Studio's Goals:

The goal of the studio is to practice urban planning in the context of Israel, with its social, cultural and political complications. 

The city is a center of human happening. Being not just a place that most of the world population dwell in, and work and spend their free time, but also contains institutions, events, struggles, and human crises. The Israeli city contains also the essence of the Israeliness: multicultural and polarized society, power relationship between communities, distant history and Israeli urban modern heritage, relationship between religions, and more. Nowadays urban planning practice in the context of Israel is at a critical phase since cities development is opposed to the geographical and social periphery, attitude to the open realm, and the need to protect landscape values and sustainable development.

Core Topics:

1. The Israeli city – Israeli local urbanism
2. Space perception, conceptual thinking, meaning and experience of space
3. Relationship between center and periphery, ethnic mixed city

Studio's Site:

The site to be selected in the begging of the semester and it will focus on one of the cities that represents the current Israeliness on all its complications.

Studio's Process:

The studio begins with investigation and extensive understanding of the city various layers. A proposal drawn by the student of a vision, which includes the different directions of the urban planning development.

Following the initial investigation, each group of students focusing on specific site will offer a plan in a quarter/neighborhood level [1:2500, 1:1250 scale]. The proceeding of planning will be detail to urban site [1:500, 1:250 scale]. The studio intentional oscillate between conceptual - idea and the concrete and the local. Students will require to back their planning with theoretical base and understanding what the social, political, and cultural meaning of the proposal is.

Planning process will go with core topics the urban planning practice, amongst them: localization, urban renewal, place identity, culture and community relationships, interest parties in the urban space, memory, tradition, conservation, context, urban landscape, center-periphery relations, mixed cities, place in the city, existing and supporting infrastructures, resource distribution, spatial justice, and more. Simultaneously during the studio cases form Israel and the worldwide will be scrutinized and examined.