No Man's Land: A Spatial Anatomy of Five Divided Cities

8/8/2019 No Man's Land: A Spatial Anatomy of Five Divided Cities

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PROCEEDINGS OF THEUS/ICOMOSINTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM

MANAGING CONFLICT &CONSERVATION IN HISTORIC CITIESINTEGRATING CONSERVATION WITH TOURISM,DEVELOPMENT AND POLITICS

ANNAPOLIS,MARYLAND,USA 24-27APRIL 2003

UNITED STATES NATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL ON MONUMENTS AND SITES

COMIT NATIONAL DES ETATS UNIS DU CONSEIL INTERNATIONAL DES MONUMENTS ET DES SITES

No Man's Land

A Spatial Anatomy of Five Divided Cities

Jon Calame, with Esther Charlesworth

The causes lie deep and simply--the causes are a hunger in a single soul, hunger for joy and some

security, multiplied a million times; muscles and mind aching to grow, to work, to create, multiplied a

million times.

-- John Steinbeck from The Grapes of Wrath

Introduction

Every city is haunted with unfinished business: irredeemable losses, stubborn memories, odd stains,

broken roofs, and unrecorded episodes. In the divided city, these ghosts multiply, harassing it with theimpossible itch of the amputee. Even where new construction takes place, displacing the scars and

rubble, that secret sense of forfeiture remains. Embattled communities straddling a confrontation line

give the impression that nervous tissues and ligaments were torn and noting properly healed, so that

even an army of architects could not bring circulation back to them. Their original vitality is elusive.

Tenants of these places, forlorn despite the feverish struggle to possess them, are typically unaware of

the city before its partition or unable to forget. Both groupsthose displaced in space and those

displaced by circumstancebecome shaken, watchful, and reluctant heirs to no mans land.

Regular soldiers eventually leave the battlefield, returning home in one condition or another. The

residents of war-torn cities are already home when they encounter their terrors, and often cannot

escape from them. Even when the politicians have sealed a peace, the suffering of urban residentscontinues with the pangs of loss and the impossibility of making up for missed opportunities. The places

and institutions that once assisted or protected them have disappeared or proven themselves

untrustworthy. An unwritten, and time-honored, social contract was broken along the way. Numerous

authors have noted that every city, no matter how sick or how healthy with respect to inter-ethnic

relations, can be located along a continuum from integration to partition.


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Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar, and Nicosia are among the lost cities, war cities, and pariah cities.They carry a special stigma in the eyes of residents and onlookers; they have traveled along the darkest,

most uncivil paths imaginable and sometimes emerged again to recite their stories. These narratives of

violent partition provide a somber reminder that urban culture can incubate bloodshed, prejudice and

discord as well as cooperation and harmony. What are the ideal conditions for this type of incubation?

Why bother thinking about these cities and their communities which seem to have disappeared, for a

time at least, over the threshold of reason and restraint? Is a fascination with them the product of

morbid curiosity? If not, what moral can be taken from the divided citys cautionary tale?

The research findings briefly summarized here suggest that these impacts are neither exclusively

negative nor entirely inconsistent with the more constructive forces shaping traditional urban

development. This paper is intended to provoke questions that lead to better understanding, clearer

recognition of patterns that unite cities in crisis, and point out the way towards less devastating

outcomes for cities approachingbut not yet breachingthe frontier of total, physical segregation

along ethnic lines.

Of primary interest are appropriate professional responses to the divided city dilemma. If the problems

of the divided city are intractable, strategies for mitigation are all the more urgent due to the heavy toll

exacted by a segregated environment on urban residents. If the problems can be solved, the nature of

the conflicts must clearly be articulated in different and more compatible terms. That is, if there is a


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discernable logic that guides the formation of divided cities, then there must be a logical response that

process of development. Our research suggests that this logic exists not only in individual cases but also

in the form of morphological patterns binding these five divided cities together.

Divided cities provide a clue for predicting the fate of urban communities confronting violent crisis

because the logic of their development reflects a struggle for collective safety and cultural identity.

Their development illuminates a chain of failed negotiations and policies from the corner coffee shop to

the United Nations. Their anatomy is recognizable: barricades, blight, no-mans-lands, homogeneous

ethnic quilting, ruined historic cores, buffers, checkpoints. Their value lies in their elucidation of

patterns that can be carried over to cities where internecine conflict has not yet sealed the fate of rival

communities.

The Divided Cities Project

This paper synthesizes some of the findings of a field-based research project lasting four years (1998-

2002) undertaken jointly by myself and Esther Charlesworth. This work was grounded in the desire to

discuss patterns of urban partition of value to those professionals and others concerned with the health

of urban communities whose security and collective identity are under siege. It was under

The divided cities project resulted from direct involvement (1994-present) in the post-war

reconstruction process in Mostar, where gross limitations of a divided municipal administration forced

the unusually intense and lasting intervention of foreign professionals in all types of humanitarian

assistance. This research stems directly from observations collected over seven consecutive summer in

Mostar and the questions raised by them.

We wondered if political settlements were the standard prerequisite for effective post-warreconstruction, if designing for a divided city is indeed immoral, if spontaneous approaches to

reconstruction were justified by the ruined circumstances of urban residents, and if any patterns govern

pre- and post-partition urban development. Above all, we felt that divided cities were not anomalous

but rather the unlucky vanguard of a much larger class of cities in which inter-communal rivalry

becomes entrenched in the physical realm. A pursuit of such questions and hypotheses led us to four

other divided citiesBelfast, Beirut, Nicosia, and Jerusalemand back many times to Mostar.

Extensive dialogue with professionals, policy-makers, critics, and residents in these five cities suggest

that mistakes were made that could have been avoided. The symptoms of discord in the urban

environment--most specifically, the physical partitions that encourage and tutor one ethnic community

to disdain another--constitute, in turn, a disease with its own pathology and symptoms, none of themespecially desirable.

The study did not touch upon physical or political remediation for any of these cities, nor is it meant to

dwell upon morbid urban transformations for their own sake. In addition, the histories of each place are

long and well-documented by others; this work relies heavily on the excellent work of these critics and

historians, but will borrow from it only as far as it is necessary to understand the broadest causes and

circumstances of partition and useful to the elucidation of patterns linking the five cities under

investigation. Acknowledging the value of analytical works on each of the selected cities in isolation, the


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research summarized here was intended to be comparative and oriented towards better outcomes in

future scenarios of urban partition. The unavoidable superficiality of treatment granted to each city is

compensated by the value and novelty of the generic profile of divided cities that emerges from thisresearch.

In order to undertake comparative work on such an ambitious scale, conventional scholarly research,

photographic documentation, library research and correspondence were complemented with large

quantities of original interview material. In each city under investigation, conversations were

documented with local residents on both sides of the partition, cab drivers, politicians, policy-makers,

architects, planners, critics, and journalists. In many cases, interview subjects rejected the very notion

that their native city belonged in such infamous company, while others urged even wider comparisons in

order to understand the magnitude of the problems they encountered, invoking the notion of urban

apartheid and anti-urban sentiment. All contributed to a fuller, more complicated picture of the

phenomenon of urban division and its causes than has been previously committed to paper.

