Professor Oren Yiftachel and Belfast Project Workshop, February/March 2009

‘Conflict in Cities’ along with the School of Geography in Queens University Belfast hosted a visit by project partner Oren Yiftachel of Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, under the School’s Visiting Professorship scheme. Prof. Yiftachel is a leading Israeli political and urban geographer who is also developing his own 'divided cities' project ‘Comparing Ethnocratic Cities’.  His lecture and seminar presentations on the current situation in Israel-Palestine and on his wider comparative project were attended by the members of the project team based in Belfast, and he conducted individual tutorials with the three Belfast-based PhD students. Wendy Pullan came over to join in the discussions with Yiftachel, and a half-day workshop involving the Belfast team discussed both projects and their common themes, and on-going empirical work on the use of public space by mothers with young children in selected areas of Belfast.