Director’s Statement
Diane E. Davis
March 19, 2008
The Jerusalem 2050 project, a joint initiative sponsored by MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the Center for International Studies, takes great pleasure in announcing the winners of the Just Jerusalem Competition, both its top prize winners and the honorable mentions. The Just Jerusalem Competition was designed to generate innovative, untested, and out-of-the box ideas from global civil society about how to generate a just, peaceful, and sustainable Jerusalem. As a university-based academic project, it was intended to offer a new methodology for producing and generating knowledge that could potentially redress real world problems. We sought novel ideas from anyone and everyone, both within and outside the ivory towers of academe, both here and abroad. When we started this project more than three years ago, we did not know what would be produced, or how receptive the world would be to this challenge. Now that the results are in, we are thrilled to see what the competition has wrought.
In a blind review of more than 125 entries solicited along these lines, an international jury with representation from the worlds of history, geography, governance, diplomacy, architecture, art, and journalism selected a set of 4 winners and 7 honorable mentions who, to our delight, collectively embody our original pedagogic and practical aims far beyond our expectations, both in their wide-ranging national origins, their diverse institutional locations, their distinctive disciplinary backgrounds, in the wide-ranging form and content of their ideas.
The top-winning entries or their authors came from countries all over the world: Malaysia, Austria, the US, India, Israel, Palestine, China, England, Australia, and Greece. All offer hopeful, creative, and passionate ideas for potentially altering daily life in Jerusalem in small and large-scale ways. Some of the winning entries were produced by teams of students who were inspired to turn their classroom work into concrete proposals, and who labored under the premise that their ideas could make a difference, thus making it worth spending months in the classroom working out the kinks before submitting to the competition. Other winning entries came from professionals, practitioners, and others who cared about Jerusalem, whether working in firms or at home, all of whom were motivated to apply their skills and imagination to a problem whose scope was immense and whose solution has remained elusive. As a group, the winners built on their divergent disciplinary skills in design, architecture, arts, politics, economics, and geography. They produced beautiful drawings, technologically sophisticated designs, economically vibrant commercial projects, comprehensive environmental schemas, geographically expansive urban networks, novel reformulations of the landscape, and an array of literary forms (both a short story and a play), each seeking to create the conditions that might enable peace, prosperity, and/or sustainability in Jerusalem. Seen as a group, the winning entries address some of the main challenges and contradictions of Jerusalem, and together they reinforce the need to think about this city as a multiplicity of activities, individuals, and meanings, all of which must be recognized as central to the objectives of peace.
From our perspective, it is both fitting and rewarding to see that that so many of the entries came from young students, or student teams. This suggests that a project constructed around hope for the future, with a target date of 2050, clearly resonates with the young people who will be living at that time, and it shows how committed the younger generation is to take responsibility for their future, to think positively about constructive change and possibilities, and to seek courageously to remedy some of the problems produced by their progenitors. Among the youngest exemplifying these ideas are Matthew Rajcok and Alex Zimmer, a middle school student and a high school student from local public schools who submitted an entry to the competition after hearing a presentation about the project from Project Co-director Leila Farsakh. The enthusiasm and commitment showed by these two young men, coupled with the high quality of their entry, inspired us to grant a Director’s Award to them both.
This announcement brings to a close several years of preparation, even as it opens the door to a new stage of the project: the hosting of winners here at MIT and the larger global dissemination of their ideas. The consensus of the jury was that the winning entries all held the potential to make a difference, but that this would only be accomplished through more critical discussion about implementation, about the logical premises underlying the ideas, and about the grounded institutional, political, social, economic, and physical conditions of the city and region. We are eager to host the winners and start this conversation, through academic and public seminars at MIT next fall. We have a great set of innovators and ideas, and we are confident that they will “incubate” well in our midst, moving from “start up” ideas to more well developed projects that just might capture world attention and the imagination of Jerusalemites in the months and years to come.