Largely missing from the existing literature on the subject of urban partition, answers to a number of

basic and intuitive questions guided this inquiry from the outset. Regarding agency, it necessary to

identify those who drew the lines, those who produced the resulting partitions, and those who paid for

them. Regarding the social and physical impacts of division, it is important to determine how life

proceeds in the wake of partitioning, what penalties and profits accompany it, and whether forcible

segregation serves any legitimate purpose in light of enormous social and material costs. Regarding

stakeholders, any investigation must identify the primary actors in the divided cities drama, determine

which of them contributes directly to the violence, and ascertain the motivations preventing them from

abandoning the city altogether. Regarding function, it was important to explore how partition relates to

notions of soil, security, collective security and sovereignty in each case, working with the assumption

that functional patterns tied to a generic divided cities phenomenon might emerge. Regarding space,on-site documentation addressed fundamental questions related to the scale, structural nature and

porosity of the partitions and thresholds separating rival communities.

Crippling phase of a common disease

Glimpsing the divided city reveals the debilitating end stage of a common urban disease. Every city

contains cultural fault lines reinforced through voluntary segregation; they give shape and character to

good and bad neighborhoods. Since all cities reflect local demographics in spatial terms, each can

be located somewhere upon an imaginary gradient spanning from perfect spatial integration to

complete separation. Beyond the far end of this spectrum lie a small handful of physically partition XE

"partition" ed cities that passed beyond the civil horizon, into dim labyrinths of inter-communalviolence, and largely out of sightprominent among them are Mostar XE "Mostar" , Belfast XE "Belfast"

, Beirut XE "Beirut" , Jerusalem XE "Jerusalem" , and Nicosia XE "Nicosia".

While each of these cities remains in the throes or aftermath of its partition, struggling to repair

assorted kinds of social and physical damage, the rest of the world is routinely introduced to another

patient who might be coming down with a case of the Troubles; the roster includes Lagos, Dagestan,

Singapore, Mitrovica, Kirkuk, and many others.


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Because its development is marked by institutionalized fear and suspicion, the partitioned city acts as a

warning beacon. It evolutionsome would say regressiondefies liberal principles of tolerance and

pluralism in favor of strict, rudimentary notions of survival. It suggests that cities too have fevers,memories, suicides. They can dismantle themselves, split, and submit to almost limitless siege within

their own boundaries; they construct interior borders, wrestles internal enemies, and makes strangers

of natives. These struggling, smoldering, anxious places are inhabited by people forced to choose

between evils: suffocating chauvinism or humiliating assimilation; exacerbation by paramilitaries or

neglect by police; subsidized complicity or impoverished resistance.

In these places, voluntary segregation was compounded by involuntary displacement of residents

according to ethnicity. They are the gravitational centers of regional and national conflicts, and they are

the proxies for wars fought larger adversaries sometimes at the international level, as with Palestine

and Cyprus. Through and along the streets, military or paramilitary engagements inscribed new

boundaries between neighbors, colleagues, and families. These boundaries often incorporated

traditional fault lines through processes both studied and spontaneous. In all cases, spatial separation

of ethnic groups was punctuated by physical partition, legitimized by discriminatory public policies,

rationalized with mythical narratives of group struggle, and cemented by recurrent inter-group

violence.

By the time each of these partitioning processes was complete, thousands of civilians were dead,

hundreds of institutions were crippled, and five cities achieved the status of international pariahs. What

ends were served?

Looking at the extreme case

Though mild forms of urban partition are not rare, in a handful of cases segregation is so rife that itdistorts all the normal functions of the city and shapes every aspect of its subsequent development.

These are the limit-cases, and the ones most fruitful for the discernment of patterns. Belfast XE "Belfast"

, Beirut XE "Beirut" , Jerusalem XE "Jerusalem" , Mostar XE "Mostar" , and Nicosia XE "Nicosia" are

further linked by a small set of common characteristics: all were the product of regional inter-ethnic

antagonisms, all were the product of violence and discrimination between old neighbors, and all remain

at least partially unresolved with respect to communal relationships and social viability. Of the five,

Nicosia and Belfast remain physically partitioned, Mostar and Beirut have shed their barricades in recent

years, and Jerusalem has the dubious distinction of rebuilding dividing walls following extended periods

of partition (1948-1967) and unification (1967-2001).

The Symptom and the Illness

In most cases, urban partition walls can be simultaneously interpreted as the outgrowth of traditional

discord, as a form of remediation in response to that discord, and as generators of new social crises

stemming from distrust and isolation. Of special interest here is the way physical partitions evolve from

the realm of the unthinkable to the realm inevitable, since this would chart a path to be studiously

avoided by city managers elsewhere. Cities progress towards, through, and away from partition can be

traced in reasonably systematic ways. Accordingly, their stories suggest both a widespread latency and

the possibility of developing frameworks for effective intervention.


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Divided cities are characterized by protracted inter-group violence, mutual distrust and chauvinism, but

these difficulties cannot be considered a natural outgrowth of ethnic diversity within the urban

condition. It is easy to cite a larger number of ethnically diverse urban populations cooperating freelydespite narratives of national identity that seem mutually exclusive. The core conflict underlying the

divided city condition may relate to incompatibility of social structures only roughly corresponding, if at

all, to religion or race: those tied to class and caste affiliation, to legitimate and illegitimate political

cultures, to indigenous and foreign communities, to loyalist and republican social movements, and to

those seeking social justice when opposed by those seeking sovereignty.

Containing a crisis

When the process of segregation slips beyond the grasp of governments and institutions trying to curb

it, urban residents living and working near inter-ethnic fault lines are among the first to feel the most

negative and violent effects. In this environment of social instability, even cities that appear healthy and

successful can become a convenient container for protracted ethnic feuds. The divided city commonly

functions as a regional sink for ethnic antagonisms not produced or fostered in the urban environment.

These cities contain ethnic fault lines as the remnant of earlier skirmishes, and the latent resentment

associated with these lines is activated by new stresses. The lines appear to have a life of their own, but

this impression is illusory.

Considering only the immediate vulnerabilities of local communities, the phenomenon of divided cities

is easily explained: physical violence must be minimized at interfaces were rival communities interact.

Like boys with their fingers in the dyke, city managers in all five cases examined were compelled to

provide protection in the form of barricades for beleaguered citizens once conventional approaches

failed. In many instances, barriers had already been erected by threatened citizens or paramilitary

groups claiming to act on the behalf of community bearing minority status with respect to governinginterests at the municipal or national levels. Physical partition is employed to contain a crisis that has

overwhelmed the normal systems for maintaining order and protecting the personal safety of urban

residents in an even-handed way. One reason municipal governments are hesitant to address the

subject of partition is that the barricades are a measure of their own failure to fulfill a basic mandate.

Another reason is that walls, whether illicit, scandalous, or ugly, curb inter-communal violence more

cheaply and effectively in the short term than police surveillance. They solve a profound, longstanding

problem in a superficial and temporary way.

If such partitions worked over the long haul, partition walls could be considered an unfortunate but

effective response to ethnic conflict. Their failure as passive security devices for the municipal

government is just one of many reasons why they should be questioned. In many cases, these partitionsalso postpone or even preclude a negotiated settlement between ethnic antagonists because they

create a climate of dampened violence, sustained distrust and subcutaneous hostility. Urban partitions

seem to dampen violent confrontation while affirming the notion that fear and paranoia are justified; if

not, why would the wall still be standing? Is it not the emblem of a threat as much as a bulwark against

it?


