Automated system test schedule

Abstract

This paper presents the role adopted by Palestinian architecture students in rethinking the entangled relation between history, citizenship and the city in conflict zones through research-by-design (RbD) final thesis projects conducted in Israeli University. As a minority facing inequalities and ethnic discrimination, Palestinian students in a “pro-active architectural” studio in the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (Haifa) claimed citizenship, ethical and national acts by means of past urban conditions, inequities of the present colonialism, and alternative space of intervention. As a representative example, I will focus in this talk on two main projects: El-Isawiyyah neighborhood in East Jerusalem and the Balata refugee camp in the district of Nablus city in the West bank. In both cases, the inhabitants were deprived of national citizenship rights by Israel, they retained the privileges and rights of urban citizenship. This was reflected by articulation of the contested history in the tension between the need-to-survive and the need-to-resist and by reshaping the encounters between the bottom-up tactics of developing the livable space under military violence. El-Isawiyyah project drew on the materiality of the architectural elements (such as, balconies, stairs, roofs, walls, courtyard) to develop a flexible architecture that provide the everyday missing public spaces and the security. The Balata’s project focused on the tension between the city and the camp as a way to discuss the national taboo of preserving the camp and limiting access to the city until the “right to return”. By requisitioning this relation, the project offered the refugees an  ownership in the abandoned and destroyed buildings in Nablus as a mean to preserve the threatened architecture heritage of the city. These RbD projects, reflect the ways studio becomes a laboratory of cultural production of critical Indigenous knowledge for rethinking architecture.