Selection
Border Ecologies (2012–Present)
Border Ecologies and the Gaza Strip investigates how war and border stresses produce unexpected ecological and social spaces, combining long-term research on spatial, ecological, and political border dynamics with participatory design, community engagement, spatial mapping, storytelling, advocacy design, maps/illustration, and exhibition curation. Working with local border communities, the project produced the award-winning Border Ecologies exhibition (Silver Lion, Venice Biennale 2021), a show at Mediamatic Gallery, essays, and a forthcoming book with Mack Books; it secured competitive funding from the Netherlands Creative Industries Fund and the Biennale curator and generated lectures at MIT and Harvard.
Spatial Design Strategies for Climate- and Conflict-Induced Migration (2024–Present)
A project investigating climate- and conflict-driven migration in the Sahel—with Mauritania as an “open doors” case—to guide design, planning, and policy responses to displacement. It combines spatial mapping, policy and field research (focus groups, interviews), curriculum development, and fundraising, in collaboration with UN agencies (UNHCR, UNEP, IOM, UN‑Habitat, UNICEF, UN Peacebuilding Fund). Outputs include essays, policy recommendations, and teaching materials.
Matters of Time (2020–Present)
A research and design project investigating the material and temporal legacies of atomic, nuclear, and quantum technologies, from the Manhattan Project to uranium mining, radioactive waste, and the nuclear demands of AI and quantum computing, treating nuclear infrastructure as a hyperobject whose ecological and social harms fall across deep time and impact disproportionately Indigenous lands. It asks how design can render invisible forces such as radiation, decay, dark matter, into matters of public concern, using layered mapping, alternative public archives joining scientific data with oral histories, multisensory installation, durable landscape markers, and policy and community-led monitoring. Developed through series of courses taught at the Harvard GSD in collaboration with the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA), the project also includes the essay “Matters of Time: Doomsday Clock Diagram,” published in Diagrams by OMA/AMO and Fondazione Prada (2025), and “Perspectives on Survival” (KoozArch, 2023 Issue #1 “Agents Provocateurs: agitate normality”).
Love in a Mist: The Politics and Architecture of Fertility (2018–2020)
Research, curatorial and exhibition design project examining the spatial politics of fertility, reproductive rights, and environmental exploitation—prompted by US “heartbeat bills” and framed through gender, bodies, law, and landscapes—combining legal, spatial, and environmental research with essaying, editorial work, and curatorial/site-specific exhibition design. Exhibited at Harvard GSD (Fall 2019) and Bureau Europa (May 2020–June 2021) with a catalogue, collaborations with artists (Yael Bartana, Lori Brown, Desirée Dolron, FAST, Rebecca Gomperts, Bernie Krause, Joep van Lieshout, Tabita Rezaire, Women on Waves), and institutional partners; generated significant press, public events, symposia, and teaching contributions.
Desert Futures: Scenarios for a World of Extremes (2007-2022)
A long-term research and design project that spatializes and makes visible the tensions between cultural and natural systems in arid and semi-arid environments, and develops design visions for habitation, transformation, and remediation centered on environmental justice and care in the face of the climate crisis. Treating the desert as a planetary site, where the fragile relationships between human settlement and the devastation of nature are most visible, the project analyzes the processes of desert colonization, identifies extractive typologies of architecture, infrastructure, and land use, and designs scenarios for their transformation. It unfolds in two parts. The first centers on the North American desert ecoregion, with sites across the Mojave and Sonoran deserts that reveal the entanglement of extraction, waste, water mismanagement, militarization, and environmental degradation, developed as a studio taught by Malkit Shoshan at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (Fall 2022). The second turns to the Naqab/Negev in present-day Israel, tracing how the desert has been divided, fortified, mined, militarized, and settled under successive regimes, and how its Indigenous Bedouin inhabitants have been displaced in the process; this part was exhibited at the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR, 2022). Across both, the project sets the work against the World Atlas of Desertification’s projection that by 2050, ninety percent of the Earth’s land may be degraded by human action. The U.S. study is gathered in a publication combining a visual report, essays by invited experts, and student design propositions.
(See also Archives of Displacement).
BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions (2007–2024)
An interdisciplinary investigation of how UN peacekeeping missions shape cities, ecologies, and economies—showing how single-purpose, extractive infrastructures create waste, dependency, and environmental harm and proposing more just, sustainable spatial models. Combining multidisciplinary research, extensive fieldwork, stakeholder interviews, spatial analysis, workshops, participatory design, and case studies of mission start-up in Mali and drawdown in Liberia, the project collaborated with the Dutch Ministries, UN agencies, IPI, CIC (NYU), and diverse experts. Outputs include policy papers, the book BLUE: The Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions, exhibitions (UN HQ, Dutch Pavilion, Harvard GSD, Boijmans, Het Nieuwe Instituut), and contributions to a 2017 UN resolution.
Drones and Honeycombs (2014–2016)
Rresearch, design and curatorial project examining how contemporary warfare (drones, surveillance regimes, and security infrastructures) reshapes cities, compounds, and civic life, and how design can respond to the militarization of everyday space. Organized around three strands (drones, compounds, missions), it used case studies, speculative spatial scenarios, public seminars/workshops, curated installation (The View from Above), and critical writing. Partners included Het Nieuwe Instituut, DPR-Barcelona, Columbia Studio-X, Dutch Ministry of Defense representatives, and numerous scholars and artists. Outputs include installations, seminars, the UNMANNED books (DPR-Barcelona), and essays in Volume; the work influenced discourse on security and the built environment and contributed to the subsequent BLUE project.
