To this day, I have never had the privilege of visiting Palestine as a second-generation Jordanian. Home to my paternal great grandparents, Al-Manshiyya was a Palestinian neighbourhood that was once situated in the North of Jaffa; it faced a mass destruction under a brutal Zionist colonial occupation, between 1948 and the present day. With the erasure of this now-absent neighborhood, I have fabricated a sequence of imaginary preconceptions that are solely derivative of my grandparents’ disjointed nostalgias and fleeting recollections. I have since yearned to re-experience a vivacious Palestinian locality that no longer exists.

To confront the erasures of Al-Manshiyya’s infrastructure, land, and culture, the following render attempts to digitally reconstruct the most relevant Architectural components of this now-absent neighbourhood. These reconstructions were primarily achieved by cross-referencing an extensive range of scarce archival photographs and personal testimonies that were collected from interviews and schematic drawings. During my interview with a Palestinian exile from the neighbourhood, Dr. Ahmad Sharkas, he fondly described how his childhood home’s kitchen, living room, and courtyard were the most culturally unifying sites of his familial interactions. They fostered the majority of his mother’s and aunt’s domestic and maternal interactions, as well as the playful dialogues that were exchanged in its vicinity.

By restoring a Palestinian emblem of Al-Manshiyya’s domesticity, this interpretive visualisation wishes to challenge the neighbourhood’s erasures that were sanctioned under the occupation. It is committed to promoting a public multicultural discussion with which to document and raise awareness to the untold Palestinian narratives that remain largely understudied in mainstream academia.

Software and equipment used

Rhino 3D, Sketchup, and Lumion 12