4 years in the ivory tower

I often forget who/what the numbers in World Bank and UNDP reports refer to.  It takes constant reminders that behind these numbers are faces that describe a developing country.

Today, I had a great talk with a friend about the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East.  The true realities of these individuals – from a first-person account – are often not reflected in the analytical and technical ways through which we, from the heights of our Ivory Tower, study issues of (under)development, conflict, and politics, to name a few.

We are privileged in looking, critiquing, analyzing, and judging the world from a place of comfort, security, and ease.  From our Ivory Tower, we can never truly understand the pain, the suffering, the urgency, and the hopelessness these individuals on the other side of the world are experiencing every day.

Would this kind of setting – one of comfort and detachment – allow us to approach crucial issues such as developmental aid and foreign military policies in a constructive and effective manner?

That is for you to decide.  But for me, I’m going back to the place where I can hear people’s personal narratives of their daily struggles.

Conventional thought is that people identify a place by its history.  That association between history and place is constructed through social processes, and is ingrained into the collective consciousness.  People seek their identity in places by super-imposing their interpretations and narratives on a piece of land or structure.

Rem Koolhaas seems to think that history is no longer relevant in conceptualizing the built environment, because history only functions to inflate already overly-occupied and exhausted city centers.  In Koolhaas’ own words:

“To the extent that history finds its deposit in architecture, present human quantities will inevitably burst and deplete previous substance.   Identity conceived as this form of sharing the past is a losing proposition: not only is there – in a stable model of continuous population expansion – proportionally less and less to share, but history also has an invidious half-life - as it is more abused, it becomes less significant - to the point where its diminishing handouts become insulting.  This thinning is exacerbated by the constantly increasing mass of tourists, an avalanche that, in a perpetual quest for ‘character,’ grinds successful identities down to meaningless dust.”

To keep city centers alive is the “thinning” out of the place’s history, and this is particular poignant in Jerusalem.  The Old City, as the center of all that defines Jerusalem – politics, religion, history, culture, ethnic identity – is over-saturated with benign and non-denominational religious icons, gaudy souvenirs that call for the pious and atheist alike, touristic re-packaging of religious rituals (or what’s left of it), holy sites desacralized under the weight of tourists, ostentatious proclamation of a place’s importance through mammoth structures…the list goes on.

There is also a “hyper-local”/”hyper-global” element to Jerusalem.  The “hyper-local” is felt in the religious going-abouts of the Orthodox Jews, the hawking of the store keepers on Jerusalem’s treasures, and the centuries-old relics that are fervently guarded by nuns and monks.  The “hyper-global” is felt in the amalgamation of global services that cater to the transient religious pilgrim, the universally-understood signage that direct tourists – regardless of nationality – to common points of interest, and the collection of international institutions that demand a piece of Jerusalem’s history.

Will Jerusalem someday implode under the immensity of its manifold tangential contradictions?