Honoring pasts, escaping presents, and dwelling in futures: The Palestine land society village reconstruction competition

Abstract

Palestinian architecture students tell a story of dwelling in the future. In the process of creating their designs to reconstruct paused lifeworlds, they show just how little bifurcation there is between past and present. In this article, I introduce the dwelling-to-(re)build perspective, which reflects a unique reality of displacement and dispossession: the spaces Indigenous communities map and dwell is not confined to this moment. For these students and this project of village reconstruction, dwelling space is not only a momentary expression of houses and lands emptied in a distant past, but a vision of rebuilding and reviving those spaces and the interactions that once filled them. These village designs, the conversations involved in producing them, and their presentation to the Palestinian community is not an abstract exercise. They are cartographic practices that insist on a decolonial future, re-dotting the map not with historic places but with future histories.