Desert Futures: Scenarios for Decolonization is a research project by the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory. It started in 2006 during our field research in the Negev/Naqab and the series of interviews we conducted with the support of Adalah. It is also part of teaching studios at the Carlton School of Architecture (2020), and Harvard Graduate School of Design (2022). 

Desert Futures: Scenarios for Decolonization aims to spatialize and make visible the tensions between political systems and natural ecologies in desert environments, as well as human attempts to colonize and commodify the desert by dividing, fortifying, mining, extracting, militarizing, polluting, and foresting it. The project launches with an installation about the Naqab/Negev, Israel, presenting a materialistic historiography of a series of selected sites, detailing their rapid colonization, and offering strategies for their regenerative cohabitation through interwoven stories. Desert Futures also marks the inauguration of the Desert Agency, a multi- and cross-disciplinary think tank, co-developed with experts, institutions, and direct stakeholders, that researches and advocates for alternative imaginaries for desert regions, foregrounding values of social and environmental justice. The Naqab/Negev is our first research area.

After the establishment of Israel in 1948, the Naqab/Negev, which covers about 60 percent of the country’s territory, became a space of national fixation—a space of experimentation, where Jewish national resurrection and modernity converged. Following calls in the early 1950s to “make the desert bloom” (a metaphor for the establishment of Israel), scientists, military and political leaders, artists, and architects traveled south to the desert to experiment with its settlement and domestication—conquering, controlling, and transitioning its ecology to make it simultaneously more green and fertile, more industrialized, mined, and settled, and less Arab.