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Architects: Studio Malka Architecture
- Year: 2022
Text description provided by the architects. In the Israeli-Palestinian caesura, the political institutions no longer envisage a situation of peace. Interestingly, at the most active period in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we were talking about a «peace process»; The semantic field alone sums up the distance taken from peace itself. Solutions have to be taken by force by non-governmental spontaneous organizations and take direct actions, avoiding processes.
In this momentum, Studio Malka has developed Walled City, a linear city installed on the West Bank separation wall, a logical follow-up to the Self-Defense project in Paris. This project is stemmed from Utopies Croisées’s book of conversations and projects with the late architect Yona Friedman.
Walled City offers a space of reunification, a link between territories and peoples, beyond borders or religions. This linear city is installed on the West Bank separation wall, from Hebron to Jenin via Bethlehem and Jerusalem.
This so-called security barrier was built in 2002 in the West Bank and declared an illegal entity and a violation of international law by the International Court of Justice decision in 2004.
In reaction to oppression and with the desire to create an alternative scenario to current policies, the Pocket of Active Resistance (PRA) is a spontaneous complex, offering a new system of life and contestation, in a permanent state of dissidence and insurrection.
As this linear bridge city is made up of modular units, the PRA allows the community to grow rapidly by unifying local and international activists and protagonists for peace. Wall City besieges this 730km long structure to create a safe zone, allowing a sufficient state of protection to dwell forums and assemblies that generate alternative political scenarios. The aim is to pacify first the thickness of a wall and inhabit this No Man's Land, above the walls that separate peoples, then the area and gradually pacify an entire region;
The PRA is a state within the state, an insurrectionary pocket that aims to establish a necessary schism and provide shelters to develop this autonomous zone. Walled City offers an "alter-socius", a political solution in the sense of Politeia, which refers to the constitution of a community. The separation wall becomes then a space of unified common resistance, a link between human beings creating a self-proclaimed and self-regulated independent pacifist nation, in reaction to the extremist policies and fundamentalist ideologies that infest the whole region.
