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