The Next Jerusalem: Sharing the Divided City

This important collection brings together noted Israeli, Palestinian, and American architects and urbanists to consider the physical future of Jerusalem and to offer specific proposals for making the city functional, beautiful, and physically generous to its inhabitants' needs. The essays focus on issues of ecology, preservation, neighborhood development, and open space. While the authors take a variety of approaches, all agree on the necessity of sharing the city amicably. Contributors are Ghiora Aharoni, Moustafa Bayoumi, and Jerrilyn D. Dodds; Ariella Azoulay; Rasem Badran; Stella Betts, David Leven, and David Snyder; M. Christine Boyer; Joan Copjec; Keller Easterling; Samira Haj; Rassem Khamaisi; Romi Khosla; Thom Mayne, Rose Mendez, and Caroline Barat; Deborah Natsios and John Young; Moshe Safdie; Mack Scogin; Michael Sorkin and Andrei Vovk; Achva Benzinberg Stein; Amir Sumaka'i Fink; Jafar Tukan; Dag Tvilde and Ali Ziadah; Eyal Weizman; James Wines; Lebbeus Woods; Oren Yiftachel and Haim Yacobi; and Omar Youssef.

This important collection brings together noted Israeli, Palestinian, and American architects and urbanists to consider the physical future of Jerusalem and to offer specific proposals for making the city functional, beautiful, and physically generous to its inhabitants' needs. The essays focus on issues of ecology, preservation, neighborhood development, and open space. While the authors take a variety of approaches, all agree on the necessity of sharing the city amicably. Contributors are Ghiora Aharoni, Moustafa Bayoumi, and Jerrilyn D. Dodds; Ariella Azoulay; Rasem Badran; Stella Betts, David Leven, and David Snyder; M. Christine Boyer; Joan Copjec; Keller Easterling; Samira Haj; Rassem Khamaisi; Romi Khosla; Thom Mayne, Rose Mendez, and Caroline Barat; Deborah Natsios and John Young; Moshe Safdie; Mack Scogin; Michael Sorkin and Andrei Vovk; Achva Benzinberg Stein; Amir Sumaka'i Fink; Jafar Tukan; Dag Tvilde and Ali Ziadah; Eyal Weizman; James Wines; Lebbeus Woods; Oren Yiftachel and Haim Yacobi; and Omar Youssef.

Publishers Weekly

"When such powerful markers of an urban landscape-the ones that root a people to a place and a land-absorb this facile brand of hopelessness and inevitability, they have the power to make corrosive myths become concrete.... How do you heal a city rent by myth?" So asks one of the 25 contributors to this visionary collection, dedicated to reimagining the physical and ideational space of Jerusalem, or (in Arabic) Al Quds. Responding to a 1997 Jerusalem architectural conference that excluded Palestinian participation, New York architect Sorkin organized a second conference on the fate of the city that took place in Bellagio, Italy, in 1999, with 25 Palestinians, Israelis and "others" (mostly Americans) participating in equal numbers. Taking an eventual two-state solution as a given, the participants came up with some ingenious plans for mutual cooperation and healing via architecture-everything from "displacing" contested sites in Jerusalem and relocating them elsewhere (such as moving the Western Wall to Safed and the Dome of the Rock to Nablus) to taking the informal sites of Arab and Jewish same-sex encounters as starting points for imagining interfaith relations. While the conference took place before the second intifada began, and thus also before September 11th, Sorkin finds that even looking at the book through those lenses, "nothing in its feeling or analysis shifts. A just and equitable peace remains the only hope." (Dec.) Forecast: A recent New Yorker piece written by a Jerusalemite depicted a city in which the secular middle class has departed and which is increasingly left to religious factions. Yet this book's site-specific visions could find their way into round-up reviews on the deepening conflict, and might serve as a basis for discussion and outreach among differing groups. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Michael Sorkin is the principal of the Michael Sorkin Studio in New York and director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at the City College of New York. His books include Variations on a Theme Park, Exquisite Corpse, Local Code, Giving Ground, Michael Sorkin Studio: Wiggle, Some Assembly Required, Other Plans, and Analyzing Ambasz.