Building a Better Palestine, From the Ground Up
Breaking out of never-ending fighting and occupation may require building a better way forward
One of the first thoughts Danna Masad had about the importance of architecture occurred to her in early 2002, during the Second Intifada. A period of intense Israeli-Palestinian violence rife with military incursions, daily checkpoints, suicide bombings, anger and political hopelessness, it was a surprising moment for a young Palestinian woman to have a career epiphany.
At the time Masad volunteered with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, a local arm of the International Red Cross.
“Ramallah was under siege and I remember entering cold concrete houses, which were covered in mold, and families living in the most dire conditions,” she recalled in crisp English. “Why were we building in this way?”
Before that, in late 1990s, Masad studied in Palestine’s most prestigious architecture program, at Birzeit University north of Ramallah. Every day she would drive from Ramallah to Birzeit — a trip that should have taken 10 minutes, but stretched to an hour due to an Israeli checkpoint — weaving through a landscape of informal architecture that is biblical and congested at the same time. The haphazard urban layout situates the buildings in strange ways. Twelve-story apartment buildings cling dangerously to steep hillsides covered in ancient olive trees. The Birzeit campus reflects this tension, sitting like a fortress with lines inspired by Soviet architecture.
After finishing her bachelor’s degree amid the simmering conflict, Masad moved to California to get her master’s in architecture from California Polytechnic State University. In 2009 she returned in Palestine, somewhat disillusioned but ready to change the way its cities were being built. To her surprise, others had the same idea.
Along with three others, Danna Masad founded Palestine’s first green design firm.
Masad is part of a generation of Palestinians who came of age during the violence, political infighting and restricted movement of the Second Intifada, which began in 2000 and lasted for roughly four years. In 2007, the New York Times called her and her peers “generation lost” in an article about their dim prospects for professional or political opportunity. “To hear these young people talk is to listen in on budding nihilism and a loss of hope,” Times correspondent Steven Erlanger wrote.
Yet after talking with Masad, one is left with a very different impression.
Far from the “lost generation,” Masad and her peers are embracing sustainable urban design with the notion that breaking out of never-ending fighting and occupation may require building a better way forward. The movement cuts across ethnic and political lines. It includes Israelis, Palestinians and international supporters from across the world.
In East Jerusalem, for instance, a young Israeli named Micha Kurz is working around the political quagmire to build a more livable reality for Palestinians and Israelis. Through his European Union-funded non-profit Grassroots Jerusalem, Kurz is attempting to make communities cleaner, safer and easier to navigate — without counting on the mythic day when the occupation ends. In the small villages dotting the West Bank, Sahar Qawasmi, with her non-profit Riwaq, is working to bring life back to historic Arab downtowns ignored during Palestine’s foreign-funded building boom.
Though small in number, these advocates are part of a larger movement seeking a greener and more open way of life in the increasingly urban Middle East. In the absence of a working peace process — or perhaps in defiance of a working peace process — they are sidestepping formal political channels to make change in neighborhoods and people’s homes. Within this honest assessment of a deadlocked political situation is a shred of hope for the region’s civic future.
“Our studio and others working on issues of urban design are trying our best to show people that we can be sustainable,” Masad said.
NOWHERE TO GO BUT UP
Ramallah, the de-facto capital of the Palestinian West Bank and just 10 miles from Jerusalem, has seen incredible growth in the past 20 years. What was once a sleepy village is now a crowded, booming capital city accommodating hundreds of thousands of people during workdays. According to the Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics, the greater Ramallah area in 2013 has an urban population of 170,000 people and a rural population of slightly less than 140,000. But on any given weekday, the city struggles to deal with the number of people pouring from all corners of the West Bank. Mind-numbing traffic jams are frequent and pedestrians fight to navigate crowded sidewalks. With each new season, Ramallah feels as though it is shrinking ever more under the pressure of Palestine’s population boom.
Across the separation wall, the far-flung Jerusalem neighborhood of Kufr Aqab has no crosswalks or traffic lights.
