The un-grounding sequence occurs with a kit of tools and attendant parameters that are allowed to “grow” on the site in a play between agency and indeterminate natural processes. The land is re-imagined as a field of intensities, the variability of which present an unlimited number of outcomes. This effort to establish a set of rules that play themselves out over time is also an effort to defer the intervention that would prematurely resolve the ground. It favors a patchwork development, a bottom-up approach that frustrates a totalizing urban agenda.
In the first stages a controlled erosion deteriorates the existing roads, lots, parking, and sidewalks. The passage of time and the natural and unnatural results of neglect are allowed to overtake the land, while at the same time preserving certain features for potential reutilization. This suspension of decay occurs at sites of intersecting streets where the asphalt is preserved and refigured in the service of an eventual connectivity to the adjacent town of Al Bireh. As the surrounding ground is alternately eroded and buried, a series of new conditions emerge – terraces of arable land re-form the western hill replacing the strategic importance of the hillside with new visual and infrastructural linkages to Ramallah. In other areas of the settlement, zones of new terrain emerge implying various types of development, forming an archipelago of parcels guided by a new logic of land ownership and distribution.
Whether thought of as parameters or as contingencies, the intrinsic variability of this process must be understood as indeterminate in outcome – its ultimate resolution subject to the negotiations, localized planning, and apportionment over time that will, no doubt, accompany a re-inhabitation of the site.
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