To assist in designing the specifications for our "Just Jerusalem" design competition, the Jerusalem 2050 Project hosted the Visionaries Conference at MIT in April 2005. We invited scholars from the region and around the world who work in a variety of different disciplines to help us begin to think about the process of planning our competition.
Aims of the April 2005 Visionaries Conference
The Visionaries Conference provided an opportunity to showcase the involvement and commentary of a group of leading scholars who came to share their knowledge of Jerusalem and their hopes for what would make this city a place of peace – a place where every resident could enjoy the same “rights to the city” regardless of religion, ethnicity, and political affiliation. If we assume that every act in or about Jerusalem has political implications, the principal aim (and challenge) of this “Visionaries Conference” was to lay the foundations for a dialogue that would allow us to discuss Jerusalem and elicit visions for its future without replicating the contemporary discourses or political initiatives that have led to sustained and intractable conflict.
Participants were asked to consider this general aim from the perspective of a particular disciplinary vantage point (law, economics, politics, religion, history, sociology, arts, urban design/planning) as well as from a larger philosophical vantage point in which questions of rights, democracy, pluralism, risk, sustainability, and equality are considered. The logic here is that cities – like their citizens – are heterogeneous bodies comprised of multiple functions and objectives, each of which may presuppose a certain form of social, spatial, political, or economic organization and meaning. The more we can recognize “diversity” in our understanding of how the city has and will continue to function, in everyday terms at least, and the more we recognize the potential variability in scope and scale of the different activities (in virtual and lived space) in a context of increasing globalization in which the relations between cities and nations are in flux, the greater the likelihood that we can imagine a Jerusalem freed from “binary” logics (Palestinian versus Israeli, secular versus fundamentalist, Muslim versus Jew, and so on) that have produced so many of the city's current problems. The views advanced by individual visionaries, posed from distinct disciplinary perspectives to capture the city's multiple logics, were then compared and contrasted in a synthetic manner by a general commentator who provided a “meta” commentary on the general themes that emerge in the conference panels.
The goal of the Visionaries Conference was to produce a series of vignettes or scenarios for Jerusalem, based on the individual and synthetic views advanced by the Conference participants, excerpts of which will be published in a Competition Booklet announcing an international, juried vision competition called “Just Jerusalem.” Our hope was that each vignette would serve as an inspiration for the competition entrants. Thus what we were looking for were multiple views of Jerusalem - past, present, and future - that themselves would elicit the creativity and imagination necessary to make the Just Jerusalem competition an exercise in peace-making, in which utopian visions of the future become the starting point for creating a more just and livable present.
In order to offer some guidance to conference participants, we offered the following leading questions to get the dialogue started. The questions were not intended to be exhaustive or restrictive, but, rather, to create a common basis for interaction, commentary, and collective discussion. Our overarching goal was to elicit imaginative yet compelling visions for the future, as opposed to focusing on practical (or even agreed-upon) solutions or positions overly tied to the constraints of the present.
Leading Questions for Disciplinary Panelists
1. Given your knowledge of Jerusalem, what circumstances or conditions in the city - associated with either the past or the present - hold the greatest potential for a building a better future?
2. If you were to construct a mutually inclusive project for the city that would accommodate all residents (which may or may not entail the dismantling of “boundaries”) where and on what scale would you begin?
3. Which resources and transformations in existent institutions, relationships, and conditions (be they urban, national, or even international) would most enable the proposal you have in mind?
Leading Questions for General Commentators
1. What are the primary assumptions about - and methods for knowing - the city that emerges within the distinct visions presented in the panels?
2. What are the principle fault lines of difference (or points of similarity) about how peace might be achieved in Jerusalem, and do they vary within or across the various disciplinary-based panels?
3. What elements are missing or might be reconfigured in order to best achieve the visionary aims of individual panelists, or even to enable a collective effort at guaranteeing a promising future for the city?
Papers from the Visionaries’ Conference:
Aruri, Naseer H. “Jerusalem In The Year 2050.” April 2005.
Azoulay, Ariella. “There is nothing exceptional about Jerusalem.” April 2005.
Klein, Menachem & Seidemann, Danny. “MIT Visions in Progress.” April 2005.
Ram, Uri. “Jerusalem: The View from Tel Aviv.” October 2005.
Shalvi, Alice. “Jerusalem 2050 Visionaries Conference.” April 2005.
