A City at the Center of the World

As an Urban Studies major, I am fascinated by cities and the term urban. Recently, my Urban Studies class considered the commonalities that link all urban environments. In my Art History class, we pondered the formal and aesthetic qualities of different urban environments. With these discussions fresh in my mind, I began to read Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths by Karen Armstrong. The book with its detailed historical account of the city, allowed me to examine Jerusalem as an ancient city from an urbanist perspective. What links Jerusalem’s creation with the creation of other urban centers? How has this city sustained itself through 3000 years of turmoil and change? These questions remained in my brain as I read chapter one and two, and formed my argument.

Cities are not solely created and sustained due to their strategic position geographically, but also due to the symbolic meaning that the inhabitants prescribe to the place. As Armstrong succinctly notes in chapter one of her book, “Even today our scientific rationalism has not been able to replace the old sacred geography entirely,” (Armstrong 10). There must be something else that drives humanity to form these places of dense inhabitation. It is what I call the innate need for humans to orient themselves around a center. Mircea Eliade, a religious historian, discusses why many cultures and faiths are drawn to have a connection with the center of the world. Be it physically or through a ritualistic object, the center can be a link between levels of the cosmos: hell, our earthly existence, and heaven (Eliade 43). While this experience of living at the center is religious in motivation, we can see a similar migration of a non-religious population to the center of urban areas. For example, Landscape Designer Elizabeth Rogers has observed that American cities are transitioning from manufacturing hubs to “places that are increasingly dedicated to personal gratification” (Rogers 471).
Americans who commute and move to their cities, do it to be part of something greater: be it culturally, socially, or economically. This example shows that there is always a symbolic force that pulls people together. Orienting ourselves around a center can provide us with symbolic meaning for living.

In the case of Jerusalem, a city that has sustained itself for 3000 years and counting, its history and religious importance drive millions of followers of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam to live there. Along with any tourists and residents whose lives and heritage are wrapped up in the city. After all, “we are meaning-seeking creatures, and once we have lost our orientation, we do not know how to live or to place ourselves in the world,” (Armstrong 10).

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Works Cited

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred”, "Sacred Time and Myths".The Sacred and the Profane the Nature of Religion, by Mircea Eliade, Harcourt Brace, 1959.

Armstrong, Karen. Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. Ballantine Books, 2005.

Rogers, Elizabeth Barlow. Landscape Design: a Cultural and Architectural History. Abrams, 2003.