ABSTRACT
From which historical point should a study of the spatial transformation of a given city begin? Such a question stands at the core of all research that aims to study the interelation between politics and space in the urban context. My choice to begin the spatial transformations of Lod in the context of the British Mandate period (1920-1948)1 is not arbitrary. Rather, I recognize the power of the discourse of modernity in this period in relation to space production in Mandatory Palestine, which was similar to that in other regions under British rule (Jacobs 1996). The practice of urban planning during this time became an important agent of modernization that often masked other imperial interests. In light of the epigraph above, this chapter demonstrates how the scientific idiom of the early twentieth century shaped the “science of planning” in order to solve the “arithmetic problem” of space, and thus accumulated influence as a progressive tool of governmentality during the Mandate period. However, as we shall also see, planners were simultaneously responding to contemporary notions of historical preservation, which frequently conflicted with the call for modernization.