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A crisis of containment

The communities living behind these walls often find that their living environment has shifted from theintense, unstable mode of violent conflict to a low-grade, bureaucratized pressure cooker. Though

neither is acceptable, the stabilized system is insidious because it is commonly perceived as a form of

resolution deemed acceptable by local politicians and foreign onlookers. It relies on thresholds both

spatialencompassing the partitions themselves with all the difficulties attending themand human,

since the violence and emotional suffering that come with sustained inter-ethnic rivalry are never

brought to normal levels. Meanwhile, the urban residents unlucky enough to live on barricaded

interfaces or in partitioned enclaves are harnessed with unusual burdens. Their opportunities to move,

work, socialize, shop, and take advantage of municipal services are severely constrained. Their lives

often become co-opted by their leaders desire to retain contested urban territory even after social or

political conditions have improved.

Worst of all, their fears and prejudices are unlikely to change as long as their view of things is distorted

by the uncompromising presence of a defensive wall. In this way, the partitions intended to contain a

crisis themselves generate new ones. In all five cities explored here, whole generations have been

molded by a physical environment that denies the promise of renewed inter-communal trust. New

psychoses emerge, different and often more virulent than the ones that prompted civilian violence in

the first place. In Nicosia, it seems almost preferable to hear the anger of an older Cypriot directed at

his ethnic rivals, where there was at least some direct knowledge between individuals from both groups,

rather than the idle prejudice of the younger citizens who have not yet had the chance to test their

cynicism through direct contact. The ignorance that breeds behind these partitions is a core ingredient

for future conflict, and its toxic effects on the social atmosphere of the city must be weighed in relation

to the short-term benefits of division, most of which accrue to the citys managers rather than its

citizens.

Statistics on Inter-Group Conflict

Divided cities are symptomatic of larger trends related to warfare, sovereignty, and group identity.

Small-scale, non-conventional warsinvolving groups most easily identified by language, religion, or

place rather than nationalityhave blossomed in a global renaissance of amateur warfare. These wars

typically lack uniforms, leaders, rules, treaties, conventions, exemptions, beginnings, and ends; their

seeds are sown in the swampy terrain of cultural identity and irredentism. Long obscured or trumped

by Cold War rivalries, inter-ethnic conflict has since become ubiquitous. More specifically, since World

War II there has been a clear shift in global warfare trends from inter- to intra-state conflict: 59 of 64

wars occurring between 1945 until 1988 were intra-state or civil wars, and during these conflicts about80% of the war dead were killed by someone of their own nationality. During this same period, 127 new

sovereign states have been created, and 35 new international land boundaries have been drawn since

1980.[1]

Currently, about 46 protracted civil conflicts are ongoing, and of these 87% are grounded in contested

group rights or threatened collective identity. The last five years have witnessed significant inter-cultural

hostilities in Afghanistan, Angola, East Timor, Chechnya, Dagestan, Kosovo, India, Nigeria, the

Philippines, and Rwanda. In 2002 Israel initiated a partitioning program amid escalating friction with


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disenfranchised Palestinians; the construction is ongoing, with plans to construct 50 miles of fencing

along the Israel-West Bank border, 30 miles around the Gaza Strip, and up to 790 yards on the

vulnerable eastern and northern flanks of Jerusalem.

Spotlight on urban, emblematic areas

Jerusalems predicament illuminates another unfortunate trend: symbolically important cities are often

central to inter-ethnic conflicts. Whether or not they posses strategic military value, they have become

increasingly prone to violence. Running contrary to conventional wisdom and gathering speed, old forms

of fraternal violence are lodging themselves in cities where security can no longer be guaranteed.

Thanks to proximity, convenience, ease of disappearance, historic associations, and a host of other

factors, cities are exploited as sustainable platforms for inter-ethnic feuds. This pattern is closely tied to

troubling statistics showing a growing death toll in the civilian sector.

Civilian toll rising

Civilian urban populations have been severely affected by the promulgation of inter-ethnic warfare;

more recently, in relative terms, than during any other period. In World War I, for example, 14% of all

deaths were civilian. That figure rose to 67% in World War II, and in the 1990swhen most wars were

within rather than between statescivilian deaths constituted 90% of the wartime totals. It can be

safely assumed that psychological trauma on a massive scale accompanies this type of loss, dislocation,

and prolonged anxiety. While most cities act as a magnet for artistic, financial, and intellectual activity,

this very concentration of wealth and cosmopolitan behavior can also convert the urban arena into a

cultural battleground when communal vulnerabilities are exacerbated. For residents of cities that

become the interface for rival ethnic communities, individual vulnerability increases even further. In

these cases the city can be interpreted as a political stage, citadel, icon, idol, treasury, emblem, andincubatorof both tolerance and prejudiceall at the same time.

As the state of contemporary warfare rapidly devolves towards fratricidal struggle, the scale of conflict

narrows and the willingness of superpower nations to intercede wanes, the likelihood of violence in

historic and heterogeneous cities will increase proportionately. These global trends and statistics

strongly suggest that small-scale warfare remains on a collision course with emblematic cities of mixed

ethnicity, posing challenging questions regarding how future wrecks be avoided.

Divided Cities Are Not Anomalies

The comparisons at the center of this study provide some grounds for optimism. Since divided citiesprovide relatively unambiguous clues regarding the evolution of urban violence and segregation,

analysis of them may provide a driving wedge into the larger problem of inter-ethnic antagonism and

rising civilian death tolls. Long neglected by scholars, divided cities provide important insights into the

relationship between urban vitality and communal rivalry. Any straightforward assessment of ethnically

partitioned cities will illuminate the sobering pitfalls and penalties in store for city managers choosing to

address collective insecurity through physical division.


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Not freaks in the urban circus, patterns connect them

These cities have received far less attention from scholars and professionals than they deserve; whilethe relatively mundane issues of public space and sprawl continue to inspire mountains of expert

analysis, cities whose development was characterized by carnage, ruin, and immeasurable suffering over

extended periods have been marginalized in the literature. Long treated as anomalies, divided cities are

linked to each other by clear and coherent patterns. These patterns encompass concerns shared by

almost every city: institutional discrimination, ethnicity as a prominent criterion for political

participation, physical security, fairness in policing, shifting relations between majority and minority

ethnic communities, and so forth. The dynamics of partition in cities like Beirut XE "Beirut" , Belfast XE

"Belfast" , Jerusalem XE "Jerusalem" , Mostar XE "Mostar" and Nicosia XE "Nicosia" become of urgent

importance if they are accepted as warning beacons for a whole class of cities prone to violent forms of

inter-ethnic tension.

This class appears to be large and growing. Even a casual scan of international affairs in the early

twenty-first century reveals that urban communities torn and traumatized by physical segregation are

multiplying quickly. Brussels remains the would-be trophy of separatist parties in Wallonia; Montreal

could be caught in a similar tug-of-war in Quebec; Los Angeles has yet to confront the racial fractures

exposed by popular violence in the 1990s; Serbian and Albanian residents of Mitrovica have split

themselves on either side of the Ibar River; Hausas and Yorubas in Nigeria are locked in a lengthy cycle

of violent reprisals in Lagos; Hindus and Muslims clash routinely in Ahmedabad, though they dispute the

Ayodhya religious complex hundreds of miles away; war in Iraq have brought old ethnic rivals out of the

woodwork in Kirkuk, where Kurds, Turkmen, Christians and Arabs all lay claim to the city; and

Cincinnatis racial fault lines were recently activated in the wake of discriminatory police brutality.

