https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-27/why-the-gaza-strip-may-be-the-city-of-the-future?srnd=citylabWhen Americans turned on the TV or glanced at their smartphones for news of the deadly clashes that engulfed the Gaza Strip in May — or if they followed the more recent spasm of violence in August that threatened to break the region’s fragile truce — many saw scenes that looked familiar: streets flooded with protesters, engaged in a struggle against highly armed security forces on the streets of a battered-looking city.
In many ways, the political and physical conditions of the Gaza Strip are unique: Nearly 2 million people are packed into a 25-mile-long rectangle of land along the Mediterranean roughly the size of Philadelphia. The territory has been home to Palestinians displaced by the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, and was occupied for nearly four decades by Israel after the 1967 Middle East War. The political wing of Hamas, which opposes Israel's right to exist, was elected to power in 2006; it took control of the enclave after a bloody schism with a rival Palestinian faction the following year. Israel — alongside Egypt — then placed Gaza under blockade as Hamas militants have continued to attack Israel. The two sides have settled into a gruesome rhythm of low levels of violence punctuated by intense conflagrations. In May’s fighting, as many as 260 Palestinians were killed; in Israel, 13 people were killed.
Gaza is a landscape of extreme economic deprivation born of the region’s complicated political dynamics — but one whose contours may soon become more common.
That’s the premise behind the recently released book Open Gaza: Architectures of Hope, published by Terreform’s imprint Urban Research. Edited by Deen Sharp, an urban geographer who focuses on the Middle East, and essayist, theorist, activist, and provocateur Michael Sorkin, the book presents a vision of Gaza as a glimpse of an imminent future, where violence, surveillance, resource scarcity and provisional use of an extremely compromised built environment are visited on all.
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