Open Gaza

Hervanta campus, R-building 2^nd floor – brief presentation of the premises, walk to the actual workshop space (t.b.a. soon).

Open Gaza project seeks to intervene in this troubled situation by bringing together an eclectic group of designers, environmentalists, planners, activists, and scholars from Palestine, the US, the UK, India, and other places – to examine this conflicted environment as a city. Through essays, colloquies, and designs we are investigating the nature of the variety and permeability of the membranes – material and immaterial – that limn both the physical and conceptual space of Gaza.

Thus far, as we are getting organized, the project is proceeding in several different registers, an acknowledgement that no single discourse is adequate to the urban, certainly not to Gaza’s complexities. Our work, therefore, will engage the tools of architecture and planning, the social sciences, environmentalism, and critical theory, to unpack Gaza. To begin, we are gathering data and establishing benchmarks and are compiling an analytical catalogue of urban systems in Gaza, including, but not limited to:

History, Environment, Forensics, Energy. Food, Water. Waste. Sewage, Manufacture/Building/Movement, Social/Institutional Infrastructure, Housing/Neighborhood Structure/Kinship Structures, Special Infrastructure Materials Recovery, Construction and Donor Industry. The Electromagnetic Field, Surveillance and Legibility.

Growing out of the analysis will be a series of essays and designs produced by individuals and teams that seek to construct a critical mass of potential interventions to suggest both directions in which a re-imagined Gaza might grow and a strategy for deploying resources.

As the project develops, we will seek where credible to investigate the merger of individual propositions to create more complex and supple projects as well as larger-scale propositions. While this cannot be strictly predicted at the moment, it might include something quite like a plan or plans. Indeed, part of the objective of this project is to explore the useful limits of planning and to examine the ways in which its artifacts and representations can de ne a progressive space of action.

What does it mean to plan Gaza? On the one hand it is hard to find existing planning documents and on the other hand documents would become obsolete as political, social and spatial changes take place on the complex ground conditions of war, scarcity and inequality that make up Gaza. Planning thus seems like an impossible and static task in a context of such complexity.

The theme of the workshop is going to unfold around 5 key elements:

1. Reflecting on the architecture of war or how the the war zone of the Gaza strip becomes visible into the forces of construction and destruction. (Lectures and discussions day 1)
2. Reflecting on the meaning of public space in Gaza and the socio-cultural re-appropriation of bombed sites in dense urban areas – in a context where gathering in public space is considered a high-risk practice. (Lectures and discussions on day 2)
3. Drafting a brief list of planning principles for the Gaza strip. (Task 1)
4. Find architectural solutions to redesign publicly accessible and socially meaningful space in areas of recent bombing and distress. (Task 2)
5. Study and experiment how scrap materials from bombed and demolished dwellings can be reused as construction material. (Task 3)

Abstract in the making.

Damiano will talk about the urban morphology of the Gaza strip and will give an extensive description of all the materials, maps and data that make the starting point of this workshop.

Questions for the following discussion:

1. What are the key elements of planning in western world? List them
2. What do you think are the key elements of planning in the conflict zone of Gaza?
3. Any place of gathering or industrial activity is a potential threat. How to sustain socio-economic development when the places of social interaction and production are considered as targets?
4. Being watched! Planning to hide or planning to respond?
5. Accepting the conflict as de facto, are the tunnels the new highways of Gaza?

The Open Gaza / Regain Gaza workshop presents us a difficult context. Both Gaza’s overcrowded urban tissue and its violent change seem to render many architectural tools and concepts useless. Public space, for example, cannot exist as gathering place because of the constant fear of killing warfare. However, war is a common feature in urban history. Cities have been designed to better resist the stress of war and even to facilitate military control of their own citizens.

In the lecture, I aim to give some illuminating examples of such socio-spatial relations. I specially focus on the complex dynamics between forced changes and self-organised processes. An interesting classic reference is Patrick Geddes. In City Development (1904) and Cities in Evolution (1915) he discussed cities as evolving organisms that both carried influences from the past and involved promises of the future (Koponen 2006 p.85). As planner, Geddes engaged in ‘constructive and conservative surgery’, visible for example in Jaffa / Tel Aviv not far from Gaza City.

After WWII, Aldo Rossi presented the ‘theory of monument’ is his milestone book L’architettura della città (1966). Criticising ‘naïve functionalism’, Rossi claimed that cities are heterogeneous collages of morphological elements that change in a variety of ways and rhythms. Major buildings, streets and squares, but also recurring large events can be ‘monuments’ that drive urban change over long time periods, but that may become obsolete as well.

Henri Lefebvre’s La Production de l’espace (1974) brought together a new vision about historical and socially produced space that reflects the conditions of its production and simultaneously provides seeds for change: Urban space is the ground of ‘urban revolution’. Bernard Tschumi’s early writings and projects, such as The Manhattan Transcripts (1981) and design of Parc de La Villette in Paris (project 1982, realisation 1984-87) operationalize the radical thoughts of ’68 in an architectural language of event montage, superimposition and cross programming.

I wish that a critical re-valorisation of these exemplary writers and practitioners show how the complex and sometimes indeed contradictory and violent urban space can be conceptualised lucidly, without too much simplification. They also show how a rich conceptualisation can lead to meaningful action. Today, we are witnessing a moment of radical change in urban space and practices worldwide. A related rethinking of urban planning, design and architecture in under way. – What these shifts could mean in Gaza 2015?

Tutor review students ideas on planning principles

Principles and ideas are joined in a single document. Final discussion to conclude Task 1.

Student will split into two groups: one group working on Task 2 and the other working on Task 3.

Students and tutors bring up their questions arose during the first day next to a warm cup of coffee. Political, architectural and social and possibly ethical issues will be shortly discussed and listed in a document to feed further research and discussion in the Open Gaza project. A set of key questions will be selected and brought to the Open Gaza meeting in London.

Groups present their works using a Pecha Kucha style to keep the presentation focused on few and central key points of their works. At the same time having a short and dense presentation will allow a longer and in-depth conversation/feedback with the tutors.