Painting for peace: mural project highlights walls that divide cities

Painting for peace: mural project highlights walls that divide cities By Ellie Violet Bramley, The Guardian on 09.26.16 Word Count 1,137 An Iraqi child sits on a trike in front of a painted security wall in August 2008 in the Shiite district of Sadr east of Baghdad, Iraq. The wall was constructed by both the U.S. and Iraqi armies for security reasons. Photo: by Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images One episode of "Game of Thrones" tells you all you need to know about how important city walls used to be for defence. But they were also about identity and belonging, as Wendy Pullan, director of Cambridge University s Centre for Urban Conﬂicts Research, explains: If you lived within the walls then you were a citizen; if you didn t then you weren t. The status used to matter a lot. In recent times, since the collapse of the iron curtain, one might have imagined separation walls would be less in vogue. But walls within cities, slicing one community from another whether on ethnic, religious or political lines are still prevalent from Jerusalem to Belfast, not to mention in war-torn cities such as Homs in Syria. All over the Middle East, you re seeing walls between Sunni and Shia residents, says Raghda El-Halawany, who works for global peace movement MasterPeace. Homs is now peppered with walls the most famous one encloses Baba Amr, a rebel stronghold, surrounded by Sunni and Christian quarters.

It s a similar story in Iraq s capital, Baghdad. While many of its walls have been built for security around schools and hospitals, or for protection against militant attacks, they re also to keep sectarian communities apart: a three-mile wall was built by US soldiers in 2007, for instance, which gated off a minority Sunni community. In São Paulo, Brazil, walls separate rich from poor communities. The most well-known is the gated communities of Alphaville, in which 60,000-odd residents are surrounded by around 40 miles of wall. The high-rise buildings inside the compound, with their bright blue swimming pools on apartment balconies, jar against the dusty red roofs of the surrounding, low-lying favelas. Referring to separating walls as a hot topic, El-Halawany also cites the recent UK proposal for a big, new wall in the French port city of Calais four-metres-high and 1kmlong to stop refugees boarding lorries to reach England illegally. Pullan says it s unclear whether there has been the same kind of growth in city walls as along the borders between countries a phenomenon that will surely increase should Donald Trump become the next US president. Certainly, though, various municipal authorities are using walls and it seems to be more prevalent, she suggests. It s with the aim of subverting the trend, and turning walls of separation into walls of connection, that MasterPeace has invited artists to spend 21 September, the UN s annual International Day of Peace, painting walls in 30 cities around the world for one of the biggest mural projects in history. Walls will be painted in Nairobi s Kibera slums, one of the worst spots of post-election violence in recent years; in the Bangladeshi city of Sylhet, prescient in a country that s home to the world s longest border wall; and in Mexico City, where the Trump wall is on everyone s minds. In most cases, separation walls are imposed, usually by some sort of authority, and usually against the wishes of some, if not all, affected inhabitants. The separation wall in Jerusalem, for instance, built by Israel from 2002 onwards to cut East Jerusalem off from the rest of the West Bank, has been built against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of Palestinians. In Northern Ireland, however, Belfast s walls are unusual as the majority of those living beside them built from 1969 to divide Protestant and Catholic communities seem to favour them. In desperate times, such walls can be a pragmatic answer to a city s volatile rifts. As Pullan concedes: You can understand that when there is fighting going on, and people are killing each other, the municipal authorities will react usually quickly in wanting to pull the warring communities apart. Although many walls start life as temporary, they very quickly take on a permanence, and divisions become harder to heal. For El-Halawany, they are antithetical to the very nature of cities: Cities are built on integration, mobility and connections. The feeling of separation creates more of this feeling of I don t belong, I m hated, so it s more okay to be violent.

