Stéphanie Dadour: Palestine has endured decades of injustice. Since October 2023, global awareness has increased, highlighting the stark asymmetry of the occupier over the occupied. In Gaza, more than 35,000 people have been killed and 80,000 injured. More than half of Gaza’s homes, including infrastructures, have been destroyed or damaged. Those three levels of destruction can be considered as genocide, urbicide, and ecocide. While architects can’t change the world, there seems to be “an effective regeneration of Palestine.” What are your thoughts?
Nasser Golzari: When we set up the Palestine Regeneration Team back in 2009, we were doing a lot of work in the West Bank and in Gaza. One of our objectives was to represent, intensify, and protect the alternative ways of creating hope and supporting the resilience that existed in Palestine, in a more sustainable and structured way. We thought it was important to do it within the concept of regenerating, rather than purely in responding or reacting.
Stéphanie: How would you define a “structured way”?
Yara Sharif: When we refer to regeneration, we refer to empowerment and to cultivating hope. By a “structured way,” we recognize that Palestinians are already active in creating their spatial practices. These practices are of the everyday, some are formalized, while others, emerging out of need and resilience, are less formal. We try to find the means to celebrate them by creating some form of a framework to allow these practices to accumulate and to create impact on the ground. This involves some form of a matrix that collects these different practices, learns from them, and shares them in a way that empowers the local community to build from a bottom-up approach. This is very important in a context where we lack a state and institutions to support Palestinians. Therefore starting from the ground and from the street is crucial, and architects have an important role to play in this process.
Nasser: When we set up our activities in Palestine, which go back quite a long way, we always felt that it was quite important to address the short term and the long term at the same time. The long term must address the neighborhood, the collective, the urban, the larger scale. This should be done in a structured and sustainable framework that relies on urban restructuring, reconstruction, available resources, hopes, and dreams. Even now, under very difficult circumstances, when we set up Architects for Gaza in November, we thought it was still very important that we not only address the immediate needs, but also think about the reconstruction on an urban scale and in a more structured way.
Stéphanie: Can you give me an example of the matrix you’re talking about? Describe everyday local practices.
Yara: We visited Gaza, where I’m from, in 2010. Gazans have developed a lot of creative and responsive practices for reconstruction after their homes were destroyed. They have worked with crushed concrete, with rebars (the reinforcing steel inside reinforced concrete) and have developed creative means to generate energy, purify water, and engage in sustainable farming. Similarly, in the West Bank, there are various small-scale practices that often start at an individual level but can evolve into community networks due to urgent needs. During the intifada, I helped set up makeshift classrooms at home to continue teaching children. Today, education inside tents have emerged, leading us to create Gaza Global University. There is a need for an effective regeneration for Palestine now, because of the deliberate process of destruction employed by the settler colonial power at all levels to erase culture, history, and memory—the urbicide, the ecocide, the genocide, you name it. We stress Palestinians’ right to their landscapes, their homes, their cities, their urban practices, and their memories. That’s why we focus on the home, the street, the neighborhood, and the landscape. Gazans don’t just need a tent or four walls, they need their city back. They need the port and the different typologies—the urban, the rural, the agrarian—that make a city like Gaza work.
Stéphanie: You use terms theorized during the rebuilding of Europe after the Second World War by Western architects such as Team 10: street, neighborhood, home. They were interested in social practices and were in touch with what was happening in European colonies. We are discussing these concepts in the context of Palestine, so they must also have significance for how people in Palestine inhabit the city or the neighborhood. Can you tell us about how people in Gaza live?
Yara: I would critique the current European context that emphasizes individuality over community and connection. There’s a strong focus on the comfort of being within your own four walls, where everybody is obsessed with owning their own flat, paying mortgage, and acquiring properties. In Palestine, there’s a strong sense of collective living and community.
I was raised this way—my mother, a doctor practicing in clinics in rural Palestine, would leave us with the village and find us at the end of the day. Whoever was looking after us would feed us well and keep us clean because of this collective sense of community. The sense of collective means that you could be together on the street watching TV rather than being into your own home. The street becomes an extension of your living room. When we think about community and the definition of home, it’s about a home where community is an integral part of it. In Gaza, these practices are the driving force behind everything we think about, whether it’s urban strategy or the concept of home itself.
Stéphanie: When we take a close look at the reconstruction of cities after wars—in Iraq, Lebanon, or Syria for example—we find volunteers, NGOs and often architects’ collectives trying to work on small programs with local communities and, on the other side, capitalist companies that impose their own projects with power and influence. How do you navigate this environment and achieve your goals? Additionally, how receptive are the people there to what you’re doing, especially since you’re also working from a distance?
Yara: The capitalist power of these big developers is indeed there. They want a slice of the cake, and they usually get it. As you rightly mentioned, what happened in Iraq, Syria or Lebanon, especially after the destruction and the emergence of refugee camps, has been disastrous and devastating for local communities. We feel a responsibility to at least put an alternative strategy forward, one that doesn’t follow a corporate kind of approach that creates generic boxes without regard for local aspirations, social practices, or culture.
