Résumé

Searching for ways that fortitude, resistance, and imagination can work in an area characterized by unimaginable despair and degradation is the driving logic of this book. The book's specific focus is the Gaza Strip, an area roughly the size of Mobile, Alabama, occupied and controlled by Israel despite having a Palestinian population of 1.8 million. The book’s broader project is to present visions and architectural or urban interventions of all scales intended to improve the lives of its inhabitants—in many ways rethinking the very strategies that those inhabitants use to not only survive but make a life for themselves. Besides offering descriptions of the systems of tunnels used to transport, among other things, medicines, building materials, and individuals visiting their families, the book also presents propositions for ecologically based zones and cities, projects centered on water remediation and collection, residential developments of all scales, places for learning and making, and ways to occupy spaces and rebuild from the rubble resulting from the all-too-frequent Israeli bombings. Open Gaza is an urgent plea for humanitarianism and imaginative, critical involvement, needs that become more pronounced with each passing day.