She feels their ill effects in her native Cairo: Whenever there is a new compound, there is increased security when you build a wall, you need to guard it walls create hatred automatically. What makes these walls so damaging, says Pullan, who is speaking from Jerusalem where she lived for over a decade, is that they re often in a place where no one would have expected a wall, they divide the urban fabric they cause spacial discontinuities. If you get that, you usually get social discontinuities as well it cuts the normal flow of movement in a city, it means that people never encounter each other, or very rarely. She takes the example of the wall and UN buffer zone built between the Turkish and Greek communities of the Cypriot capital, Nicosia: [It] goes right through what was their major commercial street... and that s what s so damaging you end up with two rump cities. Once you do that, it s very hard to put the city back together again. You only need to look at pictures of the area now eerie, like a ghost town to understand what she s talking about. In Jerusalem today, some of the same issues apply as in Nicosia s old commercial heart. In such a badly divided city, Pullan says, it s very important that occasionally people see a face that doesn t look like theirs The Palestinians hear quite a lot of Hebrew, because that s the dominant language at this point, but the Israelis need to hear Arabic These are little things but they re really important if societies are ever to come together. So separation walls feed into a much bigger narrative of estrangement in divided cities: without contact with the other side, communities will tend, Pullan says, to vilify the other. The roots of division often run very deep and it s difficult to bring walls down even when they ve been physically removed. So is there an answer? Public space, according to Pullan, is essential. There s the tendency even in cities that have a very low level of conflict to privatise, put in barriers. Turning the areas around walls into useable public space is one of the things El-Halawany hopes MasterPeace s project will achieve. They painted a wall in Cairo a few years ago, not far from Tahrir Square. Ever since, she says, the space around it has been used for pop-up concerts and events. The local community have invested in it. There probably is something fairly inherent in the way we live that we tend to want to live with our own people, Pullan says. And I suppose there s nothing so terrible about that. However, there have to be places in cities where we meet other people, and that s key. Diversity has to be there without it you really don t have a city.

Quiz 1 All the following sentences from the article show that walls have sometimes been necessary to keep people out of harm's way EXCEPT: (D) One episode of "Game of Thrones" tells you all you need to know about how important city walls used to be for defence. While many of its walls have been built for security around schools and hospitals, or for protection against militant attacks, they re also to keep sectarian communities apart: a three-mile wall was built by US soldiers in 2007, for instance, which gated off a minority Sunni community. In desperate times, such walls can be a pragmatic answer to a city s volatile rifts. Whenever there is a new compound, there is increased security when you build a wall, you need to guard it walls create hatred automatically. 2 Read the sentence from the article. Although many walls start life as temporary, they very quickly take on a permanence, and divisions become harder to heal. Which of the following conclusions can be drawn from the selection? (D) It is difficult for people to recover from the alienation that walls create. Most walls are built to remain for long periods of time. Walls quickly reinforce the separation between the rich and the poor. Divisions would be hard to overcome even without walls. 3 Which paragraph out of the first 10 paragraphs BEST reflects the central idea that some people want to reverse the negative effects of building walls?

4 Which of the following statements accurately represents the relationship between the article's central ideas? Both cities and country borders have separation walls that create lines between community inhabitants. In some cases, walls are needed to protect residents, but in most cases, walls serve only to divide the urban fabric. When authority figures impose separation walls, it prevents mobility and disrupts communities. Walls cut the normal flow of movement in a city, which promotes estrangement. Separation walls appear around the world, dividing people by ethnicity, religion and politics. The MasterPeace project hopes to convert areas around walls into usable public spaces that promote interaction. (D) MasterPeace initiated a large mural project to paint separation walls in 30 cities. The organization wants to remove barriers and encourage pop-up concerts and events.

Answer Key 1 All the following sentences from the article show that walls have sometimes been necessary to keep people out of harm's way EXCEPT: One episode of "Game of Thrones" tells you all you need to know about how important city walls used to be for defence. While many of its walls have been built for security around schools and hospitals, or for protection against militant attacks, they re also to keep sectarian communities apart: a three-mile wall was built by US soldiers in 2007, for instance, which gated off a minority Sunni community. In desperate times, such walls can be a pragmatic answer to a city s volatile rifts. (D) Whenever there is a new compound, there is increased security when you build a wall, you need to guard it walls create hatred automatically. 2 Read the sentence from the article. Although many walls start life as temporary, they very quickly take on a permanence, and divisions become harder to heal. Which of the following conclusions can be drawn from the selection? (D) It is difficult for people to recover from the alienation that walls create. Most walls are built to remain for long periods of time. Walls quickly reinforce the separation between the rich and the poor. Divisions would be hard to overcome even without walls. 3 Which paragraph out of the first 10 paragraphs BEST reflects the central idea that some people want to reverse the negative effects of building walls? Paragraph 7: It s with the aim of subverting the trend, and turning walls of separation into walls of connection, that MasterPeace has invited artists to spend 21 September, the UN s annual International Day of Peace, painting walls in 30 cities around the world for one of the biggest mural projects in history. Walls will be painted in Nairobi s Kibera slums, one of the worst spots of post-election violence in recent years; in the Bangladeshi city of Sylhet, prescient in a country that s home to the world s longest border wall; and in Mexico City, where the Trump wall is on everyone s minds.