Jerusalem beyond the walls

Abstract

In Jerusalem two parts coexist critically: the Old City, a historical-symbolic palimpsest always affected by traumatic transformations and the new neighborhoods outside the walls. The Old City, from the 20th Century, lives the dual condition of being a city-museum and a place of ethnic-religious conflict at the same time, while the new districts isolate the walled city with a fragmented ring in which planned Israelis neighborhoods and those spontaneous Palestinians are opposed, wedged between sacred areas. Today this condition defines a historical heritage in which places full of memories are confronted with a contradictory and mostly degraded urban context. The aim of the paper is to analyze the area that separates the Old City from the ‘new city’, along the Kidron valley. The conflict between the monumental and landscape palimpsest and the degradation characterizing this unique place is the basis of the discussion which wants to reflect on the possibility of introjecting the problematic reality of the transformations that in recent decades have partly obscured the legibility of the monumental polycentric landscape of Jerusalem. Attempting to reveal some critical issues that hopefully will be useful for the debate involving the relationship between ‘contemporary’ and ‘ancient’, understood as ‘active’ conservation of urban cultural heritage, i.e. protection inside a dynamic of mutations. Moreover, the research will contribute to deepen the interpretation of urban phenomena in contexts in which a symbolic stratified tissue is confronted with incoherent and traumatic urban process, typical of areas of conflict.