Accelerated urbanization and densification processes, together with extreme environmental, health and social phenomena, threaten to change the delicate balance of Israel’s scenic, cultural and social realms. In the third and last year of this theme, final projects turn to social and cultural perspectives to examine Israel’s open public space in the coming decades.

 

The progressively rare and costly public space must serve a variety of human needs with a range of solutions for Israel’s different and unique communities. In this fickle present, the projects this year make an effort to create flexible, beneficial and sustainable living environments for an unpredictable future.

 

Starting from a community perspective and through dialog with community representatives, students have identified issues and developed often unexpected research questions. Each student examined and explored issues and their effects on a select site, developing a vision and mission for future scenarios that give rise to new opportunities and experiences. Such scenarios were the basis for master plans, strategies and implementations of the vision.

 

The final project is a two-semester studio, the second of which has been conducted online in the time of Corona, challenging the usual learning process but, at the same time, enriching our observation and comprehension of the search for beneficial landscape experience in urban and rural sites.

 

Issues examined:

• The future of agricultural land in Israel,

• Open space as meeting points for divers communities,

• Communality as a starting point for urban planning,

• Pedestrian-oriented urbanism and individual transport,

• Parametric strategies for planning open spaces,

• Beneficial experiences that revive the genus loci,

• Handicap and age as inducers of generative urbanism.