Tactics and Strategies for Redemption is a proposal for a process, as much as a product, for gradually developing new physical infrastructure over a 40 year time span to address inequalities, resentment and fear that define the contemporary experience of everyday life in Jerusalem. While complex religious, political and socio-geographic differences are at the heart of the centuries of conflict, it is inequities in physical infrastructure and fear have fuelled the fire. We begin with micro interventions of events that begin a process of imagining another way, followed by small scale local interventions, then larger scale institutional infrastructure financed and controlled initially by independent non-aligned international bodies. Central to our proposal is a process for ‘blistering’, transforming and eventually demolishing the Separation Barrier, all the while maintaining security until peace and justice is ensured.
City wide networks link together more than a dozen novel proposals, including seeding new infrastructure with small transportable units that eventually take root and become permanent; developing new networks of water distribution and treatment, new rituals for waste collection and community based recycling, new prototypes for education from kindergarten to university, new hybrid health care and recreation facilities to address inequities and entrenched intolerance; a cross cultural arts centre; a memorial for those that have been lost to conflict; and new models for transforming the Separation Barrier from ”wall that divides” into a “wall that provides”.
We follow Michel de Certeau, who suggests, that even the disposessed have the power of movement and timing at their disposal to appropriate, usurp and transform apparently entrenched circumstances. He calls these ‘tactics.’ We in turn propose architectural tactics that can arise within local communities and call on global ‘strategic’ interventions to build infrastructure that ensures a peaceful and equitable future for this world city.