These citations are just a sampling.

Preconditions increasingly common

This understudied urban class is growing because a number of global trends related to communal

identity, nationhood, and urban management have conspired against the conventional model of the

healthy city. The social pressures on minority urban groups are mounting with the devaluation of their

identity, beliefs, and knowledge within a market-driven global economy. Many of these communities, in

both rich and poor contexts, are witness to a systematic failure of the traditional urban security

infrastructure due to neglect, discrimination, or persecution. These failings are the preconditions,

though probably not the causes, of urban partition and they are becoming measurably more common.

In reply to this kind of chronic insecurity, urban communities mobilize paramilitary organizations, riot,

revolt, threaten of succession, and frequently succumb to the paranoia manufactured by ethno-nationalist political parties.

In step with these trends, new walls between rival ethnic groups are constantly emerging, while old

scars are stubborn in healing. The causes for rivalry, along with an awareness of forsaken alternatives,

generally go unrecognized. Politiciansboth those embroiled in the ethnic conflicts and those

attempting to intercede on behalf of the international communityoften become mired in short-term

policy fixes that are designed in response to a crisis. Physical partition has emerged over the last fifty

years as one of the most popular and most myopic solutions to inter-ethnic violence in the urban


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environment. What the engineers of these partitions often misunderstand, regardless of the nature of

their intentions, is the corrosive effects they have on the lives of urban residents forced to navigate

them.

The Seeds of Partition

Similarities

Looking for patterns, five cities split physically along ethnic fault lines will be compared in detail. They

each became a place despised and avoided; their names that have become synonymous with chaos and

discord. All were once thriving, all were subsequently partitioned, and all were at the epicenter of civil

conflicts fuelled by inter-ethnic rivalries. Something went wrong along the way, old wounds began to

bleed, and they were compelled to construct interior borders, wrestle internal enemies, and convert

natives into strangers. In this way it seems that good cities go bad.

Their stories of physical segregation suggest that cities are subject to fevers, hallucinations, and suicides

when they are weak. They become weak when they mistake enemies for friends, neighbors for rivals,

and separation for safety. In the throes of these afflictions, they sometimes enact very un-urban

dramas; they dismantle themselves, split apart, erect labyrinths and submit to almost limitless self-

immolation within their own boundaries. Following a siege, the besieged almost invariably point to

former neighbors, friends, and colleagues as the objects of their resentment, those with whom they

once mingled in a thoroughly unremarkable way.

Limit cases

If these places could be counted as exceptionalsimply the byproducts of extraordinary circumstancethey would merit little more that passing interest from professionals and scholars. It will be argued in

the following pages that they are representative of a large, and perhaps growing, class of cities. Many

other cities are on a similar path towards polarization and partition. They generate little alarm because

their cases are not yet full-blown; they have not yet crossed the final threshold where prejudice

crystallizes into physical barricades and voluntary ghettos. Though that frontier often proves to be a

point of no return, few strategic efforts are made to avoid it. For such reasons, the partitioned city acts

as a warning beacon for all cities where inter-communal rivalry plays a potentially prominent role in

social interactions.

While many predictable forces may have predisposed Mostar XE "Mostar" , Belfast XE "Belfast" , Beirut

XE "Beirut" , Jerusalem XE "Jerusalem" , and Nicosia XE "Nicosia" to ethnic conflict, they were neither

unique in their predisposition nor destined for the intense internal violence visited upon them. In many

ways, these divided cities were caught in the crossfire of larger political events that exacerbated ethnic

rivalries and brought them to the foreground where they might have, under more stable conditions,

remained dormant. Looking further at the impacts of political instability and cataclysmic events on the

process of urban partition, a clear correlation appears, as outlined below.


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City Proximal catastrophic events Partition

Belfast WWI; 1920 Irish independence; Education Act of 1944; 1963advent of ONeill liberal administration; 1960s civil rights

revolutions worldwide

1965

Beirut 1948 Israel state formation/Arab war; expectation of UN

settlement; 1982 Israeli invasion

1975

Jerusalem 1938-45 WW2 holocaust; 1948 abandonment of British Mandate;

first and second Palestinian entifadas; WTC disaster

1948/2002

Mostar 1989 end of Cold War with dissolution of USSR; 1990 advent of

Yugoslav disintegration; breakdown of designated UN safe areas

and mass shifts of displaced persons

1992

Nicosia 1958 British pullout with interethnic loyalty split; 1961 Cyprus

Independence; 1974 Athens-backed coup detatof

Makarios/Enosis; breakdown of US regional strategy due to the

1979 Iranian revolution, new alliance with Turkey

1958/63

The way each city absorbed or failed to absorb the shock of proximal events is closely related to the

evolution of inter-ethnic antagonism. What happened in these cities was avoidable before its unfolding

and subject to mitigation afterwards. If their fate is unusual, the challenges and milestones they

encountered along the path from tolerance to partition were not. What were the key steps leading

from cooperation to partition?

Green Wax Pencils

Cities have been shattered by a wax pencil in the space of an hour, split for decades to follow by a

chinagraph frontier[2]

. Lines on a maparbitrary with the urgency of a compromise, the necessity of

war, or the waver of a human handresult in urban minefields navigated daily for decades by those

unlucky enough to live or work near them. They isolate communities that know each other, rely on each

other, and overlap. They are typically the product of external forces acting on the city with the intent to

protect it, or save it, or claim it, or demoralize it, or enlist it in a larger struggle from which it cannot

benefit. It is rare when cities divide themselves alone. Lines become walls, and walls govern behavior

steeped in paranoia and ignorance, mystifying and rendering sinister what lies on the other side. Thesebehaviors, evolving outside the influence of direct experience, intensify antagonisms and fears that

ultimately make bigotry automatic and physical division superfluous. For this reason, they deserve

careful scrutiny.

Drawn on paper, carved into the ground, and messy

While their impacts are nearly identical regardless of context, urban partition lines bear little

resemblance to one another and the processes that generated them differ greatly. Some, like those in


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Jerusalem and Nicosia, were hand-drawn by appointed negotiators on a map. Though the reasons for

each particular plotting is tied to tradition, landforms, and prior episodes of violence, the first iteration

of a partition in the form of a negotiated line on paper had huge implications for the communitiesdivided by them. Often arbitrary or counter-intuitive in their meanderings through highly contested

urban territory, these lines led to many accidental deaths and expensive forms of surveillance. Being

the result of rational design rather than combat, these lines were constructed as parallel barricades

forming a barren neutral zone in the citys center.

