Imagining Gaza Without Borders and Without War

A daily mix of stories about cities, city life, and our always evolving neighborhoods and skylines. [Curbed]( FRIDAY, OCTOBER 20 ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR [Imagining Gaza Without Borders and Without War]( Revisiting urban designs by Michael Sorkin and other architects after the 2014 Gaza War. Illustration: Courtesy of the AUC Press and Terreform In his book [Twenty Minutes in Manhattan](, the late architect Michael Sorkin detailed his morning walk from his Greenwich Village apartment through Washington Square Park to his Tribeca office. For Michael, the simple act of walking was critical to asserting a right to the city and to the formation of a democratic one. It is through walking, he wrote, that we can observe the small changes in our neighborhoods and our neighbors over time and pay attention to the urban struggles that create the cities we know and love. Propinquity — the space of nearness, neighborliness, and kinship — was central to his localist internationalism and to his idea of the good city. It is for this reason that Michael deplored the “[architecture of insecurity](”: the global proliferation of CCTV cameras, tollway scanners, GPS tags, and gated communities throughout our cities. These practices of control removed the possibility for the collision and collusion of bodies in physical space, the friction so essential to city life. For Michael, the Israeli occupation of Palestine and its blockade of Gaza were an example of the architecture of insecurity on steroids. The Palestinian Gaza Strip had become a canvas on which Israel developed, tested, and monitored different techniques of suppression. Crammed into a space of 139 square miles, 2 million people have lived under siege for nearly 20 years in one of the most beleaguered urban environments on Earth. While it is frequently described as an “open-air prison,” what this looks and feels like on the ground is a laboratory, precisely engineered to study the science of domination. In Gaza, the Israelis [built algorithms to compute and quantify the cost of human life]( in order to pursue “proportional warfare” and constructed databases [to measure the caloric intake of Gaza’s imprisoned population](. [Continue reading »]( Want more on city life, real estate, and design? [Subscribe now]( to save over 60 percent on unlimited access to Curbed and everything New York. [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( The Latest [Ken Griffin Is Building the Most Expensive House in the World And it will almost certainly get swallowed by the ocean.]( By Clio Chang [My Quest to Downsize Without Throwing Anything Away A big old house full of belongings — could I find them a new life?]( [When New York Started to Wake Up The photographs in Metropolitan Melancholia, made in 2021 and 2022, document a city learning to un-shelter in place.]( By Christopher Bonanos [The Union Square Duplex Where Taylor Swift Took the 1989 Polaroids Is for Sale The door marked up with lyrics is still there, preserved by the owner.]( By Adriane Quinlan [We Made a New York Diner-Themed Puzzle With Piecework An ode to early mornings, late nights, and unlimited cups of coffee.]( [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( [Read More From Curbed]( Introducing The City Desk, a weekly newsletter about New York. [Sign up to get it every Thursday](. [GET THE NEWSLETTER]( [logo]( [facebook logo]( [instagram logo]( [twitter logo]( [unsubscribe]( | [privacy notice]( | [update preferences]( This email was sent to {EMAIL}. Was this email forwarded to you? [Sign up now]( to get this newsletter in your inbox. [View this email in your browser.]( You received this email because you have a subscription to New York. Reach the right online audience with us For advertising information on email newsletters, please contact AdOps@nymag.com Vox Media, LLC 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, 12th Floor Washington, DC 20036 Copyright © 2023, All rights reserved