Yacobi, Haim. “Celebrating the Everyday - Jerusalem 2050.” April 2005.
Yonah, Yossi. “Jerusalem: A Multicultural City of Mixed Neighborhoods.” April 2005.
** These and more articles and academic papers can be found under “Academic Papers”
Participants
(All titles and positions are according to their positions in 2005 during the conference.)
Mohammad al-Asad
Director, Center for the Study of the Built Environment
Andrew Altman
President and CEO, Anacostia Waterfront Corporation; former Head of Planning,
City of Washington DC
Gannit Ankori
Associate Professor, Department of Art History, Hebrew University
Arjun Appadurai
Provost and Senior Vice President, Academic Affairs, New School University;
Professor of Social Sciences, New School University
Arie Arnon
Head, Program on Economics and Society, Van Leer Jerusalem Institute;
Professor, Department of Economics, Ben Gurion University
Ariella Azoulay
Academic Director of the Camera Obscura School of Art, Tel Aviv;
Professor, Visual Culture and Critical Theory, Bar-Ilan University
Naseer H. Aruri
Chancellor Professor (Emeritus) of Political Science, University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth
Meron Benvenisti
Historian; Former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem
Julian Beinart
Professor of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
M. Christine Boyer
Professor of Architecture and Urbanism, Princeton University
Naomi Carmon
Professor, School of Architecture and Town Planning, The Technion
James Carroll
Author
Manuel Castells
Professor of Investigation, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC);
Director of the Catalunya Internet Project (PIC), University of California, Berkeley
Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Urban & Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley
Naomi Chazan
Former Knesset Member; Professor of Political Science, Hebrew University
Azra Chruchman
Dean, School of Architecture and Town Planning, The Technion
Diane Davis
Director, Jerusalem 2050, MIT; Professor of Urban Studies & Planning, MIT;
Associate Dean, School of Architecture and Planning, MIT
John de Monchaux
Professor of Architecture and Planning, MIT
Leila Farsakh
Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts, Boston; Research Affiliate, the Center for International Studies, MIT
Tali Hatuka
Architect and Urban Designer; Research Fellow, Department of Urban Studies & Planning, MIT
Huda Imam
Director, Center for Jerusalem Studies, Al Quds University
Menachem Klein
Professor, Department of Political Studies, Bar Ilan University, Israel
Yosef Jabareen
Lecturer, School of Architecture and Planning, MIT
Nora Libertun Duren
Adjunct Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, Columbia University
Everett Mendelsohn
Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University
Rami Nasrallah
Head, International Peace and Cooperation Center
Alona Nizan-Shiftan
Senior Lecturer, School of Architecture, Technion University
Sari Nusseibeh
President, Al Quds University
Nasser Rabbat
Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Architecture, MIT
Uri Ram
Senior Lecturer, Department of Behavioral Sciences, Ben Gurion University
Yusuf Sa’id Natsheh
Head of the Islamic Archeology Department, Jerusalem Awqaf in
Al-Haram Al Sharifdd
Bishwapriya Sanyal
Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning, MIT;
Director, Special Program in Urban and Regional Studies, MIT
Richard J. Samuels
Ford International Professor of Political Science, MIT;
Director, Center for International Studies, MIT
Adèle Naudé Santos
Dean, School of Architecture and Planning, MIT
Danny Seidemann
Founder and Legal Cousel Director, Ir Amim: City of Peoples
Richard Sennett
Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science
Alice Shalvi
Professor Emerita of English Literature, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Michael Sorkin
Principal, Michael Sorkin Studio
Samir Srouji
Architect; Artist; Art Director
Boaz Tamir
Entrepreneur and Principal, Montefiore Partners
Salim Tamari
Director, Institute for Jerusalem Studies;
Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Birzeit University
John Tirman
Executive Director, Center for International Studies, MIT
Lawrence Vale
Head, Department of Urban Studies & Planning, MIT;
Professor, Urban Design & Planning, MIT
Heather Widdows
Professor, Centre for the Study of Global Ethics, University of Birmingham
Haim Yacobi
Lecturer, Department of Architecture, Bezalel Academy;
Post-doctorate, Department of Politics and Government, Ben Gurion University
Yossi Yonah
Lecturer, Department of Education, Ben Gurion University
Raef Zreik
Lawyer; Doctoral Candidate, Harvard Law School, Harvard University