At the opposite end of this spectrum, Belfasts government has yet to represent the peacelines

separating Catholics from Protestants as a line on any map, though millions of dollars are appropriated

to construct, enlarge, and maintain the walls in response to public petitions. In Beirut, the Green Line

was an official military boundary quite insufficient as a mapping of protected zones for urban residents,

since paramilitary warlords swiftly subdivided all larger sectors with their own lines, rules, and operating

logic largely determined by shifting location of snipers nests. In Mostar, the largest north-south street

became the front line between military and paramilitary forces, where a wall never was erected; open

space, uniquely hazardous in a dense Ottoman city fabric, constituted the primary barricade along the

line. Had this front line slipped slightly eastward to the natural partitionthe Neretva River gorgethe

elimination of the citys native Muslim population would have been assured.

These observations suggest that it is possible to craft a system for classifying partitions according to

their origins, conceptual nature, and physical nature. Armed with such a system for rational

disaggregation of embedded issues and strategies, further purchase may be gained on the problem of

urban division as a whole. Assuming that the underlying conditions for physical segregation will recur,

leaving new cities vulnerable to violent disruption and discord, more effective and precise ways of

discussing the evolution of partition must be found. An intensive investigation of the spatial and

functional anatomy of these places must complement the extensive work already completed on failedpolicy and governance. This study augments a small but growing body of literature pushing in this

direction, from the ground up.

None is unheralded, none is predestined

Lending additional urgency to the project of studying divided cities is the slow, predictable nature of

their transition from healthy, integrated places to physically partitioned ones. While sudden and

unexpected episodes of violence often herald the final stages of inter-communal isolation, the fault lines

activated during these cataclysmic periods are rarely unfamiliar to residents. They are the invisible,

largely unspoken boundaries that governed movement and perceptions between ethnic groups within

the city for decades, or centuries. They were the informal, voluntary thresholds betweenneighborhoods, quarters, or parishes, and unremarkable until brick and barbed wire converted a

preference into a rule. Every city has them.

Just as no dividing wall was unheralded in the cities where they were built, none of these ill-fated places

was destined for the trauma of partition. Up until the year of its crippling, Mostar was the emblem of

inter-faith tolerance in the Balkans; it would have been the educated observers last guess for the city

most likely to erupt into sectarian violence. Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East, a seat of

international banking, a portrait of secular and cosmopolitan life; proud of their central role in the


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business culture of the region, Beirutis held a strong faith in the unifying power of entrepreneurship and

prosperity over the divisive influence of inherited culture. Jerusalem and Nicosia had long been

crossroads of belief, politics, and commerce; they were defined by exceptional ethnic diversity, whichhad been absorbed successfully for hundreds of years prior to their episodes of partition. Belfast,

sacrificed by Dublins independence movement in 1920 and a stronghold of British influence, was the

one place in Ireland with a guarantee of strong, centralized social control; it was reasonable to assume

that peace could be maintained by Westminster, one of the strongest and most seasoned imperial

democracies in the world.

In each case, the tide of social unrest and institutional discrimination could have moved in a different

direction. The paths that eventually led to physical partition were determined both by longstanding

habits of segregation and by the vicissitudes of political fortune, making the final outcomes neither

random nor inevitable. This blending of native and exotic influence gives an analysis of the divided city

scenario much of its complexity.

Related Crises

As with any problem associated with abiding social trauma on a vast scale, divided cities should not be

appraised in isolation. They are not best characterized as bad eggs, sideshow freaks, or victims of cruel

political manipulations. Though their episodes of violence may be contained in time and space, they are

rarely a product of local forces alone. More often, they provide a stage for larger proxy wars initiated

and orchestrated by agents with interests extending well beyond the municipal boundaries. On an even

more fundamental level, the demise of a city cannot be easily separated from a failure of the social

institutions and political systems of which it is an extension. In the case of split cities, these systems

include new and old nationalisms, liberal democracy, and mechanisms of social justice.

Tied to the demise of the nation-state

Divided cities commonly rest at the center of a struggle over national identity and sovereignty. They are

often the product of a zero-sum game played between neighboring communities seeking security and

refusing compromise in relation to each other. They are a beachhead for sovereignty struggles tied to

territory through irredentism or expansionism. Accordingly, these cities bring to the foreground much

larger questions of the status of nationhood in general as well in the regionally specific struggles they

are associated with. It is probably no accident that the phenomenon of inter-ethnic urban partition has

largely been the product of the twentieth century, when great empires were dismantled and theories of

a hierarchy of races or cultures were subjected to increasingly skillful attacks. If this generation of

professionals is witnessing the demise of ethnically homogeneous nation-states, or cities, as reliablebuilding blocks for social organization, then divided cities are the bearers of bad news.

Discomfort and disorientation in the face of the divided city condition is not surprising, both for

beleaguered residents and incredulous onlookers. Partition is antithetical to what the city traditionally

represents, and it is anathema to all those whose social and material prosperity rely on the

opportunities only a city can provide. Physical division seems to imply a moral transgression as well,

since it is predicated on discrimination so ubiquitous and insecurity so rife that the citylike a body

can no longer physically function as a whole. Severing the same links and networks that define it, the


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divided city becomes a hostage to the fears of small clusters of ethnically homogeneous residents.

Division may be said to be tantamount to the death of the city, if urbanity is primarily defined in terms

of cooperation, opportunity and tolerance. It seems to imply a profound failure of civility.

Calling the city managers bluff?

More likely, the divided city demonstrates a failure of fair governance. The purpose of this investigation

is not to trace partition back to poor policy, but it must be noted in passing through the political sphere

that only a legacy of institutional discrimination upheld by numerous administrations and through

numerous cycles of decision-making can produce urban fratricide. These policies are the plow that

loosens the soil in which inter-ethnic violence is sown. When the citys protective web of spaces,

services, and laws breaks down, disenfranchised communities will contemplate isolation from the

traditional social networks. Decision-makers who look on as cities in their jurisdiction fall apart are

quick to point out that their hands were tied by external powers, that the violence was popular, and that

attempts at rapprochement were earnest. This may partially explain some of the scenarios under

investigation, but stops short of persuasiveness.

The record shows that many politicians were happy to ally themselves with national or foreign interests

at the expense of disenfranchised minority communities within their jurisdiction. On the road to

partition, examples of inter-communal cooperation and pluralism are ignored or discounted. Even

before politically weak communities are antagonized, their legitimate need for fair treatment and access

to opportunity is frequently subordinated. At the most fundamental level, guarantees of physical safety

from violent attack were not upheld in each city that ultimately resorted to urban partition.

In response, frustrated urban residents whose interests were systematically disregarded sometimes

choose to abandon the systems that no longer serve them. By way of compensation, they typically arereplacing a faith in police with paramilitaries and allegiance to political representation with direct

action. Under extreme circumstances, one of the first projects of such an agitated group is to erect

barricades between themselves and their immediate enemies. Citing threats to their physical well-being

both real and presumed, these communities call the bluff of politicians who defend failed systems of

social control. From this first moment of abandonment, all other episodes of urban division follow

according to a rational sequence. It remains only to isolate and understand the steps that lead up to this

initial break in order to characterize the process of urban partition in general terms.

The Cost of Partition

The litany of impacts stemming from urban division are too numerous and varied to mention. Whetheror not the process of urban partition is considered necessary from a policy perspective, it is impossible

to dismiss the negative consequences of forced social segregation. Whatever the political advantages

may have been for rival communities seeking isolation, both voluntary and involuntary forms of division

have universally resulted in incalculable death, suffering, disorientation, loss, and social anemia at the

local levels where they occur. These acts of urban apartheid constitute a failure of governance and

diplomacy because they rely on violence and ongoing intimidation for their success. If the assertion and

maintenance of viable ethnic clusters are essential to the health of certain cities, it is obvious that a

better way must be found to construct them within the urban environment.


