In the Gaza Strip, under a zombie ceasefire, sporadic explosions and the monotonous, deadly sound of automatic weapons can still be heard. But behind the half-frozen war, a second war broke out, taking place in the field of urban and architectural planning. The future of the territory depends on its outcome – and perhaps on Palestine itself.
The conflict involves two antagonistic projects for the physical reconstruction of the human landscape. Two years of incessant bombing have reduced the urban centers of one of the most densely populated areas on the planet to rubble. Nearly 300,000 houses and apartments were transformed into 60 million tons of rubble. In a way, the result is the dream of the modern urban planner: starting from scratch, drawing ideal lines on blank paper.
Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin (1925) called for the complete demolition of a vast section of central Paris to make way for a set of 60-story cruciform towers surrounded by geometric housing developments. The ghost of the principal author of the Charter of Athens, the original manifesto of modern architecture, circulates among the ruins of Gaza. His vision is condensed in the Grand Plan, formulated by American and Israeli advisers with input from Tony Blair’s institute.
Great formalizes the concept of the “Gaza Riviera,” made famous by the AI-generated video reposted by Trump in February. According to the plan, Gaza’s precarious urban planning is the cause of the “permanent insurgency” and should be replaced by a series of “modern, smart cities.”
The concept images show a landscape of huge futuristic towers surrounded by repetitive suburbs and lined up along an artery of highways parallel to the coast. “The Gaza waterfront could be very valuable,” Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, proclaimed at a conference at Harvard. The “Gaza Riviera” expresses, in urban space, the criminal ambition of ethnic cleansing: to move from the computer to reality, it requires the “voluntary relocation” of at least a quarter of the territory’s population.
Urban resistance took shape in an alternative project: the Phoenix Plan, developed by around 700 Palestinians, experts and students, from the occupied territories and abroad, without the participation of Hamas. “There is a long heritage, cities that have existed for millennia. It is not a good practice to ignore everything and start again,” explains Shelly Culbertson, American researcher at an independent American institute. Fênix aims to rebuild, not reinvent.
Under the Palestinian plan, the new Gaza would be similar to the old one, but modernized and tree-lined – and, crucially, without Hamas tunnels. Cities would be reborn in the same places, in the form of compact and dense cores, made up of modest buildings of four to eight floors and traffic routes organized around public transport. In its surroundings, plots of small family agricultural fields will resurface.
The value of the past appears as a divide between antagonistic concepts. The Greats hate history: they want to cancel it. Fênix envisions a future rooted in tradition. Its very existence, on computer screens, indicates the persistence of a Palestinian nation seeking the right to establish itself as a state.
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