israel-academia-monitor.com - Tel Aviv University


	Tel Aviv University

Senan Abdelkader [School of Architecture, FACULTY OF THE ARTS, Tel Aviv University] is a participating architect in "Decolonizing Architecture"

Senan Abdelkader, School of Architecture, FACULTY OF THE ARTS, Tel Aviv University. Email: senan1@inter.net.il
http://www2.tau.ac.il/person/art/researcher.asp?id=agjilhhdc

Decolonizing Architecture

·····················································

Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti,

Eyal Weizman

·····················································

Whatever trajectory the conflict over Palestine takes, the

possibility of further partial –or complete– evacuation of

Israeli colonies and military bases must be considered.

Zones of Palestine that have or will be liberated

from direct Israeli presence provide a crucial laboratory to

study the multiple ways in we could imagine the reuse,

re-inhabitation or recycling of the architecture of Israel’s

occupation at the moment this architecture is unplugged

from the military/political power that charged it.

Our project uses architecture to articulate the

spatial dimension of a process of decolonization.1

The project engages a less than ideal world. It

does not articulate a utopia of ultimate satisfaction. Its

starting point is not a resolution of the conflict and the just

fulfillment of all Palestinian claims, also, the project is not

and should not be thought of in terms of a solution. Rather

it is mobilizing architecture as a tactical tool within the unfolding

struggle for Palestine. It seeks to employ tactical

interventions to open a possible horizon for further transformations.

Recognizing that Israeli colonies and military

bases are amongst the most excruciating instruments of

domination, the project assumes that a viable approach

to the issue of their appropriation is to be found not only

in the professional language of architecture and planning

but rather in inaugurating an “arena of speculation” that

incorporates a varied cultural and political perspectives

through the participation of a multiplicity of individuals

and organizations.

Between Anarchy, Government and self-Government

The question of the use of the future archaeology of the

occupation, like similar questions posed during other processes

of decolonization throughout history, exists within

a conceptual spectrum between two contradictory/complementary

political desires for anarchy and government.

The popular impulse for destruction seeks to

spatially articulate ‘liberation’ from an architecture understood

as a political straitjacket, an instrument of domination

and control. If architecture is the means of decades

long crime, a weapon in a military/security arsenal that

reproduced the power relations of racist ideologies, then

architecture must burn.

The impulse of destruction seeks to turn time

backwards, reverse development into virgin nature, a tabularasa,

on which a set of new beginnings could be articulated.

However, rather than the desired romantic ruralization

of developed areas (there is no longer ‘sand under

the pavements’) destruction generates desolation and

environmental damage that may last for decades.

In 2005 Israel evacuated the Gaza settlements

and destroyed 3,000 homes, creating not the promised

tabula-rasa for a new beginning, but rather a million and a

half tons of toxic rubble that poisoned the ground and water

aquifers. The decontamination process has been greatly impeded

by the complete closure of the Gaza Strip –which is

the new form that Israel’s occupation has taken.

The governmental impulse is to impose political order and

a new system of control. It is thus not surprising that post-

colonial governments tended to reuse the infrastructure

set up by colonial regimes for their own emergent practical

needs of administration. Evacuated infrastructure and built

structure was often also seen as the legacy of ‘modernization’

and as an economical and organizational resource. A

strong temptation present throughout the histories of decolonization

was thus to re-occupy colonial buildings and

infrastructure and reuse them in the very same way they

were used under colonial regimes. Such repossession tended

to reproduce some of the colonial power relations in

space: colonial villas were inhabited by new financial elites

and palaces by political ones, while the evacuated military

and police installations of colonial armies, as well as their

prisons, were reused by the governments that replaced

them, recreating similar spatial hierarchies.

In the context of present day Palestine –reusing

the evacuated structures of Israel’s domination in

the same way as the occupiers did– the settlements as

Palestinian suburbs and the military bases for Palestine

security needs –may lead to the danger of reproducing

their inherent alienation and violence: the settlement’s

system of fences and surveillance technologies would

thus enable their seamless transformation into gated

communities for the Palestinian elite. Using Israeli residential

and military areas might also establish a sense of

continuity rather than of rupture and change.