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The many actions leading towards urban partitionwhich are both traceable and predictableseem to

defy liberal principles of tolerance and pluralism in favor of rudimentary notions of collective survival.

Where unitary cities are in many ways the synthesis of individual strivings and shared goals, the dividedcity appears to be a product of communal goals that resist thoughtful negotiation, present themselves

as mutually exclusive, and overshadow individual aspiration. The process of partition generally follows a

period of prolonged institutional discrimination and is accompanied by the invigoration of paramilitary

organizations. In this sense, barricades and walls constitute an insult heaped upon longstanding injury:

the persistence of a social justice system that consistently fails to meet the needs of an ethnically

diverse population. Once built, they support or even disguise the continuing inadequacies of those

same government institutions that made them necessary.

In the process, vast sums of public funding and large swaths of public land are squandered[3]

. Walls at

an urban scale are expensive to build, land values are at a premium, and interfaces prove costly to

maintain when constant vigilance is required to monitor simmering conflicts that have not been

addressed, but merely dampened. In some cases elaborate no mans lands must be constructed and

patrolled, while in others checkpoints and transit stations track movement at each crossing. New

physical and institutional infrastructure must be built on both sides of an urban partition to replace what

was left behind, and whole bureaucracies blossom in order to address problems of jurisdiction,

compensation, and encroachment. Rather than investing in the growth or prosperity of an urban

community, partition-era administrations must spend lavishly to resist the back-sweeping tide of inter-

communal violence.

Constrained by this stunted system, the lives of urban residents are disfigured along with the fabric of

the city. Family members and friends are often wounded or killed. Property is lost, social networks are

shattered, and opportunities are forfeited. Physical safety is constantly open to question, and

psychological well-being is universally undermined. Most regret the loss of places where thosememories once had residence. The real costs of urban partition are typically paid by those who had least

to do with their creation: the student, the mother, the pensioner, or the soldier. Residents in these

struggling, smoldering, anxious places are forced to choose between evils: security in chauvinism or

exposure in assimilation; harassment by paramilitaries or neglect by police; subsidized complicity or

impoverished resistance.

Salma, a resident of post-war Beirut living adjacent to the former Green Line, finds it very difficult to

make up for the losses she incurred during the partition era:

We used to see death in front of us. This is how we lived: shells, theft, murder, snipingthis is how we

lived and you would reach a point when everything becomes so blurred that you would no longerdifferentiate between your friends and your foesNo one protected us. And Ill tell you again that those

who paid the price are the Lebanese citizensProbably others would not be affected, but my life was

deeply shaken by the war.

Sean, a resident of Catholic Belfast, XE "Belfast" seems to have become dislocated in both time and

place as a result of the Troubles:


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But this here--to me this is desolate, this stretch of road. Well, I remember this as a child: there were

shops everywhere. [N]ow I remember as a child being brought down there to a wee caf, and I still to

this day can remember tasting the stew, it was the loveliest stew Ive ever tasted. We used to walkacross onto the Falls Road and nobody said Boo to you. You know what I mean?

Senada, a resident of eastern Mostar whose father and brother were imprisoned during the war XE

"Mostar" , feels a keen and abiding disillusionment in relation to her former neighbors:

in this war I found out who is a friend, who is not a friend, what it means to be a human being, what it

means to really be a good person and a good character. Its like, sometimes you say to someone, I love

you, but what does that mean, I love you? it is only after you do something for me, for example if I

get into trouble and you want to leave me to suffer, that I will find out if you really love me. Otherwise

how come you think I will believe you?

This kind of loss and disorientation is more than anecdotal. In Northern Ireland, a number of landmark

studies have quantified the impact of a shattered economy and fractured social networks in a series of

reports regarding The Cost of the Troubles. This research confirms the notion that physical partitions

generate a host of social problems separate and distinct from the ones that prompted their

construction. Divisions, while often beneficial to interface residents in the short term, typically become

a self-fulfilling prophesy of exclusion and resentment in the long term.

Physical risks are among the most traumatic for residents of divided cities. Because they are so foreign

to the typical experience of the city, most external observers have difficulty understanding them.

Several interviewees described the peril of becoming caught in the cross fire, like a Mostar XE "Mostar"resident named Mili:

Any attempt to cross over the line was awfully risky. Let me give you an example. Knowing that my wife

and our child were on the other side of the city, a friend of mine, whose girlfriend was also on that side,

even suggested that we swim across the River Neretva. [A]t the time I would surely have done

anything just to see both her and the child. However, it was impossible to swim across under those

circumstances. Someone over there wouldnt know whom you were and why you were trying to reach

the other side of the city. They would probably kill you.

While political struggles define the shape and behavior of the city as a whole, residents with little stake

in the negotiations pay the price for long-term destabilization and violence. A good example can bedrawn from the frustrations of a resident of northern Nicosia XE "Nicosia" named Nevzat:

We are waiting that moment. We are waiting for peace in Cyprus. It will affect everyone; it is good for

our health. I am 50 years old, and for almost 30 years I am thinking that tomorrow I am going to have

peace, tomorrow I am going to have peace, every day I said: tomorrow, then the coming year the

coming year, the coming yearlike that, and you are not thinking anything else for your life.


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For many divided city residents, partition corresponds with a sense of lost time and opportunity that

may never be regained. Mario, a resident of western Mostar, XE "Mostar" describes his losses in terms

of theft:

The current situation, which has lasted for years, tells that Mostar XE "Mostar" is really a divided city,

practically. Before this war started I hopedbut nobody asked me. Nobody asked all the other

reasonable people. Thats why I still cannot find the answer. I left my town. My memories have been

destroyedI am forty-one now. When this war started I was a bit over thirty. I see myself as a person

from whom somebody has stolen those eight years.

In relation to the full spectrum of injuries bound up with the divided city scenario, these voices address

only logistical concerns. There is no good way to speak of the death, anxiety, and intense deprivations

that many experienced along with partition. These comments reflect the outlook of normal residents

with little stake in the political struggles that left their hometown broken. Long after the war and its

partitions faded, as in Beirut, individuals still found their sense of belonging shaken and their prospects

darkened.

The Logic of Partition

The process of urban partition is rational, predictable, and patterned. It marks the failure of traditional

urban security infrastructure from the perspective of at least one resident group. If it provides a short-

term solution to inter-communal violence, it also typically creates a long-term impediment to inter-

communal cooperation and normal urban development. Divided cities breed a fatal sense of insularity

as social and institutional structures are built to fit them like a straightjacket; services are rerouted and

improvised, resources are atrophied and duplicated, streets and buildings are rendered obsolete, and

relationships are severed. The divided city becomes a war metropolis, a non-city, a pariah, and a warrenof claustrophobic ethnic enclaves.

This apparent inversion of natural social inclinations in the city obsessed with fortification and security is

described by Lewis Mumford as nearly fatal:

The city arose as a special kind of environment, favorable to co-operative association, favorable to

nurture and education, because it was a protected environmentPlainly, a civilization that terminates in

a cult of barbarism has disintegrated as civilization; and the war-metropolis, as an expression of these

institutions, is an anti-civilizing agent: a non-city.

