City of Collision; Jerusalem and the Principles of Conflict Urbanism

  “City of Collision; Jerusalem and the Principles of Conflict Urbanism,”

edited by Philipp Misselwitz et al (Birkhäuser XXX)

Book review by Robert Bevan (author of "The Destruction of Memory") 

In Jerusalem, it is not just the future of the city that is being contested but the past too. Architecture, archaeology and planning have been hitched to the competing claims to the land by two peoples. Whatever is built, destroyed, reworked, re-named, dug up or buried, has profound implications in terms of establishing legitimacy for these claims. These activities are not just carried out, they are continually written about, then those writings are, in turn, interrogated. That is should be so today is both entirely understandable and rather surprising.

Understandable in that Jerusalem ’s various rulers have, for millennia, sought to impose their religious and ideological visions on the corporeal city. Surprising in that, in the modern period, although the people of the book, Christian, Muslim and Jewish, continued to revere the city in liturgical terms, the place itself had become something of a backwater to both Jews and Arabs. Early Zionist settlers thought the city home to superstitious ‘hill people’ and built a Bauhaus-inspired new capital in Tel Aviv instead. Palestinian Arabs looked to Cairo and Damascus for their political fortunes. Until the difficult gestation and eventual birth of state of Israel , Jerusalemites of every faith were, in great part and for many centuries, simply that – co-mingling Jerusalemites who sometimes fought but were basically in it together. That the city is now a lightening rod for the Middle East , and especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is a consequence of the Holocaust, of the resulting militant nationalism and of the Israeli land-grabs since. It is the product of anti-Semitism and of the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. As the religious historian Karen Armstrong has observed: “Jews see Jewish Jerusalem arising phoenix-like out of the ashes of Auschwitz ; Palestinians see the city, now surrounded by Jewish settlements, as a symbol of their own beleaguered identity.”

“City of Collision; Jerusalem and the Principles of Conflict Urbanism,” edited by Philipp Misselwitz et al (Birkhäuser XXX) is the latest in a wall of paper that examines the experience of the city; there is little ‘history’ per se here but every page is, at the same time, saturated with it. It is actually the proceedings of an international academic research programme begun in 2003 and a subsequent conference (November 2004) stitched between two boards and so suffers from the repetitions and disjointedness that such volumes do This is forgivable because it is stuffed with excellent maps and detailed material that remind you of just why the future of Jerusalem is likely to be the most intractable element of any Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.

It begins with a record of a conference discussion dominated by revisionist Israeli historian Meron Bevenisti who in his excellent books has dished up unpalatable truths about Israel ’s founding-myths to his fellow countrymen.

The remaining papers are divided into binary sections: enclaves/exclaves; barriers/links; monuments/no-man’s-lands; confrontation/exchange and, finally, innovation/destruction. These section titles are a good summation of the mosaic complexity of the situation on the ground today where a conflict is being fought out in three-dimensions with bombs and bulldozers, planning rules and drawing boards. The essays within vary between the excellent and the mundane (a minority).

Subjects covered include the wall and tower morphology of early Zionist settlements on occupied territory, the brutal segmentation of the land by the rapidly rising ‘Seam Barrier’ and the appropriation of Palestinian vernacular styles by the ‘sabra’ wave of Israeli architects in the name of establishing a built national identity. And, of course, the building of new settlements on occupied land and the seizure and demolition of Palestinian homes. More than 12,000 have been destroyed since the ’67 war that saw Jerusalem re-united after nearly two decades of partition. If there is anyone who still thinks that the ethical has no place in architectural practice – that politics and speaking out against fellow practitioners’ dubious actions is a distraction from the job, this book should convince them otherwise. Architects and planners are deeply implicated the injustices that are occurring in Israel and the built ‘facts on the ground’ that make peace so elusive.

The book strays way beyond Jerusalem proper because the frontiers of the city are themselves contested; a consequence and a cause of conflict. When Israel was established by the UN, Jerusalem was supposed to be, at least initially, an international city, a ‘corpus separatum’ shared by all. To return to such an arrangement could be a crucial first stage in unravelling the ganglion of hatred but it is a task made intractable by the products of the building professions. Where would you draw the line around a new, international Jerusalem ? What indeed, is Jerusalem these days – the Old City, the massive Jewish settlements ringing its hills, or the most distant of the far-flung semi-military outposts pushing the city borders ever outwards?

Robert Bevan is the author of the recently published The Destruction of Memory ; Architecture at War, (Reaktion).