You can change your preferences at any time. Left behind in the digital era is a rich store of essays on design which have limited cultural presence because they are not online. In our ongoing series Future Archive , we republish significant 20th-century texts, each selected and introduced by a prominent scholar.
Lewis Mumford, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March To fulfill its mission, Jerusalem must become, not a national capital but a world capital, whose extra-territorial status will be protected and cherished, not by this or that self-appointed military guardian, but by all the peoples of the world β peoples who are sick with longing for the peace and security that the present power structures of national states and expanding empires do not even remotely promise.
Mumford was writing at a fraught moment. Kollek had invited him to attend a meeting of the Jerusalem Committee, an international advisory group organized to guide the master planning of the city following its unilateral unification after the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem in The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is visible, to the northwest. The status of Jerusalem has long been contested.
When the conflict ended, in , the newly founded nations of Israel and Jordan both rejected the proposed internationalization of Jerusalem β thus establishing a political division of the city that would in turn be followed by two very different approaches to urban development.
Over the next two decades the Israelis built in the western half a modern capital city with imposing new institutions including the Knesset and Hebrew University; in contrast, the Jordanians preserved the eastern half β which contains the ancient Temple Mount, Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre β as a compact sacred precinct.