Accordingly, it may be concluded that the divided city is no city at all, if cooperation and security are thehallmarks of that class. The question is a thorny one, since many urban communities demonstrate

unusual levels of intra-communal solidarity in the process of securing themselves against inter-

communal violence. In this sense, the divided city phenomenon demonstrates how a larger urban unit

can become dismantled even as security and cooperation are reinforced at the scale of the ethnic

cluster. Because the divided city appears to the foreign onlooker as a massive, endemic failure of ethical

principles, the intricacies of its evolution from function to dysfunction are routinely overlooked.


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Diverse Vulnerability

The central concept tying together all instances of urban wall-building is vulnerability. For most of urbanevolutionary history, this vulnerability was share and of a homogeneous character within the urban

domain because it was focused on discrete foreign enemiesoften ones without an urban culture

comparable in sophistication to the one undergoing siege. The uniformity and ubiquity of these threats

stimulated a kind of solidarity between social groups within the city as well as important bonds between

all these groups and the city managers. This bond was repeatedly tested as the economic and

technological burden of collective defense grew heavier. Taxes rose to pay for increasingly elaborate

perimeter walls; occasionally, cities starved and bankrupted themselves in the process of protecting

their dwindling assets from attack.

Once built, at enormous material and social cost to urban residents, it is instructive to note that the

protective benefits of the walls were offset by assorted unintended social and psychological effects.

Mumford observed:

As in a ship, the wall helped create a feeling of unity between the inhabitants: in a siege or famine the

morality of the shipwreckshare and share alikedeveloped easily. But the wall also served to build up

a fatal sense of insularity: all the more because of the absence of roads and quick means of

communication between cities.

Again, it is easy to ascertain the key similarities linking traditional defining and contemporary dividing

city walls: promulgation of solidarity, a siege mentality, and a moribund insularity. Medieval walled

cities in the western tradition reinforced their urban singularity in the process of defending against a

shared threat, and their internal discrepancies were generally overshadowed by the prospect of

collective defeat at the hands of unfamiliar enemies. Divided cities seem to have inverted this dynamic:partitions reinforce social difference and weaken the citys capacity to contend with larger forces

external to itself. Walls are the product of a diverse vulnerability that erodes traditional forms of urban

solidarity while multiplying the ills and rewards of insular behavior.

When these multiple vulnerabilities weaken solidarity among urban residents, familiar defensive

impulses are brought to bear against a host of new threats. As natural heir to the mural tradition of

urban fortification, the divided city bears a strong likeness to its ancestors with one important mutation:

the paranoid reflex is directed towards an internal enemy. At this point, the city tears at its own

substance and lays siege to itself. By the time permanent internal thresholds appear, policy-makers

have learned to manipulate the notion of collective security and survival to justify coercive government

actions, of which the walls are both emblem and agent. These justifications often fall on fertile groundwhen delivered forcefully and repeatedly to communities prone to chronic violence and social

instability, but they ultimately fail to explain why the walls were necessary and overlook negative

impacts on the communities separated by them.

Divided cities may be the most complete and unmistakable manifestation of sustained and

institutionalized discrimination. They are a form of dynamic decay and neglect, a vivid reflection of

urban discrimination and blight centered on collective identity rather than economic status. The

physically partitioned city has many cousins: the racial ghetto, the abandoned core, the neighborhood


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red-lined by lending banks, Chinatown, and the increasingly popular gated residential community. All

of these represent the end-stage of some form of demographic devolution, where cultural retention and

solidarity have been pitted against the forces of assimilation, open competition and cooperation.

Within this family, only the physically divided city makes the metaphor of fratricide visible and the habit

of ethnic discrimination mandatory. The divided city is different because it creates a fully self-

propagating system for institutional discrimination, no longer reliant on social indoctrination or subject

to amelioration through personal encounters with members of a rival group. Barricades assert what

seems to be a natural, preordained principle of mutual incompatibility that becomes very difficult to test

or resist for residents affected by it.

Urban Contract Broken

Commonly dismissed as corrupt and irredeemable, divided cities are subject to countless

misconceptions regarding their origins and meanings. Many of these misconceptions need to be

uprooted and replaced before the phenomenon of urban partitioning as a whole can be correctly

understood. In some cases, assessments according to a liberal political philosophy can lead the outside

observer astray. Though good fences rarely make good neighbors where they are the product of chronic

discrimination, it is still essential to ask Are dividing walls good or bad for the communities they

separate? and Who benefits from their creation? The answers to these questions lead to a complex

evaluation of the value and function of urban partitions, and one that runs contrary to the notion that

compromise and cooperation are the only acceptable paradigms for coexistence in a mixed urban

society.

For example, to assume that all urban residents are harshly constrained by physical barricades ignores

the function of the partition as a safety guarantee. This security function may constitute a shortsightedresponse to civilian violence, but it is often quite meaningful to the people living and working near

interface areas. Similarly, the economic value of dividing lines to municipal authorities must be

acknowledged. Where inter-communal violence is rife, partitions are commonly used as policing tools

by local governments lacking the resources to support continuous human surveillance. In this context,

dividing walls offer a relatively inexpensive, passive instrument for the damping of mob violence and

also can discourage isolated criminal acts by creating funnels and cul-de-sacs that narrow escape routes

to a minimum.

From a more symbolic perspective, partitions can augment social coherence, support voluntary cultural

quarantine, punctuate localized replies to globalization and alienation, or serve to refute a unitary,

liberal model of cities in general. All of these factors and many others make dividing walls popular inmany cities where they have appeared. For some residents, they are more than a source of

reassurance; they become a vocation in themselves, a cause or entitlement in their own right that must

be defended. For related reasons, members of ethnic communities from rural or suburban areas will

come to the defense of urban enclaves simply to defend what they consider to be a common cause. In

this way, a divided city can become the staging ground for regional strife, a proxy in relation to larger

social or political antagonisms.


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Surrogate conflicts and proxy wars

If urban partitions were simply a local protection scheme for residents living along a violent interface, itwould be difficult to condemn them. In practice, the need to protect innocent civilians has generally

been exploited as a smoke screen by bigoted politicians, a pretext for intervention or abandonment by

external powers, and a means of extortion for paramilitaries. In these cases, the safety and frustration

of interface residents are manipulated to the advantage of assorted political or quasi-political interests

while an abiding sense of dread and paranoia deepens within each isolated community. While most

normal residents of divided cities have a hard time explaining the origins and necessity of the barricades

that separate them from their rivals, few struggle to find examples of how their lives have been

damaged in the aftermath of partition. The very local dilemma of physical segregation often stems from

distant conflicts and rivalries.

Explaining the complex dynamics linking local and external interests in a divided city requires a careful

appraisal of the rivalries that lead to urban violence between resident groups. While all of the cities

examined by this study are formally defined by conflict between rival religious communities, it appears

likely that religious affiliation provided a convenient cover for struggles tied to sovereignty, political

influence, territory, property, and opportunity. Some contend that cities split when those who cherish

urban values are challenged by those who disdain all that the city represents. Some radical intellectuals

reject the city as a font and stage for social progress, most notably the early Zionists disparaging view of

urban culture in general and Jerusalem XE "Jerusalem" in particular.

