Open Gaza : Architectures of Hope.

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. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers. --Luis E. Carranza, Roger Williams University

When most Americans think of Gaza (if they think of it at all), they picture a blighted desert landscape of crumbling buildings. Yet despite decades of blockade and indiscriminate bombings, Gazans face their many challenges with defiant joie de vivre and creativity. Rejecting descriptions of their land as "unlivable," they thrive by adapting traditional practices to the "Absurd-City" in which they live, creating beauty through sustainable modular architecture, street art, and terraced gardens. In this remarkable collection of essays and photographs, the vibrancy and resilience of Gaza burst from the page in images of sustainable rooftop farms, a children's center designed to resemble a traditional Arab marketplace, and energetic teens flinging themselves through the air of parkour courts. Open Gaza dwells on the power of what may be, as well as what is. While fanciful concepts include the Internet Pigeon Network to solve communications problems using an ancient tradition, the tunnel system built to circumvent the blockade has developed into a thriving underground marketplace, transportation center, and art gallery. In a land where "the right to mourn is often a luxury," Gazans practice the Palestinian virtue of sumud, or steadfastness, employing art and sustainability not only for aesthetic or ecological reasons, but also as a way to reassert control over their lives. A dazzling book.