A new generation of architects is using rail lines, shopping centers, and football fields to keep the peace from Belfast to Baghdad.

On a single day in July, when ambient tensions escalated, Palestinian militants fired more than 180 rockets into Israel, and the Israelis launched airstrikes against towns throughout the Gaza Strip. Dozens of Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed. The order of daily urban life was disrupted, yet again, by warfare.   

Karen Lee Bar-Sinai knows the psychic toll of this conflict all too well. For four years, she endured missile attacks, sometimes daily, on a kibbutz two miles from central Gaza. But this July, her focus was on the more granular details that underscored war's impact in Jerusalem.  

The 37-year-old Israeli architect was frustrated to see how Palestinians had fixated on a rail line that runs along the city's Israel-Palestine border. As the fighting carried on, they responded by ripping tracks out of the ground, smashing traffic signals, and reportedly damaging or completely destroying a number of rail stations. What Israel had seen as a unifying infrastructure project just three years prior, some Palestinians had come to view as another arm of the occupation.....Continue Reading

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