Sapir Shay, Jordan Paul

The Urban Empty: A Revived Desert Life

Our project reimagines the Hevel Eliot regional council as a continuous urban fabric, woven together with large-scale infrastructure and landscape strategies on a rural and arid current condition. Piecemeal planning of Kibbutzim along the longest road in Israel (Route 90) has led to a highly inefficient typology of urban agglomeration with vast swaths of underdeveloped land. Our proposed strategy deploys a network of interventions towards a “distributed cooperative” along Route 90. The multiscalar approach to connectivity works both within existing kibbutzim and between them, as well as to new areas of development. The core of our design principles is an “extended program,” which disaggregates and disperses the public amenities typically found in denser urban settings across a cluster of smaller mixed-use buildings within a comfortable walking distance. Multifamily residential buildings are woven between public buildings and commercial centers, increasing the domestic footprint is expanded via access to a network/grid/complex/link of high quality and shaded common spaces that complete or add on to the existing life. From participatory and cooperative architecture to international transit planning, our multiscalar approach offers a vision of a new kind of desert lifestyle that is sustainable, accessible, landscape-appropriate, and economically viable.