Jerusalem is a landscape of boarders, a landscape of layers with centuries of contested space. The Just Jerusalem Competition seeks to inspire ideas and to generate discussions about Jerusalem that transcend nationalist discourses and instead focus on questions of daily life and the "right to the city."
As architects/students, we are exposed to the influx of recent competitions. Typical answers and program elements tend to come out of these types of idea stimulations. For example: put an urban beach, an urban garden there, theater here, free bicycles there. Sometimes these are appropriate and placed in the most cohesive area. Other times, they these are misdirected ideas of utopian ideologies, imposed on separate systems.
While keeping a hopeful perspective, we have set out to create an infrastructure for the people of Jerusalem. Citizens can use this infrastructure to start to begin implementing urban conditions that they need and want in their own neighborhoods.
This infrastructural machine producing this infrastructure is SOCIAL FIRM. SOCIAL FIRM survives through ideas and manufactures within existing conditions. SOCIAL FIRM gives citizens a new platform for digital and physical connectivity. From the pedestrian to the urban planner, SOCIAL FIRM enhances communication towards a collective goal by technologically enabled relationships, and activating the city. Through the use of the SOCIAL FIRM Interface, the people of Jerusalem can turn a landscape of boarders into a landscape of desires.
SOCIAL FIRM opens opportunity opportunities for ownership, for reclaiming land, not by through violence, but by the active re-imagination of the city’s program by its citizens. SOCIAL FIRM looks to the future, incorporating new technology and anticipating future technologies in the new order of Jerusalem, a Jerusalem defined by the people.
