How did you come to explore the role of imagination in Palestinian planning?
The seeds of my research question were sown approximately five years before I approached the Graduate Institute. I was a diploma student in architecture in the UK at that time. Prior to my final year, I noticed a leaflet circulating within the architecture and art department at London Metropolitan University. In 2011, the Palestinian NGO International Peace and Cooperation Center (IPCC) — an organisation pivotal in crafting strategies for Palestinian planning in Area C of the West Bank, as I later learned — invited international experts to assist in developing a master plan for a one-square-kilometre area in northern East Jerusalem. I responded to the invitation, and that summer, I spent time in Jerusalem with other architecture students and distinguished professionals from the UK, Germany, Ireland, Brazil, and the Netherlands. After seven weeks of master planning for the Palestinian NGO, I returned to my architecture studies in London.
I remained profoundly affected by both the insights I gained regarding the Palestinian situation and the nature of the collaboration between Palestinians and international actors. My colleagues in the workshop envisioned a Palestinian neighbourhood in relation to its geography, ecology, and connections to neighbouring areas of East Jerusalem, presenting it through evocative visuals. I reflected that my international colleagues, although working within the constraints of the site’s geospatial conditions, largely overlooked the fact that Palestinians in Jerusalem are governed by Israel and did not consider the planning restrictions imposed on Palestinian communities by the Israeli Civil Administration (ICA) — an Israeli body created under Military Order 947 (14 November 1981) and responsible for all planning in areas occupied by Israel — which, after the Oslo Accords, include Area C of the West Bank. Surprisingly, these geographically aware yet politically indifferent visuals seemed to be exactly what the Palestinian NGO sought. A few years later, I posed this conundrum as a research question in my PhD application to the Graduate Institute.
In 2016, during my first year of doctoral studies, I revisited the IPCC. On this occasion, I asked my Palestinian colleagues about the significance of those foreign master plans from the 2011 workshop. They did not deny the need for stunning, courageous proposals; rather, they reflected that Palestinians “need imagination”. The thesis then evolved into a quest for understanding: What is orthographic “imagination”, and how does it operate in Palestine?
Can you clarify what you mean by “orthographic imagination” — and what method did you use to study it?
The thesis examines the influence of what my interlocutors termed “imagination” in Palestine. I theorised that it is a linguistic construct grounded in the objective depiction and denotation of Palestinian spatial and social conditions. I contended that maps represent a form of artificial language based on principles of logic, expressed through geographically referenced, two-dimensional shapes and articulated within the universal grammar of planning rules and regulations. My ethnography consistently demonstrated that Palestinian planners, urbanists, and, by extension, administrative bodies strive to articulate the futures of their cities and villages within this framework. Through orthographic language, they argue that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict should not limit their design, as it relies on geospatial principles rather than the agents behind the design. Therefore, objectivity could penetrate the geopolitical deadlock that Palestinian masterplans perpetually encounter.
In the thesis, I inquired about the fate of those “imaginations” — Palestinian logical objective representations of their futures. I asked: Is imagining continuously enacted? How do imaginaries arise, what do they synthesise, and what do they describe and narrate? What purpose do emerging new imaginings serve? What does abandoning the imagination indicate?
I proposed that planning in Palestine exists within two distinct epistemic realms. The first concerns the Palestinian material and social fragmentation perpetuated by decades of Israeli settler colonialism. I presented the history of Palestinian planning, emphasising the administrative and regulatory frameworks that have shaped Palestinian urban designs and detailing the Israeli occupation’s influence on both the administrative and aesthetic aspects of Palestinian master plans. The second realm asserts claims to objectivity, positioning planning as separate from this context and emphasising its capacity to generate knowledge and develop new epistemologies. The multi-sited ethnography conducted within Palestinian planning consultancies and associated governmental or semi-governmental bodies revealed a Palestinian ethos of neutrality in their datasets and objectivity in their proposals. Simultaneously, the material and political reality in Palestine constrains imagination, whereas the semantics of mapping, although embedded within the disciplinary framework, allow for the consideration of the future and the expression of freedom. A positivistic approach to planning — i.e., claims to objectivity — therefore emerged as capable of dual representation, consolidating the contradictions of Palestinian lived experience and the desire to transcend it — all on the surface of the map.
One of the primary methodological and stylistic strategies I employed throughout the thesis is the thick ethnographic description of the Palestinian urban masterplans and their journeys to various meetings. I deconstructed representations down to the level of the sign. I analysed how orthographic signs reference reality and were woven into the new imaginary. I also scrutinised the utility of signs and colours on Palestinian maps within various contexts. As representations evolved through different Palestinian institutions, the international community, and the Israeli Civil Administration, a linguistic analysis of the ethnography revealed how politics asserts itself on the sign, from which new expressions could or couldn’t emerge.
What are your major findings?
The thesis is theoretically concerned with objective language in Palestine, examined through the work of Palestinian planners and urbanists. I demonstrate that the often-overlooked engineers generate knowledge about Palestine, while Palestinian urbanists and planners act as political strategists and architects of their nation’s future. I illustrate how they navigate their occupied condition while striving for sovereignty. These two practices are interlinked. The detailed mapping aims to protect Palestinian livelihoods by producing comprehensive knowledge of every Palestinian home and structure and sharing it with the international community. Additionally, the imaginative and anticipatory practices of Palestinian planners, civil engineers, and urbanists safeguard Palestinian communities by aesthetically withholding details in the master plans submitted to the ICA, thus shielding these communities from the dangers posed by the Israeli Military Orders enforced by the ICA. Where possible, Palestinian planners, with their intimate knowledge of the land, anticipate and counter Israeli spatial interventions, coordinating both local and international efforts to prevent Palestinian evictions or relocations. In the thesis, I argue that planning in Palestine is a form of aesthetic activism and an anticipatory practice that contributes to strengthening their epistemology, institutions, and the horizon of a conceivable future.