An interesting example in this category is Al-

Muqata in Ramallah, the present-day seat of the Palestinian

President. It was built by the British military as part of their

effort to put down the Arab revolt of 1936-39 (often referred

to as the first intifada). From 1948 to 1967 it was used as a

military base and prison by the Jordanian military and for

the same purposes by the Israeli army after 1967. The place

was evacuated as part of the Oslo process and became

Arafat’s headquarters. During this time the compound was

closed off and monitored, and some of the cells were used

again for incarceration and torture. After the death of Arafat

the place was monumentalized into a site of pilgrimage.

We also know, however, that evacuated colonial

architecture doesn’t necessarily reproduce the functions

it was designed for. There are examples of other uses, both

planned and spontaneous, that have invaded evacuated

colonial architecture, subverted their programs and liberated

their potential. Even the most horrifying structures of

domination can yield themselves to new forms of life.

Given the scale of Israeli construction in Palestine,

and the need for housing, all three approaches

need be applied and simultaneously coexist. Some areas

of settlements will be destroyed, some reused and others

subverted –used and abused for different purposes and

opening new possibilities for collectivity.

Because the reuse of the colonial architecture

is a general cultural/political issue, we do not seek to

present a single, unified architectural solution, but rather

“fragments of possibility”.

Believing in the potential of existing forces to

shape reality, the starting point of our investigation is the

most complex option of the three –a strategy of subversion–

which speculates on the use of colonial architecture

for purposes other than those they were designed to perform.

For this reason, the project seeks to spatialize a set

of possible collective functions into the abandoned military

structures and the evacuated houses of the colonists2.

What new institutions and activities can model

the evacuated space and what physical transformations

these spaces require?

The guiding principle is thus not to eliminate

the power of the occupation’s built spaces, but rather to

reorient its destructive potential to other aims. We believe

that if the geography of occupation is to be liberated, its

potential must turn against itself.

Destruction

The first moment of access to the colonies and to the military

bases is a possible moment of transgression whose

consequences are unpredictable. Although in the Gaza Strip

it was the Israelis who demolished most of the buildings,

those buildings left intact were mostly destroyed by the

Palestinians. The morning after the military left Palestinians

destroyed the space and carried out as many remnants of

building materials they could use and carry. This destruction

is a spontaneous architectural moment of reappropriation,

and as such we believe that it should not be prevented

or controlled.

It is only after the indeterminate result of this moment

of first encounter, and within the possible rubble of its

physical results, that architectural construction may begin.

This moment of first access questions the conception

of architecture and urban planning. The acceptable

precondition for planning is a situation of spatial and

political certainty –a clear site demarcation, a schedule, a

client and a budget. The erratic nature of Israeli control and

the unpredictable military and political developments on

the ground renders Palestine an environment of high un-

certainty and indeterminacy. Planning in such conditions

could not appeal to any tested professional methods.

Manual of Decolonization

Rather than a single unified proposal inhabiting the entirety

of Palestine (itself an area whose extent has not been

politically defined) our project presents “fragments of possibilities”

–detailed transformations on the architectural

scale. Because the number of typologies in settlements

and military bases are limited– variations on the singlefamily

dwelling in settlements and concrete prefabricated

barracks in military bases –these ‘fragments of possibility’

constitute a semi-generic approach that could be modified

to be applied in other areas evacuated.

The instructions, descriptions, diagrams and

drawings add up to form a manual, meant both at professionals,

public institutions, and private citizens who are

faced with the problem of how to deal with the remnants

of colonial architecture. The manual will determine to what

extent the evacuated structures are flexible to accommodate

new uses and will demonstrate the various ways that

they can be adapted or transformed.

The production of the manual is based upon

a series of meetings with the “stakeholders” in this process.

It includes representatives of various organizations

and individuals, the local community, members of various

NGOs, government and municipal bodies and academic

and cultural institutions, local residents and resident associations.

Their genuine participation is the crucial factor

and the only agency that could guaranty the implementation

of the actions outlined in the manual.

The Smile

Whenever we presented and discussed our plans and models

the initial reaction of our discussants was a smile. We initially

feared we were ridiculed. Are our plans so far fetch redicilous

within this environment of permanent impossibility? It is

also true that models are reduced worlds ‘under control’ and

that they often make people smile. The smile may thus be

the first moment of decolonization. It is a strange to imagine

the transformation of Israeli settlements, but we would like

to interpret the smile as an aesthetic reaction, an opening of

the imagination to a different future in which our participant

could engage. It is also the first moment where the Palestinian

articulate their right for planning their future and regain

their agency. Engaging the project require an active role, creativity

and imagination, rather than contemplation.

