the research analyses the relationship between space, perception, and power, questioning the ways in which the built environment can contribute to the production of bodily, psychic, and collective states of vigilance, adaptation, and trauma.

over the past decades, mental health has progressively been recognised as a public health issue, especially in relation to wars, catastrophes, severe accidents, systemic violence, and conditions of prolonged exposure to danger. post-traumatic stress disorder, initially studied in significant ways through the experience of veterans, survivors of extreme events, and victims of disasters, has shown that trauma cannot be understood solely as the psychic consequence of a past event. it concerns the way in which the body continues to perceive the world after violence has interrupted the continuity of experience.

trauma alters the relationship between body, memory, and environment. it produces hypervigilance, sleep disturbances, difficulties in concentration, disproportionate responses to stimuli, and a loss of trust in the surrounding space and in the predictability of the future. in this sense, it does not belong exclusively to the individual sphere, but is inscribed within the material, social, and spatial conditions through which everyday life is organised.

this research takes this perspective as a point of departure for questioning an extreme condition: what happens when trauma does not follow an event, but coincides with the environment itself? what happens when there is no “after” in which the body can begin to deactivate its state of alert? in contexts of occupation, siege, and genocidal violence, trauma does not appear as a temporary interruption of normality, but as an ordinary structure of inhabitation.

palestine, and gaza in particular, today represents one of the most radical examples of this condition. occupation does not operate only through the seizure of land, the fragmentation of space, or the destruction of infrastructure. it also operates through the continuous production of an unstable perceptual environment, in which the body is forced to reorganise itself around risk, waiting, loss, and unpredictability.

the sound of drones, the presence of checkpoints, the destruction of homes, the interruption of routes, the transformation of schools into shelters, the collapse of hospitals, the lack of water, care, and safety, the impossibility of knowing whether a place will still be accessible or even exist the following day: these elements are not only consequences of war. they constitute a traumatic infrastructure.

public health, in this framework, cannot be reduced to biological survival. it does not concern only the number of dead and wounded, nor can it be separated from the destruction of the conditions that make life liveable: continuity of care, access to food and water, housing security, the possibility of sleeping, studying, moving, remembering, mourning, and imagining the future. when these levels collapse simultaneously, violence does not affect only bodies, but the entire material and psychic ecosystem of collective life.

it is at this point that the research introduces the concept of neuro-architectures of domination.

this term refers to those spatial, infrastructural, and perceptual arrangements through which power does not merely control bodies in space, but intervenes in the very conditions of perception, attention, memory, and nervous response. domination does not operate only through borders, walls, military devices, or visible systems of surveillance. it also operates through the production of sensory states: alertness, anxiety, disorientation, docility, exhaustion, and the anticipation of danger.

from this perspective, architecture is never merely a formal configuration. it is an environmental technology that organises behaviour. every light, sound, material, distance, threshold, or control device produces a specific perceptual condition. each perceptual condition, in turn, defines a political relationship between body and space: who can stop, who can cross, who can rest, who can be visible without becoming suspicious, who is forced to move, wait, or disappear.

contemporary cities have progressively incorporated this dimension. surveilled squares, hyper-regulated airports, public spaces hostile to permanence, distributed control devices, and architectures designed to direct behaviour show how space no longer organises only functions or flows, but experiences. form becomes instruction. the environment becomes pedagogy. through space, the body learns what is permitted, tolerated, discouraged, or prevented.

however, in colonial contexts and contexts of occupation, this logic assumes an extreme form. the city does not only discipline: it wounds. it does not only orient: it disorients. it does not only regulate movement: it produces exhaustion, dependency, and temporal suspension. the checkpoint, for example, is not only an infrastructure of territorial control. it is a perceptual and temporal device that transforms ordinary movement into waiting, uncertainty, and vulnerability. the body learns that every route can be interrupted, every everyday gesture can become a risk, every space can suddenly cease to be inhabitable.

in gaza, this condition is brought to its maximum intensity. the destruction of space does not produce only material loss. it produces a profound transformation in the relationship between population, environment, and nervous system. a destroyed home is not only a lost building, but a fracture in the continuity of memory. a destroyed school is not only an interrupted service, but a suspension of the time of childhood and future imagination. a destroyed hospital is not only a damaged healthcare facility, but the deactivation of collective trust in the possibility of being cared for.

in this sense, trauma does not arrive after violence. it is produced by the very form of the environment. it becomes an inhabited condition, a landscape, an atmosphere, the daily organisation of perception.

the research connects this condition to the concept of traumatic neuroplasticity. neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s capacity to change in response to experience and environment. it is a fundamental resource for learning, healing, and adapting. yet when the environment is constantly violent, unpredictable, or threatening, this capacity for adaptation can turn into a form of forced survival. the nervous system learns danger as the norm. vigilance becomes habit. alertness becomes structure. fear is no longer merely a reaction, but a mode of relating to the world.

in contexts of occupation and genocide, this plasticity does not concern only the individual. it assumes a collective and intergenerational dimension. trauma sediments itself in gestures, rhythms, ways of moving through space, family relations, forms of care, the transmission of memory, and the capacity to imagine a future. what is attacked is not only present life, but the psychic, social, and symbolic continuity of a population.

it is here that colonial violence reveals its deepest level. it does not aim only to occupy a territory, but to transform the way in which that territory can be perceived, remembered, inhabited, and desired. it does not merely destroy buildings, infrastructures, or bodies. it intervenes in the very possibility of imagining continuity, return, repair, and future.

the research defines this dimension as neuro-colonialism: a process through which colonial domination acts not only on geography, but on the neurological, perceptual, and affective conditions of inhabitation. to colonise space also means to colonise the perception of space. it means producing environments in which the nervous system is forced to adapt to violence, until it incorporates it as an ordinary horizon.

from this perspective, architecture cannot be considered neutral. even when it presents itself as technique, planning, emergency, or reconstruction, it participates in the production of perceptual worlds. it can reproduce a colonial imaginary of form, imposing housing, aesthetic, and functional models that erase memories, local practices, and situated forms of life. or it can contribute to a practice of spatial decolonisation, recognising that every built intervention produces not only material effects, but also social, psychic, and political ones.

decolonising architecture therefore means moving beyond the critique of form as object. it means questioning the perceptual conditions that space produces, the bodies it renders legible or illegitimate, the memories it preserves or erases, the futures it enables or prevents. it means recognising that public health is not at stake only in hospitals, but also in homes, streets, camps, borders, checkpoints, ruins, and places of waiting and survival.

neuro-architectures of domination name this threshold: the point at which space ceases to be merely the scene of violence and becomes one of its active infrastructures. understanding this threshold is necessary in order to imagine forms of design capable of escaping false technical neutrality and fully assuming their political, social, and perceptual responsibility.