Template:Did you know nominations/Mixed cities

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Theleekycauldron (talk) 01:42, 3 July 2022 (UTC)

Mixed cities

The mixed city of Nof HaGalil

• ... that Israel's mixed cities don't have much mixing? Source: Hawari, 2019, p.177: This rejection of the "mixed city" notion by Johnny and others reflects the spatial reality on ground and the political and social marginalisation faced by the Palestinian community everywhere inside Israel… The narrative of continuous historical coexistence and a mixed present-day reality in Haifa serves to support Israel's self-image as a pluralist and democratic society. In addition to giving the settler-colonial reality legitimacy, the existence of mixed urban spaces leads many to assume that under the current structures of power, a shared life is possible. The reality, however, is a space in which both Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews live mostly separately and with vastly different experiences.
  Tzfadia 2011, p. 160: "Israeli mixed cities, particularly after 1948, cannot be perceived as multi-cultural cities, a point poignantly reflected in the absence of this term in the indexes of the reviewed books. Although localities were divided between the culturally distinctive Jews and Arabs, the cities still did not bear the potential to become multicultural. This absence of a multi-cultural vision in Israeli mixed cities impinges on the concept of "right to the city." For example, Yacobi maintains that the Arab community in Lod does not enjoy freedom in the city--it lacks the legitimacy to maintain individual and collective identities and lifestyles, to take part in decision-making, and not to be excluded. Thus, Holston's (1999) project to oppose and undermine dominant narratives of the state within the urban framework and to create alternative local narratives that do not necessarily reflect the rationale of the nation, has failed in mixed cities in Israel."
  Yacobi 2009, p. 1: "However, a critical examination forces us to question the term "mixed city," which might originally suggests the integration of society, while instead the reality is controversial. As in other cases of ethnonationalism, a clear spatial and mental division exists between Arabs and Jews in Israel, and hence the occurrence of "mixed" spaces is both exceptional and involuntary. Rather than occurring naturally, it has resulted from a historical process during which the Israeli territory, including cities that were previously Palestinian, has been Judaized. This book attempts to discursivelv undermine the term "mixed city," which raises images of mutual membership while ignoring questions of power, control and resistance."
  • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Habibi (poet)

Created by Onceinawhile (talk). Self-nominated at 21:40, 15 May 2022 (UTC).

• Comment: I get that Google pushes the Israeli use to the fore but, no, this term has been in common use since the mid-1800s. The fact so many cites are "sneer quoting" the term suggests they're just calquing some Hebrew term and don't really consider it the main and proper meaning of mixed city in English. This article shouldn't be parked at the main namespace here, and fwiw the plural form is also wrong. It should be at something like Mixed city (Israel). — LlywelynII 04:42, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

The use of the title Mixed cities without any form of disambiguation is supported by peer-reviewed scholarly research in the

ISSN 0096-1442

. A search for the phrase mixed cities in English, conducted on Google on June 14, 2020, unequivocally showed the significantly frequent usage of the term in its exceptional Israeli interpretation even if English is used. Of the first forty results, twenty-eight (70%) were about Jewish Arab cities in Israel. Most of these entries referred to quotidian matters and much less so to scholarly studies. Six (15%) denoted articles about the "Most Diverse Cities in America" and in the world. Four (10%) dealt with the notion of mixed use in city planning and various functions; one (2.5%) addressed Apartheid South Africa's so-called "grey" inner cities areas. The last reference (2.5%) was to an article in the British newspaper The Guardian, written by the influential urban scholar Saskia Sassen, in which she enthusiastically characterized the "mixed city" as a social, ethnic, and cultural barricade to the ills of globalization. A search for the term mixed cities in English as an exact phrase (set within quotation marks) produced similar results: thirty-six entries out of the first forty (90%) concerned Israel's multi-ethnic/multi-national urban space.10 These entries comprised many daily reports along with some references to scholarly studies, underlying the fact that this concept is widely used not only in research literature but mainly in discussing daily life in Israel. Similar searches in leading journals of Urban Studies and in Google Scholar produced comparable results to the searches cited above. Thus, a search on Google Scholar on February 17, 2021, for the term mixed cities, found that fifteen of the first twenty results (75%) were about scholarly publications that discussed Jewish Arab urban space in Israel or in British Palestine. An exact search, set in quotation marks, produced even more significant results, as eighteen of the first twenty entries (90%) led to scholarly publications on Palestine/Israel's Arab Jewish urban spaces. Moreover, the above-mentioned searches unequivocally show that an overwhelming majority of scholars who employed the terms mixed cities or mixed towns in their studies of the Arab Jewish urban scene in Israel went through some of Israel's formal and informal socialization systems. These include mainstream Israeli Jewish scholars as well as Arab scholars who were educated in Israel and critical Israeli Jewish scholars. Since most research on this urban space is conducted by these scholars, the unique employment of this term inadvertently creates an exceptional interpretative framework. As mentioned above, as a graduate of that hegemonic discursive regime myself, I have also used that term in a previous publication. Hence, the current critical look is also a self-critical examination of the power of hegemonic discourse on one's own identity construction and scholarly work.

As to the origin of the term, Karlinsky writes: "scholars concluded that the term was coined by the British authorities during the time Britain controlled Palestine as a League of Nations’ Mandatory Power (1918-1948)." He goes on to argue the British borrowed it from Zionist discourse (which was written in many languages including English).

This is also underpinned by the fact that in 20 years of Wikipedia each of the terms "Mixed cities", "Mixed city", "Mixed towns" or "Mixed town" have remained unused and never even been a redirect.

Onceinawhile (talk) 07:00, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

Pretty sure I just said that Google wasn't a reliable source for this. Finding a printed work using an unreliable methodology doesn't validate the same unreliable methodology. It just means you found a shoddy source and still need to fix the namespace. Even within Google, the 2nd highest scoring 'mixed city' is Kirkuk, which (last time I checked) still wasn't within Israel even under the widest territorial claims. See also here for the JUH’s general provincialism and shoddiness, not that it matters given the obviousness of the problem. As far as needing to see broader use of the term, cf various standard phrasings like "mixed cities of the" ~ (ranks just below "mixed cities of Haifa...") and the results range from the ancient Near East to imperial Germany. More generally, "mixed cities of" pulls up modern Israel, ancient Israel, modern Israel, Central Europe, London & Westminster, modern Israel but *not* talking about the formal designation you mean, ancient Israel, ancient Israel, North Africa, modern Israel, ancient Israel, ancient Israel, modern Israel, central Iraq, modern Israel, North Africa, early modern Israel (not the formal designation you mean), British India, modern Israel, the towns of the European Diaspora of Jews, modern Israel, the Ancient Middle East, &c. You're batting about 30-40%, which is a lot but doesn't make this the PRIMARYTOPIC for the lower-case words. Alternatively, if you truly hate dabbing, just capitalize it as a formal class designation instead of a general use of "mixed" + "city", which isn't Israeli focused in the English language.