בניית שלום בירושלים: התשתיות העירוניות כתשתיות לשלום?

Divided cities, such as Jerusalem, Nicosia, or Belfast, pose a significant challenge to peace builders worldwide. Such cities are ethnically, religiously,and nationally sensitive. They are central to any peace negotiation process and are settings where violence occasionally erupts. At the same time, the city’s residents live their ordinary lives despite the conflict and hostility between the groups – they sometimes work together, shop at the same stores or share public space. In this article, we use urban peace building framing and ask what urban peace building is and how the urban setting shapes the peace building process and vice versa. We conceptualize urban peace building as a combination of urban and peace processes through a theoretical discussion, presenting the central concepts and the city’s related political and spatial aspects. We demonstrate this conceptualization by employing an ethnographic analysis of a peace building initiative in Jerusalem that took place during 2017-2020. The findings stress the combination of the urban—in particular, urban infrastructure—and inter-group relations, pointing to the potential inherent in the urban setting as well as its limitations. In conclusion, we suggest that municipalities can foster peace initiatives through urban policies and peace builders can lead urban initiatives. We state that wherever there is conflict, there is also potential for a healing process, and we, as political and urban researchers,must illuminate this potential.