Nasser: We set up PART and AFG to offer an alternative and hope. We felt there was a need to show the power of the alternative ways that Palestinians are resisting and creating new ways of inhabiting. When we set up Gaza Global University in December, we had to provide an alternative where students who were unable to finish their studies could complete them. Now we are in collaborative discussions and partnerships with Palestinian universities and others. Teaching has started, lectures are taking place online, and there is hope for in-person meetings later.
Stéphanie: What will happen next?
Nasser: The whole situation didn’t start in October 2023; it’s been going on for 75 years. We’ve been involved with Palestine for decades and we never stopped because the siege, occupation, exploitation of resources, stealing of water, etc., haven’t stopped. At the same time, we’re designing a mobile clinic that also serves as a classroom, which we hope to move to different locations.
Yara: There is the long-term strategy in terms of reconstruction. It’s such a tough question when the whole city has collapsed and become a refugee camp. What does a home mean in a context of destruction like that? Is it four walls? Or, because the relationship between street, neighborhood and home has collapsed, do we have to rethink the home in a new way? How do we think about rubble when the whole city has become rubble? I mean, my family lost 40 members within the first three days of the massacre. They are under the rubble, and we haven’t been able to recover them. How do we make sure this rubble, of our families, doesn’t just end up becoming the port the Americans are building? How do we think about reconstruction? It is an ethical question to think about whether a new typology is needed, or if we should preserve and keep the old street typology as an important testimony to how the city used to operate.
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All photos © Yara Sharif.
Stéphanie: Palestine has been making headlines since 1948; however, little action in academia has been taken. A genocide is underway, people are waking up. How do you cope with this?
Nasser: The situation has been boiling underneath the skin for 75 years. We have many people, students, families, and the UN reaching out to us, asking what they can do to help. It’s all voluntary work, so it’s a matter of balancing and maintaining our psychological strength to respond effectively.
Stéphanie: You are in contact with architects on the ground. How would you define your practice in Gaza or in Palestine as architects based in the UK?
Yara: Our families are in Palestine, so we’re always in Palestine. We don’t have an office in Palestine, but we’ve been working closely with a lot of organizations, municipalities, and local communities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. I also worked in Palestine for 10 years before moving to the UK, so my connection to the culture in deep-rooted.
In Beit Iksa, we worked on offering small-scale interventions like working with the local community on inventing a sustainable green roof typology that can help them create more stepping gardens after their agricultural fields were confiscated by the occupation. My definition of resilience means more than just resisting; it’s about reshaping and empowering. Resilience, in our view, is about taking control of the situation, reshaping it, and empowering communities. This positive aspect of resilience is crucial for us.
Stéphanie: It’s hard to reshape with private investors who are after profit. How do you reshape when you have to start from scratch?
Nasser: We see a lot of hope, action, resistance, resilience, and practices. Just to give you a quick example, the first time that I went to Gaza, we had to take a lot of small kits to demonstrate how they could rebuild. One of the kits we took from the Centre for Alternative Technology in the UK showed how to generate photovoltaic solar energy. Within a period of 10 years, Gazans built and relied on photovoltaic solar panels. Last October, one of the first acts of this genocide was to destroy all these solar panels. Back then, when we met the families, they would say to us “just give us something, we’ll do it.” We took a number of what we call self-help documents, because I worked with the late architect Walter Segal, who developed this self-built technique, in the ’70s in the UK. He built a technique of how groups can get together—families, not necessarily with building techniques—to build their own homes. He produced amazing drawings, little diagrams, cross-sections, and we actually took these with us to develop with the UN what we call a self-help book. We actually gave them the self-help books; they appointed their own contractors and they designed their own homes.
Stéphanie: This is what you call the framework.
Nasser: We call it the framework, exactly. So we just provide how to build it so that it’s actually more sustainable and reduces the use of energy, water, and so on. In Beit Iksa, as Yara was explaining, we set up the greywater recycling system, a very basic system. We set it up and we organized a meal for 250 families. They came, they ate, and then we set up this sink, the water, the plant, and so on, back into the kitchen to show them how the dirty water comes in and gets cleaned. The first thing the plumber said was, “Interesting, I can improve on that. I can do it in my own home.” And it’s amazing. And that, for us, was enough. They picked it up, they said, “I’m going to do that, I’m going to do better than this one because I know how to use local conditions.” And these, for us, are massive inspirations. It just means that they’re not defeated.
Bibliography
- Golzari, Nasser and Sharif, Yara. 2015. “Cultivating Spatial Possibilities in Palestine: Searching for Sub/urban Bridges in Beit Iksa, Jerusalem”, in D. Petrescu and K. Trogal (eds.), The Social (Re)Production of Architecture. Politics, Values and Actions in Contemporary Practice, Farnham: Ashgate.
- Hammami, Rima. 2006. “Human Agency at the Frontiers of Global Inequality: An Ethnography of Hope in Extreme Places”, inaugural address as 2005/06 holder of the Prince Claus Chair in Development and Equity, delivered in The Hague at the ISS (International Institute of Social Studies) of Erasmus University of Rotterdam.
- Sorkin, Michael and Sharp, Dean (eds.). 2020. Open Gaza: Architectures of Hope, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.
- Sharif, Yara. 2017. Architecture of Resistance: Cultivating Moments of Possibility Within the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict, Abingdon: Routledge.
