Jerusalem 2050 is a visionary and problem-solving project jointly sponsored by MIT's Department of Urban Studies & Planning and the Center for International Studies. 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, a place of diversity and peace 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 the cycle of despair and conflict in Jerusalem, and largely removed questions of urban livability from the public discourse, 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 solicit 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.
As such, one goal 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.
A second goal is to encourage new ways of thinking about peace in Jerusalem and other conflict cities. 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, we challenge citizens 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.
The project is predicated upon the belief that the act of preparing and sharing visions of a peaceful Jerusalem at mid-century may contribute to conflict resolution in a number of different ways. For one, we suspect that many of the participants in this web-based initiative will discover that they share a set of deeper values underlying their visions, and that these shared values will prove inspirational enough to spur efforts to design new paths of action for promoting peace. For another, one or more of the visions may even motivate political forces in the region to bring new and creative proposals to the current debates and negotiations.
Along the way, the Jerusalem 2050 community will be able - with many partners in Jerusalem, Palestine, Israel, the surrounding regions, and more broadly in the world - to develop practical ideas for addressing Jerusalem’s urban problems, be they large or small, from water to open space to IT to new commercial and industrial growth to housing to educational opportunities, and so on. It is a commitment to engaging with issues of everyday urban life without losing sight of visionary ideals that makes this project unique.
