Cities in Conflict Working Group

What would it take to make cities wracked by ethnic, religious, racial, or nationalist violence “merely” cities again, places of difference and diversity in which contending ideas and citizenries could co-exist in benign yet creative ways? In a joint effort supported by MIT’s Center for International Studies (CIS) and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), with the participation of faculty from Political Science and Architecture, we announce a year long faculty seminar that will examine Cities in Conflict.

The seminar is intended to bring together on a regular basis faculty and graduate students to discuss the root causes of violence in cities and to consider innovative strategies for advancing a vision for peace in these cities. While the seminar’s aim is to be able to consider some of the world’s most conflicted cases (e.g. Jerusalem, Belfast, Mitrovica, Jakarta), we also hope to pose very general questions about social and political identity, nationalism or imagined community, the public sphere, and perhaps even transnational governance networks and institutions in light of the specific urban experience of divided or “conflicted” cities, especially their built environments but also their social, spatial, political, and economic histories. The hope is that by considering a variety of normative theoretical ideals and principles related to the study of politics and society more generally, but by doing so in combination with a focus on more “grounded” urban questions and design concerns about cities and how they operate, especially divided cities, we could ponder alternative social practices, spatial patterns, networks, identities, technologies and institutions that might hold the potential to create a more peaceful co-existence in cities torn by conflict. It is helpful to think of this task as one of building on a deep, historical knowledge of the cosmopolitan dynamics of city life and of the diversity necessarily embedded in the urban experience—as a possible way of forming new practices or commitments that would contrast with (and hopefully counter-balance some of) the essentialist identities or social, ethnic, religious or national allegiances that have led to violence, conflict, animosity, and public insecurity in so many cities around the world.

The Cities in Conflict Working Group has turned its full attention to the Jerusalem 2050 Project, for the time being at least. For more information, please visit that website at (http://web.mit.edu/cis/jerusalem2050/). For more materials on related activities developed in the Cities in Conflict working group, please check MIT's OCW (www.ocw.mit.edu)

If you have further questions contact Diane Davis (dedavis@mit.edu), Roger Peterson (rpeters@mit.edu) or John de Monchaux (demon@mit.edu).