IN-PERSON ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

Cities form the identity of their residents, they belong to one another in ways that transcend the physical. This bond becomes most visceral when people are displaced, instinctively reaching for architecture, streetscapes, and spatial memory to anchor their sense of self, culture, and homeland. For the people of Gaza Strip, successive waves of conflict have systematically dismantled the spatial identity of what was once a historically-layered, culturally-rich, and livable city. What remains risks becoming unrecognisable, not only to outsiders, but to the very residents who grew up navigating its streets, sheltering under its archways, and measuring their lives against its landmarks. This paper argues that rebuilding Gaza without reading its architectural DNA risks producing a city new in form but homeless in spirit, where returning residents find themselves strangers in the land that carried them since childhood. Memory, therefore, becomes the most critical architectural document. Community-valued buildings endure collectively long after physical destruction, feeding back into remnants and sustaining identity within absence. Drawing on the “Architecture of Absence” framework, the paper builds on prior research mapping community-valued structures across Gaza, categorising surviving and remembered fabric into an architectural dictionary, a spatial record of what has persisted, what has been lost, and what remains legible only through collective recall. This chromosomal reading reveals that architectural identity, once established, endures: transformed, fragmented, or spectral, but never entirely erased. The architectural dictionary proposed here will serve architects, planners, policy makers, and most critically Gaza’s own residents, ensuring that rebuilding restores not merely structures, but belonging.