Open Gaza Advocates Social and Spatial Justice for the Beleaguered Strip

A new book edited by the late Michael Sorkin and Deen Sharp offers speculative visions that prioritize the recovery of the people’s agency and humanity.

Spatially speaking, the Gaza Strip is a hyper-dense string of Palestinian cities and refugee camps whose geographic smallness belies its global import. Implicating an international web of geopolitical interests (most saliently those of Israel, which effectively encircles it), it is also the subject of a new volume from Urban Research, the imprint of urban think tank Terreform, founded by the architect and critic Michael Sorkin, who died earlier this year. (One of Sorkin’s last works, the book is dedicated to him.)

Coedited by Sorkin and Deen Sharp, the contributions collated in the book are “surely eclectic,” they write, from architectural accounts of uniquely Gazan typologies to speculative visions of future development trajectories in the beleaguered territory. Gaza’s resilience in the face of abject desperation has long inspired the international community, making it a highly salient crucible in discussions of spatial justice, occasionally to the point of abstraction…..