planning and politics is a non-hierarchical set of interactions, negotiated within specific historical, geographical, legal and cultural contexts—in other...

This paper’s core argument is that we should start creating theories that encompass different cities and include them in a more flexible and relational comparative framework. This must include a new urban terminology which does not continue the all-too-fashionable labelling of cities on a continuum between first world and third world, global North-...

This paper explores the role of planning in the deeply divided and politically polarized context of Jerusalem. The overall argument developed throughout the paper is that the relation between planning and politics is a non-hierarchical set of interactions, negotiated within a specific historical, geographical, legal and cultural contexts – in other...

Throughout history, cities have been the theatre of social and spatial struggles. The issue of urban protests, however, has not yet been investigated in detail in the light of the growing concern of the need to rethink urban studies, from theoretical and epistemic assumptions, to methodological issues. It is argued that the mobilisation of urban di...

This article aims at providing a review of various streams of literature dealing with the spatial fragmentation of cities. In the last two decades many different contributions emphasized the growing fragmentation of the urban environment; the idea of “divided city” covers a multiplicity of approaches, methodologies and field of research. Still, the...