Planning For A Peaceful Palestine

"Steven N. Simon, one of the leaders of the Rand study, recruited Mr. Suisman after sounding out several urban planners about a possible design. Mr. Suisman, who has designed public spaces and transit systems, principally around Los Angeles, was 'the most enthusiastic,'...Palestine had persisted as a dream or nightmare, as an abstraction to occupy diplomats and politicians, not as a concrete challenge for urban planners....At its most prosaic, the proposal calls for a mere connecting of the dots, for a high-speed train and fiber-optic network curving through the West Bank and Gaza to link the main Palestinian cities and towns. Yet it amounts to a reimagining not only of the landscape, fractured as it is by checkpoints and army positions after years of conflict, but also of the Palestinian experience. In place of Palestinian political and social fragmentation, Mr. Suisman proposes the most modern and swift of connections. In place of the Palestinian condition of near paralysis, he posits a state of motion.

Thanks to Larry Armstrong