Selected Works | Gil Mualem Doron

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Gil Mualem-Doron

The Dead Zone & The Architecture of Transgression [PhD Thesis, TU Delft, 2018]

The Dead Zone and the Architecture of Transgression is Gil Mualem-Doron’s doctoral research, completed at TU Delft in 2018. The thesis investigates marginal and abandoned urban spaces and asks how places commonly understood as derelict, dangerous or without value can become sites of alternative social, political and spatial practices.

Focusing on neglected industrial landscapes and other urban ‘dead zones’, the research challenges conventional approaches to architecture and planning that understand such spaces primarily through regeneration, redevelopment and economic productivity. Instead, it considers their capacity to accommodate informal uses, unexpected encounters and forms of occupation that resist prescribed functions and established spatial orders.

Drawing on architectural research, critical theory, photography, fieldwork and artistic practice, the thesis develops the concept of transgression as a method for understanding how boundaries—physical, social and disciplinary—are produced, negotiated and crossed. Particular attention is given to bodies, identity, exclusion and the politics of public space.

The research connects architecture with Mualem-Doron’s wider socially engaged artistic practice. It proposes marginal space not simply as something awaiting redevelopment, but as a potentially productive condition through which dominant ideas about ownership, belonging, participation and the organisation of urban life can be critically reconsidered.

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