The Next Jerusalem: Sharing the Divided City [Paperback]

Michael Sorkin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2, 2002 | ISBN-10: 1580931006 | ISBN-13: 978-1580931007

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.

Editorial Reviews

From 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."
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Inside Flap

Jerusalem is in a unique position to bend modernity and tradition to create a global model of cooperation, economic innovation, and sustainable environmental practice. As a paradign of the kind of social mosaic that will increasingly charactize the world's cities, Jerusalem migh well become a laboratory for spatial practices that mediate the autonomy of individuals and of groups and for the cooperation of cities and nations. As a purely physical matter, this presents very little difficulty.

Perhaps architecture can help.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: The Monacelli Press (December 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1580931006
• ISBN-13: 978-1580931007
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 1.1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #553,188 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars You're Kidding Me!, January 25, 2010

By 

E. Moed "ERIC MOED" (Brooklyn, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Next Jerusalem: Sharing the Divided City (Paperback)

As an architecture student- one would think I could at least understand the rational of one thinking abstractly or creatively. Well to be short, i embrace that kind of thinking, until it leads to THE ABSURD. Moving the Western Wall over 100 miles away from its location at the Temple Mount? Is this a joke!? I think that this so called professor and architectural theorist needs to get his head checked. One of the paradigm points of architecture is to be PRAGMATIC or PRACTICAL. Architecture takes real-world situations, rule sets and norms and DEALS directly with them. This is nothing but pure novelty and novelty always loses out to REALITY. I would buy this book if you want to have to get your head checked [you may be in line behind the author]. Strong words, i know, but sometimes insanity needs to be dealt with before it poisons society. I'm a compassionate person, but architecture, like politics, is something that cannot be screwed with.