Reclaiming space: Mushaʿ land and indigenous urbanization in Ain Al-Basha

Source abstract

Historically, mushaʿ, or communal land, represented a system of collective land ownership and crop rotation that provided social and spatial control over land in Jordan. This system persisted until the British Mandate in the early 20th century, which redefined land ownership toward private control as a means of taxation and sovereignty over the colonized population. Drawing on archival research, mapping, and interviews, this article explores how members of a tribal group have reclaimed land by establishing parallel infrastructures on mushaʿ land along Jordan Street in Ain Al-Basha. This case advances two theoretical contributions to Indigenous urban studies and urban planning scholarship. First, it develops the concept of state flexibility, theorizing uneven and reactive state governance not as planning failure but as a deliberate, situational strategy through which regulations are selectively extended or suspended in relation to historically embedded constituencies. Second, it proposes the dialectic of intention and response as a framework for understanding how Indigenous urban space is co-produced through ongoing negotiation between community agency and state calculation, rather than through straightforward opposition or resistance. Together, these concepts expand the analytical scope of Indigenous urban studies beyond settler-colonial frameworks, foregrounding a global South context in which tribal or Indigenous groups are neither external to the state nor uniformly dispossessed, but deeply entangled in its political and institutional foundations.