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Planning in minority communities requires attention not only to physical and spatial conditions but also to the social relations, everyday practices, and meanings through which residents experience and understand place (Jabareen, 2014; Totry-Fakhoury & Alfasi, 2017). These dimensions may be particularly important in contexts where access to land, housing opportunities, and future development are shaped by distinctive ownership structures and by complex relationships between local communities and planning institutions. This study examines these relationships in Majdal Shams, a Druze minority community in the Golan Heights characterized by predominantly private landownership, limited land mobility, housing pressures, and a complex geopolitical context. It asks how residents’ everyday knowledge of place becomes visible within planning processes and how it encounters the forms of knowledge through which planning institutions make spatial decisions.
The analysis draws primarily on 157 formal objections submitted through the planning system regarding the Majdal Shams Comprehensive Master Plan, alongside planning documents, institutional responses and protocols, and semi-structured interviews with actors involved in the planning and objection processes. The objections initially appear as responses to specific planning interventions, including the designation of private parcels, proposed roads, residential development, agricultural land, public uses, and the distribution of development rights. Yet their analysis reveals that these claims are embedded in broader social and spatial realities that extend beyond the immediate plan and, in some cases, have developed over years and generations. The objections thus provide an empirical lens through which apparently technical planning disputes can be examined in relation to the everyday realities in which they are situated.
Land ownership emerged as particularly significant, both because of the meanings residents attribute to privately owned land and because of the broader ownership structure within which housing opportunities are produced. The findings suggest that Majdal Shams’ housing shortage cannot be understood solely as a shortage of land designated for residential development. It is also shaped by a highly concentrated structure of private landownership, the limited tradability of land, and the limited availability of public mechanisms that can provide housing opportunities for residents who do not own developable land.
Under these conditions, access to housing is unevenly distributed: owning suitable land may allow a household to build, while residents without such land face far fewer alternatives. The structure of landownership therefore becomes closely intertwined with housing inequality and heightens the importance attributed to privately owned land. The objections further indicate that this importance extends beyond the individual landowner and the economic value of property. Private parcels are frequently understood as family resources connected to housing needs, children, and future generations. A parcel may therefore represent not only present ownership but one of the limited options available to secure a family's future housing needs. Planning interventions that affect the development potential of privately owned land can therefore intersect with family continuity and younger generations' ability to remain and build within the locality.
This context also helps explain the significance attributed to agricultural land. Agricultural parcels are not understood solely through their productive use or formal land-use designation. In a context of land scarcity, concentrated private ownership, limited land tradability, and constrained housing opportunities, agricultural land becomes part of the broader question of access to land and future development. At the same time, these lands carry agricultural, economic, familial, landscape, and cultural meanings. Agricultural land therefore occupies a complex position: it is simultaneously connected to cultivation and livelihood, private and family ownership, attachment to place, and expectations concerning future generations. These overlapping meanings demonstrate how an intervention that appears within planning as a question of land use may intersect with multiple dimensions of residents’ everyday lives.
The objection process therefore served a function beyond its statutory role. It created an arena in which residents articulated and documented aspects of their everyday relationships with land and place within a formal planning procedure. Importantly, this does not mean that all such knowledge existed beforehand as clearly formulated claims waiting to be communicated to planners. Some of it was embedded implicitly in everyday practices, family arrangements, expectations, and relationships with land. Encountering the plan required residents to articulate why a particular intervention mattered, thereby transforming aspects of lived experience into claims that could enter the planning process.
Yet this articulation occurred at the objection stage, when the plan had already been substantially developed—a limitation previously identified in research on public participation in the Israeli planning system (Alfasi, 2003; Eshkol & Eshkol, 2017). This temporal gap raises a central question concerning planning under uncertainty: what remains uncertain to planners and planning institutions when important dimensions of everyday life become visible only after major spatial decisions have already been formulated? Here, uncertainty cannot be understood solely as an absence of information. It may also arise from a gap between the categories and forms of knowledge through which planning institutions understand a place and the ways residents experience, use, and value that place. The question is therefore not whether planning can eliminate uncertainty, but whether earlier encounters with local knowledge can make some of these relationships visible before they emerge as objections to an already-developed plan.
A second planning process, operating at a higher level of the planning hierarchy, provides another perspective on this question. Unlike the comprehensive plan, this process introduced a large-scale infrastructure intervention into agricultural lands closely connected to local cultivation and private landownership. Residents’ concerns extended beyond whether agricultural cultivation could technically continue following the intervention. They linked the proposed changes to private ownership, agricultural livelihoods, landscape and tourism, family and community practices, and future development possibilities. Residents and local representatives repeatedly sought to communicate their concerns to planning institutions as the project advanced, yet these attempts did not develop into a sustained dialogue capable of addressing the contested issues. The disagreement therefore persisted beyond statutory approval and became particularly visible when implementation began, culminating in confrontations on the ground.
