Gaza Phoenix!

It has been already twenty years since I come for the first time to the Gaza Strip and ten years since I left. I consider privileged for having the chance to be back, seeing so many colleagues and friends with who we share so many projects and adventures, as well as visiting for the first time built up projects that I left at design stages. As an architect-planner to be able to see and experience built-up territories that you imagine, or dream, ten and twenty years ago is definitively special. Specially in the context of Gaza Strip where so much hope has been rise, and also spoiled, especially of those living there as well as so many living all around the world who care about the future of this tiny piece of land in the crossroad of history and geography.

The re-housing projects for families whose houses were demolished when IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) left the strip as part of the "disengagement plan" (2005) was the reason that bring me back to the Gaza Strip in 2005 to develop its urban master plan. I was in 1997/8 working initially for Gaza Municipality in a technical support project in urban planning and GIS (Geographical Information System) provided by UNV (United Nation Volunteers) recruited and monitor by White Helmets (a governmental initiative of international cooperation sponsored by the Argentinian Government). The project succeed in producing a city master plan, based on a solid diagnosis covering plot per plot collected through the cooperation with the Islamic University of Gaza, replicated in Khan Younis and Rafah (1998).

My return to Gaza Strip, last May 2017, after several conflicts and extreme suffering of the inhabitants, was a re-discovering of a people and resilient culture that I really admire and, I believe, contain relevant lessons for the rest of the world, especially during this dark times in which we seems to live. It will be unfair to ask the people of Gaza to provide lessons to the rest of the world, taking into account the enormous challenges that they face daily, lack of water and basic things for survival, threat of new military excursions, oppression, etc. However, talking with people in Gaza it was clear to me that the basis for their resilience lay in their extensive social and family networks that allow them to re-organize permanently to face challenges it doesn't matter how tough they are. And this characteristic of the Palestinian people has been very present in our master plan of Gaza, Rafah and Khan Younis, in addition of being actually the essence of the "family approach" applied to re-housing project scheme.

How to plan cities under perpetual siege, with limited land and almost without infrastructure? Well, the response is simply, just regulating what the people knows to do: Building upon the roof of their relatives sharing the same plot. This principle of sharing plots and building structures is applicable to the rest of infrastructures, incomes and everything related to survival. Gaza master plan simply encourages housing densification, and prevent sprawl, essential to protect land for agricultural purposes. Notoriously, the same master plan produced in 1997 is still there, regulating Gaza urban expansion. After destruction of its northern part, once again, Gaza like the phoenix bird re-bird from its ashes.

The re-housing project is still there, too. The family approach allows people to organize themselves as a family to protect their vulnerable members, the senior, the handicap and simple the poorest members. The triplex typology is ideal to densify in small pieces of plots, whose sharing of land give the inhabitants secure tenure and the master plan was design on the basis of adapting to the natural topography creating an organic landscape with circular streets following the sand dunes contour lines. Re-visiting such place in two cities (Khan Younis and Rafah) gave me the chance to see in reality what was projected ten years ago, when future was a possibility for peace and welfare for a society suffering already from more than half a century.

My visits to this land have seen pain followed by pain. But also, resilience. Re-construction brings new airs and hopes for a better future. Living in the crossroad of geography and history is not easy for those that need to fight tough for their daily survival. The fa?ade of their buildings and neighborhoods are full of identity. Identity revealing better passed times, Arabic arches everywhere and decorated windows and stylish architecture, present practical arrangements based on solidarity to survive sharing practically everything, recycling whatever is available, and future bet in very advanced schools and services for children and youth, in modern buildings and infrastructures operating with green energies, the hope put on generations to come. Such powerful lessons of architecture and urbanism speaks aloud in a moment in which the "Arab dream" of a region united and in peace seems to fall apart. Gaza Strip, rebuilding once again in its long history teach us that even in the middle of despair and lack of everything, the spirit of individuals are tempered to achieve even beyond human capabilities to forge really resilient communities.