Open Gaza: Architectures of Hope (Middle East Urban Studies)

Cutting-edge analysis on how to improve life inside the Gaza Strip through architecture and design, illustrated in full-color

The Gaza Strip is one of the most beleaguered environments on earth. Crammed into a space of 139 square miles (360 square kilometers), 1.8 million people live under an Israeli siege, enforcing conditions that continue to plummet to ever more unimaginable depths of degradation and despair. Gaza, however, is more than an endless encyclopedia of depressing statistics. It is also a place of fortitude, resistance, and imagination; a context in which inhabitants go to remarkable lengths to create the ordinary conditions of the everyday and to reject their exceptional status. Inspired by Gaza’s inhabitants, this book builds on the positive capabilities of Gazans. It brings together environmentalists, planners, activists, and scholars from Palestine and Israel, the US, the UK, India, and elsewhere to create hopeful interventions that imagine a better place for Gazans and Palestinians. Open Gaza engages the Gaza Strip within and beyond the logics of siege and warfare, it considers how life can be improved inside the limitations imposed by the Israeli blockade, and outside the idiocy of violence and warfare.

Contributors Affiliations

Salem Al Qudwa, Harvard Divinity School and Harvard Kennedy School, Cambridge, USA

Hadeel Assali, Columbia University, USA

Tareq Baconi, International Crisis Group, Brussels, Belgium

Teddy Cruz, University of California-San Diego, USA

Fonna Forman, University of California-San Diego, USA

M. Christine Boyer, Princeton University, Princeton, USA

Alberto Foyo, architect, New York, USA

Nasser Golzari , Westminster University, London, UK

Yara Sharif, Westminster University, London, UK

Denise Hoffman Brandt, City College of New York, USA

Romi Khosla, architect, New Delhi, India

Craig Konyk, Kean University, Union, NJ, USA

Rafi Segal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, USA

Chris Mackey, Payette Architects, Boston, USA

Vyjayanthi V. Rao, Terreform, New York, USA

Sara Roy, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA

Mahdi Sabbagh, architect, New York, USA

Meghan McAllister, architect, San Francisco Bay Area, USA

Deen Sharp, London School of Economics, UK

Malkit Shoshan, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA

Pietro Stefanini, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

Michael Sorkin (1948–2020) , City University of New York, USA

Helga Tawil-Souri, New York University, USA

Omar Yousef, Al-Quds University, Jerusalem

Fadi Shayya, The University of Manchester, UK

Michael Sorkin (1948–2020) was the founder and president of Terreform. Sorkin was an architect whose practice crossed design, criticism, and pedagogy. He is the author or editor for over twenty books, including The Next Jerusalem: Sharing the Divided City (Monacelli, 2002) and Against the Wall: Israel’s Barrier to Peace (The New Press, 2005). In 2000, he was appointed the Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York, CUNY, and in 2014 he was made an honorary member of the Architectural Association in London.

Deen Sharp, PhD Graduate Center, CUNY, is the co-director of Terreform, Center for Advanced Urban Research and a visiting fellow in human geography at the London School of Economics. He was previously a post-doctoral fellow at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is the co-editor of Beyond the Square: Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings (Urban Research, 2016) and has published in a number of scholarly journals, edited books, and e-zines.

Sara Roy is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University. She has published extensively on the Israeli –Palestinian conflict, with a focus on Gaza. She formulated the concept of “de-development” to explain the impact of Israeli policy on Gaza’s economy. Her major work, The Gaza Strip: the Political Economy of De-development, is now in its third edition (2016). Previously she authored Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector (2011).

Terreform is an urban research studio and advocacy group. Founded in 2005 by Michael Sorkin, its mission is to investigate the forms, policies, technologies, and practices that will yield equitable, sustainable, and beautiful cities for our urbanizing planet.