Spatial justice in Palestine: from ethic to infrastructure

To think with and through Palestine is to think from one of the world’s open wounds. It is a wound I personally carry in my blood. I was born to Palestinian parents whose families were exiled from their homes in Yāfā and Nāblus many decades ago. But it is also a wound I carry in my work and practice: across the various sites, studios and institutions in which I have operated as an architect, researcher and educator. Palestine is not an abstract inheritance to me; it is a spatial condition I am professionally trained to read. It presents a piercing and uncompromising lens that lays bare architecture’s role in violence and normalization. These are slow, insidious spatial processes that render precarity liveable, domination sustainable and injustice habitual by design.

Architecture rarely admits its political force. It often cloaks itself in apolitical languages such as design, innovation and sustainability. Yet most spatial practitioners would agree that it inexorably shapes the conditions of life. And yet, in the Netherlands, fluent as we are in debating housing shortages, climate adaptation or social cohesion, our disciplinary vocabulary falters, often retreating into abstraction, when we are confronted with spatial justice as a practice. (When I speak of ‘we’ in our shared disciplinary faltering, I mean this community that I both critique from within and have come to claim as home.) When invoked, spatial justice in the Netherlands is often treated as a domestic ethic rather than a global method. This produces a robust but inward-facing fluency, one that risks becoming selective blindness across geopolitical distance.

Spatial justice is not merely an ethical stance; it is a practice that requires professional responsibility at both individual and disciplinary levels. It does not only concern equitable access. It requires a recalibration of space as a site of collective agency, one that actively counters how planning, design and infrastructure encode or reproduce hierarchies of power. Palestine exposes and lays bare the limits of our disciplinary frameworks. It confronts us with questions that require us to see architecture not simply as a service, but as an apparatus. This apparatus must be reoriented from personal awareness or declarative political statements towards an infrastructure of repair.

Spatial violence

Let me begin by mapping that landscape. I do so not through the numbing fog of humanitarian abstraction, now second nature to many in the Netherlands, but through the spatial logics we are trained to recognize. Palestine’s built environment constitutes a regime of spatial governance and control. This regime is rooted in the Nakba of 1948 (when over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled and 530 villages depopulated), and entrenched since the Naksa of 1967 and through the Oslo Accords’ fractured interim geographies (made manifest after 1993). As a practitioner, I read this not metaphorically but materially: a territorial project organized through zoning, circulation control and infrastructural asymmetry. Territorial fragmentation unfolds through illegal settlement blocs that carve up the West Bank like a cadastral chessboard. The apartheid ‘separation’ wall snakes through villages, olive groves and aquifers, operating as both border and instrument of internal partition. A dense web of checkpoints, segregated roads and permit systems further transforms mobility into a privilege rationed by a racialized bureaucratic system. Demolition orders and stalled building permits function as anticipatory design tools, structuring life under constant threat, while unequal access to water, electricity and land starves entire ecosystems of their ecological and social viability.

In the Gaza Strip, these logics intensify into a form of carceral enclosure. Its communities are an aggregation of forcibly displaced Palestinians from across the shifting borders of the UN ‘Plan of Partition’ since 1947, ghettoized under a totalizing siege since 2006, and subjected to genocide and urbicide since October 2023. Whole neighbourhoods have been methodically razed. Universities, schools and hospitals have been reduced to rubble, while roads and water systems are severed in a calculated unmaking of urban life. This is neither exceptional violence, nor ‘collateral damage’. It is part of a continuous, systemic process and production  within a settler-colonial project. Planning frameworks, legal categories and infrastructural hierarchies (tools familiar within our discipline) have been mobilized for decades to foreclose self-determination and diminish life.

My dual positioning sharpens these continuities. I write as both a transient practitioner with Palestinian roots and someone increasingly embedded in Dutch spatial practice. Consider the Indies’ colonial polders, engineered to extract and contain indigenous labour through hydrological control, or contemporary Dutch zoning that distributes opportunity while inadvertently enforcing subtle segregations. These are not casual analogies. They are forged through my lived experience: working here, shaped by inburgering histories, learning of Rotterdam-Zuid’s bestemmingsplannen, and encountering polder legacies in every flood defence. This perspective reveals why Palestine destabilizes our discourse. We describe Gaza’s rubble as a ‘crisis’, yet hesitate to analyse the spatial regime that produces it. We treat reconstruction as technical challenge, while avoiding naming structural domination. What we are witnessing is not failure but function: the violence in Palestine operates as the intended output of architectural systems, not their breakdown. This is architectural malpractice. It is the deliberate use of tools such as zoning, checkpoints and infrastructure hierarchies – tools we continue to refine in studios, circulate through research collaborations, and export globally.

