Daphna Levine
At this lecture, I would like to present the city of Bat-Yam and the background to the accelerated process of urban regeneration it is currently undergoing. My research touches on three interrelated fields of knowledge influencing each other: economy, society, and planning. I will point to significant changes that co-occurred in these three fields in Israel during the 1980s: the welfare state was succeeded by Neo-Liberalism, a society of immigrants has evolved into a middle-class one, and modernism was followed by postmodernism. Since the 1980s, Bat Yam was forced to base its budget on self-income. It became increasingly involved in initiating significant building and privatization projects and grew into one of Israel’s most densely populated working-class cities. However, despite the development efforts, its inability to function – stemming from a lack of funding due to housing density and the absence of profit-earning land brought the city to a state of spatial and social neglect.
Nowadays, Bat Yam is ranked last in the Quality of Urban Life index among Israeli cities and has the highest population density. My research shows how in this state of affairs, the municipal management of the past decade has viewed entrepreneurial urban regeneration as the only outlet for improving the built environment, attracting a more substantial population, and generating income for the municipal treasury. As a result, Bat Yam is advancing hundreds of urban regeneration projects. Collapsing buildings are replaced, improved living conditions, and the apartment value increases. On the level of individual profit, apartment owners who take part in regeneration projects enjoy a new or renovated reinforced building with an elevator, as well as a roomier apartment. However, the municipality, one might say, sacrificed itself for private profits without being compensated by the central government and sometimes without being able to bear the burden of the required investments in practice.
Architect Daphna Levine is a Ph.D. candidate in the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. She is engaged in searching for routes to integrate social issues into urban planning by creating models representing abstract social phenomena. By combining cutting-edge technology (e.g., Spatial Microsimulation) and qualitative research, she strives to encode and assess urban regeneration processes’ demographic dynamics and social impacts. Her research was awarded the Azrieli Fellowship for outstanding academic merit and exceptional personal achievements. Daphna graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in architecture and from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in philosophy and comparative literature. In 2016 her master’s thesis was published in book form The Third Space – Center and Periphery in Israeli literature.