Acts of repair: Heritage, conservation and healing in the divided landscape of rural Jerusalem

Swiss partners

• Universität Basel: Emilio Distretti (main applicant)

Partners in the MENA region

• Birzeit University, Palestine: Khaldun Bshara (main applicant)

• RIWAQ - Center for Architectural Conservation, Palestine

Presentation of the project

This project investigates the preservation of cultural heritage in Palestine as a form of resistance to the Israeli settler colonialism. By showing how across decades of Israeli occupation architecture and urban planning have been used to fragment Palestinian territory the project explores the possibilities of rehabilitation (architectural, social and cultural) of the historic centers of a cluster of rural villages historically belonging to the area of Jerusalem.

Since the 2003 construction of the Separation Wall by Israel, many Palestinian rural communities located at the outskirts of Jerusalem have been progressively isolated – geographically, politically, economically and culturally- from its urban center. Mobility for Palestinian workers and residents has become increasingly difficult, while historic economic ties with the city of Jerusalem have severed and agricultural lands have been progressively confiscated depriving farmers, traders and labourers from their main source of subsistence. Moreover, the historic centers of these villages which constitute an important archeological and architectural heritage from the Bronze and Iron age, Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine eras, as well as from successive Islamic empires, have been progressively abandoned facing the risk of decay, depopulation and being forgotten.

This project aims to create a research partnership and collaboration between Urban Studies at the University of Basel, the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Birzeit University and RIWAQ– Center for Architectural Conservation in the West Bank, Palestine, to promote the conservation of four rural villages at the outskirts of Jerusalem: Lifta (depopulated village but not destroyed under Jerusalem Municipality control), Al-Jib (fragmented by the Separation Wall and under Israel security control), Qalandiya (extending from the former Palestinian international airport to Israel’s infamous checkpoint) and Beit Hanina (fragmented into two segments, one under the Greater Jerusalem Municipality and one under the Palestinian civil administration). Since 2017, RIWAQ – Center for Architectural Conservation has embarked on the 'Life Jacket project' to rehabilitate these villages which includes preventive restoration of buildings, alleys, courtyards and squares, local gardens, rooftops at the core of the historic centers, while documenting properties, redefining yards and ownership boundaries.

Our partnership project intends to continue and strengthen a participatory rehabilitation process, revitalizing cultural activities, enhancing shared development plans and economic interests between the villages, by tackling the problems of geo-political dispersion caused by the Israeli occupation. The project offers a conceptual shift that moves away from a conventional restorative approach—that is, conservation and documentation of single and “authentic” buildings and sites—into exploring the wider (present and past) relations between Palestinian urban and rural worlds, and mapping Jerusalem rural surroundings, while protecting their heritage.

To do so, the research partnership proposes to extend the conservation process to extensive in-depth background research and analysis of a broad range of sources. These will entail archival research, oral histories of residents and owners, related historiographic sources, academic and civil society reports, images and cartographic research. This work aims to recover preexisting relations among the villages as well as with the city of Jerusalem, concerning their cultural and social bonds, and their interrelated environmental histories and challenges, which are part of Palestine broader ecosystem.

This project seeks to show how a critical understanding of Palestinian architectural heritage can initiate a process of repair for the rural communities near Lifta, Al Jib, Qalandiya and Beit Hanina to heal the separations caused by the wall and Israeli policies. It engages with critical research methodologies to deploy the public dimension and function of architectural heritage as a space for repair from colonially inherited forms of urban/rural segregations and their racialized, social and economic aftermaths.

The project is driven by the operative concept of repair – an analytical method for probing the variety of marginalized political, cultural and social histories and narratives that exist and emerge in Palestine’s long history of colonial occupation.

