Project Directors: Diane E. Davis and Leila Farsakh

Steering committee 2006
John deMonchaux, Tali Hatuka, Yosef Jabareen, Philip Khoury, Jennifer Klein, Nora Libertun Duren,Hania Maraqa, Everett Mendelsohn, Richard Samuels, Bish Sanyal, Richard Sennett, John Tirman, Lawrence Vale

Just Jerusalem is an interdisciplinary initiative led by MIT's Center for International Studies (CIS) and Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP).

It is often said that the future of Jerusalem depends in large part on the future of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. While this is undoubtedly true, change and improvement in Jerusalem can be achieved independently of any final peace agreement. In fact, transformation in Jerusalem may actually aid the resolution of the larger conflict. Therefore, Just Jerusalem: Vision for a Place of Peace is a project determined to generate new ideas and discussions about Jerusalem as it might be in the future-a just city shared in peace by its residents, whether they be Muslims, Christians or Jews, Palestinians or Israelis. What would it take to make a city 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?

The Promise of the City
The genesis of this project emerges, in part, from a sense that it may be time to try a new approach to Jerusalem, one that entails envisioning this city as transcending the constraints imposed by nation-states, especially those within which it has become historically embedded. If the superimposition of nationalist projects and aspirations on ethnically or religiously-diverse urban locales like Jerusalem has fanned the flames of aggression and violent conflict, could concerted efforts to think about what social, political, economic, or spatial practices would "emancipate" this city from nationalist blueprints possibly serve as the solution, or, at minimum, help lay a partial foundation for greater tolerance and perhaps even peace? While utopian in conception, this question requires a new way of thinking, which is precisely our aim here. To paraphrase Arjun Appadurai, in his reflection on Benedict Anderson's claim that the nation is an imagined thing, "we must be prepared to recognize the critical reciprocal of [Anderson's] insight, that it is the imagination that will have to carry us beyond the nation." Yet this project's inspiration also comes from a multiplicity of writings on "the promise of the city" as the locus of tolerance and cosmopolitanism. Considerable scholarship on the history and philosophy of cities focuses on them as sites for diversity, tolerance, and democracy. Such claims about the city not only have a grand lineage dating to Max Weber among others, they still flower in many contemporary writings on the city. From Marshall Berman's notion that the city offers perhaps the only kind of environment in which modern values [of tolerance, freedom, and so on] can be realized" to Andy Merrifield's view of the city as host for "togetherness in difference" to Ira Katznelson's sense that "the compound of liberalism and the city promote a liberalism of depth and complexity" to Richard Sennett's idea that the city is a place where strangers meet and his attendant proposition that "people grow only by processes of encountering the unknown" (a view prefiguring the political theorist Iris Young's views on the togetherness of strangers in cities), scholars have long celebrated the humanistic potential and endowments of the city. As David Harvey further reminds us, the "figures of `the city' and of 'Utopia' have long been intertwined," as have the notions of city and citizenship, such that "[p]rojects concerning what we want our cities to be are, therefore, projects concerning human possibilities, who we want, or perhaps even more pertinently, who we do not want to become."

