Dwelling on the green line: privatize and rule in Israel/Palestine

landscape elements from far to near. Certainly, this may be a harsh suggestion when there is no rich source at hand to support the description of a general structured landscape. Notwithstanding the lack of overall structural analysis of Dongchuan’s urban landscape, the book highlights important aspects of Dongchuan’s historical experience. These include the landscape construction strategies of the Qing state’s civil elites and the wisdom of the indigenous inhabitants and immigrants who dealt with the new living environment. The latter constructed landscape by employing geographical resources to maintain and express the local groups’ identity, status, and adherence to local traditions. In a nutshell, the reshaping of the urban landscape presented in this book is not simply a rough transformation of the original landscape by the elite groups representing the imperial power, but a field of dependence, negotiations, and compromise among different groups, which makes up a part of the continuous civilizing process in the context of local natural geographical features. The author shows that during this process, also apparently innocent sites, such as buildings, roadways, fields, mountains, waters, and scenic spots, interacted with the imagination, memories, and daily lives of those who lived between them, shaping different cultural traditions and identities and thus a unique and multi-layered border landscape.