LANDSCAPE MANIFESTATIONS OF ROOTEDNESS 01: THE WALL

“You cannot be a complete person alone... For that you must be part of, and rooted in, an olive grove... Because without a sense of home and belonging, life becomes barren and rootless. And life as a tumbleweed is no life at all.”10 –

Thomas Friedman

A land flowing with milk and honey, the ‘Holy Land.’ A piece of land that is roughly the same size as Lake Winnipeg, where I spent much of my time growing up. It connects three continents, bridging flora and fauna, climates, and conditions of Africa, Asia, and Europe. Snow and bears exist in the north, while camels and sand dunes live in the south.11 Rivers, mountains, seas, swamps, valleys, and riverbanks. Vegetables, fruit trees, wheat fields, grape vineyards, and olive tree groves. These are more than ecological conditions; they represent a greater desire for rootedness. There are many environmental factors to this conflict that characterize both Israeli’s and Palestinians’ desires to find stability and rootedness in the land to counter their experience of diaspora. The calculated use of trees and walls in this conflict highlights how the landscape reflects the existing political and social context.

The Wall: Strongholding

Hamas, a widely recognized terrorist organization, launched a series of suicide bombings and attacks in Israel starting around 1993.12 These perpetrators detonated explosive devices on their bodies in very public areas in Israel. These terrorists’ signature bombing locations were public buses. I remember family members being anxious about public buses and being sensitive to this subject when I was growing up. In the same year, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli Defence Minister Shimon Peres, and Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat met with United States President Bill Clinton to negotiate peace processes and agreements. The resulting signed

‘Oslo Accords’ are notoriously disappointing as many grave issues were left unresolved, and most parties felt unfulfilled. Hopes were high as people worldwide witnessed a historic handshake on the White House lawn. To the world, the Oslo Accords appeared somewhat successful, even earning Rabin, Peres, and Arafat the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.13 However, these signed arrangements were just the beginning of continued violence and failures on all sides to implement any agreements. Individuals suffering in this conflict felt that they were either no closer to reaching security or no closer to independence and statehood; this process “progressively eroded confidence on both sides.”14 A second Oslo Accord was signed in 1995, which saw Israel relinquish control of some of Gaza and the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority (PA) (formerly PLO.)15 Shortly after, a twenty-seven-year-old student assassinated Rabin in opposition to his negotiations with Palestinian leaders. Ehud Barak was elected Prime Minister of Israel and continued negotiations and withdrawal processes. Clinton hosted another meeting at Camp David, which saw fourteen days of negotiations in which no deals were made, and no issues resolved.16 Lack of progression to peace was fueled by Palestinian refusal to take responsibility for terrorism, security, and diplomacy, and Israeli refusal to let go of land annexed.17

Shortly after Camp David in 2000, Israeli opposition leader, and later Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon made the injudicious decision to visit the temple mount with hundreds of armed guards. Some scholars suggest that his visit intended to strengthen Israel’s entitlement to a united Jerusalem, and to undermine Ehud Barak, his political rival.18 The substantial military presence at the sensitive site provoked riots and violence. While Sharon’s visit triggered the uprising, it was not the cause. The cause was pent-up frustration with the peace process, seeing no change in everyday life, and anger.19 This event threw

Israelis and Palestinians into an unimaginable wave of violence known as the Second Intifada. The First Intifada, while slightly less violent, ended around 1991. Stone-throwing, rioting, suicide bombings, and killings were met by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) with even more violence, including but not limited to tear gas, rubber bullets, tanks, and rockets. Instances of suicide bombings increased and continued to occur in public places such as malls, buses, street corners, and restaurants. The number of suicide bombings reached around 120, and death tolls were in the thousands.20 Violence, negotiations, mass murders, elections, and assassinations continued. Israel launched ‘Operation Defensive Shield’ in 2002. The operation commenced a military occupation of much of the West Bank and its major cities and towns, which saw the arrest of thousands of Palestinians. Israel began the construction of the separation barrier in June 2003.21 At the time, this decision was the latest strategy employed to dominate and progress Israel nationalist intentions and to keep the unwanted ‘others’ out.

