Sharing Experiences: Towards a new approach to shaping public space in the West Bank
In January 2017, I received a Fulbright Alumni Development Grant sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, enabling me to present at an urban design conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The 47th Annual Urban Affairs Conference featured sessions on enduring urban injustices along ethnic, spatial, political, and economic lines.
At the conference I presented a paper which addressed the politics of place-making and urban dynamics. My paper, entitled “Reinventing Urban Public Spaces in Palestine,” was based on a project I led with a group of architecture students from Birzeit University, made possible thanks to the support of a Fulbright Community Action Grant. The paper explored strategies for reshaping the urban public space through the intervention I implemented in Midan Falalstin city square. This project enabled me, as a Fulbright alumna and as an instructor, to shed light on the importance of design when meeting the changing needs of a community. The project aimed to raise awareness of public spaces in the West Bank and allowed the community to experience them in new ways by introducing innovative design elements that support the identity of the community as well as the function of the public space.

My project also enabled me to employ new teaching methods and allowed me to make new connections with stakeholders and committee members who are involved in projects that focus on public spaces in the West Bank. Public space has been an important area of focus in teaching design studios, and my background in both architecture and interior design enable me to synthesize between these two disciplines in my teaching methods. When I applied to the Fulbright Community Action Grant, I was looking for an opportunity to implement new teaching methods and new ideas related to public space. The success of the community action project inspired me to share this experience with others and to think about new ways to develop and re-invent existing public spaces in the West Bank.
The Urban Affairs conference provided a great platform for sharing my Fulbright experience and for exploring new ideas related to community oriented projects. The conference offered many powerful speakers who presented a critical evaluation of the methods, tools, and the broader design culture that surrounds the practice of urban and community oriented design. I was pleased with the discussions and reflective conversations that followed these presentations as they help to spark ideas and engage in meaningful conversations that allowed us to share our diverse experiences from different disciplines.

One of my favorite parts of the conference was a tour through the city of Minneapolis, which focused on understanding the urban fabric of the city and evaluating the successes and failures of its public urban spaces. The tour enabled me to draw comparisons between the projects in the US and the West Bank, and it inspired more innovative ideas and concepts that can be applied in future interventions in public spaces in the West Bank. The tour also introduced me to the city of Minneapolis which has the largest skywalk network in the United States that offered an alternative urban life inside the buildings instead of the streets. Walking in the streets and then inside the skywalks led to several discussions within the group about the quality of urban street life, and how technologies and urban transformations affect the urban activities within the city and the way people identify with the city. The spatial experience of walking in the city and the interesting discussions and evaluations of the urban life provided me with new perspectives about urban design. This gave me new methods to employ in my design studios to help students become more aware of the quality of urban life in the city. This experience was very helpful as it explored different concepts in urban design that relate to the studios I teach at Birzeit University and showed me that there are common problems and challenges public spaces face all over the world. Throughout the tour we discussed different strategies and interventions that can be implemented in these spaces.

By attending and presenting at the conference, I had the opportunity to reflect on my research and consider alternative tools that can be appropriated from other fields that influence public space such as economic development, urban theories, gender and ethnicity, public safety, and community development. The conference’s content inspired my future research and academic career. Attending the different conference sessions and meeting people from different fields of research expanded my knowledge base and exposed me to new academic resources, innovative teaching, and research tools, which I can now share with my colleagues in the West Bank.. These innovative exchanges around urban design will eventually help influence our cities’ artificial environment. Urban design is often not utilized to its full potential if it only considers aspects related to urban planning and urban design policy; it needs to be inclusive and consider other aspects. I hope this experience will open more opportunities for future community based projects in the West Bank.
May is from the West Bank and is an alumna of the Fulbright Foreign Student Program. She graduated in 2010 from Washington State University where she earned a Master’s degree in Interior Design.
Read more Fulbright stories here.
