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 Cities of CollisionJerusalem is a laboratory of the extremes where radically different cultures and mentalities collide, amongst them a mentality of formal western planning and a culture that is often defined as its polar opposite: the informal. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has transformed these cultural frontiers into an often destructive relationship of dualities and opposites where both sides are unable to understand the other and consider mutual influences. The project Cities of Collision began in 2003, based on a trilateral initiative between Palestinians, Israelis and Germans to investigate the complex patterns and structure of informal housing in East Jerusalem and its relationship to the formal planning applied in West Jerusalem and the settlement areas. This project had two parts: the Grenzgeographien, which is made of a series of workshops, as well as a conference on a parallel line. ten Palestinian, ten Israeli and ten German students began to engage in an analysis of tools and techniques, networks, systems of exchange, processes and motivations, which give rise to both formality and informality. The Grenzgeographien was organized in a series of four workshops with several themes, gathering all the participants into lectures, fieldwork, presentations and research. The first workshop in Jerusalem, "the informal house" focused on the historic Palestinian village of Sur Bahir. Since each group was composed of six mixed members, three groups of students examined on a micro level the practice of informal construction in three case studies, a fourth group examined informal spatial, social and organizational patterns across the entire village. Finally another group considered the relationship between formality and informality on a broader macro scale. The second workshop in Berlin, "Informal Systems" facilitated the discussion and conceptual focusing of the first workshop's results. Through the development of playful scenarios, elements and intrinsic rules of informal systems were tested as potential variables for a new system of controlling urban change. The exercise followed the aim to bridge analysis and urban design by deploying and giving positive dynamics to tools that already exist intrinsically within the practice of everyday life of Sur Bahir. The third workshop attempted to build upon the first two in order to draw conceptual sections through Sur Bahir and Har Homa and detect hybridity and mutual influences between clashing cultural traditions, conceptions of space and mentalities of planning. The workshop focused on the different cultural, political and social meaning of open space or in-between space that is highly impacted by the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. It was indeed found that where Israeli settlements and Palestinian neighbourhoods meet, open spaces had become spaces of decay and fear because of the psychological divide of the two populations caused by the tension of the conflict. At the end of this workshop, the work of the five different groups was compiled in a book that presented their research findings and a website was created as well (http://www.grenzgeografien.org/01_info/01_news/inhaltframe_info_news.htm). Finally, the last workshop welcomed ten new students from Zurich to explore the microcosm of Sur Bahir and settlements in Southeast Jerusalem. The investigations of the past workshops were used to prepare a series of maps that challenge the conventional methodologies of cartographic representations. The aim was to subvert the tools usually used for cartography in order to develop alternative mapping tools that represent the ambivalence and everyday reality of the human condition on the ground. The main result of this experience was the ability to inform and educate architects about the situation in Jerusalem while most of them had very little knowledge of it at this point in time. For the Palestinians and Israelis, these workshops offered a unique opportunity to gain insights into a more global debate on informal urban development within architecture and urban planning. Naturally, for the German students, this project represented a unique experience as well as they had a more complete understanding of how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unfolds on the ground in very surprising ways. In spite of the obvious tensions that occurred during the first workshops, the dialogue and understanding that was made possible through this professional experience between the Palestinians and Israelis was quite a step forward in the comprehension of the conflict itself and possibly, its resolution. |
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