Why The Gaza Strip May Be The City Of The Future

Gaza is a landscape of extreme economic deprivation born of the region's complicated political dynamics - but one whose contours may soon become more common.

When Americans turned on the TV or glanced at their smartphones for news of the deadly clashes that engulfed the Gaza Strip in May - or if they followed the more recent spasm of violence in August that threatened to break the region's fragile truce - many saw scenes that looked familiar: streets flooded with protesters, engaged in a struggle against highly armed security forces on the streets of a battered-looking city.

In many ways, the political and physical conditions of the Gaza Strip are unique: Nearly 2 million people are packed into a 25-mile-long rectangle of land along the Mediterranean roughly the size of Philadelphia. For decades, the territory has been home to Palestinians displaced by the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, and subject to Israeli occupation since the 1967 Six-Day War. But since 2007, after the political wing of the Islamist group Hamas was elected to power, Gaza has been under an Israeli blockade. In response, Hamas militants have attacked Israel with suicide bombers and missile attacks, and the two sides have settled into a gruesome rhythm of low levels of violence punctuated by intense conflagrations. In May's fighting, as many as 260 Palestinians were killed; in Israel, 12 people were killed. Gaza is a landscape of extreme economic deprivation born of the region's complicated political dynamics - but one whose contours may soon become more common. 

That's the premise behind the recently released book Open Gaza: Architectures of Hope, published by imprint . Edited by , an urban geographer who focuses on the Middle East, and essayist, theorist, activist, and provocateur Michael Sorkin, the book presents a vision of Gaza as a glimpse of an imminent future, where violence, surveillance, resource scarcity and provisional use of an extremely compromised built environment are visited on all. 

Sharp sees connections, for example, between the unrest in Gaza and the racial justice demonstrations in U.S. cities after the murder of George Floyd in 2020: In both, the key issue is who has a right to the city - the right to claim contested urban space. "The Black Lives Matter protests and that broader movement and recognition of the types of oppression that are going on [in Gaza] is something that's been made visible," he says.