Abu Ghazaleh, R: Urban Adaptive Mechanisms for Communities u

This book investigates the coping mechanisms for communities under conflict, war or siege and how these mechanisms affect the urban form in the area of Jerusalem, Palestine. The aim of this study is to document how the Palestinian communities living there manage their daily lives with the existence of checkpoints and the recently built Israeli Segregation Wall. Specifically, the book looks at how the urban functions (and spaces) serve to fulfill the basic needs of the Palestinian communities and the types of informal adaptive strategies used to survive the restrictive and discriminatory policies of the formal Israeli system. The investigation is based on an attempt to answer the following questions: What were the daily living activities before and after the introduction of the checkpoints and the Wall into the Palestinian urban fabric? Where is the location of the temporary urban functions? How do these functions clash with the existing land use typologies? And finally, what forms do these adaptive mechanisms and temporary urban functions take?