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.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2909/
an explosion . The building’s ruin is not by conflict but reconstruction, the planned detonation of dynamite at the structures foundation . A large cloud of dust rises from the collapsed building and the screen is engulfed in the fog of reconstruction . In Lebanon, the fogs of war and reconstruction have at times been difficult to distinguish .
The Middle East is one of the most urbanized and urbanizing regions in the world. The proliferation of urban megaprojects, skyscrapers, gated communities, retail malls, airports, ports and highways continues unabated. From 2006 to 2016, cement production almost doubled in the region’s major cement producing countries, such as Saudi Arabia (from 27 to 61 million tons), Egypt (29 to 55 million) and Turkey (47 to 77 million). [1] The majority of production is aimed at domestic markets. Saudi Arabia from 2008 to 2016 even banned the export of cement to ensure lower domestic prices for the government’s large infrastructure projects.
September 29th, 2015
Constellations: Searching for the Global Suburb
November 20th, 2013
Beware of Small Cities
September 6th, 2012
Urbanism and the Arab Uprising: Downtown Cairo and the fall of Mubarak
[Translated into Arabic]
August 6th [September 6th] 2012
The End(s) of Stability
May 8th, 2012
Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
by David Harvey
Dubai: The City as Corporation
by Ahmed Kanna