Challenging Erasure and the Blank Canvas
At a time when global powers openly call for turning Gaza into a blank canvas and redrawing it again, and the spaciocide and systematic erasure of Gaza’s coastal city unfolds, architecture has the potential to challenge the colonial narrative and hierarchy of knowledge production.1 These narratives, rooted in ideologies of exclusion and otherness, continue to subjugate the weak, leaving them and their landscapes scarred. It is within these contexts that Architects for Gaza (AFG) was established in November 2023 to engage with the politics of place and critically interrogate the role of architecture and urban practice as tools for resisting colonialism.2 The work builds upon years of efforts by our team to think about how to heal the fractured Palestinian landscape and offer alternative readings through a lens grounded in local knowledge and lived experience.3
AFG’s work in Gaza ranges from engaging with the materiality of ruins to working with municipalities. It is both a response to the current crisis and a long-term engagement with questions of repair, mapping, and spatial justice. Attempting to narrate and heal the geography of Palestine’s coastal landscape of Gaza forces one to confront uncomfortable questions related to repair, reconstruction, and erasure. How does one conceptualize ruins in a city that has been subjected to near-total destruction? What does it mean to rebuild home in the absence of streets and neighborhoods? What constitutes repair in a context marked by scarcity and ongoing genocide? Can temporality and impermanence serve as design tools for marking, holding, storytelling, and witnessing?
In the context of the current genocide and spaciocide in Gaza, architecture can critically respond to destruction not through grand design or “master plans,” but through resisting erasure and reasserting local agency and collaboration in the reconstruction process. Central to this approach is the belief that Gaza's reconstruction must be led by its own residents. The language and inheritance of master planning too often carries colonial connotations. As such, our work deliberately avoids totalizing visions, and instead takes the form of small, site-specific gestures—incubators, or moments of hope and care that unfold in bits and fragments and spreads across Gaza. Any larger choreography of Gaza’s spatial future must and can only emerge from Gaza itself.
Reclaiming Ruins to Mark the Street, Home and Neighborhood
Ruins can serve as a critical tool to reclaim and mark the coastal edge of Palestine, drawing attention to the politics and danger of absence as a mechanism for cultural erasure.
Palestinian scholar Edward Said introduced the concept of “imaginative geography” to describe the manipulation of space and shaping of human perception through imagery and text.4 Historian and photographer Issam Nassar later referred to this process as “colonization by imagination,” highlighting how descriptions of “nothingness,” “emptiness,” and “silence” have historically constructed scenes that provoke and reinforce the Western biblical imagination.5 This discourse, emerging alongside European colonial expansion, frames certain spaces as lacking dynamism, vision, and control, thus justifying their domination.
The ongoing erasure and attempt to “reinvent” Gaza are enacted not only through military aggression but also through an occupation of the imagination. Media portrayals of Gaza as a gray, devastated void serve to legitimize a colonial narrative—framing the territory as culturally empty and awaiting modernization. This imagery obscures Gaza’s identity as a historic Mediterranean coastal city, once central to regional trade and rich in cultural heritage.
The systematic denial of Gaza’s right to home, neighborhood, street, and even access to building materials brings to light difficult questions around reconstruction, home, ruins, memory, and identity. As early as in 2010, following Israeli aggression on Gaza, we began interrogating the notion of home in a temporary landscape:
Gaza City is no longer dwelled in, in a conventional sense; instead, the link between the street, the block, the room, and the living room is blurred. One roams through ruins and finds an absence of skin, apparently vacant voids, and frozen objects, uncertain of whether one is at the scale of a city or the scale of a room.6
While this question was critical fifteen years ago, it is far more complex today, when over 70 percent of Gaza’s buildings have been turned into ruins.7 On the one hand, the urban, rural and coastal fabric has been lost; its monuments and memories erased. On the other hand, the city’s new scars are also witnesses. Unlike ruins’ historical representation of emptiness, in Gaza today they are the narrative of place. Ruins have become the house, the street, and neighborhood. They therefore need to be captured, and not “cleared off from site” as some are calling for.
