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Short abstract

Environmental contamination is often framed as a crisis demanding urgent remediation. Examining former military-industrial sites in Israel and Palestine, this paper shows how crisis narratives obscure how pollution produces planning paralysis that unintentionally protects urban ecosystems.

Long abstract

Environmental contamination is frequently framed as a crisis demanding urgent remediation and technical intervention. In dominant planning and policy frameworks, pollution appears as a disruption that must be rapidly managed to restore environmental order and enable redevelopment. This paper examines how the category of crisis shapes the way contaminated landscapes are observed, governed, and politically mobilized.

The analysis focuses on three heavily contaminated former military-industrial sites in the Tel Aviv metropolitan region. These landscapes are embedded in the environmental legacies of military-industrial production, occupation, and protracted conflict. Drawing on qualitative analysis of planning protocols, court documents, ecological surveys, and interviews with planners, ecologists, and environmental activists, the paper examines how contamination becomes a specific form of crisis observation within planning and environmental governance.

Paradoxically, the toxicity that renders these landscapes dangerous for human habitation has repeatedly delayed real-estate development, producing prolonged planning uncertainty. In the absence of construction, unexpected ecological assemblages have emerged: rare plant species, wildlife habitats, and informal recreational landscapes flourish because development has been stalled.

Rather than treating contamination as a temporary anomaly demanding resolution, the paper argues that these cases reveal a different dynamic: crisis discourse often obscures alternative socio-ecological realities. By framing contamination primarily as a problem to be solved, crisis narratives legitimize redevelopment projects that would eliminate ecosystems that emerged during decades of planning delay.

The paper therefore analyzes contaminated landscapes as sites where crisis operates as a performative mode of observation, producing epistemic blindness while stabilizing particular political and planning futures.