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Jerusalem is an ancient cradle of human cul-
ture and one of the most important loci of
three world religions. But as long as the city
has existed, it has been the cause and breed-
ing ground of conflicts, as well as the target
and site of dispute and war. It is both victim
and weapon. During this eventful history, the
city has been destroyed several times, and its
urban fabric exposed to ever-shifting owner-
ship. Different cultures and ethnicities raise
claims to the city as a symbolic cultural centre.
In more recent history, the city has been the
staging ground for 80 years of violent conflict
between Jews and Palestinian Arabs, each nur-
turing a long-established emotional and cultural
attachment to the city, each claiming the city to
be its legitimate capital.
The intense conflict over territorial and demo-
graphic control remained the most crucial
engine for urban change in the city throughout
ist spectacular development from a landlocked
provincial town into a sprawling metropolis.
During this period Jerusalem has become a
laboratory for the production of extreme spa-
tial configurations, an condition that could be
described by the notion of ‘conflict urbanism’:
A conceptual tool to read urban landscapes and
social and cultural behavioral patterns not only
in Jerusalem, but also in other, less extreme
conditions elsewhere.
Conflict Urbanism has produced a city where
modernisation and adaptation always intertwine
with political agendas. It is a city that changes
its physical form, infrastructural systems and
in an accelerated, at times almost daily fashion.
Processes of urban change such as road plan-
ning, closures, construction of walls, fences,
etc. that require year-long planning processes
in Western cities can be implemented virtually
over night – an uneasy, panicked ridden dyna-
mism, that relies on the rapid implementation of
facts on the ground. This permanent state of
radical transformation has involved a dramatic,
physical and demographic growth, as well as
unprecedented decline and destruction.
In this essay we would like to describe some
key aspects that characterize Conflict Urban-
ism, using Jerusalem’s present condition as a
filter.
Enclaves/ Exclaves
Almost forty years after the 1967 Six Day War
and Jerusalem’s military unification, the notion
of the city as the “unified city” remains fragile
rhetorical acrobatics. In reality, residents of
the city do not experience the urban territory
as a continuum, but conduct their everyday lives
within almost completely separate socioeconomic
cultural and spatial systems. Every aspect of
the city is invested with ethnicity, and a com-
plex system of codes (wrought in architecture,
signage, dress, etc.) helps residents to navigate
through perceived safe passages and protected
environments. This extreme level of segrega-
tion has produced a spatial landscape akin to
an “archipelago” of isolated “islands” (Eyal
Cities of
Collision
by Philipp Misselwitz and Tim Rieniets
Weizman) [1]. As soon as Israeli military victory
was achieved, fighting over permanent control
of the city continued by other means. A war of
cement and stone radically changed the urban
fabric, altering its contours from a continuous
borderline(dividing Palestinian East Jerusalem
from Jewish West Jerusalem between 1948 and
1967) to a complex matrix of exclaves (settle-
ments for Jewish Israelis built in annexed East
Jerusalem) and Palestinian enclaves, served
by segregated road systems and surrounded
by buffer zones. While all municipal resources
were mobilized to make a re-division of the
city impossible, East Jerusalem’s Palestinians
refused to assimilate into the Israeli system,
nurturing their own parallel visions of Jerusa-
lem as the religious centre and political capital
of an independent Palestinian state.
The spatial logic of exclaves and enclaves
did not begin with 1967, but date to the very
beginnings of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A
similar simultaneous logic of spatial containment
and territorial control was typical for the plan-
ning of early c20 kibbutzim, often referred to
as “homa umigdal” (“wall and tower”), alluding
to their perimeter wall and watchtower which
protected them against an often hostile sur-
roundings.
In the post-1967 era, the idealistic settlements
of the early Zionist era have been replaced
by large-scale, state-controlled investment
projects. Motivated pioneers eager to construct
a Jewish homeland in Palestine have been
replaced by suburban dwellers seeking conven-
ient, American-style, suburban living. Most of
the current 400,000 Jewish settlers have been
lured across the Green Line by state-subsi-
dized financial incentives rather than a Greater
Israel ideology. Successive Israeli governments
have “succeeded in transforming much of the
settlement enterprise into a socio-economic and
geographical process of metropolitan suburban-
ization” (David Newman).
