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Review | books

Conflict Urbanism in a City of Collision

CITY OF COLLISION
Jerusalem and the Principles of Conflict Urbanism
Edited by Philipp Misselwitz and Tim Rieniets
Birkhauser
ISBN-10 3-7643-7482-9
ISBN-13 978-3-7643-7482-2
Paperback: 391 pages

Conflict resolution and conflict urbanism are intrinsically bound to both the political and social spheres spinning amidst countries with sensitive and ambiguous boundaries. In times like these, architecture can hardly avoid being a political handle between these tenuous boundaries. In the light of recent violent conflicts unfolding around the world in urban environments, an editorial team comprising of members from ETH Zurich, Berlin University of the Arts, IPCC Jerusalem and the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, launched an open research process incorporating Palestinian, Israeli, and European participants in 2003. This initiative set out to understand the production of space in Jerusalem in convergence with the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It also sought to study the city inhabitants’ parallel strategies of resistance, adaptation, and survival.

Tracing a Jerusalem through essays, photographic documentary and a series of narrative and conceptual maps, this publication reads as a spatial and cultural navigator into the ambivalence, dynamism, and complexity of life lived at the borders. As hints the title, the crux of this endeavour illuminates the multifarious situations the city’s inhabitants have been living in, in terms of barriers and violent frontiers, confrontations and spaciocide, destruction and planning deadlocks, no-man’s-lands and imprisonment.

The exposé on reading such contested space is aptly illustrated by one of the contributors to this publication, Shmuel Groag – ‘in Jerusalem, the quality, size, and nature of each road… is a fair indicator of whether Palestinians or Israelis move along it’. While these studies may be site-specific, cities worldwide are already ‘exposed to dramatic changes following new security policies and preventative measures against real or imagined threats’ (book jacket). Our acquaintance with these extremely estranged spaces through this book will elicit a better grasp on what space means, what space could be – applied to our own explorations on the collision of site forces.

S$92.00

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Debbie is a student of architecture, a lover of poetry, and a hopeful song-writer who longs for solo-travels and tends to dip her fingers in too many honey-pots.