Many of these same hopes and ideals sustain Henri Lefebvre's seminal writings as well, especially his notion of "the right to the city," a proposition which holds great resonance to those living in divided cities like Jerusalem, where mobility and access to everyday activities and the urban built environment are hindered or strongly curtailed. It is worth remembering that Lefebvre conceives of the city as "gathering the interests of the whole society" as much as those who physically inhabit it. But what may be most significant about Lefebvre's formulation is his use of society -- not the state or nation -- as the conceptual reference point for the city's humanitarian promise. Moreover, for Lefebvre a city's "inhabitants" are not necessarily bounded in space or in the formal confines of the city proper. Arbitrary territorial boundaries coercively imposed by national or other state authorities are antithetical to this proposition, and would violate Lefebvre's notion of the right to the city if they also restricted the flows, the "place(s) of encounter," the "priority of use value," and the natural spaces in and surrounding formally-drawn city borders. In this sense, Lefebvre is highlighting "the right to urban life" as much as to the city itself, a presupposition that sustains our desire to place the notion of urbanism as central to any emancipatory political vision. To bring this vision to life so will entail re-imagining both the city and urbanism in such a way as to further the humanitarian and democratic potential of life in Jerusalem. Lefebvre's views of urbanism rest not merely on a recognition of the importance of individual access to a wide range of places and spaces, on the exposure to social and class diversity, or on myriad other ways to `rightfully' partake of the city. It also builds heavily on a specific understanding of the relations between cities and nation-states in a way that is particularly relevant for understanding the problems of Jerusalem. Not unlike the classical arguments formulated by Max Weber and paralleled more recently in work by Manuel Castells, Lefebvre suggests that where cities are dominated by or fused with states one is likely to see violence and a "vacillat[ion] between democracy and tyranny." The assumption here is that in order to eliminate violence and tyranny, and restore the possibilities for democracy in both city and society at large, this fusion must be challenged. Of course, given the nature of this challenge and the fact that states are not about to disappear, any progress in disarticulating city and state (national or otherwise) must be best measured in degrees rather than as a total break. Still, Lefebvre is not alone in advocating for a conception of the city as operating on its own terms in order to sustain a society's greatest potential; nor is he alone in seeing cities as the territorial location most likely to generate democratic institutions and practices.

The Value of Historical Imagination
So why at this time in history would we want to think about a new vision for Jerusalem as a city that is institutionally autonomous from competing nation-states while at the same time capable of collectively embracing all the distinctive religious or ethnic groups that people it? To embark on such a project, which calls for an analytical bypassing of nation-states, will not only invite controversy and opposition both within and outside the Middle East, primarily because it entails working against the grain of prevailing approaches to conflict resolution proposed by peacemaking specialists for the Middle East and most other regions of the world. It also will require critical reflection on past failed efforts to establish Jerusalem's relative "independence" as a city, especially as embodied in the 1947 and 1948 UN mandates to make Jerusalem an international jurisdiction under UN trusteeship. If such efforts to de-link Jerusalem from the nationalist claims of Arab and Israeli nation-states were so unsuccessful in the past, why would we consider that they might be revived in some form now --even if only in imagining the future?

One commanding reason it is worth proposing that the city serve as the analytic entry point for producing peace is the fact that conditions change, and with historical change we see new opportunities that may have been foreclosed in the past. Indeed, the world is a different place that it was when the original UN resolution on Jerusalem was produced more than half a century ago. Now we are facing a world in which the powers and responsibilities of the nation-state are being transformed by globalization, when the asserted value of the state as the primordial agent of domestic politics is under question on a variety of fronts, and when cities themselves are becoming actors in the global scene. In the words of Manuel Castells, "the tendency towards state centralism and domination by the state over the city is being opposed all over the world by a massive popular appeal for local autonomy and urban self-management. The revival of democracy depends upon the capacity of connecting the new demands, values, and projects to the institutions that manage society."

Yet in using the experience of cities rather than nations as a starting point for imagining a peaceful Jerusalem fifty years hence, we must take advantage of the opportunities created by changing global conditions and not merely rely on the promise of urbanism. These changes include the rapidly accelerating globalization of the world economy, which has created new constraints on the capacities of nation-states to control economic, cultural, and social dynamics within their borders, thereby placing a wedge between nation-states and the basic actors and institutions responsible for conditions within countries and cities. More importantly, with these new global dynamics many cities have been empowered vis-?-vis their host nation states in ways that are relatively unprecedented in modern history. Not since the pre-modern period when cities existed as sovereign political and economic entities, have certain urban locations been catapulted to such a position in the global economy. Of course, globalization does not empower all cities equally; and it does not mean that every urban location - including a city like Jerusalem - holds the potential to become the economic and political powerhouse of a London or a New York or a Tokyo. After all, globalization can also make cities dependent on external actors and institutions in ways that limit their economic and political autonomy. But the point is that globalization is changing the nature and character of economic and political relations between cities, nations, and their constituent actors and institutions. The increased global flows of capital and the concentration of globally-networked activities have offered many cities new opportunities to solicit or manage foreign investments, sign transnational agreements, and act with many of the same capacities previously reserved for nation-states. And as cities themselves become key global actors, we are beginning to see the development of city-to-city alliances and affiliated institutions and practices that further empower cities and their citizens vis-?-vis nation states. Such real world changes, wrought by the last several decades of globalization, could be harnessed in the service of imagining a new and different Jerusalem, free from the ongoing nationalist struggles that have made it much more divided, contested, fragmented, and ethnically circumscribed than it was even in 1947.

