MIT announces Just Jerusalem competition

A group of people at MIT "hope to encourage new ways of thinking about the many difficult issues and hardships faced by Jerusalemites, regardless of their faith or ethnicity".

So as part of their "Jerusalem 2050 project", they recently launched a competition for visionary ideas for the city called Just Jerusalem. The submissions to the competition must be "Well Specified Projects" that support "a vision of a just, peaceful, and sustainable Jerusalem". Their web site lists 4 submission tracks to the competition:

• Physical infrastructure (buildings; urban designs; landscape projects; transportation, sewage, water, or communication systems; etc.)

• Economic infrastructure (new activities or products; employment or social security schemes; trade, banking, or currency arrangements; technological innovations; etc.)

• Civic infrastructure (inventive institutions or social practices; neighborhood or community-level activities and organizations; new civil-military relations; educational systems; health care services; etc.)

• Symbolic infrastructure (essays, films, photographic exhibitions, poems, songs, museums, festivals; etc.)

The Prizes page states that "At least one prizewinning entry will be selected in each category of submission, with a total of 5 awarded. Prizewinners will be given the opportunity to spend up to an academic semester in residence at MIT as Visiting Fellows, with all expenses paid, including travel, housing, and stipend."

I really like the idea of this competition. Interestingly enough, it also links two places which have influenced my life: Jerusalem and MIT. I was born in Jerusalem, and lived there for the first 6 years of my life. One branch of my family tree even includes people born in Jerusalem at least 5 or 6 generations back. As for MIT: this is one of the institutions I admire. I keep finding that I share the same professional views as people at MIT (especially the MIT media lab) - and am always excited by the projects they have there. (At some point I even seriously considered applying for PhD studies at there - but was sucked into the industry instead). So I'm really looking forward to finding out what the competition will generate!

-I.B.