Samir Harb: Cement Entanglements
Cement, Control, and Urban Annihilation
in the Palestinian Territories
Al-Asr العصر, © Samir Harb, February 2025
The lecture by Samir Harb offers a critical analysis of cement-based concrete
in the Palestinian territories from an urban and political ecology perspective. It examines cement as a multi-scalar network
entangled with power relations, territorial conflict, land acquisition, exclusion, political desires, and the limits of urban
metabolism. As a substance, it plays an active role in urbanisation and construction projects in the West Bank. Control over
its circulation consolidated the power over urban metabolism. Establishing independent cement plants requires sovereignty
over land and energy resources. And finally, the destruction of Gaza shows us that this material’s agency is no longer seen
as a banal modern construction material but rather as an activated weapon for urban annihilation.
Samir Harb is a human geographer and trained architect whose work examines the material politics
of urbanisation, infrastructure, and the environment, with a focus on cement and its production networks. He completed his
PhD at the University of Manchester on how cement shapes urban and territorial transformations in Palestine, linking production
to questions of sovereignty and political autonomy. As a postdoctoral researcher in Berlin, he extended this research to European
cement industries, net-zero CO₂ agendas, and the political ecology of decarbonisation. Harb is also an artist whose graphic
novels and mappings visualise complex spatial and political processes internationally.
Studio Space Popular in
collaboration with Österreichische Gesellschaft für Architektur. Moderated by Anousheh Kehar / Studio SPoP, Nina Kolowratnik
/ÖGFA
The event is hybrid: To attend online, please register at studio.space.popular@uni-ak.ac.at 
