Lab 3: Jerusalem- Liquid Jerusalem

The Lab will focus on Abu Tor neighborhood. Bounded by Ben Hinnom Valley, Hebron Road, the Peace Forest and Sherover Promenade, Abu Tor is a clear embodiment of Jerusalem's seam line and the changes the city has undergone since 1948. For 19 years, the neighborhood was cut by the "municipal line"—a few dozen meters wide no-man's land, representing the width of the pencil line drawn on the map by Moshe Dayan and Jordanian commander Abdullah a-Tel. After 1967 and the actual erasure of the Green Line, Abu Tor was considered the only mixed neighborhood in the city. Since the outbreak of the first intifada in 1987, separation processes have gradually grown—and today the education, welfare and transportation systems in the Arab part of the neighborhood are completely separate from those on the Jewish side. In the lab, we will use a variety of mappings to determine the different characteristics of the site, on a local, urban and regional scale; trace the site's history and the political, social and planning changes that have taken place in the territory; and examine the variety of narratives and approaches to the site. In the process, we will create a spatial "lexicon" for the site, which will define, alongside in-depth mapping, concepts and new directions for the future of the site. Finally, students in the lab will be invited to use the variety of tools and methods they learned in the previous labs to offer a vision for the future of the site, which takes into account its controversial aspects, and offers an inclusive and enabling urban intervention strategy. The design strategy developed in the lab will explore the interplay between the various factors in the site, not only as a tool for understanding and mapping the space, but also as an opportunity for intervention through planning actions focused on creating new relationships in it. The planning action will combine bottom-up design practices with those that examine the space from above and allow informed and visionary view of the top-down context. Taking diversity as leading concept in the development and healing of space, the lab will offer planning interventions that create new interactions and relationships, as a tool for promoting spatial justice and "reciprocity" in the urban space by new stitches and lines between public and private, open and closed, built and natural.