I received an email recently telling me about a non-traditional walking tour that allows citizens in Telaviv to ‘meta-tour’ Palestinian Gaza, and New Yorkers to explore Baghdad in their own city.   The concept confused me a bit so I decided to check it out. 

Youarenothere.org (YANH) calls itself a ‘dislocative tourism agency’.  A Jewish and Palestinian-founded group, Palestinian Laila El-Haddad and Israeli New York-based Mushon Zer-Aviv have created a city tour to explore conflict zones from a distance.

How does the tour work?

For each project (New York and Baghdad and Tel Aviv and Gaza) they created a two-sided downloadable map that pastes the two cities together, finding the equivalent of each site within the other city.  The tourist prints off the map and starts the walking tour, holding the map up to the light to see the Gaza/Tel Aviv destination.  Once at that site in Tel Aviv, the YANH team has stuck a sticker (playing with the ‘you are here’ sign) at the site with a phone number to call for an audio tour of Gaza.  (Yes, this does seem disorienting, but that’s the point).

They refer to themselves an ‘urban tourism mashup’.  A mashup is a web page or application that combines data from two different sources to create a new service.  (Think many of the handy iphone apps). According to its founder, Mushon Zer-Aviv, “The tour does not try to blend the two cities. Rather, its intention is to momentarily disorient the tourist and then reorient them with a new perspective – one that includes Gaza as part of their consciousness.” Zer-Aviv launched the project to ‘fight a perception among Israelis who associate the territory with violence.’

Though they have discontinued the New York tour, and some have criticized the Gaza tour for being too political, it’s a powerful start and a creative idea. 

What can we learn from mashups?

YANH is an interesting concept, and one in the growing set of questions of how can mashups make our lives better? The government of the District of Colombia has held two “apps for democracy” competitions to encourage designers to create mashups that will help the city govern better. Interestingly, the gold place winner was a historical walking tour that mashes up a Google map with Flickr photo feeds and Wikipedia entries. (The government of Finland has started their own competition, as has Germany and Australia, and the organization has just created a Launch Your Own “Apps for Democracy” Guide for communities all over the world to do the same.) 

Mashups for Peace

• Why not hold an Apps for Peace competition?
• How can we use technology, and particularly cell phones, to break down barriers?
• How do we create mainstream technology apps that help increase peace?

As important, of course, as creating these apps, is implementing them in a way so that a variety of citizens are using them, not only those that are already sympathetic to the cause.  It would be interesting to see who in Tel Aviv has gone on the ‘youarenothere’ tour, for example.  Nonetheless, YANH is an interesting example of a service developed across boundaries using the principles of design, technology, new media and the politics of space to increase our capacity for the ‘other’.