The term repair organizes the theoretical and practical aspects of this research partnership. Repair refers to finding a remedy for something that is ‘torn’ or ‘broken’. The noun repair cogently addresses the need to fix damage, an injury, loss or harm. In conservation the repair traditionally refers to notions of ‘building pathology’ utilized by architectural preservation theory and science in order to identify and determine a building’s condition and structural performance with respect to causative pathologies or transformative structural events (such as weather, explosions, earthquakes, or conflict). However, beyond the sphere of the physical repair of decrepit buildings, an act of repairing also constitutes a healing power, whether with objects and buildings or people.

In the context of Palestine, the repairing of heritage is therefore intended as one that addresses double ‘wounds’: the material decay suffered by buildings and sites caused by endemic deterioration processes and the destruction and violence caused by colonial measures. To address these ‘pathologies’ this project intends to employ the concept of repair in its extended meaning, as a way to innovatively offer new narratives/practices of heritage preservation that address both physical and psycho-social needs.

In recent years the foundation of new relationships between cultural belongings and space has become an integral part of the repair of colonial segregation predicated on the material and territorial dispossession of indigenous people – especially in settler colonial and former slavery societies such as US, Canada, South Africa and Australia. In those contexts, reparative designs and strategies in heritage conservation have inspired a new image of architectural conservation as a care-based practice that places questions of social and environmental justice at the forefront of the preservation process. This has provided analytical tools for practitioners to think about repair at the urban scale so as to tackle disruption and social division. Furthermore, this has also shown that the achieving justice is also about healing collective existences marked by race-based structural violence and division. Addressing intergenerational experiences of radical loss and trauma poses the question of the repair as both a form of healing and a form of resistance.

In the contexts and spaces of Lifta, Al-Jib, Qalandiya and Beit Hanina, the project mobilizes repair (as both discourse and practice) to address the need of Palestinian communities so as to tackle ongoing issues of erasure, identify loss, trauma and injustice. Thus, this project creates a field of spatial intervention and research producing a preservation of the present that simultaneously reconstructs, recollects and narrates histories of violence and resistance to it through re-appropriation of the architectural/spatial/rural realities that have been forcibly cut off from the urban center. This is to understand the very condition that enables ‘conservation’ to become both a diagnostic and care-giving skill at the service of communities, whereby immaterial forces and forms of intangible heritage are made manifest and thus proclaim themselves. The foundations of repair in the Palestinian context will be formulated in relation to local architectural and conservation knowledge and the work of communities addressing specific forms of past or present exclusion, segregation and displacement.

The project’s central research questions are:

• • How can we use architectural heritage to re-connect to, and help heal experiences of erasure, trauma and loss?
• • What kind of restoration and rehabilitation programs are needed by Lifta, Al-Jib, Qalandyia and Beit Hanina’s communities?

The project will answer these questions by studying, exploring, suggesting and elaborating forms of repair. These range from material/physical intervention, addition, transformation to public interventions, gatherings, workshops and performances that can imagine the return of this heritage to the common use of their communities affected by spatial segregation. Building on the existing work produced at Birzeit University and RIWAQ, the project will investigate forms of repair that bring to the surface historical narratives that have been marginalized, with the attempt to imagine ways of healing the spatial divides that separate Jerusalem’s rural communities from the city.

The main objectives of this project are to:

1. mobilize architectural heritage as an active space for critical knowledge production, a resource by which Palestinian histories could be reconstructed, analyzed and better understood;
2. activate the concept of repair in heritage making to (re)connect Palestinian life-worlds, sociality, subjectivities and communities that bear the scars of displacement, marginalization and exclusion in the rural area of Jerusalem;
3. further point out new ways for conservation knowledge to operate as an analytical tool with political and social resonance with the present in the wider Palestinian context.

In seeking to study the complexity of repair in Palestine, the project combines participatory research approaches in urban studies, conservation, architecture and heritage with theoretical study and empirical analysis. The project can be understood as both a practice of heritage-making and community-building and also a means of investigating the way repair mobilize architectural heritage for social justice in Palestine, and beyond.