MIT has 44 years to figure it out

August 23, 2006 - 12:02 AM by Sarah

MIT announces a new design competition:

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Imagine the “city of peace” in Jerusalem in the year 2050, C.E.

Jointly sponsored by MIT’s Department of Urban Studies & Planning and the Center for International Studies, with the participation of Palestinian and Israeli scholars, activists, business leaders, youth, and others, Jerusalem 2050 is a uniquely visionary and problem-solving project. It seeks to understand what it would take to make Jerusalem , a city also known as Al Quds, claimed by two nations and central to three religions, “merely” a city, a place of difference and diversity in which contending ideas and citizenries can co-exist in benign, yet creative, ways.

In order to break out of the stalemate that has reinforced despair and conflict in Jerusalem, and relegated questions of urban livability to the back burner of national political diplomacy, the Jerusalem 2050 project aims to bypass the standard route of negotiation between “representative” peoples and turn instead to the liberating potential of imagination and design. Rather than aiming for unity or synthesis among competing parties in their plans for the city, we will encourage the production of bold and “non-negotiated” visions for Jerusalem, with the assumption being that only through such methods can there emerge a shared understanding of the basic urban conditions necessary for a tolerant and culturally vibrant city to flower, independent of ethnic or religious partisanship.

A second but related aim of this project is to promote the use of design and other creative imaginings of space as techniques for arriving at a more positive social, political and economic organization of the city.

With these principles in mind, we seek to host an international, juried Vision Competition for Jerusalem 2050. Rather than crafting solutions based on the claims of peoples and their religious identities on the one hand, or nations and their historical and ethical claims to existence on the other, our hope is that this Vision Competition will provide opportunities for Jerusalem’s inhabitants to ask new questions and imagine new possibilities that may offer an exit from the destructive cycle of violence, hatred, and terror that has not just shattered peoples and nations, but also significant parts of the city itself.

I browsed around the site, and was struck by this tidbit . . .

In the “competition abstract,” the outline contains the following item:

# Whose Nation? What State(s)? What city?
# Scenarios for a solution:

i. capital of two states,
ii. capital of one binational state
iii. international open city
iv. other daring option?

I love the way “capital of a Jewish state” is not an option.

Of course “capital of a Palestinian state, and no Jewish state existing” is not an option either — which, to me, is a good thing.

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