BEFORE/ PRESENT STRUCTURES
"The law of the city-state was neither the content of political action, nor was it a catalogue of prohibitions, resting, as all modern laws still do, upon the Thou Shalt Nots of the Decalogue. It was quite literally a wall, without which there might have been an agglomeration of houses, a town (asty) , but not a city, a political community. This wall-like law was sacred, but only the inclosure was political."
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Often seen from a global scale, THE ISRAELIAN-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT must be read and understood at a regional and at an urban scale. If in its socio-economical form, this conflict presents patterns that are easily recognized in many similar cases trough out the world, the particular is made by the way the national identity is built here - in Palestine/ Israel, the national identity is linked with a religious identity (and also with a social identity) - they often fuse and construct each other.
SO WHAT IS THE TRUE NATURE OF THE CONFLICT? The conflict is based on the two narratives, each claiming there is only one true connection with the land (It’s not really a problem of territory, but rather how they invest this territory). Each of the two narratives exclude (and is based on the EXCLSION of) the other. This kind of CON-FRONTATION is characterized on the fact that no one is really FACING the other. No side is truly RECOGNIZING the other side (of course there are exceptions). Instead there is a very complex apparatus dealing with this problem - so an INTER-FACE (ideological or even physical) is created. THE SEPARATION WALL is (only) a visible part of this interface. It function as a LIMIT, a DELIMITATION, as an apparatus for CONTROL, but it is also an act of LEGITIMIZATION of the Israelian state. The others can’t ignore it and, even more, they are forced to be a part of it, in the complex rituals of the passage through the checking points.
An explanation for the current situation is the fact that the two nations are still found in the first faze - the establishment. This lack of RECOGNITION and LEGITIMACY for the other national construct is in fact the lack of recognition and legitimacy for their own national construct (as it is now). A major problem is constituted by the cities caught up in this conflict - the case of Jerusalem being maybe the most well-known and the most dramatic.
Jerusalem/ Al-Quds is a holy-city; because of this it functioned as an world-city and its prestige was international. Jerusalem/ Al-Quds has a hibryd population, a situation not recognized by the national narrative(s), but a situation that must be deal with. The conflict between the two nations has become a conflict between the nation(s) and the city (and its citizens) - Jerusalem/Al-Quds is not recognized a city as such, it is recognized only as a capital for (one of ) the nation(s). Today, Jerusalem/Al-Quds is separated from West Bank by the Separation Wall. The wall affirm the appartenance of Jerusalem as a part of Israel, but seen from the other side, Jerusalem has become only a part of the wall. Quietly, the new Jerusalem is built, as the capital of Israel. But two things happen: first it must be destroied the very complex city it is now to be preserved only as a museum-city, to celebrate complexity, simply, only in its mummified form. (A well-known example is the Museum of Tolerance which is going to be built by the Simon Wiesenthal Center - a museum that will celebrate tolerance but which, will be built on an desecrated muslim cemetery.) And second, Jerusalem/Al-Quds as such seize to exist for the rest of the Palestinian territories. This is a very important issue, because, the Palestinians imagine Jerusalem/Al-Quds as their future capital and, even more important, this city functioned as a very important economical and infrastructural center for West Bank.
AFTER/ PROPOSED STRUCTURES
“What they could not risk was a life-and-death struggle, with no prospect of a compromise at the end; for, in this struggle, the less sophisticated combatant would survive.”
A.P.J. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy
In this context, the question is how to preserve and update Jerusalem’s unique complexity? Or IS IT POSSIBLE TO PRESERVE THIS COMPLEXITY? And CAN JERUSALEM/ AL-QUDS FUNCTION AS A CAPITAL FOR ISRAEL AND FOR THE FUTURE PALESTINIAN STATE?
The answer is EXAPTATION - a concept used in anatomy and behavioral sciences, it describes a shifting of a function of a trait during evolution. Exaptation is a tool which can be used in RE-STRUCTURING present situations, imagining different scenarios, but using the present elements.