While the Israeli population sees the wall as a security measure to prevent terrorist attacks, International Law sees closures as a method of collective punishment.22 The current occupation has divided Palestinians into different levels of residency, whether it be Jerusalem residents, West Bank residents, Gaza identity, or even those holding Jordanian passports. Each group holds a definite hierarchy that determines how much freedom or access that person is entitled to.23 However, Jews worldwide are given automatic citizenship should they return to Israel according to the Israeli Law of Return and are provided easy access anywhere in the country. The checkpoints allow the IDF to decide who gets to pass through and who doesn’t. Closure and checkpoints restrict Palestinian’s access to employment, healthcare, and farming practices. In the resulting landscape “social networks and community are disrupted, and memories of place and familiar routes begin to recede, replaced by a circumscribed space of everyday life.”24 Thousands of Palestinians funnel through unsanitary and overcrowded checkpoints every day. Checkpoints are embarrassing, discriminating, and unpredictable. The wall, checkpoints, and watchtowers allow Israel to assert visual dominance over the Palestinian territories. While Israelis and Palestinians live in close proximity as neighbours, the wall renders them distant. Author of Apeirogon: A Novel, Colum McCann writes:

“For him, everything still came back around to the Occupation. It was a common enemy. It was destroying both sides. He didn’t hate Jews, he said, he didn’t hate Israel. What he hated was being occupied, the humiliation of it, the strangulation, the daily degradation, the abasement. Nothing would be secure until it ended. Try a checkpoint for just one day. Try a wall down the middle of your schoolyard. Try your olive trees ripped up by a bulldozer. Try your food rotting in a truck at a checkpoint. Try the occupation of your imagination. Go ahead. Try it.”25

-Colum McCann

The wall is now almost 800 kilometres long. Some sections are made of prefabricated concrete slabs, and some sections are made of metal fencing and razor wire. It is punctuated by watchtowers and firing posts around every 300 meters. Beside the wall, a gravel road makes up the ‘buffer zone’ where military patrols travel and set up remote sensors, cameras, and barbed wire.26 The wall roughly follows the green line, although it is roughly double its length due to its tendency to include Israeli towns built inside the west bank and surround important land assets like forests and scrublands. The wall separates farmers from their lands and families from one another. It prevents the flow of not just people but of flora, fauna, and ecological processes.

Sampling the wall every 5 kilometres illuminated that the wall traverses many different land types and, most importantly to this project, two very distinct physical manifestations of national rootedness in the landscape - the pine tree and the olive tree. The wall uprooted thousands of acres of agricultural land and tens of thousands of trees.27

Map

LANDSCAPE MANIFESTATIONS OF ROOTEDNESS 02: THE PINE AND THE OLIVE

In Israel/Palestine, the pine and olive trees have come to represent nationhood through the direct use of these trees as proxy-soldiers and proxynation-builders. The pine and the olive became cultural counterparts and, in a sense, are perfect opposites. The pine roots deeply, fast-growing, and shorter-lived, whereas the olive roots slowly but is long-living and slow growing. They also represent different cultural landscapes, the forest and the field, or even different ideas of human labour.28 Irus Braverman, author of Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine, summarizes these cultural counterparts by saying: “The pitting of pine tree/people against olive tree/people reflects the discursive and material split constructed with much fervency and determinacy by the two national ideologies that compete in and over Israel/Palestine.”29 The history of these two trees becoming the symbols they are today likely begins with an analysis of the Ottoman Empire and the land practices and systems they employed in this land when they occupied it. This analysis is outside this project’s scope but a worthy investigation for future research. This section will briefly explain the primary agencies and processes that created these two symbols of nationalism and rootedness.

Pine Tree / ربونصلا ةرجش / ןרוא ץע

Jewish tradition and biblical teachings stress the importance of caring for the land and preserve natural resources. The annual festival in Israel of Tu Bishvat celebrates trees and the mitzvah of planting trees. Throughout recent history, many Zionist projects involved settling recently immigrated Jews in agriculturally fertile land, asking them to land reclamation and cultivation. The Jewish National Fund (JNF) is Israel’s intermediary for land acquisition and their prime afforestation agency, two roles which are co-productive and co-dependent. The JNF has successfully persuaded Jews worldwide to contribute to and become involved in land cultivation and transformation. The signature JNF blue tin boxes are entrenched in my memory as they sat in the halls of my school, synagogue and youth organization growing up. By putting money in the blue tin box, you could sponsor the planting of a tree and feel rooted in Eretz Israel. The JNF created a widespread perception of the tree as a personal symbol of identity, as described by Simon Schama:

