Architects for Gaza (AFG) is a collective of volunteer architects, urbanists, designers, planners, engineers, researchers, and built-environment professionals from Palestine and across the globe.
We have come together in solidarity to contribute our professional and technical knowledge, skills, and experience towards supporting a just spatial future for Gaza and its community.
Through a range of initiatives, from education and research to reconstruction and design, our work is grounded in providing a professional perspective and activities with a participatory approach.
Driven by empowerment and resilience, we believe that Gaza’s future must be shaped by its people and informed by their aspirations, histories, cultural heritage, collective memory, and rights.
We envision a Gaza where every resident has the right to a home, a neighbourhood, and a city that is safe, dignified, inclusive, and resilient, with equitable access to land, infrastructure, materials, natural resources, and opportunity.
Rebuilding Gaza is not only a matter of reconstructing buildings and infrastructure; it is a process of restoring social life, cultural identity, collective memory, and people’s relationship to place and land. Our work is rooted in the right to the city, the right to home, and the right to neighbourhood, the right of communities to shape, inhabit, and participate in the future of the places they call home.
By working across disciplines and geographies, we create platforms for research by design. Meaningful reconstruction must foster community ownership, support self-build and enable residents to actively shape the future of their neighbourhoods and cities.
Through research, design, professional practice, and engagement, we offer a platform to rethink future scenarios for Gaza that cultivate hope and place people, communities, and local knowledge at the centre of recovery and reconstruction.
We aim to:
- Draw attention to the realities on the ground through academic research and design.
- Explore notions of home, restitution, repair and empowerment.
- While making and documenting we also try to stress importance of envisioning an inclusive and affordable spatial future. One that celebrates local skills and knowledge, rebuilding on local innovative initiatives and approaches.
- Imagine pathways for healing, stitching, and empowering communities and the landscape through education, speculative research, workshops, co design and live projects
- Ask questions on what healing the fractured urban and ecological landscapes through design means.
- Explore what architecture, urban design and spatial practices can offer within our contemporary global context?
Architects for Gaza – Rebuild Cluster is dedicated to the advancement of citizenship & community development.
Architects for Gaza – Education Cluster is dedicated to the advancement of education for the public benefit.
Resources including authored articles, recorded events, podcasts and materials we have found helpful from those amplifying support for Palestine at this time.