The Colony of Psagot/Jabel Tawil

Two project sites were chosen as two prototypes of decolonization:

the colony of Psagot (still inhabited by colonists)

and the former Israeli military base of Oush Grab, which

was evacuated in 2006.

***

Case Study North: The Colony of Psagot/Jabel Tawil/ Ramallah

Region

Located on the hill of Jabel Tawil, 900 meters above sea

level, the colony visually dominates the entire Palestinian

area. Until the occupation it was used as an open space for

recreation. The hills of Jerusalem and Ramallah were popular

with families from the Gulf especially Kuwaitis that

traveled there to escape the summer heat (the people of

Ramallah still call the hill “the Kuwaiti hill”). In 1964, the

municipality of Al Quds (Jerusalem) bought the land and

prepared a plan for its development into a tourist resort.

The work started in early 1967 with the construction of an

access road. The work was interrupted by the Israeli occupation.

In July 1981, on the initiative of the Likud party,

the colony of Psagot was inaugurated as a ‘compensation’

to right-wing Israelis for the evacuation of the Sinai peninsula.

The area designated for tourist accommodation was

the first to be occupied by settler housing. The first houses

set on the hill of Jabel Tawil were pre-fabricated structures

wheeled over from Yamit, a settlement in the north of the

Sinai. Psagot is at present a religious settlement inhabited

by 1,700 people, mainly American Jews and a minority of

recent Russian and French immigrants.

Case study South: the former military base Oush Grab

(the Crow’s Nest)

In May of 2006, the Israeli army evacuated a military camp

strategically located on the highest hill at the southern entrance

to the Palestinian city of Beit Sahour, part of the region

of Bethlehem. It was a menacing fortress overlooking

the edge of the town. Most houses surrounding the camp

were destroyed by tank shells and gunfire originating at

the base. Flood lit during the night, flash lights constantly

scanning the area around it, the base has been in one an

‘endless day’ The evacuation was itself a violent operation,

at night dozens of tanks rolled into the town and in the

morning the base was found empty. Moments later, Palestinians

entered the base and took away every element and

material that could be recycled.

The military history of the hill is longer than the

occupation. It was built as a military base by the British

Mandatory army during the Arab revolt (referred to by

some as the very first intifadah). After 1948 it has become

a military base of the Jordan Legion. After 1967 it has become

an Israeli military base.

It would be possible to imagine this base used

by a revolutionary Palestinian army, but Palestinian military

tactics are more stealthy and covert and have no

need for the static high-point bases of yesterday’s wars.

During the Oslo era an agreement was signed

between the municipality of Beit Sahour and the central

government under Arafat, guarantying that in case of a

possible Israeli evacuation the base would not be used by

the Palestinian police and be handed over to the management

of the municipality as a public space. Upon gaining

control of the site a municipal masterplan designated a

set of public functions, a neighborhood with a hospital and

an amusement park. A play area for children, a restaurant

and an open garden for events have already been constructed

on the slopes of the hill.

The most contentious part of the site is its summit.

There, several concrete buildings formed the heart of

the former camp. Surrounded by a giant earth mound running

the top rim of the hill these building seem to inhabit

the crater of a volcano.

Although the summit is evacuated, it is still kept under

the [remote] control of the Israeli military. Providing the

most strategic views in the entire area, the military did not

accept it occupied by Palestinian eyes.

Revolving Door Occupations

Since its evacuation the summit and the buildings that

inhabit it were at the centre of various political vortex and

contentious confrontations between Jewish settlers, the

Israeli military and Palestinian organizations and in which

our office has been directly engaged. In may 2008, protesting

against Bush visit to Israel and in anticipation of some

‘government concessions’ settler groups sought to use

the emptied buildings of the military base as the nucleus

for a new settlement/outpost. The topographical location

of the base on the summit and its existing fortification

would easily lend themselves, they thought, to their regimented

and securitised way of life. The military declared

the site “closed military zone” but nearly every week settlers

come back to occupy the base, hold picnics, heritage

tours and Torah lessons there and raise the Israeli flag.