“What we did know was that a rooted forest was the opposite landscape to the place of drifting sand… The diaspora was sand. So what should Israel be if not a forest, fixed and tall.”30 – Simon Schama

Since 1901, the JNF has planted over 240 million trees in Israel, mostly pine trees that became the signature Zionist tree as they ‘re-forested’ the Holy Land.31 Tree planting in masses was a way of rooting outside the physical act. It helped people to fill the hole in their lives caused by recurring social traumas of displacement.32 The state of Israel, hand in hand with the JNF, was able to cloak their political agendas in green, as trees appear neutral but simultaneously claim and occupy the land. Today, the pine tree, among other species, are “icons of national revival, symbolizing the Zionist success in “striking roots” in the ancient homeland.”33 Irus Braverman, author of “Planting the Promised Landscape” writes:

“In the Israeli context, the pine tree has become almost synonymous with the Jewish National Fund (JNF). JNF is probably the major Zionist organization of all time. It is also the most powerful single organized entity to have shaped the modern Israeli/Palestinian landscape.”34

-Irus Braverman

Olive Tree / نوتيز ةرجش / תיז ץע

The olive tree has been a signature symbol of Arab Palestine and a distinctive feature of the cultural and physical landscape. Olive orchards have been the centre of many land and lawrelated disputes between Palestinians and Israeli settlers since the 1980s and prior.35 For Palestinians, the olive tree represents resistance and Sumud (steadfastness) and has been one of the primary roots of their economy. The olive tree has helped them to strengthen their territorial claims over land and, over time, came to symbolize the Palestinian people as a wholetheir durability, longevity, and strength through the struggle for independence. The olive tree has become a living memory of the Palestinian village and its people and is a silent witness of their suffering36 and their beauty and strength.

While the first few Prime Ministers acknowledged that there were olive groves around most Arab towns, they maintained that the olive trees had been planted by Alexander the Great, and during the Arab conquest, no trees were planted; this created the misconception that Palestinians were neglectful and unproductive.37 Regardless, olives remain integral to Palestinian culture. As of 2008, 50% of the Palestinian population in this region participate in annual olive harvests, and there were around 9 million olive trees in occupied territories.38 Before the Second Intifada in 2000, many rural farmers in the West Bank were employed in Israel. However, since the Intifada resulted in Israel tightening their restrictions on movement in and out of the West Bank, many farmers lost their jobs in Israel. As such, the agricultural sector and the local olive industry in Palestinian culture have increased dramatically since the start of the Second Intifada. In I Saw Ramallah, Mourid Barghouti describes the Palestinian connection to olives and olive oil. He writes:

“After ‘67 my discovery that I had to buy olive oil was truly painful. From the day we knew anything we knew that olives and oil were there in our houses.... For the Palestinian, olive oil is the gift of the traveler, the comfort of the bride, the reward of autumn, the boast of the storeroom, the wealth of the family across centuries... In Cairo I would not let olive oil into my house because I refused to buy it by the kilogram.”39

-Mourid Barghouti

Olive branches have also been a symbol of peace for Jews and Israelis and are wrapped around a sword in the emblem of the Israeli Defense Forces. The decision to use the olive tree in these state emblems came from the consensus that the olive was a concrete symbol of peace and abundant fruit of the land.40 Ultimately, this idea of rootedness is clearly carried through for both peoples and both trees. The Palestinian draws a connection to their ancient presence in the land with the olive tree rooted for thousands of years. The Israeli sees the afforestation task as a method of finally feeling stable in their ancient homeland from which they were displaced. Braveman summarizes this notion in Planted Flags, saying:

“The olive speaks for the uprooted person. The interplay between the olive’s absence and presence in Palestinian narratives could be seen as a mirror image of the pine’s absence and presence with relation to the diaspora Jew, who’s absence from the Promised Land is embodied in the presence of the pine donated in her or his name.”41

-Irus Braverman

Endnotes

1. Ingrid Anderson, “Surviving the Story: The Narrative Trap in Israel and Palestine by Rosemary Hollis (Review),” The Middle East Journal 74, no. 2 (2020): 323.

2. Julia Chaitin, “Co-creating peace: Confronting psychosocial-economic injustices in the IsraeliPalestinian context,” In Peacebuilding, Memory and Reconciliation, edited by Charbonneau, Bruno and Genevieve Parent, Routledge, 2012, 147.

3. Michael Rubner, “The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine - A Tale of Two Narratives,” Middle East Policy 23, no. 1 (2016): 164.

