Lab 2: The Israeli Urban Field

The Israeli Urban Field lab focuses on the Israeli city, its present and future challenges, in the local and global context. A space that is influenced by climate crisis, political instabilities, emergency and crisis conditions that we are not familiar with and require new aware and flexible attention.

The Israeli city is developing in patterns described in contemporary “the horizontal city” – one characterized in a “flat” space, non-hierarchical, dispersed infrastructures and urban phenomena that developed in parallel to the “classis city”.

The lab will re-examine Israeli urbanity and the ways it developed since mid-20th century until nowadays through the traditional definitions of urban – suburban. We will follow the typical characteristics of this specific urbanization form, and the residential, leisure and employment premises it holds, as well as its relations with the open territories and nature in the city and around it.

The lab will emphasize use of mapping tools and methods which seek to extend from prevalent quantitative and technical discourses but rather map the phenomenon in a broad perspective, its planning, formal, socio-economic, programmatic and historic aspects. This integrated overview will be used to identify the unique planning characteristics of the space, with their advantages, disadvantages and embodied opportunities. Based on that, future scenarios for the chosen site will be developed, on the base of which the students will propose strategies and planning actions that intervene in the site and change it.