Ruins in the urban fabric of Gaza are not a symbol of finality, or decay, but a strategic instrument for an alternative mode of reconstruction. These remnants of the lived and built environment can be seen as foundational elements of resilience, with materials and artifacts of destruction repurposed to mark time and space.
The practice of reusing rubble for rebuilding has been commonplace in Gaza for years, largely due to the ban on importing cement and other types of construction materials. As such, rubble already “articulates overlaying of temporalities,” embodying both past and present relationships with home, belonging, and domesticity.8 The conceptual schism in the traditional Western European articulation of ruin versus rubble is lost in Gaza, as the cultural and intimate significance of rubble—which not only embodies the remnants of one’s home or place of attachment, but also often contains the detritus of the remains of loved ones—is by no means inferior to its practical value and potential as a building material.9
While the ruin should not be aestheticized or fetishized, it is important to enable a continuum of inhabitation while acting against its profanation and reduction to nothing but raw material. Key to this is the adaptation of ruins/rubble as a permeable skin, which can serve as tool to mark and reclaim the footprints of the lost homes, land plots, and neighborhoods. It is a way to sustain the urban fabric and traces as they once were, reaffirming ownership and preserving the lived experiences and sense of place that define Gazan communities.
Atlas of Materials (2010–present) has been collected from and inspired by the resourcefulness and ingenuity of Gazan families whose resilience, forged through decades of siege and hardship, has led to the development of innovative methods for rebuilding and repurposing materials.10 In the face of near-constant destruction, Gazan families have pioneered practices of salvaging and reusing materials, turning rubble, reclaimed reinforcement bars, crushed concrete, sand, clay panels, recycled corrugated metal, timber, and even discarded cardboard, into vital components for rebuilding. Atlas of Materials builds on these practices by creating a matrix of possibilities within a permeable skin structure, where crushed concrete, clay, sand, and metal can hint at scenarios of stitching and healing.
Within the context of the recent war, Atlas of Materials served as the basis to engage local teams in Gaza in dialogue and collaboration to test, make, and reclaim space as a tangible, locally-driven practice. Palestinians in Gaza today dwell in ruins, return to homes, and stitch together fragments. These acts are therefore not only practical, but also political gestures of defiance and resistance. Repair, in this sense, might emerge not as a final outcome, but as ongoing, small-scale acts of collective empowerment.11 In dialogue with Professor Farid Alqeeq, a leading academic on emergency repair and a member of the Palestine Housing Council (PHC), we are currently patching ruined homes to create habitable conditions together with the presence and knowledge of local residents.12
While these small-scale acts of repair work to reweave the fabric of daily life in Gaza, the municipality is working to mend the broader social structures and the collective provisions that keep the spine of the city going. Despite the constraints and the scarcity in materials, the municipality has led both short- and long-term initiatives aimed at reactivating everyday life through acupunctural interventions. This work operates on the belief that rebuilding and repair should not wait until the end of the genocide and spatial violence against Gaza. Here, repair is not seen as a “post-disaster” response, but rather as an ongoing, vital process to keep the city alive.
The Cultural Complex: Reviving the Heart of Gaza
The Cultural Complex occupies an important location in Gaza City: a rare expanse of publicly-owned land in an area where open space is precious and density is high. Approximately fifteen hectares in size, the site is a seam in the city’s fabric, positioned close to the city’s old commercial hub and almost equidistant between the Old Town and the ephemeral Gaza costal line. The site also straddles the main arteries of the historically important Omar al-Mukhtar Street and Al-Wehda Street.
Once a collection of civic life—a mosque, a municipal library, a children’s center, a football stadium, a public garden, a market, and the municipal maintenance garage—the complex bore witness to Gaza’s cultures, joys, and struggles. Much of it now is destroyed or physically erased. The mayor and his team envisioned not just rebuilding the city but its reinvention as a “modern, resilient, and stronger city.”13 The Cultural Complex is intended to be the cornerstone of this transformation: not simply restored, but reimagined as an inclusive, adaptable public space. Rooted in the memory of place, it was meant to act as incubator for other parts of Gaza’s fragmented landscape. In one of the world’s most densely populated cities, where green spaces are few and every square meter holds social weight, the task was as ambitious as it was necessary: reclaim lost functions, honor the past, and sow the seeds of a more inclusive future.