4. Omer Bartov, Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples, edited by Omer Bartov, 1st ed. New York: Berghahn, 2021, 4.

5. Rubner, “The Two-State Delusion,” 164.

6. Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, 1st ed. New York: Anchor Books, 2003, 88.

7. Bartov, Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples, 6.

8. Rubner, 164.

9. Rubner, 164-165.

10. Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999.

11. Rachel Gottesman, Tamar Novick, Iddo Ginat, Dan Hasson, and Yonatan Cohen, Land, Milk, Honey: Animal Stories in Imagined Landscapes, Tel Aviv; Zurich, Switzerland; Park Books, 2021, 34-35.

12. “Historical Timeline: 1900-Present,” Britannica | ProCon, June 14, 2021.

13. “Historical Timeline,” Britannica.

14. Kirsten E. Schulze, “Camp David and the Al-Aqsa Intifada: An Assessment of the State of the IsraeliPalestinian Peace Process, July-December 2000,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 24, no. 3 (2000): 215.

15. “Historical Timeline,” Britannica.

16. “Historical Timeline,” Britannica.

17. Schulze, “Camp David and the Al-Aqsa Intifada,” 217.

18. Schulze, 216.

19. Schulze, 220.

20. “Historical Timeline,” Britannica.

21. “Historical Timeline,” Britannica.

22. Julie Marie Peteet, “Permission to Breathe: Closure and the Wall” in Space and Mobility in Palestine,

Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2017, 35.

23. Peteet, “Permission to Breathe”, 37-38.

24. Peteet, 40.

25. Colum McCann, Apeirogon: A Novel, First ed, New York: Random House, 2020, 123.

26. Peteet, 42.

27. Peteet, 42.

28. Irus Braverman, Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine, Cambridge University Press, 2014, 31.

29. Braverman, “The Tree is the Enemy Soldier,” 450.

30. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1995, 5-6.

31. Irus Braverman, “”The Tree is the Enemy Soldier”: A Sociolegal Making of War Landscapes in the Occupied West Bank,” Law & Society Review 42, no. 3 (2008): 450.

32. Braverman, Planted Flags, 95.

33. Yael Zerubavel, “The Forest as a National Icon: Literature, Politics, and the Archeology of Memory,” Israel Studies (Bloomington, Ind.) 1, no. 1 (1996): 60.

34. Irus Braverman, “Planting the Promised Landscape: Zionism, Nature, and Resistance in Israel/Palestine.”

Natural Resources Journal 49, no. 2 (2009): 318.

35. Sheffi and First, “Land of Milk and Honey,” 203.

36. Braverman, Planted Flags, 128.

37. Gorney, “Roots of Identity, Canopy of Collision: Re-Visioning Trees as an Evolving National Symbol within the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” 331.

38. Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, 1st ed, New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2008, 24.

39. Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah. 1st ed. New York: Anchor Books, 2003, 58.

40. Sheffi and First, 203.

41. Braverman, Planted Flags, 129.

Part 2: Literature Review and Methods

This project sits at three key intersections: landscape as a device of war and peace, storytelling and dialogue as an approach to peace, and reading and telling those stories with landscape design. This literature review will examine some of the bodies of work that span these fields, such as political science, planning and landscape, conflict resolution, and design.

Spatial Transformations: War + Landscape

Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture

Fionn Byrne’s research builds upon the emerging research on the relationship between landscape, well-being, and conflict. Byrne’s article “Verdant Persuasion” (2022) frames this relationship in the context of furthering military agendas through a three-stage framework: preparation for war, active combat, and postwar activities. The postwar activities stage is often the focus of related work, where landscape researchers and ecologists analyze the influence of war on the landscape and how inhabitants feel these changes.1 Byrne’s work focuses on the second stage,- active combat, and how landscape design is used as a tool during wartime to advance military goals.2 He presents Operation Enduring Freedom to illustrate how some US Military-funded projects employed landscape elements, like tree planting, to meet military goals. In other words, his analysis centres around landscape design as an active, rather than reactive, warfighting tool.3 He argues that the manipulation of landscape, be it from active combat or landscape-related intervention during wartime, has lasting impacts on the well-being of residents beyond active combat.4 He calls the use of landscape in this context ‘soft power.’

