Mapping Divided Cities and Their Separation Walls: Berlin and Jerusalem

Abstract

This project compares two separation barriers and their urban landscape in two very different socio-cultural and historical contexts: in the cities of Jerusalem and Berlin. The focus is on how different mapmakers from opposite side of the respective divides represent physical divisions, such as walls and barriers, as well as imaginary divides, such as geopolitical or socio-ethnic divisions. Jerusalem and Berlin are particularly powerful symbols of political partition as the Berlin Wall split the city of Berlin for over twenty-six years and Jerusalem remains a divided city to this day. In both cases, their walls have become defining feature of their city’s urban identity. Through much of its recent history, Berlin became synonymous with the wall that split it, and Jerusalem also has become an iconic example of a city divided along physical and imaginary lines.[1]Such barriers - whether they are real or imaged - evoke varied meanings for different social groups in terms of their function and consequences.[2] At the same time, they can determine ways of seeing and making visible certain urban infrastructures and socio-ethnic geographies on either side of the divide. In other words, as geopolitical barriers are contested, their urban surroundings also become sites of contention. Indeed, the geographies of physically divided cities - their spaces, infrastructures, locales, and streets - are places in which geopolitics dictate that which is made visible and that which is made invisible in maps. Therefore, instead of conceiving of maps as representing and mirroring the world around us, these case studies exemplify how society and politics shape a map’s contours and content. Consequently, the social-political implications of such barriers help “make up” cities, their people, and their geographies in varied ways.[3]Critical cartographers have long questioned the presumed objectivity of cartography and pointed out that maps, rather than being seemingly “objective” representations of “the world out there,” represent certain social and political concerns that shape the hierachization of spaces as well as the visual and linguistic information included.[4] The selection, inclusion, and elimination of certain visual and linguistic information hereby serve as tools to affirm the existence of certain features and not others. As a result, maps are more like arguments than representations:the map is actually a system of propositions (a proposition is a statement affirming or denying the existence of something), an argument . . . the map has gone on to a long career rich in the affirmation of the existence of a bewildering variety of things, some whose existence we continue to affirm . . . some we have come to deny (the island-continent of California, the Northwest Passage, the open polar sea, etc.), but, in any case, things very hard to imagine without the creative intercession of the map.[5]If maps can be understood as arguments for the existence and the affirmation of certain features and not others, we need to develop conceptual tools in order to understand their visual rhetoric. Visual rhetoric includes the use of various graphical, symbolic, and linguistic tools to invoke authority, appeal to particular audiences, elaborate social concerns, and make political statements. Some commonly used visual rhetorical devices in maps include: visual signifiers (including features such as a map’s projections and scale, levels of cartographic detail, and choice of colors); textual signifiers (including the naming of places and other signifiers that load an image and reveals its target audience); and the demarcation of the space (by selecting certain geographical or infrastructural features such as roads, maps can create a specific spatial hierarchy).[6] How these different elements are used to design maps and thereby co-construct particular geopolitical visions is informed by the social and political context of the maps’ production. …

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