Who are the antagonists in the divided city? Is it the frightened residents on either side of a wall? Rival

political parties? Seething clerics urging their adherents to pursue mischief? The Green and the Orange?

The painful cleavage punctuated by urban partition cannot be understood well in relation to any single

criterion of difference; it is best to conceive of many overlapping dichotomies that can, when takentogether, describe the distinction between parts a and b in the divided city scenario. A few of many

potentially meaningful combinations as listed here. In each instance, no single group will always be

column a or column b, but will fit decidedly in one or the other:


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a b alternate dichotomy

city city security v. sovereignty

religion religion Christian v. Muslim

sect sect Sunni v. Shiite

legitimate illegitimate Israeli v. Palestinian

Loyalist Republican Croatian v. Bosniak

for status

quo

for change coercive v. irredentist

orthodox secular partisan v. resolver

conservative liberal rigid v. flexible

moderate radical center v. fringe

rural urban homogeneous v.

heterogeneous

east west collective v. individual

rich poor privilege v. deprivation

past present entitlement v. occupancy

present future disenfranchisement v. destiny

majority minority superior v. subordinate

minority minority double minority syndrome

official unofficial military v. paramilitary

indigenous colonial incumbent v. settler

1st

generation

2nd

generation

experience v. ignorance

here there us v. them

before after archaic v. modern

Within this framework, any number of dichotomies might apply to a specific inter-ethnic rivalry. It may

be that this multiplicity of overlapping rivalries, with all the contradictions that seem to accompany

them, could help to explain the persistence of conflict in divided cities and the widespread perception of

intransigence. This complicated, layered model of inter-ethnic relations can be easily applied to the

five cities under scrutiny here. In the following table, each of the conventionally recognized rival groups

in each divided city is considered with regard to factions and interested third parties. The resulting

picture of inter-group relations is considerably more intricate than is generally perceived.


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city dominant group subordinate group 3rd

parties

Belfast Loyalists (maj Protestants)

factions:

Presbyterians

Anglicans

Paramilitary

working class

liberal/affluent

Republicans (maj Catholics)

factions:

political

paramilitary

working class

diaspora

liberal/affluent

UK

Ireland

US

Beirut Christians (maj Maronite)

factions:

Orthodox

Communists

Kataib (Maronite)

Muslims (maj Sunnite)

factions:

Sunni

Mitawalis (Shiite)

Pal. Arab Lib Front

Palestinian refugees

Syria

Israel

France

Iraq

Iran

UNIFIL

Jerusalem Israelis (maj Jewish)[4]

factions:

secular

Palestinians (maj Muslim)[5]

factions:

Israeli

Britain

Jordan

Egypt

US

UN


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Orthodox

Ashkenazi

Sephardic

Diaspora

West Bank/Gaza

diaspora refugees

paramilitary

liberal/secular

Mostar Croatians (maj Catholic)

factions:

Herzegovinian

Croatian

displaced/rural

urban/local

Bosniaks (maj Muslim)

factions:

secular

Islamic

displaced/rural

urban/local

Serbia

Croatia

US

UN

Turkey

Nicosia Greek Cypriots (maj Chr.)

factions:

Communists

Cons. Democrats

displaced/rural

local/urban

Turk Cypriots (maj Muslim)

factions:

settlers

indigenous

Britain

Greece

Turkey

US

UN

EU


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Security guarantee reneged

In exploring the problems generated by the divided city condition, the sanctity of the city is far lessimportant than understanding how and why its ability to meet the security and development needs of

resident communities can become so swiftly and severely degraded.

One problematic assumption about the origins of urban division seats full responsibility for discord and

partition at the highest levels of national or international governance. This is the policy-driven model

that has provided a subtext for most of the existing literature on the subject of divided societies.

According to this generic thesis, discriminatory policy leads to social strife, failed mitigation of those

conflicts generates a crisis, partition is the reply to the crisis, and reformed policy is the sole avenue

leading back to unification. Clearly the cascade of problems that follows from bad policy is a major

factor in the emergence of urban partitions. A strictly policy-driven model tends to neglect the historic

context of segregation and the ways in which cultural identity becomes politicized over time. This

constitutes a failure to encompass the legacy of inter-communal competition that leads up to the

episode of division and makes it appear inevitable.

Where dividing walls are products of bad policy, that policy is generally best understood as a symptom

rather than a cause of widespread social discontent. A better framework for understanding the causes

and mechanisms of urban partition expands away from faulty governmental action, no mater how

despicable it may be in individual instances, towards the roots of political culture. Such an expanded

model acknowledges the implications of a system where political affiliation is tethered to heredity so

that ethnic identity becomes the principle of incorporation into the political community, with direct

implications on the rules of allocation and participation.[6] It also links scarcity of core resources to a

stabilized zero sum perception of inter-group competition that is often supported by local

representatives of industry and wealth seeking to avoid broad-based class conflict. Avenues ofnegotiation and cooperation are systematically blocked as tractable paradigms of conflict are displaced

by intractable ones. Habits of discrimination are consolidated and strengthened through the

institutionalization of difference within the mechanisms of government.

This suffocating climate of dwindling resources and dimming prospects for peaceful resolution chafes at

rival communities. An atmosphere of tension and uncertainty provides a fertile ground for isolated acts

of violence. Political actors either favor the interests of their group by inclination or represent the same

moneyed interests that helped to open the sluice gates of inter-ethnic rivalry in the first place. In both

cases, the outcome is similar: inter-communal violence is met with half-hearted mitigation efforts.

Failed mitigation leads to deepening strife, which in turn justifies coercive policies reinforcing the

political relevance of ethnic identity. In the most extreme examples of urban discord, these policies areabetted by physical partition. Far from a static condition, this division intensifies and institutionalizes

the antagonisms that prompted it, creating a thicket of social and political dilemmas that continue to

claim the lives of residents and the careers of diplomats as long as the partition is maintained.

Urban Contract Re-Negotiated

These trends, and the stark realities of life in divided cities that illuminate them, indicate that the social

contract knitting together the interests of city managers and urban residents since the Middle Ages has


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frayed and weakened. No longer a permanent respite from the perils of the rural hinterland, the

developed western city has become a venue for every nuisance, misery and hazard imaginable while the

hinterland has either fallen under its apron or become dubiously cloaked in the myth of romanticNature. No longer a reliable reservoir of employment opportunities, the city has become a welfare

shoal for whole populations trapped in cycles of destitution. Having created large, growing populations

reliant on the incentives of urban culture, the city system as a whole offers diminishing benefits and

little recourse to its increasingly frustrated subscribers.

Responding to scalar shift and geo-political change

Physical partition can also be understood as a reaction to cities that expand to a point where communal

identity is threatened. In this scenario, division acts as a tool for spontaneous urban downscaling

towards defensible social formationsthe integrated, manageable ethnic cluster. The desire to hem

in an ethnically distinct community against the forces of assimilation is often linked with irredentist

impulses, allowing for a partial interpretation of urban partition as a discrete form of cultural heritage

conservation. The enclaves that result constitute a sanctuary when interaction with the d

Documents

No Man's Land: A Spatial Anatomy of Five Divided Cities