Why Israel?
BRIDGING DIVERSITY IN A GLOBALIZING WORLD
Despite the conformity of an increasingly globalizing world, diversity continues to flourish. While physical, economic and social global processes continue to challenge our planet, they are inevitably met by a multiformity of responses at the national, regional and local scales. This paradox forms the primary theme of the conference.
The international geographic community is uniquely poised to investigate these diverse responses. The integrative nature of the geographical sciences means that in the physical, economic, cultural and social spheres, geographers have a key contribution to make towards bridging diversity. For
example, the global challenges of desertification, climatic change and air quality have elicited a plethora of reactions in different national and regional contexts. In the economic realm, supra-national economic integration has ironically given rise to neo-regionalism in some places and a reaffirmation of the nation-state in others. In the social and cultural dimensions, the response to rising global personal mobility has been the unwitting re-creation of social segregation in some urban areas and the heterogenization of others.
The political expression of diversity is reflected in the upscaling and downscaling of geographical phenomena such as boundaries and relationships. These are in constant flux in an era of highly complex networks. Geographers can play a key role in analyzing, explaining and bridging this diversity in response to the challenges of a globalizing world.
Israel provides a highly suitable backdrop for this task. Physically situated at the focal intersection between the European, Asian and African continents and demographically, culturally, and politically rooted in each of them, no location better reflects the theme of ‘bridging diversity’. Since establishment, some 60 years ago, Israel has always envisaged a bridging role in the Middle East. As an immigrant Jewish society, with some 20% Arab-Palestinian population, the country has grappled with the social, cultural, ethnic and political challenges and opportunities of human diversity. The semi-arid
climatic regime of the country has demanded imaginative ecological and environmental responses for sustaining the physical diversity of the national landscape. This has been reflected in areas such as water management, natural habitat protection and countering desertification. In the absence of
natural resources and in order to sustain a rate of economic growth commensurate with that of other newly developed countries, the country has had to develop diverse human capital-based points of entry into the global economy.
Hosting the IGU regional conference in the city of Tel Aviv further highlights the conference theme. Tel Aviv-Jaffa reflects a level of social and cultural diversity unparalleled even in a society as heterogeneous as Israel. As the bustling economic core of the country, Tel Aviv, with its 2.5 million metropolitan inhabitants, provides the ideal venue for an inspired engagement with the challenges of bridging diversity.
