A Lens Onto Ourselves

Under what conditions can planning address the expansionist violence of settler colonialism in Palestine (and Lebanon, and elsewhere)? What transformations are necessary to create those conditions?

Please consider joining us for a two-day symposium at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning grounded in these crucial questions. Talks will begin the afternoon of Friday, February 21st and continue through Saturday, February 22nd.

All are welcome, but space is limited, so please register as soon as possible to reserve your spot. We ask that participants plan to attend the entire event if possible. Please note that you may be waitlisted due to limited capacity.

"ايد على ايد رحمة" 

"A hand in hand is mercy"

- Arabic Saying

The ongoing genocide in Gaza has devastated the urban landscape, with cities relentlessly shelled, essential infrastructure destroyed, and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble. The scale of loss—both in human life and the built environment—has overwhelmed previous urban planning frameworks, rendering traditional conceptual and interpretative tools insufficient to comprehend or address the depth of this crisis.

Institutional structures have failed to protect civilian spaces, and the breakdown of governance leaves planners grappling with how to rebuild in a context where systematic violence dismantles both cities and the very idea of urban justice.

Asymmetric power, willful colonial violence, and wholesale destruction of entire cities and communities requires more than repair, reconstruction, and historicizing occupation and ethnic cleansing. We need to reckon with the rubric of planning itself and the tools—of questioning, thinking, and action—it imparts as a discipline and profession.

1. Examining and critiquing the roles that urban planning, urban design, development aid, and architectural practices have played in sustaining socio-spatial control and oppression in Palestine. Exploring pathways together for how academics and practitioners, especially those in American institutions, can contribute to immediate and long-term repair and justice in Palestine.

2. Learning from and with Palestinian practitioners around supports that are most welcome and needed at this moment and in future reconstruction efforts.

3. Fostering a strengths-based, trauma-informed community to advance liberatory planning practice in Palestine. We center relationship building as a goal in and of itself, and welcome members across geographies, generations, and fields as peers with unique gifts.

4. Prioritizing the preservation and revitalization of Palestinian culture, heritage, and identity as vital components of resistance, resilience, and reconstruction as a goal and archival outcome; especially with aims to guard against a framing through a damage-centered narrative– a tendency which often collapses Palestine solely into an academic inquiry concerning violence, war, and occupation.

5. Upholding a starting point that reflects the reality of the ongoing occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

These goals are not conclusive, and instead serve as the basis for forging common ground and will continue to be informed by Palestinian perspectives through the course of the symposium and beyond. We recognise the importance of the framing and phrasing of Palestinian colleagues rather than our voices. Through elevating the voices of our partners, we hope to foster ongoing dialogues centered on Palestinian liberation.

MIT Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (AKPIA) 

MIT Global Health and Medical Humanities Initiative (GHMHI) 

DUSP Displacement Research and Action Network (DRAN) 

MIT CSF, MIT MSA, MIT Mobin, Mipsterz 

Palestine at MIT

MIT Jews for Collective Liberation

DUSP Bemis

DUSP City Design and Development

DUSP International Development Group

DUSP Housing Community and Economic Development

DUSP Racially Just Research Initiative

MIT Data + Feminism Lab

MIT Open Documentary Lab

Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at Religion and Public Life Program at Harvard Divinity School