This is architecture’s quiet sleight of hand: the translation of political force into technical language. I have encountered this repeatedly in both practice and pedagogy, where questions of power are deferred in favour of performance metrics or design innovation. Yet Palestine collapses this distance, revealing that we are not external observers but practitioners trained within (and operating through) the very systems producing it. The universities we teach in contribute to research infrastructures implicated in Israeli surveillance and control. The offices we work in operate within economies tied to occupation, further entrenching segregation of Palestinian communities. Even procurement chains embed our work within systems that sustain spatial injustice. These are not peripheral entanglements. They are constitutive relations that implicate us in conditions that foreclose Palestinian life.

Disciplinary blindness

I recognize the geographical and cultural distances – and their Orientalist inheritances – that shape Dutch perspectives on Palestine. These distances often frame it as an external issue rather than as a spatial condition continuous with our own practices. From my position, I encounter this distancing repeatedly. It appears in universities and design schools that frame Palestine as ‘too political’, and in institutions that prioritize neutrality over accountability. Yet this framing is untenable. The instruments we deploy – mapping, zoning and infrastructural design – do not stop at national borders. They travel, adapt and operate transnationally. To disregard their continuities is not only inconsistent, but also isolationist. It reduces spatial justice to an empty slogan and a Schengen-bound ethic that exempts European settler-colonial spatialities from scrutiny beyond Europe’s borders.

This selective application fractures our discipline. Siloing Dutch practices from Palestinian realities forecloses any meaningful claim to spatial justice. It reduces the concept to parochial reformism, blind to the global circulation of its own tools. To treat spatial justice as a method requires us to recognize that our drawings, policies and pedagogies shape conditions beyond their immediate sites. The question, then, is not whether to engage, but how to assume responsibility for how our field already operates across these extended spatialities. Palestine does not stand outside Dutch spatial discourse; it exposes its limits.

Call to action

The rubble of Gaza, an ongoing international crime scene still strewn with the bodies of countless Palestinians, is already being spatially reorganized. Reconstruction is increasingly framed through capital investment models and securitized masterplans, where territorial control is repackaged as development. In the West Bank, fragmented geographies continue to be recalibrated through incremental forms of containment. Israel has extended its violent colonial reach beyond Palestine through missile strikes, landmine detonations and ground incursions into southern Lebanon, Syrian buffer zones and the Jordan Valley. As a practitioner, I am not only horrified by this spectacle of destruction, but also by its sedimentation: the enduring infrastructure of fences, walls, settlement grids and cadastral logics that stabilize and legitimize it over time. Missiles may clear ground; tanks may secure it; but it is spatial planning that codifies possession and renders it governable, normalizing annexation and transforming violence into infrastructure.

As spatial practitioners, we must move beyond passive critique. Palestine compels a disciplinary reorientation: from reading violence as event to understanding it as structure; from seeing design as solution to recognizing it as an instrument. We must interrogate reconstruction economies that displace agency in favour of capital accumulation. We must refuse institutional partnerships that normalize domination under the guise of research or innovation. We must align with boycotts, divestment and sanctions, not as symbolic gestures, but as spatial strategies that withdraw support from infrastructures of dispossession. To do otherwise is to legitimize the very mechanisms that weaponize our discipline against human life.

This is a call to strategically mobilize the distributed leverage embedded in our daily decisions. The leverage of our field lies in its distributed nature: in the juries we sit on, the briefs we construct, and the collaborations we accept or reject. It requires that we speak with clarity and act with intent, refracting our everyday practices through the spatial questions Palestine so urgently poses to designers, educators, researchers, policy-makers, regulators and curators alike. Responsibility does not lie only with those who speak loudly; it accumulates through practice. It accumulates through multiple sites of practice: an educator who reorients a studio to map erasure and prototype repair, an architectural office that audits its partnerships and divests from infrastructures of demolition and dispossession, and a professional community that refuses silence and instead organizes, advocates and holds the field accountable. It is enacted through decisions that, while seemingly minor, aggregate into disciplinary positions. The task is not abstract; it is embedded in the everyday operations of our work.