Planner and Professor Gary Fields argues that landscapes reflect the communities that inhabit them and represent the powers that govern them.5 In “Landscaping Palestine” (2010), Fields highlights the built environment’s capacity to advance territorial agendas and maintain political control, especially in Israel and Palestine. Fields references the Israeli government’s uprooting of olive trees and how that disrupts not only Palestinian economic life but also the cultural life that maintains Palestinian’s place in the landscape.6 His discussion on the direct and indirect effects landscape or built elements have in furthering military goals parallels Byrne’s writing. While Byrne presents these concepts relating to the US Military and counterinsurgencies in Afghanistan, the notion of landscape as a soft power tactic to the conflict in Israel and Palestine is supported by Fields’ writing. Both scholars are concerned with how the landscape is affected by active conflict, control, resistance or a marker of societal wellbeing. These topics are critical in understanding the relationship between landscape, conflict, and people. This project aims to fill a gap in this scholarship regarding how landscape design can be used during an active conflict as a peacebuilding mechanism rather than as a warfighting, control, or resistance tool. It would be impossible to move forward in this project without a foundational understanding of how the landscape is used to divide, control, influence, or resist colonial and military agendas. Not only does this understanding help us grasp the historical use of landscape in war, but also how the interventions we propose may change over time both physically and socially.

Storytelling + Dialogue in a Divided Landscape

This project establishes that dialogue and storytelling are critical in studying peacebuilding and are approaches that are innately interwoven in the context of the landscape. A large body of research has investigated the effectiveness of dialogue and storytelling both in the context of Israel and Palestine and in general conflict studies. A group from UC Santa Cruz, including

Ella Ben Hagai, Phillip Hammack, Andrew Pilecki, and Carissa Aresta studied Israeli/ Palestinian dialogues by analyzing recorded sessions to pull out the root narratives and illuminate the tactics that led to more acceptance and progress. The article “Shifting Away from a Monolithic Narrative on Conflict” (2013) is a fantastic investigation of root narratives and power dynamics across different scales. Most importantly, their research revealed that when groups shared personal experiences and stories, they noticed an increase in acknowledgment, perspective-taking and empathy.7 Emphasizing the personal nature of the narratives we chose to tell and their power in building inter-group empathy is an especially key takeaway moving forward. As part of this study, participants partook in group-building exercises such as visiting tourist spots and playing outdoor games which likely helped increase comfortability and companionship with the participants. However, this article lacks an explicit discussion on spatial barriers to successful dialogue, as these studies took place in the United States. The article also fails to mention the quality of space that hosted the dialogue sessions and why or why not that might have contributed to the success of conversations.

Economic and Social Research

Council

Postdoctoral Fellow Silvia Hassouna argues that literature relating to dialogue and conflict resolution neglects the importance of spatial planning in contested landscapes.8 Hassouna studies storytelling in this political context, documents joint efforts for peace, and highlights creative and imagined futures. Her article “Spaces for Dialogue in a Segregated Landscape” (2016) asks imperative questions about the feasibility of spaces for dialogue and barriers to such practices, emphasizing the separation wall in Israel/ Palestine as having exacerbated these problems and hindered opportunity for dialogue. Her findings concluded that there are numerous barriers to human interactions, such as travelling logistics, isolation, and dehumanization, and offers strategies to overcome such barriers. The previous authors’ findings set the foundation that dialogue-based approaches are indeed effective in increasing empathy in Israeli/Palestinian groups, underpinning Hassouna’s argument that more specifically stresses the capacity dialogue carries in renegotiating collective narratives. Hassouna states that this conflict is an intractable struggle of identity where recognizing the legitimacy of one side means denying the legitimacy of the other.9 Additionally, she maintains that one of the most significant barriers to peace negotiations and dialogue-based initiatives is an antinormalization drive rooted in many community members who see those who engage in such initiatives as unpatriotic or traitors.10

I heard these misconceptions in my own community and discussed these notions about competing narratives in my dialogue group. Lessening the anti-normalization drive and acknowledging each other’s narrative through dialogue-based initiatives propels us to “recognize the common sense of belonging to the land.”11 Both articles emphasize storytelling as one method that breaks through these barriers and even saw epiphanies regarding the need for nonviolent approaches to ending the conflict. Numerous other highly inspirational tales of such epiphanies and moments of reflection exist.12 Both articles examined in this section illustrate the weight of personal and collective narratives and how space creates either a barrier or an opportunity. This project echoes Hassouna’s argument that while dialogue may be an effective conflict-resolution method, space must be created to facilitate it, especially in a divided landscape. This position is best summarized in her writing:

“Space can be used as both a force for conflict when urban planning becomes the manifestation of division and as a force for peace when used to facilitate contracts and dialogues in contested spaces.”13

-Silvia Hassouna

Memory and Stories in the Landscape

We have established that storytelling and dialogue are effective peacebuilding strategies that must now be translated into physical spacemaking. What does space-making mean in this context and what are the legitimate strategies for making space in such a contested landscape? Many of the methods designers employ when designing for post-war or active conflict involve commemoration or memorialization. Such strategies are exhaustively written about across numerous fields.14 However, in Topographies of Memory (2017), Instructor of Landscape Architecture and researcher Anita Bakshi challenges some approaches to commemoration, saying they are problematic, especially in contested cities, as they often seek to freeze time in place and tell sanitized versions of collective memories. Controlling collective memory through memorials or museums doesn’t often leave room for alternative meanings and is “rooted in Western and colonial understandings of heritage, which prioritize the nation state as the arbitrator of the past despite competing claims by minority groups.”15 She does, however, recognize that landscape architecture is a vehicle through which the ephemeral phenomenon of memory can be expressed16 and offers some strategies for new forms of commemoration.

The strategies outlined in the book often involve active participation, which helps participants process the dynamism of events and their perceived effects on physical places.17 This process often involves layering individual memories through map-making or sketching to create a dynamic display of collective history. These activities help the participants process the dynamism of events and their perceived effects on physical places.18 The fieldwork summarized in this chapter illustrates the importance of establishing new connections with place and allowing community members to engage in the process: critical aspects to consider as I approach this project. In the following chapter, Bakshi discusses physical and material interventions that may more equitably highlight memory. It is evident that spaces associated with contested or traumatic memories require a thoughtful approach to narrativization and memorialization. Such approaches should involve design considerations for the body’s physical, emotional, mental, and social aspects.19 Bakshi presents a short discussion on a child survivor of the Holocaust to make the central point that these spaces may not just share the story of a collective or personal experience (in this case, the horrors of the Holocaust) but that the space may help individuals come to know and process the experience. In these cases, abstraction and ambiguous forms may be ineffective compared to designs that engage the body more wholly.20 Bakshi emphasizes the importance environments conducive to sharing and the subsequent strengthening or re-understanding of narratives.

Landscape architect, author, and Distinguished Professor Anne Whiston Spirn details design approaches to reading and writing meaning into landscapes in the chapter “A Rose is Rarely Just a Rose: Poetics of Landscape” in her 1998 book The Language of Landscape. These techniques, including emphasis, exaggeration, contrast, distortion, and metaphor, are certainly options to consider as methods in this project and have been used by world-renowned landscape architects like Martha Schwartz. In other chapters, she discusses theories relating to stories and the reading of meaning in the landscape. Whiston Spirn proposes that landscape forms, materials, and processes are innately analogical, poetic, and enveloped with meaning.21 She argues that landscape designers often fail to recognize the potential power landscapes hold to evoke meaning, both intended and unintended, surface level and profound.22 However, the critical notion of landscape literacy is missing in Whiston Spirn’s book but present in Bakshi’s book. Additionally, while Bakshi positions interactive map-making and active participation as key to establishing connections to memory and place23, Whiston Spirn places the most emphasis on the designer as the key driver in creating meaning in the landscape.

Landscapes are Peacebuilding Mechanisms

It would be a shame not to introduce Professor of Political Science Annika Björkdahl briefly. Her research studies peacebuilding and space, but primarily the article “Urban Peacebuilding” (2013) offers seminal insights and arguments to consider. She frames the concept of urban peacebuilding as an attempt to transform ethnonationally contested and divided spaces to mitigate conflict, strengthen interdependencies, and weaken division.24 She contends that placebased processes are equally as crucial as peoplerelated processes in achieving self-sustaining peace.25 She and I share a similar viewpoint that research is lacking around the legitimate production of space and peacebuilding practices. I found that this article, some of her other writing, and the key works cited still lack specific methodological approaches to peacebuilding as a landscape intervention. These and other pieces of literature reaffirm my position that this conflict is, in part, a landscape problem to which a landscape solution is applicable and possible. An approach forward will entangle numerous strategies (such as those mentioned by Whiston Spirn) and considerations across fields.