This process reveals a different moment of planning uncertainty: What happens when a formally approved decision made at a higher level of the planning hierarchy encounters, during implementation, the everyday uses and meanings of the land it seeks to transform? It highlights how different forms of knowledge and competing considerations are recognized and weighted in decision-making, including the relationship between broader planning objectives and locally articulated needs. From this perspective, uncertainty concerns not only what is known when a decision is made but also what may happen when unresolved differences between planning priorities and local understandings of place materialize on the ground.
A third planning arena emerged from within the community itself. In response to local land and housing needs, community actors initiated a spatial planning effort grounded in detailed knowledge of community needs, social relations, landownership, and the difficulties younger generations face in securing housing. Here, the relationship between knowledge and uncertainty appears from the opposite direction. Translating this local and social knowledge into spatial planning required professional and procedural capacities as well as coordination with the formal planning system. The process generated difficulties and social disagreements, but these cannot simply be interpreted as evidence that community-led planning is ineffective. Rather, they expose another form of disconnection between knowledge and planning capacity.
The three planning arenas therefore reveal different dimensions of the same problem. Formal planning institutions possess professional, statutory, and procedural tools but may have limited access to, or encounter only later, knowledge embedded in everyday local life. Community actors, by contrast, may possess extensive knowledge of local needs, social relations, land, and everyday practices without equivalent access to professional planning tools, procedural knowledge, or institutional coordination. The distinction between expert and local knowledge is therefore insufficient. Neither can substitute for the other.
The findings therefore point to the importance of how knowledge becomes articulated, recognized, translated, and incorporated into spatial decision-making. Knowledge embedded in everyday life may remain implicit until a planning intervention makes its implications visible; once articulated, however, it does not necessarily become legible in professional planning terms or receive meaningful weight in decision-making. Previous research on the Israeli objections process has similarly shown that institutional responses vary by actor and that ordinary citizens and Arab objectors face particular limitations in having their objections accepted (Talia Margalit & Adriana Kemp, 2019). Conversely, extensive local knowledge does not necessarily give communities the professional and institutional capacities needed to translate it into feasible spatial planning.
From this perspective, planning uncertainty in minority communities emerges not only from what is unknown, but also from when and how knowledge becomes visible, whose knowledge is recognized, and how different forms of knowledge are translated and weighted in decision-making. The three planning arenas show how this uncertainty can surface at different moments: through objections when local knowledge enters an already-developed comprehensive plan; during the implementation of higher-level planning decisions, when unresolved differences encounter everyday realities on the ground; and in community-initiated planning, when local knowledge must itself be translated into professional and procedural forms.
The findings suggest the value of a more place-based approach to planning minority communities. Such an approach would treat the local “fingerprint” of a place—including patterns of landownership, family and social structures, everyday spatial practices, local identities, and the meanings attributed to land—as part of the knowledge base from which planning begins, rather than primarily as information encountered through later opposition. This does not imply replacing professional planning knowledge with local knowledge, nor does it suggest that uncertainty can be eliminated. Rather, it calls for an earlier and more continuous encounter between different forms of knowledge. Such an encounter may enable planning institutions and communities to better navigate uncertainty by making social and spatial implications visible earlier in the planning process, rather than primarily through later objection, conflict, or implementation difficulties.
References
Alfasi, N. (2003). Is Public Participation Making Urban Planning More Democratic? The Israeli Experience. Planning Theory & Practice, 4(2), 185–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649350307979
Eshkol, B., & Eshkol, A. (2017). Participatory planning in Israel: From theory to practice. Journal of Place Management and Development, 10(3), 213–239. https://doi.org/10.1108/JPMD-07-2016-0042
Jabareen, Y. (2014). ‘The right to the city’ revisited: Assessing urban rights – The case of Arab Cities in Israel. Habitat International, 41, 135–141. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2013.06.006
Talia Margalit & Adriana Kemp. (2019). Stratified and defensive planning democracy: Hearings on objections to plans in nine Israeli cities. 56(16), 3504–3521.
Totry-Fakhoury, M., & Alfasi, N. (2017). From abstract principles to specific urban order: Applying complexity theory for analyzing Arab-Palestinian towns in Israel. Cities, 62, 28–40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2016.12.001