Placemaking as a Tool of Social Sustainability: Scripts of Palestinian Resistance on the Israeli Segregation Wall

Under spatially oppressed contexts, quality of life becomes a privilege where life is barely guaranteed. Despite several studies discussing the aftermath of wars and military violence on the community's wellbeing and psychological health, the ongoing impact of any spatial violence remains unfolding. Exclusive of embedded human consequences, colonial power destructs physical and social spaces to strip people's sense of ownership, agency, and place. This research is exploring placemaking as a tool of social sustainability that people utilize to resist the ongoing spatial violence. Focusing on occupied Palestine context, this paper discusses the Israeli-built Segregation Wall as an urban violence performed to obstruct normality of Palestinian everyday life. As such, Palestinian graffiti movement expressed on the wall is explored as a creative practice of placemaking intended to resist the status quo and reclaim agency, restore their meaning of place, and achieve communal wellbeing. Based on the dynamics of everyday life expressed through ethnographic interviews, this paper concludes that graffiti on the Segregation Wall is an inseparable tactic of the Palestinian nonviolent resistance strategy and of their overall Sumood against the Israeli occupation. Doing so, this paper contributes to the overall understanding of the interrelations between theories of resistance, placemaking, and social sustainability.