As a result of intense settlement construc-
tion in East Jerusalem, Palestinian communities
are forced within the spatial containment that
characterizes the settlements: they have lost
their agricultural land reserves and became
enclaves within a space of Israeli hegemony—
remaining largely excluded them from Israeli
political, social, and cultural life. “In the Pales-
tinian-Israeli conflict, the Israeli target is the
place” (Sari Hanafi). “The weapons are not so
much tanks, but bulldozers that have destroyed
streets, houses, cars, and dunum after dunum
(1 dunum equals 1,000 square meters) of olive
groves. It is a war in an age of literal agora-
phobia.”
Discrimination is written into the city’s master
plan, which is based on the declared aim to
facilitate a 70% Jewish majority in Jerusalem.
Yet despite all obvious restrictions, Israel has
not been able to avoid rapid Palestinian popula-
tion growth, exceeding Israeli population growth
by far, and posing a permanent demographic
threat.
Endurance and resilience have been effec-
tive tactics for Palestinians. Prohibited from
expanding beyond established built-up areas,
villages and neighborhoods have become densely
knit, congested, and uncontrollable. Families
invest cash in cement and mortar, upgrades and
small extensions, improving daily life gradually
by adding modern conveniences. The conflict
between modernization and military occupation,
between stubbornly preserved traditions and
new lifestyles, between growing communities
and lack of public institutions forces Pales-
tinian neighborhoods into “urbanization without
urbanity” (Rassem Khamaisi).
Barriers/ Links
In Jerusalem, “[t]he quality, size, and nature
of each road, one might say, is a fair indicator
of whether Palestinians or Israelis move along
it“ (Shmuel Groag). A short drive along one of
the convenient fast highways, with breathtak-
ing desert views, links the settlements of East
Jerusalem to western Jerusalem. Behind the
banality of commuter traffic, however, lays the
same settlement logic. Cutting right through
hostile territory, bypassing Palestinian neigh-
borhoods without distracting their Israeli driv-
ers, commuter cars are the bullets of civilian
warfare.
In contrast, roads in Palestinian neighborhoods
and villages suffer from chronic underinvest-
ment. Residents rely on old, evolved capillary
road systems whose non-hierarchical nature
require familiarity. The result is the parallel
and superimposed existence of two almost com-
pletely separate systems. With such inequality
in spending of municipal resources, urban space
becomes treacherous and unreliable, fuelling
biases and distrust. Indeed, “In Israel, the mun-
dane is a strategic weapon.” (Sharon Rotbard):
a highway directly connecting settlements with
Israeli territory is at the same time an invinci-
ble barrier for Palestinians who live next door,
but have no access to it.
The most obvious and ruthless example of the
dual presence of barrier and links in the same
infrastructural system is the construction of
more than 60 kilometers of Separation Wall in
the Jerusalem area, which has radically altered
physical and socioeconomic realities. Its absurdly
meandering contours, combined with new roads
and tunnels, fulfils the two (at times contra-
dictory) principles of securing a “unified city”
for a Jewish Israeli population while at the
same time excluding many thousand Palestinian
Jerusalemites.
Monuments/ No-Man’s-Land
The Separation Wall has become a photogenic
asset for a global media persistently in search
of new iconic images to represent the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict. But the Separation Wall
can be seen within a much larger historical
continuum that denies Arab Palestinian cul-
tural presence in the region, detectable in the
works of European Christian photographers in
the mid-19th century. Then Palestinian natives
were “reduced to a backdrop upon which the
biblical story could be substantiated, rather
than recognized as a real place in the real
world—attesting to real histories other than
the Judeo-Christian narrative” (Issam Nassar).
From this perspective, Issam Nassar reconsid-
ers the spatial impact of the Separation Wall
and “the effect it has on one’s imagination of
the Other. The issue of seeing, or, in our case,
not seeing, the Other may not be of enormous
consequence in the short run, but…will have
serious long term effects.”
Fear and denial of the Other is equally present
wherever Israeli and Palestinian urban frag-
ments collide and produce a host of frontier
spaces: territories of fear and anxiety, a hos-
tile wilderness, excess space where garbage
is dumped or fragments of ancient agricultural
landscapes disintegrate.
