CARTOGRAPHIES OF POWER - HISTORY OF THE JORDAN VALLEY LANDSCAPE

Cartographies of Power describes the gripping history of the Jordan Valley through the study of the site of Naharayim/Al-Baqoura, a site of power struggles for the land and for water for centuries. It immerses us in complex political and cultural dynamics and reveals to us the aspirations competing claims over contested vital resources. Featuring many new and spectacular maps and comparing them on a time scale, Ben Gitai shows how these documents have been instrumentalized by the regimes successive – Ottoman, British and Israeli-Jordanian – which transformed the site and its landscape over the last one hundred and fifty years. This corpus cartographic dialogue with period photographs and visualizations by point clouds which allow to update the understanding of the site and its layers. Ben Gitai thus places himself at the intersection of architecture, landscape, political geography and history, developing an approach that can be applied to other sites and other scales, in the quest for a deeper understanding of the landscape, its transformations as well as the human who shapes them.