The perverse urban planning of Gaza's 'reconstruction'

Paris, Nov 6 (The Conversation) From the very first term of Donald Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner had forged business relationships with prominent Saudi and Qatari entrepreneurs.

These individuals had financed – and likely rescued from bankruptcy – one of his real estate companies in Manhattan, and subsequently supported the company he founded after leaving his father-in-law's administration.

Today, Kushner no longer represents the American government: he is merely a businessman, who happens to be close to the president. His diplomatic role, alongside the US special envoy to the Middle East, real estate investor Steve Witkoff, is purely unofficial, and he is naturally not accountable for any conflicts of interest related to his business activities.

This complete overlap between diplomatic and business networks illustrates a politico-economic entanglement whose logic lies at the very heart of the Gaza project.

Kushner had already outlined the plan long ago: the Gaza coastline represents a real estate opportunity. However, its inhabitants must be relocated, for example, somewhere in the Negev desert.

To discuss this, Trump convened Witkoff, Kushner, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the White House in late August 2025. According to some analysts, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation headed by Johnnie Moore, an evangelical ally of the White House, developed the plan, which was subsequently published by the Washington Post.

Presented as a sophisticated technical exercise, the plan is also cited in the text of the proposed peace agreement.

Comprising some 40 slides rich in figures but poor in images, this document seeks to demonstrate the "feasibility" of reconstruction while ignoring the human tragedy of Gaza's inhabitants and erasing the political dimension. Its sole focus is the financial profitability of a vast project modelled on Dubai.

Gaza, a real estate approach This document deserves attention not for its moral value — which is nonexistent — but because it illustrates how financial capitalism now dictates the very grammar of social life.

Trump's “peace project” replaces the commercial pacifism of globalisation with a Roman-inspired pax imperialis: first annihilation, then profit.

This model, reminiscent of Kushner’s real estate deals in the Gulf, conceives of Gaza as a site for geopolitical and urban redevelopment, not as an inhabited space. Hence the emphasis on infrastructure and urban design: a development based on Excel spreadsheets, expected returns, and corporate marketing clichés.

Gaza is no longer viewed as a city or a territory, but as a logistical hub linking Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Mediterranean, a global duty-free corridor. The plan suggests that the Saudi-Israeli rapprochement is stronger than commonly believed, at least from Washington's perspective.

Oil and rare earth minerals from Saudi Arabia and the Indian Ocean would reach the Mediterranean without passing through the Suez Canal, guaranteed by a strategic alliance built on the backs of the Palestinians.

The most serious absence In the brochure for the "Riviera" project, the inhabitants of Gaza appear only as a residual category, perceived as a demographic obstacle or an Iranian pawn.

Two million residents are erased from history and replaced by a narrative where the "villains of history" are too bad to deserve any rights. And Hamas is mentioned only as a criminal organisation, without any political considerations.

The plan assumes that a quarter of the population will emigrate, even more if economic incentives are offered. The arithmetic is chilling: each departure is valued at a "gain" of $23,000.

Compensation for property is based on its current value, which is virtually zero, while new housing is valued at Tel Aviv prices, unaffordable for almost all Gazans.

In the AI-generated visualisations, the inhabitants have disappeared, replaced by investors in white robes and keffiyehs, emerging from luxurious Tesla cars.

A devastated land The Romans were more sincere. As Tacitus wrote about the conquest of Britain: "They create a desert and they call it peace." The same logic prevails here, without even pretending to listen to the voices of those concerned.

After two years of systematic destruction, the very fabric of Gaza, its history, its topography, and even its land registry, has been erased; within its 365 square kilometers, stretching from desert to sea, its population density is 50% greater than that of Tel Aviv.

The damage is horrific: 61 million tons of rubble, 78% of buildings destroyed or damaged, half of the hospitals out of service, and only 1.5% of land still arable for two million inhabitants.

The cleanup would require approximately $18 billion, thousands of machines, tens of thousands of months of work, mobile processing units and specialised landfills.

But how? Scattering this debris across the entire strip would raise its surface by 30 centimeters. Dumping it into the sea would simply move the disaster elsewhere, a solution no doubt considered by those rapacious entrepreneurs who dream of a port and artificial islands like Dubai.

This process would also erase existing topography and land registry records. This presents an opportunity for the plan, which proposes replacing land registers with "tokenised" property rights, tradable on speculative blockchain-based markets, transforming the ruins of Gaza into a real estate lottery.

The economic mirage Rather than addressing famine and the humanitarian crisis, the plan invokes the promise of a "Middle Eastern Riviera", a concept dear to Trump. It aims to increase Gaza's real estate value to $300 billion within 10 years, with over $100 billion in investments. Control and security would remain in military hands.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation would become a trust tasked with administering the territory "until a reformed and deradicalised Palestinian community is ready".

This trust would hold a third of the territory and acquire most of the rest, while the population would be confined to "temporary housing" — a euphemism for camps.

The list of potential investors includes major Saudi and international construction groups, the Bin Laden family, Tesla, Ikea, and Amazon. These companies may never have been consulted, or perhaps they were; we'll know soon enough, but in the meantime, their logos appear on the brochure. The "Riviera" narrative masks the true objective: land speculation and infrastructure monopoly.

Design as a tool for control Urban design plays a central role in the plan. Like Haussmann's Paris, the project aims to eradicate insurrection through spatial reorganisation. The underlying assumption is that of a complete tabula rasa, material, topographical, and legal. The coastline is envisioned as an extractive frontier for gas and oil platforms.

The proposed spatial order is uniform and unsettling: seven or eight cities of 200,000 inhabitants each, defined by an economic function or a private actor, data centres, logistics, tourism, isolated and linked by corridors of infrastructure and surveillance.

AI tools produce deceptively precise projects, concealing a complete lack of empathy, experience, and human scale.

At Sciences Po's Urban School, I asked students to imagine the most "evil" city possible. Their responses anticipated this vision: gated communities, artificial public spaces, barrier infrastructure, total surveillance, anonymous monumentality.

They instinctively understood that the opposite of good urban planning is not disorder, but control, the calculated elimination of diversity, proximity, and community life.

A catalogue of perverse urban planning The proposed plan for Gaza is not an academic exercise. It is the deliberate application of a perverse urban logic, designed to create a “safe” environment for global capital.

A logic that isolates, fences off, and commodifies every resource, destroys nature, represses social life, restricts mobility, and imposes surveillance and hostility. It annihilates agency, community, and dignity in the name of security and profit.

This phenomenon is not limited to Gaza. The same principles are already visible from the Gulf to Asia: privatized spaces, artificial landscapes, monitored enclaves, control infrastructures. The "perverse city" is no longer a dystopian fiction, it is the emerging model of contemporary urbanization which, after urbicide, simply promotes necrocity.

One could conclude with an even more disturbing thought: the United States of reactionary supremacists, who vow to annihilate the enemy within, look to Gaza as a model. Bombs to destroy, a developer to rebuild. What to rebuild, you might ask? Warrior Pete Hegseth and promoter Donald Trump made it explicit to the 800 generals they recently gathered at Quantico: the enemy is among us, prepare yourselves, your next battle zones will be the cities of the United States. (The Conversation) SCY SCY