Still, advocating the role of globalization we have to bear in mind two key points: first that cities are locals of inequality however much anyone will have the right of the city. Second, just as globalization is changing our international and local economic and political reality, nationalism has strengthened not weakened. This raises new questions about the role of the cities as emancipatory locals especially as nationalism takes on a more religious rather than a secular dimension. These points only further emphasize the role and need of historical imagination.

Yet history - and historical imagination -- is relevant not only in the sense that, with changed temporal conditions, now may be a good time to rethink the original idea of an international city free from any particular nationalist control, and structured around uniquely "urban" needs. It also valuable in its more conventional sense: as a reference point for past legacies which continue to mark the present. Jerusalem's long and complex history not only shows us how destructive were early twentieth-century efforts to impose a nation-state logic on this religiously and ethnically diverse city, which for centuries had functioned relatively well without a single sovereign nation. It also offers some clues as to how and why efforts to imagine a city belonging to no nation-state(s) might bring it one step closer to peace. Indeed, if one looks to back to Jerusalem's history, it is clear that while ethnic, religious, and nationalist claims are old, none are older than those claims about the right to the city. During the Ottoman period, in fact, long before struggles for the creation of a single sovereign national state in this territory, a multiplicity of institutional arrangements governed servicing and representation in the city, and they operated in ways that led to relatively peacefully co-existence among the city's Jews, Muslims, and Catholics. By no means are we proposing an uncritical return to a period of imperialism. However, in this early period the binary -- or even tripartite -- understanding of space and identity that now generates so much controversy was almost completely absent. This is said, then, not in order to diminish what has happened in the Jerusalem during the last several decades, but to suggest that the linking of land, people, and nationality -- which now serves as the unquestioned basis for almost all negotiations -- is just one of the many possible ways the city could and has been organized. Such observations suggest the importance of thinking about alternative models for organizing and managing the city, including those that disappeared when competing nation-states hijacked the discourses and practices of urban organization.

Just Jerusalem: Vision for a Place of Peace is a project determined to generate new ideas and discussions about Jerusalem as it might be in the future. As an international competition it calls for visions of Jerusalem that transcend nationalist discourses and instead focus on the questions of daily life and the "right to the city" for all its inhabitants . All entries to the competition will be expected to describe what it would take to create this type of urban arena by the year 2050. The year 2050 is not an arbitrary point in time so much as a metaphor for a future far enough from the present conflict to allow some freedom to imagine a different situation, but near enough to generate serious deliberation. What is best for the inhabitants of a city? What are the ways in which life can be made viable and livable for them? As a conflicted urban locale, Jerusalem is also a site of resource scarcity, ecological degradation, deeply flawed urban design, and ungainly, dysfunctional, and segmented areas of built space. The local economy lags behind those of neighboring cities. Socially, the city is divided by continuous occupation and marked by profound inequality, injustice, and violence. Though these qualities could describe many other cities, Jerusalem is an interesting case study due to the unique and unavoidable tensions between the local and universal nature of the city. Jerusalem requires us to address Jerusalem's sense of universality as well as its sense of unique identity.

The competition addresses the belief that the nature of the city, and the way out of its conflicts, cannot be reduced to a single, negotiated view. In the case of Jerusalem, such consensus-building strategies are often part of the problem, leading to conflict over the terms and outcomes-not to mention perceived betrayals-of negotiation. The process of negotiation pretends that all parties are brought to the table as equal partners; yet this is rarely, if ever, the case. We seek to bypass the standard route of negotiation between "representative" peoples and turn instead to the liberating and regenerative potential of individual imagination and vision.