Peace/time landscape proposals for the Israeli and Palestinian border
This thesis began with a consideration of time in landscape architecture. Design practices in landscape architecture are usually open-ended in terms of time, but a prevalent new condition, the shrinking scale of social time, provides opportunities for landscape to readdress the open-ended model in design method. What would change if works of landscape architecture were conceived not for an uncertain, open-ended future, but for a defined time period (i.e., a limited duration)? Landscape architecture typically overlays two categories of time—social and natural. This thesis integrates social and natural time by engaging natural processes the durations or lifespans of which coincide with the abbreviated scale or frame of contemporary social time. Political relationships are considered in terms of social time and potential relations to natural process. Landscape architecture has already begun to engage that nexus through peace parks. With the new temporalities of contemporary life in mind, framing short-term natural processes through six units of social time—seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months—can expand opportunities and possibilities for peace parks. These new models of works are examples of peace landscape. The six pieces of peace landscape will be proposed along Israeli and Palestinian “border”, the separation barrier. By engaging short-term natural processes with cultural significance in the region, peace landscape can provide immediate and powerful opportunities for social engagement and implement progressive transformation upon the separation system: from an implement of sovereignty and oppression to a medium of peacemaking. In truth, the individual proposals for peace landscape represented here together form one proposal: to shape the built landscape indirectly by operating directly on human consciousness.
time, natural process, peace landscape, peace park, Israel and Palestine Barrier
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign