Ludd and Lydda: A Tale of Two Plans

This article discusses a half century of urban transformation in one relatively minor town in Palestine, situated on a major road, under two regimes: the late Ottoman Empire and British Mandate. The changes in Ludd/Lydda are examined through the planning prism. Given the lack of any systematic, official planning in that town before World War I, an attempt is made to reconstruct such a plan out of available documents. Both the real plan one produced by the British colonial mind and the imagined one—produced so to speak by the Indigenous inhabitants as reconstructed here—serve as case study for tracing how the town’s Palestinian inhabitants coped with different regimes until their town was occupied by the Israeli military and they became refugees.