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A peace park for the Middle East
September/October 2008
by Melinda Tuhus
When diplomats look for solutions to the seemingly
intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “send architects” has never been high
on the list. But a group from the Yale School of Architecture spent several
days in the Middle East in May working on a project that combines tourism and
sustainability, with the ultimate goal of fostering goodwill.
Five Yale professors of architecture and
environmental studies, along with three architecture students two weeks shy of
graduation, participated in a charrette—an intense architectural design
workshop—on the site of a proposed “peace park” that will span the Israeli and
Jordanian sides of the Jordan River. A few days after the charrette, the team
presented its initial proposals at two forums, one in Amman, Jordan, the other
in Jerusalem.
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The Jordan River resembles a sewage channel more than a sacred river.
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The project is being spearheaded by Friends of the
Earth Middle East (FoEME), an environmental organization with Israeli,
Jordanian, and Palestinian co-directors. The proposed park is the site of a
hydroelectric power plant that supplied electricity on both sides of the river
from 1932 until 1948, when it ceased operation due to the Israeli-Arab war. It
has been a closed military zone ever since. The plant was built on an island
created at the juncture of the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers; the 1,200-acre site
today includes the abandoned plant, associated canals and bridges, and cabins that
housed the plant’s workers. One of the goals of the Yale participants was to
re-imagine uses for these elements in a park that will promote “regulated
tourism, sustainable development, and goodwill between neighboring countries,”
according to a statement from FoEME. Another goal is to allow biodiversity to
flourish once all forms of physical boundaries are removed (although boundaries
will still be maintained around the periphery of the park).
The effort stems from FoEME’s campaign to restore the
Jordan River, which, on its lower stretch from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead
Sea, has been reduced to only five percent of its historic flow and resembles a
sewage channel more than one of the world’s most sacred rivers. The site will
include four ecosystems: river, wetland, arid landscape, and arid agriculture.
Its promoters say it offers an extraordinary opportunity to incorporate two of
the fastest-growing elements of tourism: ecotourism and heritage tourism.
“The overall goal is to make that shared cultural and
environmental heritage accessible and understandable to a broad range of people
with very diverse backgrounds and very diverse interests,” says Alan Plattus
'76, professor of architecture and urbanism at the School of Architecture.
“People will not come to this site out of the same motivation. But our aim is
to create a vivid and open place where those visitors can meet, at least for
the time they’re on the site, in peace and understanding, to appreciate the
past, to take some degree of shared pleasure in the present and its evolution
towards a future for the river and for the region that we hope will be a
positive future.”
But as if to underscore the political difficulties
involved in such a cross-border project, both the Palestinian and Jordanian
co-directors of FoEME arrived at the forum late. One was delayed at a
checkpoint on the West Bank, and the other was delayed crossing the Allenby
Bridge from Jordan. In addition, one of the local Jordanian mayors involved in
the project didn’t make it at all because he couldn’t get a visa to enter
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