Mapping Jabal Al Natheef

A couple weeks ago, I went to a panel discussion at the Columbia University Middle East Research Center that discussed challenges facing the mostly Palestinian neighborhood of Jabal Al Natheef. The event doubled as a book launch for Mapping Jabal Al Natheef, a joint project between architects and urban planners to map parts of the neighborhood and interview residents about how different aspects of their environment---roads, houses, stairways--- affect their lives.

With successive waves of Palestinian refugees in 1948 and 1967, the neighborhood of Jabal Al Natheef has grown in a very fast manner without central planning. The authors of Mapping Jabal Al Natheef hope that their map can "assist in more precisely diagnosing problems" and serve as a resource for proposals to help the neighborhood deal with problems of overcrowding, narrow streets, and a scarcity of open, public spaces.

From Mapping Jabal Al Natheef

I just finished the book, and of course was looking for mentions of public transportation, my main interest. The only person who brought it up in one of the interviews was a man in his 60s named Abu Awad who said that he is "satisfied with the public transportation, he uses the service taxi route from Natheef to Raghadan".

After hearing so much about the neighborhood, I went and took a service up the mountain, though not the one that Abu Awad mentions. This one started in the Balad and went most of the way up the mountain.

Service: Jabal Al Natheef

At the end of the panel discussion at CUMERC, I spoke with one of the urban planners who very kindly gave me the names of a few people in the Greater Amman Municipality who work in public transportation. As this project progresses and we have something more to offer, I'm looking forward to reaching out to them and hopefully having something of value that the GAM will be interested in using.