The call for proposals put out by the municipality in early 2024 was meant to show a “moment of possibilities” rather than a fixed master plan. We treated the complex not as a blueprint, but as a living framework: a spatial strategy anchored in urban design principles of place-making, yet flexible enough to evolve and be appropriated by the physical and cultural context.14 Our aim was to provide a set of guiding concepts that would offer a vision, both to demonstrate the site’s potential and attract funding when opportunities arise. This vision was shaped not by zoning and needs, but by memory, resilience, and everyday life. Here, architecture and landscape are not ends in themselves, but instruments of repair to rebuild home and community in the absence of streets and neighborhoods.
During the development of our proposal, it was impossible to carry out a detailed site survey, but a determined team of over forty volunteers rose to the challenge and, with assistance from the municipality, combed online archives and websites to reconstruct the site’s physical and social contours. This was reinforced by a planning framework commissioned prior to the current genocide and Gaza’s recent Phoenix Plan.15 As work progressed, five distinct interwoven design principles emerged.
One of the core tensions lay in reconciling the varied needs of the program: the contemplative atmosphere demanded by a library, for example, sat uneasily beside the kinetic energy of a bustling market. These spatial frictions, rather than being avoided, were embraced as opportunities to choreograph proximity, layering, and separation in new ways. Given Gaza’s density and scarcity of open land, what ultimately unified the project and became the logic of the plan was the landscape. This green infrastructure became the connective tissue, weaving across the site—from a new civic square that opens itself to the city to more protected zones that gently filter access around the children’s center and dedicated facilities for women and girls. Landscape became a democratic and poetic medium, a way to hold memory, mediate tension, and make space for joy.
Culturally significant historic anchors were identified, forming the spine of the project.16 Small informal details of the everyday—familiar points of interest and everyday rituals—also became incorporated into the plan. The formal park was much loved prior to the genocide, with its green trees and flowers providing a contrast to the city’s harsh urbanity. The damaged football stadium was even more redolent of joy and loss, both in its pre-genocide existence as a sporting facility and its wartime use as a refugee camp. The mosque added a third “fix,” and the restoration of these three structures in their former locations offered strong links to collective memories, including the Qattan building, the post office, and the medical center.
Alongside these anchors, the project sought to reimagine the latent potential of the site’s topography, embracing its natural gradient as a generative force. Picking up on the Palestinian tradition of terracing, the proposal uses rubble from the Israeli bombardment in gabions that retain new landforms and facilitate informal social open spaces. The municipal maintenance garage would also be accommodated in their undercroft, thereby removing a source of pollution from public areas.
The municipality’s request to increase vitality within the complex was answered by constructing a new market and a multi-functional cultural center adjacent to and on both sides of Al-Wehda Street. New multi-story mixed-use buildings, accommodating combined shops and homes, as well as live-in workshops, would provide habitation as well as employment. These buildings also give definition to the complex’s boundary while increasing its access points. And upon discussion with the Gaza team, the contemporary planning concept of “active travel” was incorporated into the design.17 Post-war Gaza will have many disabled residents, so a new car-free north–south route will be created, along with traffic calming on Al-Wehda Street and step-free access to public buildings.18
Our design for the Cultural Complex is currently under development following a stakeholders’ consultation session. Voices from Gaza, their aspirations and lived experiences, continue to shape the evolving strategy. The Gaza Seed Funding Initiative emerged out of this design process as a means of honoring the local voice and the aspirations of local architects.19 The initiative enables local practitioners to codevelop and refine the design strategy, ensuring genuine empowerment and ownership of the process.
Sheikh Radwan Reservoir: Strategic Repair and Spatial Resilience
At Sheikh Radwan Reservoir (SRR) in Gaza City, water is both sustainer and threat. This vast reservoir, once part of the city’s stormwater system, has become a deeply contested terrain. Since the start of bombardments, the reservoir transformed into a cesspool, flooding nearby streets with sewage, disease, and trauma. Hence, an urgent short- and long-term strategy was needed.