ZOO, or the letter Z, just after Zionism (2011–2016)
ZOO, or the letter Z, just after Zionism investigates architecture’s constructive and destructive roles in conflict, using the Israeli–Palestinian context to trace how landscape, infrastructure, and settlement are mobilized as political instruments and strategies of war, and how imagination and fantasy function as survival under oppression. Methods include mapping, archival and community-based research, interviews, drawings, spatial and curatorial design, and the collection of visual, textual, and oral materials. Exhibited as long-term and site-specific installations at Bureau Europa (2012), Tropenmuseum/Manifesta (2014), and Harvard GSD (2017), with an exhibition catalogue, essays, and international lectures; collaborators include Bureau Europa, Tropenmuseum, Sarah Roy, Edo Amin, and David Hancock.
Reconstruction of Memory: International Heritage Protection for a Stateless Nation (2005–2007)
A research and advocacy project on Lifta, one of the last pre-1948 Palestinian villages left largely intact within Israel, examining how preservation and development can operate as instruments of cultural erasure. The project documents a development plan that would convert the depopulated village—whose 2,000 inhabitants fled during the Nakba—into exclusive real estate, preserving its Palestinian architecture, terraces, spring, and olive-oil works as desirable heritage assets while erasing the history, memory, and right of return of the people who built it, including the renaming of the village after a biblical Jewish site. Setting Lifta within a wider history of destruction and nation building, from postwar Europe to Kosovo, the work argues that UNESCO conventions linking cultural heritage to the rights of ethnic minorities should extend to Palestinian heritage, treating preservation not as a tool of value extraction but as a basis for restitution, the right of return, and the restoration of dignity for both Palestinian and Jewish communities. Methods include spatial and archival research, historical analysis, and critical and advocacy writing, alongside a series of public events and an international symposium in Amsterdam convening scholars, practitioners, and communities around heritage, memory, and cultural cleansing.
Golden Heart Pavilion: First Community Building for Ein Hawd (2008)
The first community structure for the unrecognized Palestinian village of Ein Hawd, a transient, inflatable pavilion for conversations and exhibitions about the community’s displacement from the original village one kilometer away, now Ein Hod, occupied by Israeli artists. Designed by Malkit Shoshan as a contemporary homage to the diwan, Ein Hawd’s pre-1948 communal gathering space, the heart-shaped double dome inflates in five minutes to provide ninety square meters of space and can be removed or relocated to reveal a landscaped garden beneath. Its golden dome references the diwan and the Temple Mount, while its aerial heart shape gently addresses the Israeli authorities who use aerial photography to detect unauthorized construction. Realized for the One Land Two Systems and Platform Paradise event in Ein Hawd, July 2008. Inflatable design and exhibition curation: Malkit Shoshan. Interior design: Sharif Waked.
One Land Two Systems and Platform Paradise (2004–2014)
A long-term design and advocacy project engaging the unrecognized Palestinian village of Ein Hawd to envision alternative futures through master planning, landscape design, community workshops, participatory design, competitions, exhibitions, and an advocacy campaign. Methods include spatial research and mapping, essays, curatorial design, and publication editing. Partners include the local community, Association of Forty, Mediamatic, and numerous artists and architects (Yona Friedman, Dan Graham, Tomás Saraceno, Museo Aero Solar, Joseph Grima, Petra Blaise, Rebecca Gomperts, Map Office, Sharif Waked, Noga Inbar, Stefano Boeri, and others). Outputs include an architecture and landscape competition, exhibitions and workshops, a master and landscape plan, and the book Village: One Land Two Systems & Platform Paradise (Damiani, 2014); the project earned an Aga Khan Award nomination and wide critical recognition, including a large installation at the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Archive of Displacement (2006-2008)
A documentation and advocacy project on the spatial politics of displacement, focusing on the unrecognized Bedouin villages of the Naqab (Negev) desert in southern Israel. Across the world, displacement unfolds at vast scale—and among the displaced are the unrecognized: informal localities whose lack of official status is itself a political and ideological act, a decision to render communities absent from maps, planning, and public provision. The project examines this condition through the roughly forty unrecognized villages of the Naqab, where Bedouin communities live without electricity, water, or basic health and educational services, and in particular the twin villages of Um al-Hiran and Atir—built of corrugated iron and breeze-blocks within sight of well-serviced Israeli towns, and now facing a second forced exodus in fifty years. Working with the human rights organization Adalah, the project documents the legal and spatial processes through which displacement is enacted and contested, combining interviews, spatial mapping, and short films to record these communities and the threats they face. Initiated by Alwine van Heemstra, documentary filmmaker, in collaboration with FAST and Adalah.
Atlas of the Conflict (2001–2010)
Atlas of the Conflict is comprehensive cartographic and narrative atlas visualizing the spatial mechanisms of the Israel–Palestine conflict over time, produced through extensive spatial research, data gathering, mapping, and visual narrative/diagrammatic design. Published as the book Atlas of the Conflict: Israel–Palestine (010, 2010), it received the Netherlands Best Book Design Award and the Leipzig Golden Letter (First Book Award), and is widely reviewed and cited as a landmark publication. The book author, map maker and map design: Malkit Shoshan.