The thesis further highlights the limitations of self-determination inherent within the planning process under occupation and the resulting designs. I analyse how Palestinian consultancies, representing communities under occupation, must submit their master plans to the Israeli Civil Administration. Due to the numerous detrimental rules and regulations imposed on Palestinians over decades of Israeli military and administrative control, the plans envisioned by Palestinian planners were being redrawn multiple times. Through various observations, I argue that intuition does not safeguard Palestinian logic and creativity; it is, however, practised with unwavering individual ethics.
My findings highlight that the war for Palestine is being waged by Palestinian urbanists, architects, and civil engineers in every act of surveying and within the framework of each master plan they create. Although subject to numerous traps and failures, in the Palestinian context, orthographic mapping and planning — emphasising objectivity — serve as tools of resistance, epistemic grounding, state-building, and liberation.
Have events since October 2023 had an impact on the way you conducted your research and on your research content?
All my ethnographic material, which informs the thesis, was gathered between 2016 and 2019. When the war in Gaza began, I was finalising my thesis. The war rapidly turned into genocide and parallel urbicide. The realisation that Israel intended to utterly obliterate the entire built environment in the Gaza Strip aligns with my thesis findings.
In my doctoral thesis, I present a comprehensive archaeological reconstruction of Palestinian planning from the 1970s onwards. In particular, I recount how since the 1980s, Israel has been removing geodetic markers of Palestinian lives — such as signs on Israeli maps and plans commissioned by the ICA on behalf of Palestinian communities — and how Palestinian planners have consistently challenged these Israeli designs with detailed counter-plans suggesting that Palestinian villages and towns are vibrant with life, illustrating what this life entails and what it requires. While not granting Palestinian counter-plans any validity, Israel has been meticulously aware of the locations of every Palestinian house, issuing and executing their demolitions.
I think about the total destruction of the Gaza Strip since October 2023 as the realisation of Israels’ forty-year planning semantics, which has systematically evolved from constraining and enclosing spaces for Palestinian life to denying Palestinians representation even within those delineated areas, and then to the complete physical destruction of the built environment. The new map of Gaza will indeed leave few structures intact, enabling Israel to assert that Gaza is devoid of buildings, homes, people, and history.
According to the proposal made by Trump in February, this new map might depict the “riviera of the Middle East”. Do you care to comment?
During my research, I learned that despite the despair stemming from decades of Israeli occupation, in 1987, buoyed by the optimism arising from the PLO’s diplomatic victories, the Palestinian Authority aspired to transform the Gaza Strip into “the Hong Kong of the Middle East” (Filiu 2014: xxi). The vision of a prosperous Gaza was periodically revisited throughout the Peace Process and manifested in various plans and concepts: the 1997 Master Plan for Gaza, prepared by the Norwegian PPIB Mission (Tesli 2008), in collaboration with the Palestinian Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation (MoPIC), the Agricultural University study commissioned by MoPIC in anticipation of the Israeli Disengagement Plan in 2005, and a 2016 study titled Global Palestine, Connected Gaza by a coalition of Palestinian private sector investors. Thinking of Gaza as prosperous is a Palestinian dream that was envisioned, revisited, enumerated, costed, and planned long before President Trump’s statement that Gaza could become the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
However, in another statement President Trump remarked with a neocolonial conviction, “The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too.” Not only do Trump’s words imply an escalation of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing, but they also elude the highly educated, intelligent Palestinian nation with its engineers and urban planners, as if they lacked the insight or creativity to rebuild their communities and cities. Furthermore, Trump then shared an AI-generated video featuring luxurious hotels along the Gaza coastline that resemble an out-of-context megadevelopment. This was countered by other equally contextless proposals, such as an Egyptian plan for the complete reconstruction of the strip, supported by President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. As a result, the US president not only supports Israeli colonial ambitions but also promotes the idea that the reconstruction of Gaza could be approached as a swift mega-development. This approach disregards the sensitivities of displaced people and the region’s history, identity, culture, and Palestinian agency.
What are you doing now?
Immediately after completing my thesis, I became involved in the preparations and mentorship for the Architecture & Design Studio titled “Gaza: Rebuilding Home, Street, and Neighbourhood”. This initiative was a collaboration among Architects for Gaza, the Office of Displaced Designers, and the Global Free Unit, all of which aim to create opportunities for displaced Palestinian professionals to contemplate the reconstruction of Gaza.
I aim to maintain this involvement and support Palestinian civil engineers, archaeologists, architects, and urban planners in adopting a compassionate approach to Gaza’s reconstruction, resisting the threats posed by careless political statements and ill-considered urban initiatives.
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On 1 October 2024, Dorota Kozaczuk defended her PhD thesis in Anthropology and Sociology of Development, titled “Imagining Palestine”. Professor Alessandro Monsutti presided over the committee, which included Professor Vinh-Kim Nguyen, Thesis Director, and, as External Readers, Professor Ruba Salih, Department of the Arts, University of Bologna, Italy, and Adjunct Professor Robert Mull , Umeå School of Architecture, Umeå University, Sweden.
Citation of the PhD thesis:
Kozaczuk, Dorota. “Imagining Palestine.” PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, 2025.
An abstract of the PhD thesis is available on this page of the Geneva Graduate Institute’s repository. As the thesis itself is embargoed until January 2028, please contact Dr Kozaczuk for access.
Banner image: Working version of Detailed Urban Plans (DUP) for Burqa, CEP Offices. Ramallah, 4 November 2018. Photo by Dorota Kozaczuk.
Interview by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.
The views and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to Dr Kozaczuk and should not be construed as representative of or endorsed by the Geneva Graduate Institute.