geof bell

baarch, LEED GA

lifta: permanent impermanence

In the ongoing territory of conflict between Israel and Palestine, planning becomes a tool for marginalization. By demarcating zoning areas for Israeli or Palestinian development, along with "open space" preventing further development, Palestinian neighborhoods are hemmed in and suppressed under what Eyal Weizman has called the "pretext of preservation." (Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation (2007)) Ostensibly to maintain historic value, Palestinian residential construction is limited, transforming neighborhoods into "archipelagos of imposed authenticity."

The project situates itself in the current state of arrested political development in the status of Palestinian refugees. The stopgap of the refugee camp is not a pause in cultural development, but an intensification that has radically altered the emergence of a new Palestinian identity. The project draws from concepts derived from the study of refugee camps and Israeli policy to insert a temporary-permanent construct into the current social/environmental/political terrain of Lifta; temporary in the sense that it is designed to meet the current needs and permanent in an attempt to lead toward permanent socio-political change.

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