Salim Tamari, director of the Institute for Palestine Studies and an adjunct professor of contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, blames the impending crisis largely on the explosive growth of Israeli settlements. “The main issue in terms of urban development on the West Bank is that there is confinement,” Tamari, an affable older man with bushy eyebrows, explained in his book-lined office in central Ramallah. Between sips of strong Turkish coffee, he explains Palestine’s quixotic urban geography, shaped by nearly five decades of Israeli occupation and the Oslo peace accords.
Signed in the mid-1990s between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Oslo peace accords gave way to interim self-government called the Palestinian Authority and divided the landlocked West Bank into three sectors: areas A, B and C. With various restrictions, Palestinians were given control over Area A, or about 18 percent of the West Bank’s 2,173 square miles. The rest of the West Bank came under shared Israel-Palestinian control or sole Israeli control, with 61 percent falling into the latter category. Today, more than half of West Bank Palestinians live on the 18 percent of land controlled by Palestinian officials.
For these young designers, a more sustainable Palestine would be a political statement of independence and a solution to Palestine’s burgeoning housing crisis.
While studying at Birzeit, Masad quickly realized that her coursework wasn’t preparing her to solve these problems easily observed in Ramallah. “There was a disconnect between what I saw on the ground and what I was being taught in the classroom,” she said during a recent interview, emails flickering on a laptop in front of her.
“It was great to learn about Frank Gehry but it had nothing to do with the issues facing us on the West Bank.”
The lessons on Frank Gehry were in early 2000, just before the breakout of the Second Intifada and the collapse of the Oslo peace process. As violence engulfed Israel and Palestine, a state of direct military occupation, in which Israeli tanks were stationed in various Palestinians cities, became a daily reality. Ramallah had transformed into a war zone. The aftermath of this violence left a strange status quo in Israel and Palestine. Israeli settlement activity surged throughout the West Bank while leaders bemoaned the need to rekindle the peace process, something that continues until today.
This was a moment in time when the international architectural community was turning its focus to the twin challenges of climate change and a changing global economy. In Ramallah, Masad began to formulate ideas about how Palestine could respond to its own environmental and economic conundrums. How could Palestine house a growing population in ever more limited space when access to both foreign resources and capital were also limited?
Rawabi, Palestine’s first planned city, will contain 5,000 housing units in 23 suburban-style neighborhoods.
The designer started to think about things like building more affordable housing with fewer imported materials and reclaiming waste as raw material for construction. In 2010, she enrolled in a traditional permaculture course in the West Bank village of Marda, near Salfit. The course proved to be a turning point in her career, introducing her to a handful of other architectural alumni from Birzeit University who were motivated to bring green thinking to Palestine. For these young designers, a more sustainable Palestine would be a political statement of independence and a solution to Palestine’s burgeoning housing crisis.
Within a couple of weeks, Masad and three other designers, Ghaith Nassar, Rami Kasbari and Lina Sale, had created Palestine’s first green design firm. The collective is called ShamsArd, which means “sun” and “earth” in Arabic.
In a small studio buried in the midst of Ramallah’s jumbled architecture, the young firm began building furniture out of trash found on the West Bank. The act had an implicit political meaning — Israel has tight restrictions on shipments and production of anything that Palestinians could use for military purposes, which includes building materials, including cement, gravel and lumber. By reusing materials, the collective demonstrated independence from these restrictions. Inside their studio, old doors become tables and wooden crates transform into a desk suitable for a functioning office. The collective’s latest project is a series of houses in the Jordan Valley made entirely out of earth and mud.
“We are part of an industry that is not sustainable here on the ground,” Masad said. “It is damaging to the environment and also to the community because it is uses materials that are not locally made… This is the part where we believe we can change the local community through empowerment.”
This is an excerpt from a longform story. Want more? Read the full article here at nextcity.org and learn more about how Palestinians and Israelis are reshaping the urban environment.
Story by JOSEPH DANA
Photography by EMILIE BAUJARD
Next City is a non-profit media organization dedicated to connecting cities and informing the people who work to improve them. We write about public policy and current affairs from an urbanist perspective at nextcity.org.
