Retrieving Jabalia refugee camp: Drawing as a means of bearing witness to the violence of reconstruction

This paper explores how architectural drawing can serve as a tool of resistance and spatial reclamation in the aftermath of genocide, focusing on Jabalia Refugee Camp in northern Gaza. Amid catastrophic destruction and erasure, the project rejects conventional reconstruction frameworks that often reproduce colonial power structures. Instead, it proposes a methodology rooted in memory, storytelling, and speculative drawing – developed through collaboration with a former resident of Jabalia. Using co-mapping, 3D recollection and fictional letters from a liberated future, the work repositions survivors as active authors of space. Drawing becomes a means of witnessing, not to fix loss, but to resist it – layering emotional geographies, temporal fragments and imagined possibilities. This approach challenges the neutrality of architecture, arguing for a practice that emerges from within the community rather than being imposed from outside. Ultimately, the paper offers a method of designing grounded in solidarity, care and the collective right to remember, return and rebuild.