Edited by Michael Sorkin and Deen Sharp
American University of Cairo Press
3/2/2021, hardcover
SKU: 9781649030719
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
With a foreword by Sara Roy.
Reviews:
"[T]he authors grapple with the physical siege and geopolitical preconceptions of Gaza, countermapping their way to novel architectural thinking, discourse, and pedagogy. In these collected works, professionals take civil responsibility for the horrors and injustice of the world, reframing students' studio work as part of a radical pedagogical experiment." -- Journal of Palestine Studies
"This remarkable collective volume, Open Gaza, includes architectural contributions that imagine a better future, touching accounts of the tragic present, and historical and ethnographic portraits that together enable us to see the community of 2 million people living in the Gaza Strip as they really are and could be, and not as they have been made out to be by the incessant campaign of dehumanization to which they have been subjected. Capacious and enlightening, Open Gaza is a credit to its many authors, and fitting monument to one of its editors, the late Michael Sorkin." -- Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017
"Rather than rehearse the statistics and calamities that have marked the abundant coastal enclave for social death, Open Gaza provocatively shows how Gaza continues to be a source of life in its ingenuity, love, and possibilities. Simultaneously, it makes clear that current conditions in Gaza are not inevitable but have been constructed, reproduced, and justified by lawmakers indentured by a political present. From a journey through a network of tunnels, an alternative digital grid, agriculture zones, transportation routes that rehabilitate a fragmented Arab world, this collection of essays is a powerful retort to the tired discourse that has framed Gaza's future as a security question contingent upon demilitarization and containment. Open Gaza is an exciting invitation into new futures that Gaza and Palestine, more generally, offer for Palestinians and the world." -- Noura Erakat, author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine
About the Contributors:
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 and Against the Wall: Israel's Barrier to Peace. 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. He is the co-editor of Beyond the Square: Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings 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. Previously she authored Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector.