Rutgers Shines A Light on Land and Power

What is a public university? When is it at its very, very best?

New Jersey’s universities have taken quite a beating over the past few years. Budget cuts. Bad press. Administrators basically declaring war on their full-time faculty, as we’ve seen at Kean University. Full-time faculty scholars being replaced by overburdened and underpaid adjuncts.

But Rutgers, our venerated state university, our colonial treasure, continues to step up to the challenge. It continues in its tireless efforts to inform not only its own students but the residents of New Jersey as a whole. Its ongoing efforts to reach out to alumni and everyone with outstanding and fascinating public events need to be noted, because it demonstrates the university’s dedication to the vital role it plays as community educator.

A good example took place just last night on the university’s beautiful Douglass Campus. On a gray afternoon, under the threat of an impending snowstorm that today has shut the entire northeast down, a genuine stream of sunshine shone through.

Rutgers has dozens and dozens of academic departments. Yes, there are the ‘standards’ like English, History, Biology, etc. But there are a tremendous number of more specific divisions and institutes dedicated to expanding knowledge and providing professionals with training and preparation for a lifetime of productivity. Yesterday afternoon, two in particular stood out: the Center for Cultural Analysis and The Department of Landscape Architecture.

Normally, I would not associate these two lines of study with each other, but at an outstanding and fascinating presentation co-sponsored by both divisions I learned a lot, a lot. And like all good presentations, it raised more questions than it answered.

The presentation, titled Is Green Always Good? Landscapes of Division and Silence, was delivered by Dr. Anita Bakshi, a graduate of Cambridge University. It concerned how, in many urban locales, different ethnic, religious and state groups use landscape architecture and the laws that regulate parks to change the land and embolden themselves at the expense of their opponents.

She brought up a few examples that were just completely fascinating and demanded further investigation. One concerned ongoing events in Jerusalem, the other in Cyprus.

Bakishi began her presentation with an interesting historical tale. Under British occupation in the 1920’s, many British leaders sought to transform Jerusalem from a densely populated, gritty city to an “ideal” holy site, surrounded by parklands, rolling fields and handsome pathways. Many British officials during this period were apparently unhappy that the Holy City appeared, well, unholy-like. It was too busy and disorganized, and its appearance defied the proper Western expectation of a handsome, ancient center of faith. So they made a plan – the British love plans – to terraform, or completely change the areas surrounding the Old City. From their point of view, it would amount to an improvement, but if you were one of the tens of thousands of people living in the areas slated for “improvement,” you were out of luck.

After the Israeli annexation of the city in 1967, the Israeli government picked up where the British left off. Indeed, the Israeli government cleared away large quarters of the city, from densely populated zones to open, unused areas, to create parkland and public space. Today, this parkland is so well fashioned, so expertly designed, that there is absolutely no way for the casual visitor to realize what stood before.

Now to be fair, I’m not going to argue whether or not the Israelis had a right to transform their national capital so dramatically. These kinds of disruptive, urban projects have occurred all throughout modern history, and continue to cause controversy today in places like Mainland China. Paris was a medieval, filthy, dismal mess until Napoleon III paved wide boulevards through whole neighborhoods in the mid-1800’s. Hong Kong’s worst crime and gang-controlled slum, called the “Walled City,” was demolished in the 1990’s and few in that great city miss it. Manhattan’s own ghastly neighborhood, the infamous “Five Corners” quarter near Chinatown, has been thankfully replaced. Cities are places of harsh, steady change. The old is frequently torn down to make way for the new. The past makes way for the present. The world belongs to the living.

But in her studies, Bakshi reported that she noticed some strange and curious elements in recent Israeli plans. New parks cut through Arab neighborhoods, with entrances connecting Jewish neighborhoods and fences along the borders of the Arab zones. Homes were being condemned and bulldozed without the usual hearings and studies, since under Israeli law such legal formalities are either not required or streamlined when an area is declared national parkland. Upon looking at an overall map of all the projects, it seemed that the city was being divided up formally, in almost an apartheid-like (my words, not hers) fashion, into near or totally isolated neighborhoods divided by irregular and winding greenbelts. Additionally, some Arab neighborhoods are in the process of losing ready pedestrian and automobile access to Jerusalem’s markets and thus, are forced to shop and sell in smaller Bethlehem. “Regardless of what your opinion may be,” she stated (and I’m paraphrasing here) “on the causes of this, these physical changes have created new facts-on-the-ground. They literally affect the lives of residents every day.”

But Bakshi was not delivering some anti-Israeli academic rant. She absolutely stated that these developments and their patterns have raised questions, and she was just pointing them out, putting them in the sunlight for further examination. Basically, she was doing her job as an academic. She was making queries, demanding new knowledge…

Flag Mountain, Cyprus. Not a friendly advertisement.

Bakshi then turned to Cypress. That Mediterranean island is presently split, and has been for decades, between a Turkish-dominated northern state and a Greek-dominated southern state. The irregular, artificial border twists and turns through the rocky island, and even bisects Nicosia, the capital city. She then projected a strange picture on the screen. In one bizarre area of the borderland on the Turkish side, the northern state has fashioned some of the highlands into a gigantic crescent and star. This Muslim feature is even illuminated at night and visible in plain sight, on a 24-hour basis, to the thousands of Greeks right across the border. Bakshi did not make any commentary on what she thought of the landscape; she didn’t need to. The point was more than obvious. And it raised questions, so many questions. What was the point of such an effort? What kind of message did the Turks want to send to their Greek neighbors? What kind of signal does it send to people everywhere when land is so dramatically refashioned?

Bakshi brought up other examples, as in divided Bosnia where Christians and Muslims also compete with gigantic monuments and architectural restorations in their rival efforts to claim the heritage of the land.

Such a fascinating presentation. So many questions. When it was time for questions and commentary, I brought up that such terraforming and refashioning of urban areas along ethnic lines had occurred right here in North America. I pointed out that Montreal, for the first half of the 20^th century, was largely an English-speaking city with streets and parks with English names. When the pro-French Parti Quebecois took over the Province’s government in the 1980’s, it passed laws that resulted in the de facto “Francoization” of the entire city. Street names were changed, signs torn down and replaced, monuments relocated, whole environments changed. Over a half million English speakers, reacting to a variety of new pro-French laws, fled the city for Toronto and the Canadian West. Today, Americans visitors to Montreal are presented with an almost totally French city, a “Second Paris.” But historically it just isn’t factual. Before the 1970’s, the city resembled New York more than Paris. But does it matter anymore? Is physical transformation destiny? Do such changes obliterate memory and minority claims to land and sights? So hard to say…so debatable…

Praise again goes out to the two Rutgers divisions that sponsored this fascinating talk, those being the Center for Cultural Analysis and the Department of Landscape Architecture. I’ll never look at Home Depot’s gardening section the same way again.