Israeli soldiers are present to ‘protect’ the settlers.

Palestinian and international activists including members of

our office also occupy the site and confront the settlers. A set

of competing graffiti written by one side and then obliterated

by the other testifies for a ‘revolving door’ occupancy. Our

proposal for the reuse of this site becomes also an intervention

into the contentious political struggle for this hilltop.

UNGROUNDING: Urbanism of the first 10 centimeters

Could controlled material decay become a process of place

making? How destruction could become a design process

that may lead to new uses?

In the case of ungrounding it is clear that the

destruction of the surface –through actively uprooting its

elements and also through accelerating the decay of other

surface elements– would create the ground from which

new life could emerge.

In the base of Oush Grab we have employed the

first stages of our architectural proposal as forms of destruction.

Because of its ‘revolving door occupation’ in which the

danger of the place’s appropriation by settlers always exist,

it is important to first render the building less amenable to be

used, before allowing for new functions to inhabit them.

As a first stage of design we propose to perforate

the buildings of the military base by drilling holes into

their walls. When the building is finally appropriated these

would render walls into screens.

Another way of intervention within the base

is to transform its landscape. The earth rampart raised

around the buildings has been constantly shifting due to

Palestinian contractors using the site as a dump for their

unwanted rubble and to other contractors taking some of

the earth from the rampart as material for construction.

Our intervention seeks to use the shifting nature of the

rampart to reorganize the relationship between the buildings

and the landscape. We will partially bury the buildings

in the rubble of their own fortifications.

The molecular level of the occupation is the

single-family house on a small plot of land. Investigating

ways to transform this repetitive semi-generic structure

may open up ways to transform the entire geography of

occupation. What are its limits of transformability?

Can a single-family home become the nucleus

of a new type of public institutions? Which structural

parts should be retained and what are the possible ways

of connecting together groups of houses?

The problem is also how to transform a series

of small-scale single-family houses into unified clusters

of communal space, to accommodate larger functions like

halls and classrooms, laboratories for a research institute,

clinics and offices.

Folded Vision

The problem of unhoming is not only a technical question of

transformations.. A lingering question throughout the project

was is how to inhabit the home of one’s enemy. Within

the multiple cultures that inhabited Palestine throughout

the decades, rarely has one ever been the “first” or “original”

occupier; but rather one is always a subsequent. To inhabit

the land is always to inhabit it in relation either to one’s present-

day enemies or to an imagined or real ancient civilization.

This is a condition that turns the habitation of old cities,

archaeological sites, battlegrounds, and destroyed villages

into culturally complex acts of co- or trans-habitation.

For example –we believe that any act of de-colonization

must include interventions in the field of vision.

The settlements are organized as optical devices on suburban

scale. Their pattern of streets as concentric rings

around the hilltop, the placement of each house, the space

between the houses and the organization of windows and

rooms follow design principles that seek to maximize the

power of vision with both national-aesthetic and nationalstrategic

aims in mind. The pastoral view out of home

windows reinforces a sense of national belonging when it

reads traces of Palestinian daily lives –olive groves, stone

terraces, livestock– as signifiers of an ancient holy landscape.

The paradox of vision is that although what composes

the panorama are traces of Palestinian daily lives, the

settlers wish to have these inhabitants disappear.

The view is also national-strategic in overseeing

tactical roadways and surveying the Palestinian cities

and refugee camps. The visual affect of the settlements

on Palestinians is in generating a constant sense of being

seen. From Palestinian cities one can hardly avoid seeing

a settlement, and one is most often seen by one.

Because the organization of homes is directed

towards the surrounding view, the main door into each settlement

home is approached from the inner areas of the settlement.

Entering the home one moves into the living areas

and the main window which opens onto the landscape. But

what happens if the people that should now be arriving at these

houses are those otherwise “composing of the view”, if the

new user would now approach the house from the view?

Our response is a small-scale intervention. We

propose to change the direction of the front door to face,

not the inner areas of the settlement but the Palestinian

cities. Changing the direction from which one enters the

house, also alters the spatial syntax of its interior. This

small-scale intervention is ‘cinematic’ in the sense that it

is an intervention in the framing of the conditions of vision

and in directing ways of seeing. It reorganizes the field of

the visible, a perspective folded onto itself.

