Jordan Valley: a Vision for Integrated Valley Urbanism

It took only sixty years of technological advancement to create a condition of "perceived" water scarcity in one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited regions. A scarcity created through human settlements that exist almost completely independent of the environmental and ecological systems that sustain them. Through mapping, graphic illustration and photography, this book uncovers the underplayed link between water-diversion for urbanization and agriculture and the resulting...
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It took only sixty years of technological advancement to create a condition of "perceived" water scarcity in one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited regions. A scarcity created through human settlements that exist almost completely independent of the environmental and ecological systems that sustain them. Through mapping, graphic illustration and photography, this book uncovers the underplayed link between water-diversion for urbanization and agriculture and the resulting desertification in one of the world's most disputed and symbolic border-river regions. It is also a proposal for a regional landscape planning scheme that necessitates an understanding of the landscape's limitations and potentials to create a new agro-urbanization regime for the Jordan Valley. The proposal takes the form of a 100 km city, with a series of "water hubs" that collect, treats, and store rain water and run-off, and become nodes of civic life and urbanity. It is a utopian linear city which interfaces an ancient agrarian crescent and an augmented protected- river floodplain that makes landscape, not politics, the new hegemon.