As a solutions/ answer to those problems, it can be imagined AN EXTENDED JERUSALEM, governed only by a civil administration in wich both nations could be represented. It won’t function as a state, but as a city. It is a CON - STRUCTION - a structure capable of attracting, adapting and including people. In order to exist, it will use and transform the actual limits - THE SEPARATION WALL will become the wall of the new city; the frontier with Israel may become a wall if necessary, assuring a certain reciprocity but also a desired degree of security for both sides. THE WALL will function as a LEGITIMACY for the city. An inverse process in wich the CONTROL of city (and of THE WALL) is taken from the military and given to a civil administration of Jerusalem/Al-Quds. A Paradigm of contemporary development could be implemented generating a new urban condition in which hibridity is allowed and encouraged; a generic contemporary city, where history is not blotted out, but updated.
It’s unlikely that the social/ethnic/religious divisions could be abolished (in this way). If old borders will be transformed, new borders will appear (inside city walls) and new forms of segregation. But at least, Jerusalem/Al-Quds will have a normal, a functional appearance.
Jury Comments:
I appreciated the variety of geographies, scales and procedures that accompanied the submissions. But at the same time I was surprised at the quantity of entries that were proposing the same approach: The production of neutral, 'free' autonomous zones in-between the conflict. In general, I have grown skeptical of these autonomous zones that only tend to either ghettoize the problem or through their exception remain islands within the archipelago of atomized environments that do little to subvert the existing hegemony of institutional political and economic power. My predilection has been for practices of encroachment that infiltrate themselves into the rigidity of institutions in order to re-configure existing protocols -and in so doing, suggest new spatial and infrastructural organizations.
Because of the brevity of the competition's time period, I wanted to simply focus on seeking compelling 'before-after' diagrams that could suggest such institutional transformations and their visual and physical consequences. Nevertheless, I welcomed many attempts to transcend the 'diagram' and investigate its unfolding within the specificity of architectural schemes.
Also, while I sought compelling images that could trigger ways to re-imagine border regions, I was also seeking their operational dimension, the degree by which they would suggest alternative socio-political and economic procedures. The most dramatic images were backed by intelligent processes and therefore my criteria for evaluation included: the uniqueness of the diagram's intelligence (before-after), the depth of the research and the graphic quality of the investigation.
Two projects came forward: 'Border Archipelagos of Narrow Spaces' and 'Common Visions: The Case of Prespa Region.' Both produced intelligent diagrams that enabled a different conceptual view of the territories they both engaged: whether the amplification of the Mediterranean islands that have become the critical immigration thresholds between two continents, consolidating them into one conceptual system, a new archipelago with alternative political consequences; or the visualization of natural vacant spaces across nations as armatures to imagine more elastic ecological and socio-economic relationships and exchanges. Also I was interested in the way both of these projects moved from broad conceptual and territorial scales to the specificity of local ecologies and city spaces. This simultaneous engagement of the large and the small, the top down and the bottom up, the abstract and the specific is essential to transcend the ideological divide across the institutions of architecture and urbanism.
In addition to these two projects, I selected three mentions: The first one "Metropolitcal Void" was backed up by a very rigorous research and was one of the most visually compelling documents. It took the discussion of geo-political borders to the very scale and contestation of the metropolitan. The most important image from this research, the recuperation of the forest as a mediating space that frames the growth of the city by producing a differential 'in-between' resonated with many other entries that sought a 'free-zone' of exchange and political autonomy. But in my mind the green zone needed to have more complex gradations of green, maybe even tinted with a bit of red: The democratization of space needs to mean more than a top down gestures that emblematize the re-installment of a new politics of the state, through absolutist architectures. The democratization of space and of borders themselves, and hopefully of a new conception of the political, is an inclusive, contested and agonistic process , where consensus and dissent, the planned and the unplanned are in perpetual tension.
The final two mentions, were actual excerpts from two entries: Mediterranean Big Bang and Mediterranean Union. As if their separate titles composed a unified manifesto, these images were extracted from their processes as singularities because of their provocative message. One shows a dramatic view of a mediterranean water-less landscape, fusing North Africa with Europe. The second image is, in a way, one that has been in our collective imagination for a while: the mediterranean as continent, field, elongated -and permeable- circumambulatory boundary where the vectors of force that have shaped it are not inland but on its edges producing a regional consortium of interconnected points. These images suggest an idea that is pressing in our time: that a point of departure to re-imagine geo-political borders today begins by acknowledging the socio-economic and ecological co-dependance and co-existance of these divided territories and regions.
Teddy Cruz
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