Rather than offering a conventional design brief, the municipality demanded an emergent, responsive approach shaped by shifting conditions and on-the-ground realities. Instead of beginning with architecture, our work began by collaborating with local engineers as they struggled—often manually—to pump out wastewater using decentralized systems. Even in these darkest moments, Gazans worked with determination and care, producing high-level environmental engineering assessments and improvising real-time interventions that were as environmentally attuned as possible.
We worked alongside engineers and environmentalists to imagine interventions that could respond not just to collapse, but to what might come after: from emergency response strategies to transitional infrastructure, and eventually toward centralized civic proposals. One such proposal is a raised civic structure that bridges water, ecology, and communal life. The design is being developed by a multidisciplinary, international team that includes water engineers, sustainability specialists, and Gaza-based professionals who have intimately known the site for years. These local experts have provided critical technical surveys, engineering reports, and lived insight, often while enduring blackout conditions and direct violence.
Spatial strategies were informed in part by pedestrian mapping techniques that helped identify key desire lines around the reservoir, which were translated into a light, connective, and responsive Y-shaped walkway bridge connecting to the main road system. Drawing inspiration from Augusto Murer and Carlo Scarpa’s Monument to the Partisan Woman (1965) in Venice, where at times tides render the female figure isolated in the water, we conceived a monument to Palestinian resilience on the axis of the bridge, isolated and located in the reservoir. Architecturally, the structure draws from both symbolism and constraint. The design of the façades was inspired by the testing and creation of a permeable skin using rubble, along with recycled and locally available materials. Rubble is incorporated not only into the permeable façade but also into the building’s foundations, in the form of gabion retaining walls. The orientation of the roof follows the path of the sun, optimized for photovoltaic panels, yet its triangular profile echoes the sails of Gaza’s fishing boats. In its program, the proposal holds space for a public market and a shaded commons—places of gathering, rest, and reclaiming civic life above the waterline.
Strategically, we thought about how this intervention could operate as part of a wider urban system, how it might link to the broader water infrastructure of Gaza City through distributed nodes of activity—what the team calls a “pearl necklace” approach. This vision imagines a series of civic anchors, each modest in scale but powerful in intent, activating space through small, vital interventions. In this view, the reservoir becomes not a challenge of containment, but a catalyst for a fertile civic fabric: an ecology of care, resilience, and public life.
Ultimately, Sheikh Radwan Reservoir is not just an infrastructural problem to be solved. It is a civic space, a place where the right to clean water, to gather, to imagine, and to heal can be reasserted. From a zone of contamination emerges a space of possibility: not a return, but a reclamation.
Conclusion
If the landscape changes, then I don’t know who I am either. The landscape is a refracted autobiography. As it disappears you lose your sense of self.20
—Iain Sinclair
Ruins in Gaza are not a typology for rebuilding, nor a prototype for reconstruction. Instead, they are a living landscape to challenge and resist erasure. Far from inert, they act as witness to engage with the land as a charged terrain. Gaza’s layers of history—marked by both destruction and persistence—should be integral to the city’s identity. Hence, the ruins of Gaza are not mere vestiges of a broken past, but essential elements in the ongoing narrative of survival, adaptation, and the will to reconstruct. Each building and every street is a symbol of both continuity and hope.
Ruins in Gaza are active participants in resistance rather than passive reminders of loss. They are part of our ongoing effort to retain Palestinian identity and to hold on to the map. They hold the stories of violated bodies and the loss of the familiar—fragments of history that must be reclaimed. With its scarcity, urgency, and interrupted temporality, repair in Gaza is an ongoing and continuous process of resisting spatial erasure. Our work does not claim to provide a solution to large-scale erasure or the horrors of contamination and ecocide. It does not offer final answers or claim resolutions. Instead, it continues to hint toward possible futures that locals can lead. Architecture here serves as a tool to mark, critique, and enact change. It can honor everyday innovations, moments of hope, and local practices of resilience.
Our dialogue with local partners remains open and continuous, constituting a shared enquiry into what can be reclaimed and how. Attentive to the specificity of place, material conditions, and social realities, our design propositions privilege suggestion over prescription, creating space for local agency and adaptation. Reconstruction should be a process rooted in impermanence and layered temporalities: a way of bringing the city back into life while acknowledging its fragmentation. Repair and rebuilding, in this sense, are embodied political and spatial practices, temporal strategies through which a fractured landscape might be reclaimed, remembered, and reimagined.
