DISCUSSION, TALK & EXHIBITION
April 28, 2018 | 2 pm | Amman, Jordan

Rooftop Farming Practices in Palestinian Refugee Camps

During the last decades the idea of urban agriculture has become a common practice within dense urban areas. Recently this approach is also to be found in the context of Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, using the roof as a resource of food production. Pilot projects from Jordan and the West Bank manifest first community-based approaches which use urban agriculture as a tool of social empowerment and income generation.

Jadal for Knowledge and Culture in collaboration with a group of three Urban Design and Architecture students from Technical University Berlin, currently investigating on this topic, are happy to invite you for the discussion and exhibition.

14:00 
Input by Mahmood Saeed, Manager of a Community-Based-Organization (CBO) in the Palestinian refugee camp Al Huson. He will introduce the CBO’s project in which they provided 20 families and 10 camp institutions with rooftop farms.

14.45
Input by Elham A. Abaddi, permaculture professionalist and farmer. She will talk about what urban agriculture can learn from permaculture.

15:15 - open end 
Exhibiting rooftop farming practices in Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan and the West Bank.

The exhibition will present four case studies on rooftop farming practices in Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan and the West Bank. All of them follow different approaches: some are drivers for the community and enhance participation processes, others try to introduce new possibilities to generate income. What they all share is the contribution to the resilience of the particular neighborhood, whether on an economical, ecological or a social scale.

The second part of the exhibition consists of photos showing individual perspectives of 10 camp inhabitants, who slipped into the role of a photographer. The photos show their individual perception of places associated with plants, greening, recreational qualities and places that they connect with the memory of Palestine.

The Amman-based NGO Greening The Camps will be on spot with their pilot rooftop farm, which they implemented in Jadal in 2017.

The event will be mostly in Arabic with English translations or vice versa