DE-PARCELIZATION

In the course of our analysis, we made use of both documentary

and narrative sources to identify some of the landowners

within the areas of the colonies.

Jabel Tawil/P’sagot is at the gravitational centre

of various orbits of extra-territoriality: displaced communities,

individuals, migrations and family connections.

Our investigation traced some of the Palestinian landowners

to the US, Australia, Kuwait, Saudi-Arabia, Iraq and of

course in Palestine closer at hand, sometimes fenced off a

few meters away from their lands. Their private and family

histories are the intertwined histories of Palestine and its

displaced communities, forced out by the occupation and

by economic and professional opportunities overseas.

About half of the area occupied by the Psagot colony

belongs to private owners with the other half registered

as belonging to one of various kinds of collective lands.3

The fate of private lands should be decided by

their owners, it is within the communal lands that we propose

various types of collective uses.

We discovered a map dating 1954 which shows

the original parcellation of land on Jabel Tawil. We superimposed

the 1954 plan onto the plan of the colony. The

Palestinian demarcation lines cut arbitrary paths through

the suburban fabric of the settlements, sometimes literally

through the structures themselves, creating a new relationship

between the houses and their parcels, internal

and external spaces and between public and private spaces.

Some of these odd lots are public lands. This archipelago

of public lots forms the basis of our proposals

The Public, the Communal, and the Non-Governmental

Public spaces and public institutions are generally managed

by state and/or local authorities and are thus an

important means by which the act of government articulates

itself. In Palestine, the long period of “statelessness”

under colonialism has shifted the manner by which public

space and the public in general functions.

Until the beginning of the 1990s, Palestinian

cities where directly managed by the Israeli Military.

Through the “civil administration” the military controlled

planning and development permission and thus the central

activities of the different municipalities. During this

period the Palestinian cities where transformed into dormitory

towns with very little public space. Furthermore,

the ‘civil administration’ actively inhibited pubic institutions

from developing. Private clubs, cinemas, schools and

universities were put under close scrutiny or forcibly shut.

The military required any association of more than three

persons to have a permit. But difficulty in establishing

and maintaining public institutions persisted even after

the Oslo accord of 1993. The main reasons that impeded

the creation of open public space in the Palestinian cities

were the borders set up for Palestinian ‘self administered

areas’. These borders where drawn tightly around the

build up area of the Palestinian cities and villages leaving

out little potential land for new construction.

The structure of land ownership within Palestinian

cities meant that very little land was not privately

owned, andmunicipalities have had a dire access to lands.

Most open spaces and new institutions were created by

the many international organizations and NGOs.

The role that NGOs play in Palestinian society

must be explained: Palestinian civil society was greatly

strengthened during the Intifada of 1987-1992. Local leaders

organized resistance and a set of alternative services

like schooling and medicine, to those shut off by the

Israeli army. When the Palestinian Authority was established

in 1993 there was a clash between two systems of

government. The Palestinian Authority, whose leaders

have largely come from abroad, attempted to centralize

and regulate the network of self-governing institutions

that developed throughout the intifada.

The network of institutions locally formed during

the first intifada was transformed into the infrastructural

framework of contemporary NGO structure in Palestine.

The local leaders of the first Intifada largely preferred to

become directors of NGOs than ‘officials’ in the Authority.

Most former leaders of the leftist ‘Popular Front’ are now

directing leading NGOs. (A good example is Mustafa Barghouthi

and his healthcare network).

The West Bank has since been governed in parallel

by the Palestinian Authority and by a series of local

and international NGOs, both under the umbrella of ultimate

Israeli sovereignty. In many cases Palestinian NGOcracy

(as the phenomenon came to be known) provided a better

quality services –medical, educational, planning– and the

services NGOs provide are often better funded than those

of the Palestinian Authority, which was always less than a

government in less than a state.

NGOcracy has its dangers of course. Most NGOs,

much like the Palestinian Authority, are internationally

funded, and although donors are operating ‘in support of

Palestinians’ they are in fact not accountable to the people

of Palestine and often pursue the cultural and political

agendas of the donor states. Philanthropy has thus become

one of the main vehicles for western countries to intervene

within the politics and culture of Palestine.

