London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

This paper considers how Israelis living in the northern Galilee use their home bomb shelters to imagine, forecast, interact with and creatively manage the future. Bomb shelters, ubiquitous throughout Israel, are part of the infrastructure of war and Occupation, and are also sites where visions of future safety, security, risk, comfort and wellbeing intersect. Using ethnography, the paper examines wellbeing through the prism of infrastructure, temporality and personhood. This provides broader insight into the illusive cultural dynamics that shape people’s visions of the future - as well as how wellbeing is forecasted and managed from the present.