Palestine Regeneration Design Workshop

Last Saturday I was invited to participate in a design workshop by the Palestine Regeneration Team (PaRT) and UN-Habitat, a UN led agency which promotes socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities with the goal of providing adequate shelter for all.

PaRT is a initiative started by my former professor Murray Fraser, together with Nasser Golzari and Yara Sharif. Of the 20 people participating, there were architects from all over London, Arup engineers and native Palestinians.

The workshop was focused on designing an architectural intervention in the Gaza strip, just south of Gaza City. The site was an adjacent to a high school in the suburbs or Gaza City. The brief was to design a 'learning room', creating an interface between the surrounding villages and the school through the 'technical testing’ of self-help green ideas and prototypes for reconstruction by individual or groups of families. The Learning Room contains most of the principles emerging from the series of workshops that we have run over the last 2 years addressing reducing the use of resources in developing cities, including the use of appropriate forms of building technology, low energy water and drainage systems, greener everyday habits and self-help practices.

Obviously the situation in Palestine is horrific. The Israeli oppression is shockingly brutal, and their strangulation tactics on electricity, food and water supply are inhumane. All recognisable infrastructure has been destroyed and all import and export is banned. This leaves the Palestinian people in a fragile position. Some things do arrive through the illegal underground tunnels between Egypt and Gaza, although these come at a premium.

This uniquely deprived situation has a fascinating implications on their their habitats and building activity. With no new construction materials entering Gaza legally, and any imported through the tunnels affordable only to the wealthy few, people are forced to recycle everything and anything to create shelters for their growing families. Another interesting element to this project is the psychological image of certain building materials. Concrete is considered the sophisticated civilisation's material. The people of Gaza would love their regeneration to be built in concrete, though this is a relatively expensive building technique and of course requires imported cement. Rammed earth construction is a building technology which suits Gaza's current predicament and environment. It is thermally massive and requires relatively little imported building materials. However, this modern adaptation of an ancient building technique is viewed with shame in Palestine. They say, "why do you always want to put us in mud huts? We are a modern society, modern people. We should not be sent back to the dark ages where Israel wants us." It is difficult to argue otherwise.

The day was intriguing, and the ideas promising. We will now wait and see if the 'learning room' can materialise into a real part of Palestine and Gaza's regeneration. There's undoubtedly much more to design and people to persuade, but I'll try and keep updates on the blog.