Contradictory elements of decay are juxtaposed
with areas orchestrated by Israeli designers,
producing pockets of a highly-engineered and
aesthetic (yet often equally deserted) land-
scape. The rural has been replaced by the
suburban, the agricultural by the decorative,
all symptomatic of a fight over identity, own-
ership, and aesthetic domination of the urban
landscape.
Design is also strategically used to create
a decorative veneer on spatial planning that
effectively limits the expansion of Palestinian
urban space. Vast tracks of Palestinian pri-
vate land in East Jerusalem have been legally
expropriated and designated as public green
zones blocked from Palestinian construction,
often later to be rezoned for the construc-
tion of Jewish settlements. A naive trust in
professional (versus political) planning ethics
or financial incentives lures Israeli planners to
accept commissions for settlements, blurring
agendas of good design and political planning.
Confrontation/ Exchange
In Jerusalem, xenophobia is heightened and
space is divided into that of “us” and “them,”
resulting in islands of cultural containment
and social exclusion. Wherever possible, the
crossing of ethnic boundaries is avoided. But
a complete physical disengagement is equally
impossible. One of the most notorious sites of
involuntary interaction is Qalandiya checkpoint,
one of the largest checkpoints in the West
Bank, which separates the Palestinian suburbs
of Jerusalem and Ramallah. Drawing on Michel
de Certeau‘s distinction between “strategy,
which is the domain of the powerful who pos-
sess a place and perspective of their own (e.g.
a watchtower) and tactics, which is the “art
of the weak,” those who are limited by the
givens of place and time (...)a degree of Pal-
estinian power and Israeli weakness, a place
of resilience, even defiance. The Palestinians
defy the brutality of the checkpoint with their
very presence—passive in appearance, pacifist
in practice, self-controlled and civil, as they
transverse a threatening, humiliating obstacle”
(Tamar Berger).
Such patterns yield to a muddling of roles,
unveiling the schizophrenic conditions of a city
that is politically “unified” but ethnically divided.
“Tell me, did you occupy East Jerusalem or did
we occupy you?” a Palestinian cab driver from
East Jerusalem asks his Israeli colleague from
West Jerusalem, cynically alluding to his own
Israeli identity card, which allows him to prag-
matically exploit some advantages of access to
the other side. “I go wherever I want. I eat in
your restaurants, sleep with your women, and
take your work. I think it was we who occupied
you in 1967” (Yaakov Garb).
Palestinians often employ tactics that under-
mine and erode the otherwise clear-cut roles
and patterns of occupier and occupied. In light
of the recent housing crunch, Israeli newspa-
pers report an increase in Palestinians consid-
ering buying apartments in Jewish settlements,
which are generally a no-go zone for them. This
trend could undermine Jewish ethnic hegemony
in the settlements, as involuntary pioneers
employ techniques of camouflage and assimila-
tion: a potential “Trojan horse.” [2]
Thus social and economic innovation is born
from need, as one can explore most clearly at
places such as Sudra checkpoint. While suf-
fering from humiliation, endless delays and
obstacles in arriving at school, work, and home,
Palestinians “establish the collectively under-
stood, but individually achieved, daily resistance
of simply getting there.” Nevertheless, “the
unlikely symbols of the new steadfastness are
not “national institutions,” but rather the sub-
proletariat Ford van drivers, whose semi-crimi-
nal bravado is summed up by ubiquitous Nike
“No Fear” stickers emblazoned on their rear
windshields” (Rema Hammami). These entrepre-
neurs are ambiguous figures, easing everyday
oppression but also benefiting from it.
Opportunism also fuels a fragile web of eco-
nomic relationships between Jews and Arabs in
Jerusalem. The proximity of contrasting social
cultures and resources, the asynchronism of
Arab and Jewish religious holidays, as well as
the salary gap between the two groups, has
created economic possibilities for both. Despite
the persistence of two parallel economic cent-
ers, transport, and education systems, approx-
imately half of East Jerusalem’s workforce
migrates into West Jerusalem as day laborers,
while cheaper goods and services in Palestinian
communities lure Jewish Jerusalemites. Although
asymmetric power relations dominate these
economic exchanges, they effectively undermine
the notion of closed borders and strict seg-
regation .
