Architecture of Resistance ─ Cultivating Moments of Possibility Within the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict

This book interrogates - through the mechanism of research by design - the relationship between architecture, politics and power, and how these factors interplay in light of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. It takes Palestine as the key ground of spatial exploration, looking at the spaces between people, boundary lines, documents and maps in a search for the meaning of architecture of resistance. In doing so, the author tries to cultivate potential spaces of possibilities that can empower the fragmented Palestinian society and bridge the gap between the divided spaces, while also working against the Israeli project of spatial marginalization. What makes this book unique is that it is the first book of its kind to explore and critically frame the Palestinian life under occupation from a spatial dimension that focuses on the Palestinian forms of appropriating space. Even though the literature on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is dauntingly vast, when it comes to examining the issue of colonization and its relationship to the daily production and reproduction of space, there tends to be a one-sided image put forward, focusing mostly on Israeli strategies and their worst manifestations of power. Mainstream literature has previously tended to ignore the social narratives involved in shaping the urban space by the Palestinian community. Palestine today is being left with an absent mental map, hardly making sense of where its space starts or ends. Stemming from the need for an alternative discourse that can nourish the Palestinian spaces of imagination, the author tries to re-read, or re-draw the land from a new perspective, by stripping it of the dominant power of lines to expose the hidden dynamic topography born out of everyday Palestine. The book provides a visual documentary account of the urban and spatial consequences of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. It relies on the hybrid approach of research through design whereby the relationship between critical text, design and drawings offer an unconventional method of representation where each component complement the another. In addition to the combination of text, illustrations, mapping techniques, and collages, the author also counts on capturing the absent local narrative as an essential component of spatial investigation and, thereby breaks new ground in terms of representation of the context. Lying between dreams and realism the series of architectural interventions in the book might be speculative in their nature, and at times they can even be seen as ironic. However, their ultimate aim is to provoke a critical form of architecture and offer a spaces of play and creativity in which social life can be recuperated.

Yara Sharif is a practicing architect and an academic, she is a lecturer at Oxford Brookes University and a partner at NG Architects London, an award winning practice that has developed a reputation of working on sustainable community projects with specific interest in issues of cultural identity and responsive design. Her work generally stretches internationally where she mainly looks at design as a means to facilitate and empower forgotten communities, while also interrogating the relationship between politics and architecture. Sharif has co-founded Palestine Regeneration Team (PART); a design-led research group that aims to search for creative and responsive spatial practices in Palestine. Her current research by design has been granted the 2013 commendation award - RIBAa€?s President Award for Research for Outstanding PhD Thesis.