City of Collision

Book excerpt: Almost eight decades of violent urban conflict have transformed Jerusalem into an extreme spatial configuration. From a Western perspective, Jerusalem is all too often considered an uncanny reminder of an age long past: colonial and terrorist violence blurring distinctions between the military and the civilian. But as a laboratory of conflict urbanism, Jerusalem is in fact closer than we think. Cities worldwide are exposed to dramatic changes following new security policies and preventative measures against real or imagined threats. Palestinian, Israeli, and international authors open up different perspectives on the complex and ambivalent urban reality of Jerusalem. Thirty essays are complemented by new photographs and over forty detailed thematic maps capturing a city of permanent destruction and reinvention, of political planning and strategies of resilience, of collective fear and individual exchange, of physical and mental walls and their transgression in the every day.