“There’s a huge gap between the broad stroke of policymaking and the reality on the ground,” Karen Lee Bar-Sinai, the co-founder, with Yehuda Greenfield-Gilat, of SAYA, a Jerusalem-based design studio, said. SAYA drafts hypothetical solutions to brick-and-mortar problems in disputed territories around the world. The pair has consulted with teams to unravel national borders in the former Yugoslavia, reconcile Greek and Turkish claims in the divided Cypriot city of Nicosia, and, far more frequently and closer to home, sketch profiles of peace for Israel and Palestine. “Policymakers tend to frame their questions in terms of numbers,” Bar-Sinai said. “Sometimes they don’t consider that conflicts will be resolved in space.”
Bar-Sinai and Greenfield-Gilat wandered into the no man’s land of peace-planning during their final year as architecture students at the Technion in Haifa. It was 2002, the same year Israel began construction on the separation wall, a four-hundred-and-thirty-mile concrete-and-chain-link barrier strung across contested border areas. Built to stop terror attacks, the wall was controversial both in Israel and abroad: it was unilateral; it intruded on Palestinian lands; and, most significantly, it established a de facto border. The two students thought design was an issue, too. “This was the most costly, ambitious, and probably the most significant piece of construction in the history of the country,” says Bar-Sinai, who spent the past academic year as a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. “No one in the planning community was saying anything. We were leaving it to generals and security officials to determine what our future with the Palestinians would look like.”
For their senior project, Bar-Sinai and Greenfield-Gilat selected a small segment of what those who advocate for a two-state solution see as the future border between Israel and a Palestinian state—the French Hill area in northern East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed following the 1967 war—and explored the way a built environment there might foster and sustain a viable peace. The design-centric Technion faculty was, at best, lukewarm; one professor even warned the pair they might not graduate. But the students persevered, and drafted a combination light-rail station and border crossing at the American Colony Hotel—a facility designed not just to keep the two populations apart but one that could also help them connect.
“The separation wall was built for political and security reasons,” says Greenfield-Gilat, who does his annual military reserve service with the Israel Defense Forces’ Strategy Department. “But it’s not fit for either purpose. It separates farmers from their farms, children from their schools. It’s ugly. And you can’t stop terror with just a fence. We need to imagine structures that can build hope instead of fear and resentment.”
It’s not that the SAYA designers dismiss security or the need for it. But the borders they imagine try to be smarter. One SAYA proposal envisions two parallel highways along the existing Route 60, which runs north from Beersheba, through Jerusalem. One side for Israel. One side for Palestine. And a light-rail system running in between them as border. “We’re used to certain separations in life,” Bar-Sinai observes. “Separations like highway divisions or train tracks. Why not build security into structures that are familiar and benign.”
In 2008, one of SAYA’s proposals for Jerusalem ended up on the negotiating table between Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. (In a 2011 story for the New York Times Magazine, Bernard Avishai recalled how, during an interview, Olmert showed him “an architectural sketch for a symbolic Palestinian checkpoint leading to the American Colony Hotel in Sheik Jarrah.” Avishai later wrote on his blog that the sketch belonged to SAYA.) The meeting, like so many before and after it, did not bear fruit. But it may have sparked a slight shift in process. “SAYA is very creative,” says S. Daniel Abraham, the founder of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace. Abraham commissioned the Jerusalem proposals from SAYA and then presented them to Olmert. Their work showed, he said, “that you can have a border that is attractive, that doesn’t obstruct the city, but that also provides security.” Abraham also commissioned a series of drawings for villages of low-cost dwellings in Israeli territory that could house Israeli settlers relocating from the West Bank.
“It’s said that nothing is agreed in a negotiation until everything is agreed,” said Greenfield-Gilat, who studied policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. “But instead of drawing a random circle around Jerusalem, why not single out small patches of territory, patches that could be traded off and eventually sewn together like a quilt. It’s not just a question of working this out in space. It’s a way of being flexible, of breaking through some of the psychological obstacles that keep us from concluding an agreement.”
Along with cultivating politicians and generals, the studio is also enlisting the general public into design for peace. SAYA’s online interactive map, which it developed in collaboration with the Abraham Center, invites users to draw their own border between Israel and Palestine, and to decide which West Bank settlements should be included in Israel proper. A mouse click over the settlement of Modi’in Illit brings roughly a tenth of Israel’s half million West Bank settlers into the Jewish state, and with minimal impact on Palestinian life. Trying to weave the Ariel settlement into Israel’s national fabric proves far more disruptive and problematic: it lies well east of the 1967 lines, and would require building a corridor through several Palestinian towns.
But inflexibility and design ignorance may not be SAYA’s most worrisome foes. There are also opponents of a two-state solution in Israel, politicians and settlers who use their own knowledge of urban planning to stymie negotiations and undermine peace. One of SAYA’s most recent proposals, which it developed along with Terrestrial Jerusalem, an Israeli N.G.O., denounces Israel’s proposed expansion into the E1 block between Jerusalem and the Ma’ale Adumim settlement on the West Bank. “The administration calls it spatial shaping,” Greenfield-Gilat explained. “But it’s a euphemism for a settlement surge. If Israel develops in that direction, it will fragment any future Palestinian state into isolated cantons. There’s no way a two-state solution could work in those conditions.”
The partners at SAYA told me that they weren’t selling structures; their product is an invitation for policy planners to think more like architects, and architects to think a little more like policy planners. There are probably more roadblocks than road before them—reciprocal fear, hatred, atrophy at home, and, in some other countries, a stigma and doubts about Israel and Israelis (and Israeli urban planners), even those who are committed to peace. Still, they want to push forward. “We have a professional responsibility here,” says Bar-Sinai. “An obligation to devote our skills to resolving these problems. We can’t close our eyes on them because they’re difficult.” Or, maybe, because she knows that while peacemakers are blessed, they might be doubly blessed if just a few more of them were mapmakers.