#  Orwa Switat's Mapping of Haifa Restores Both Demolished Spaces and a Lost Way of Seeing 

 





June 23, 2025

 

 

 Zainulabideen Jafri, MTS '26 

- [ Event Coverage ](/news-categories/event-coverage)
 
 

 

     ![Orwa Switat presents innovative digital mapping of Haifa's history and demolished spaces.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-06/20250428_PeopleAndRuins_NatalieCC_17.jpg?h=c4b13bb1&itok=NhM75Ftz) 

Photo by Natalie Cherie Campbell



 



 

On April 28, 2025, Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School hosted RPL Fellow in Conflict and Peace, Dr. Orwa Switat, for a conversation about the launch of an innovative digital map that traces the history of Haifa and its displaced spaces and memories. The discussion circled around the restorative mapping of Haifa embodied in memory and indigenous archaeology. Switat focused on the evolving project to reconstruct the historical urban landscape of Haifa through digital cartography.

To contextualize the project and the contributions that sustain it, Switat began with his personal story. In 2018, while completing his PhD on the status of marginalized groups in urban planning, he was told: “There are no maps that show the historical Arab spaces of Haifa before 1948.” He immediately felt the need to address the implications of an entire city’s history being omitted. This glaring absence became the impetus for his mapping project, which gathered a team of students from the Graduate School of Design, local planners, filmmakers, and displaced residents. Switat described this multidisciplinary effort as digitizing ruins, buildings, markets, courtyards, and sacred spaces that existed before the 1948 Nakba. The team also turned to filmmaking to capture spatial memory and visualize practices around ruins that had long been excluded from the city’s official narrative. The project emerged from a wide network of collaborators. The result, as Switat described, is “a restorative indigenous map of Haifa,” one that makes visible a cosmopolitan urban landscape that could never fully be erased.

What lay at the heart of the project, Switat explained, was understanding that while “the city was destroyed, the erasure was incomplete. It left the city with ruins and traces of its heritage.” For Switat, restoring demolished spaces also meant restoring a lost way of seeing. “Now we know that under this street, there was a cemetery. Now we know that under this courthouse building, was a school. Now we know where Umm Kulthum, the famous Egyptian singer, performed in Haifa.” It is this buried cultural and historical memory, suppressed by decades of re-zoning, real estate development, and nationalist historiography that Switat’s project brings back into view.  
  
Switat’s presentation situated the work within broader patterns of displacement, from wars and wildfires to settler colonialism and climate collapse. His work presents itself as a counter-framework to build against the forces of erasure. People, he argued, resist not only through protest but by reclaiming ruins, repurposing memory, and restoring meaning to obliterated places. “Three years ago, they could say there were no maps,” Switat said. “Today, we have one. It belongs to all those who still dream of Haifa.”

[*Read the full transcript of this event here.*](https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/news/2025/06/video-people-and-ruins-remapping-narrative-demolished-spaces-haifa)

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 See also:- [ Religion, Conflict, and Peace ](/news/religion-conflict-and-peace)