Service economies in West Jerusalem acces-
sible to Palestinian employees—health, trans-
portation, or construction—are the only places
where regular personal exchange takes place
between Jews and Arabs. Despite a backdrop of
fear and hatred, these casual and inconspicu-
ous work encounters in West Jerusalem offer
the opportunity to escape “the posturing and
political declarations about a united/occupied
Jerusalem…[E]veryday passions, kindnesses,
mischief, and creativity weave us together”
(Yaakov Garb).
Innovation/ Destruction
“Kulanu yehudim!” (“We’re all Jews!”), Yaakov
Garb quotes a Palestinian cab driver jokingly
using the phrase Jews, sometimes use to
express brotherly largesse, to allude to the
absurdity of his situation, “ruling” Jerusalem’s
roads with a fleet of yellow cabs. The turn
of phrase is symptomatic for the contradictory
dynamics emerging between the two opposing
groups, each seeking for, and protecting, its
identity, but always in relation to the other.
The involuntary encounter with ‘the other’
present in slang is also registered in fash-
ion, lifestyle or built environment, reflecting
the struggle for identity and spatial belong-
ing. Representations of cultural and political
identity in architecture embody the persistent
tension and contradiction between assimilation
and rejection. For Zionist architects, the crea-
tion of an independent and recognisable Israeli
architecture led initially to the embracing of an
international style, only to be replaced quickly
by a fascination with the forms of Palestinian
Arab villages: “[t]he Israeli desire to achieve
the Arab’s nativeness—which was seen as the
ultimate expression of locality” (Nitzan-Shif-
tan).
The aesthetic appropriation of the Pales-
tinian vernacular into a new style of Israeli
architecture was paralleled by the program-
matic appropriation of a vast stock of build-
ings expropriated from Palestinian refugees.
Especially the homes of middle class Palestin-
ian Arabs were quickly absorbed and divided up
to house newly arriving Jewish immigrants. But
even some of the village architecture, left in
ruins after the fighting of 1948. Many mosques
were turned into museums, restaurants and
cemeteries into parks. A particularly poignant
example of is the home of the Baramki family.
Between 1948 and 1967, the building lay along
the Jordan-Israel no-man’s-land dividing Jeru-
salem. After being confiscated, then serving
as an Israeli military border post, it was later
reopened as the Museum on the Seam, with
the municipality refusing to acknowledge the
Baramki family’s ownership of the home. Today
the Baramki house serves “as a component of a
different architecture of knowledge production”
(Thomas Abowd).
Israeli cultural references are also found on
the Palestinian side. Israeli settlements for
example are often viewed with ambivalence:
symbols of the occupation, yet a window on
modernity and Western life-style at the same
time, admired for their formidable organization
and high-quality construction. These cross-cul-
tural influences do not necessarily travel a
direct route from Israel to Palestine or visa
versa, however. Diaspora links in both com-
munities play a role in these cultural importa-
tions. In fact, this back-door route leads to the
unintended approximation of both groups in the
references of international capitalism. Cultural
and political elites returning to Palestine during
the Oslo period (1994-2000) introduced economic
power and entrepreneurship, as well as new
urban and architectonic models. Palestinian
“gated communities” for new elites resemble
their Israeli counterparts, and even apply set-
tlement security strategies.
As such, beyond the visible processes of nega-
tion, a thin and unconscious cultural exchange
is underway. The result is an unintentional
urban productivity - a common culture located
between the extremes of total rejection, on
one hand, and subtle, unconscious hybridity, on
the other.
However, these quiet tones rendered in architec-
ture, lifestyle, or language are mostly drowned
out by the ongoing noise of the intense con-
flict, which has produced a city that alters its
physical form in an accelerated fashion. Urban
change (Israeli road planning, spatial closures,
construction of walls, fences, but also private
Palestinian homes) that would normally require
lengthy planning processes are implemented
virtually over night—an uneasy, sometimes
panicked dynamism. It is “a policy of scorched
earth, rather than planning...” (Meron Benven-
isti). Nationalist interest determines the city’s
development: political planning by the Israeli
municipality but also the tactical responses of
the city’s Palestinian inhabitants.