“War on Gaza has left 70 percent of roads in ruins after Israeli bombardment,” Middle East Eye, January 23, 2025, ➝. Spacio-cide is a term that refers to the systematic destruction or erasure of a specific space or territory, particularly with the intention to remove its cultural, historical, or social significance. The term was coined by the Palestinian sociologist Sari Hanafi, see Sari Hanafi, “Spacio-cide: Colonial Politics, Invisibility and Rezoning in Palestinian Territory,” Contemporary Arab Affairs 2, no. 1 (2009): 106–21.
Architects for Gaza, ➝.
See Yara Sharif and Nasser Golzari, “Absurd-City, Subver-City,” in Open Gaza: Architecture of Hope, ed. Michael Sorkin and Dean Sharp (The American University in Cairo Press, 2021), 90–119. See also Yara Sharif, Architecture of Resistance: Cultivating Moments of Possibility Within the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict (London: Routledge, 2017) ; Yara Sharif, “Landscape of Time and Immobility,” Landscape Research 44, no. 7 (2019): 872–91; and Yara Sharif and Nasser Golzari’s White As the Marker and The Eraser: The Politics of the Skin, 2023: a work shown in “Instant Modernism” at the Qattan Foundation, Ramallah, Palestine.
Edwad W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 54.
Issam Nassar, “Colonisation by Imagination” in City of Collision: Jerusalem and the Principles of Conflict Urbanism, ed. Philipp Misselwitz and Tim Rieniets (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2006), 222–26.
Sharif and Golzari, “Absurd-City,” 103.
“War on Gaza Has Left 70 Percent of Roads in Ruins After Israeli Bombardment,” ➝.
Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, Ruins of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 8.
In his 2012 article “Ruins, Rubble and Human Remains: Negotiating Culture and Violence in Post-Catastrophic Warsaw,” Polish-Canadian scholar Jerzy Elźanowski scrutinizes a tradition rooted in the picturesque, where the ruin becomes a tool for understanding what he describes as “the uncomfortable relationship between culture and nature.” According to thinkers such as Georg Simmel, the results of manmade violence unleashed upon the built and lived environment sit outside of such relationships, thus rendering the notion of ruin into rubble: nothing but a material without cultural significance which is meant to be cleared off. In his article, Elźanowski contests this division and, within the context of the post-WW2 rebuilding of Warsaw, attributes a memorial character to the rubble specifically due to the fact that it contained human remains. Jerzy Elżanowski, “Ruins, Rubble and Human Remains: Negotiating Culture and Violence in Post-Catastrophic Warsaw,” Public Art Dialogue 2, no. 2 (2012): 114–46.
See Objects of Repair, an exhibition by Palestine Regeneration Team (PART) as part of the British Pavilion exhibition “Geology of Brittanic Repair,” curated by Kabage Karanja, Kathryn Yusoff, Stella Mutegi, and Owen Hopkins at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennial.
Nabeel Hamdi, Small Change: About the Art of Practice and the Limits of Planning in Cities (Abingdon: Earthscan, 2004).
The collective exploration of the notion of home and self-build dates back to 2010 when alternative reconstruction techniques were examined. Working alongside UN-Habitat and local partners in Gaza including Professor Farid, we explored available techniques and revisited existing forms of rebuild under conditions of scarcity. For further details on the self-build outcomes, see Sorkin and Sharp, eds., Open Gaza: Architecture of Hope.
Emma Dent Coad, “Architects unite internationally to rebuild Gaza,” Morning Star, December 8, 2024, ➝.
Rob Cowan, Essential Urban Design: A Handbook for Architects, Designers and Planners (London: RIBA, 2021).
Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1966).
Simon Cook et al., “More than Walking and Cycling. What is ‘Active Travel’?” Transport Policy 126 (2022): 151–61.
Cook et al., “More than Walking and Cycling.”
“Support Gazan Architects: Seed Funder,” Architects for Gaza, ➝.
Ian Sinclair, ed., London: City of Disappearances (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006).