Baring these dangers in mind, the network of

NGOs seems to us an important vehicle in developing new

types of Palestinian public, social and communal spaces,

and some NGOs might be the first to occupy the evacuated

and transformed spaces.

We have started by setting up a series of meeting

with local NGO –the Palestine Wildlife Society, Women

Shelter, Save the Children, Alternative Tourism Group, Alternative

Information Centre amongst others– and developed

with them conceptions regarding the various ways

in which particular sites within the colonies and military

bases could be designed.

We have noticed that the archives of these

NGOs are also the ‘living archives’ of Palestine. A combined

archive of the hundreds of local NGOs, or access thereof,

would provide information about the environment, welfare,

human rights and politics throughout Palestine, and

thus offers a diffused and multi-perspectival alternative

to state centered information centers.

***

Throughout our work we have started to realize that the

project may form a possible laboratory for architectural

actions whose reach may go beyond the local specificity of

our environment, it may also form a beginning of a model

to think through the future of the suburban settlements,

[ENG] [ENG]

many of those in dire crisis, in other places worldwide. The

ritual destruction, reuse, ‘redivivus’, or ‘détournement’ of

the single-family house may suggest a possible repertoire

of action for the larger transformation of other types of secluded

suburban spaces at large.

1. We suggest to revisit to the term of “decolonization” in order to maintaining

distance from the current political terms of a “solution” to the

Palestinian conflict and its respective borders. The one-, two-, and now

three-state solutions seem equally entrap in a “top-down” perspective,

each with its own self-referential logic. Decolonization implies the dismantling

of the existing dominant structure—financial, military, and

legal—conceived for the benefit of a single national-ethnic group, and

engaging a struggle for justice and equality. Decolonization does not

necessarily imply the forced transfer of populations. Under the term

decolonization, for example, Jewish communities could go and live in

the Palestinian areas.

2. Although our proposals are based essentially on the third approach,

we consider the possibility in some cases of also using the other two

at the same time. Demolition, for example, will be necessary in cases

in which colonies or military camps are constructed in particularly

valuable landscape aries, just as simple reuse as residences could be

proposed in areas where demand for housing is particularly urgent

and in which colonial architecture is constructed on lands belonging to

private Palestinians. In these cases, only the owners can decide on the

future reuse of these structures.

3. sThe differences between the various categories of collective land

ownership were erased by the regime of occupation, which considered

all these lands as “public lands” and thus as the property of the

sovereign. As sovereign in these areas Israel used these “public lands”

to construct upon most its settlements.

····································································································

This article is a reflection on the project Decolonizing

Architecture directed by Hilal, Petti and Weizman and

concerned with the potential future transformation of Israeli

Colonies and Military Bases. The project is sponsored

and produced by Eloisa Haudenschild and Steve Fagin,

partners in spareParts, a division of the haudenschild-

Garage.

The project will be displayed at the BOZAR Palace in Brussels

from October 30th 2007 to January 4 2008. The

exhibition is curated by Lieven De Cauter and coordinated

by Iwan Strauven. Participating architects: Senan AbdelKader,

Nasser Abourahme, Nora Akawi, Yazid Anani, Saleh

Hijazi, Rana Shakaa, Omar Yusuf.

Landscape design in collaboration with: Situ Studio, NYC

Artists and Architects in residence: Ursula Bieman, Vincezo

Castella, Bianca Elzenbaumer, Marco Ferrari, Fabio

Franz, Anne Gough, Zakiya Hanafi, Jake Himmel, Armin

Linke, Jesse Long, Francesco Mattuzzi, Michele Marchetti,

Allegra Martin, Barbara Modolo, Pietro Onofri, Armina Pilav,

Giovanni Piovene, Salvatore Porcaro, Francesca Recchia,

Lorenzo Romito, Roberto Sartor, Rianne Van Doeveren.

Academic collaboration: International Art Academy Palestine,

Goldsmiths Centre for Research Architecture.

Committee: Giorgio Agamben, Stefano Boeri, Lieven De

Cauter, Teddy Cruz, Jad Isaac, Laura Kurgan, Thomas

Keenen, Andrew Ross, Salim Tamari.

Back to "Tel Aviv University"

Send Response

Top Page

Developed by Sitebank & Powered by Blueweb Internet Services

Visitors: 45287349