Restless Space Narratives of Change Around Landscapes of Rupture

For a project cooperation in landscape architecture, supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), we looked at small strips of urban land in Germany and Israel that carry the marks of a violent political rupture. Two areas symptomatic of this condition in the cities of Berlin and Jerusalem were studied in terms of their disciplinary, social, and political changes: an area around the former Luisenstädtischer Kanal which was part of the Berlin wall and the Musrara neighborhood in Jerusalem where the pre1967 border to Jordan ran through. The first goal was to lay bare the narratives embedded in these sites and analyse the interventions that had created them. In a second step, the attempts of healing the topographical wounds left after the disappearance of the political border were studied. While in Jerusalem the measures taken were mainly infrastructural a highway and a light rail track were built acting again as barriers , the Berlin site became remade through a grinding process of give-and-take between different stakeholders. This paper presents the first results of the study about the Berlin area.