Epilog
From a Central European perspective, Jerusalem
is frequently considered an uncanny reminder of
an age long past: a conflict of colonial and ter-
rorist violence that blurs distinctions between
military and civilian, public welfare, and ethnic
discrimination. Western European capitalist
democracy is still seen as a universal concept
dismissing both social revolutions and military
conflict to the periphery of the developing
world. It seemed only natural then, to export
this apparent success story to the Middle
East, Asia, Africa, etc., in the role of morally
superior arbiter engaged in political and moral
mediation. From this skewed perspective, the
roots of aggression such as New York’s Sep-
tember 11th attacks, or the subsequent attacks
in Madrid or London, could only be found in
the jealousy, religious fanaticism, and barbarism
that characterizes an “uncivilized” periphery.
The apparently unexpected return of such vio-
lence to the “First World” city was shocking,
and only seemed to reaffirm fears that “out
there“ barbarism still prevailed—now in the
form of militant Islamic terrorism. In this light,
Jerusalem’s violent urban context appears as
a dangerous disease from which we must guard
and protect ourselves.
Thus, the drastic measures adopted in the “War
on Terror” have been justified as a means of
protecting Europe and North America against
outside threats. But in reality, such threats
have been fused with the fears derived from
internal conflicts resulting from long-term
structural problems of the European and North
American city: the same preventative security
measures and rhetoric are readily used to
“deal” with failed integration of migrant com-
munities or increasing social polarizations. Lines
between external and internal pressures are
blurred.
What is changing European and American cities
is not destruction by means of suicide bomb-
ings but the growing fear of “the other” and
the manner in which these suspicions are mani-
fested in urban space. Government and private
measures against the pervading fear of terror
threats (be they real or imagined) have chal-
lenge the very freedom of the individual that
was once heralded a triumph of the Western
system. Urban diversity itself is perceived as
a potential threat. “The worry here is that
attempts will be made by governments (and the
security-military-industrial complexes which
have burgeoned since the advent of the “war
on terror”) to re-engineer cities so that their
porous, open, and intrinsically fluid spaces and
systems become little more than an endless
series of securitized passage points” (Stephen
Graham).
As Western cities become cultural, socioeco-
nomic and political microcosms of a globalized
and diversified world, our mental map of the
city should be redrawn, and the position of
cities like Jerusalem vis-à-vis the European
city revised. Geographic distance is no longer
relevant. What seemed at the periphery of
Central Europe is now in fact closer than ever.
A change of perspective not only allows us to
better understand the city and the dynamics
through which conflict alters urban fabric, but
also allows us to better understand the devel-
opment—current and predicted—of the relation
of conflict and the Western metropolis. Jeru-
salem is a laboratory for a conflict urbanism
whose symptoms are already all too familiar.
Philipp Misselwitz is an architect and lives in Berlin/ Tel
Aviv.
Tim Rieniets is working as lecturer and researcher at the
chair for architecture and urban design at the ETH Zurich
since 2003.
He is teaching at design studios and seminars and has
been a guest lecturer and critic at various academic
institutions.
Grenzgeografien – geographies of conflict is the first platform for
cooperation between Israeli, Palestinian and international participants
with the aim to investigate and analyze the spatial reality of the
middle eastern conflict. Activities and events are jointly organized
by a trilateral network of partners that includes the International
Peace and Cooperation Centre IPCC (East Jerusalem), the Faculty of
Architecture of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design Jerusalem,
the University of the Arts Berlin and, since November 2004, the
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule ETH Zürich.
International workshops were conducted, that brought together
Israeli, Palestinian, German and Swiss students of architecture. The
unique cross cultural composition of the teams allowed them to
break everyday rules of urban segregation and to bend stere-
otypical ethnic roles, thus gaining a new qualitative access to the
city—access that has long been lost to Jerusalem’s residents, includ-
ing its professional and academic communities.
The results of these workshops encouraged us to open the project
to a wider community of local and international experts in the fields
of architecture, urban and cultural studies participated in the con-
ference “Cities of Collision” held at the Van Leer Institute Jerusalem
in November 2004.
The contributions of experts and students resulted in the book ‘City
of Collision – Jerusalem and the principles of Conflict Urbanism’,
(Birkhäuser Publishers for Architecture, Basel, 2006).
[1] all quotes are referring to the essays published
in:
Philipp Misselwitz and Tim Rieniets (editors), ‘City of
Collision – Jerusalem and the Principles of Conflict
Urbanism’, Birkhäuser Publisher for Architecture,
Basel, 2006
[2] Tom Segev, “Conceding Har Homa,” 1 February 2006
www.haaretz.com
