Contesting Spatial Injustice: Palestinian Housing Cooperatives, Collective Agency and Transformative Resilience in Jerusalem

Cooperative Housing has become a vital participatory urban strategy to address the growing housing challenges of the 21st century, particularly in contexts marked by political, socio-economic and spatial inequalities. This paper examines cooperative housing in East Jerusalem as a form of transformative resilience that operates under conditions of colonial domination and spatial injustice. In response to the systemic challenges confronting the Palestinian housing sector—including the denial of building permits, land confiscation, restrictive planning regimes, and the absence of equitable legal and institutional frameworks—this paper explores locally driven cooperative housing initiatives as alternative pathways for securing housing rights and sustaining urban presence. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of spatial injustice, transformative resilience, and participatory design, and drawing on selected Palestinian-led cooperative housing cases, the study demonstrates how communities mobilize collective action, shared resources, and participatory processes to navigate exclusionary planning systems and resist spatial injustice. By examining the relationship between participatory design and transformative resilience, this paper highlights the critical role of community agency in producing adaptive, inclusive, and context-sensitive spatial practices. It contributes to broader debates on housing justice by demonstrating how cooperative models can challenge dominant housing paradigms, and offer alternative frameworks for collective governance, spatial empowerment, and transformative resilience in contexts shaped by persistent inequality and political constraints.