Countless efforts to establish a dense and active city center for Beer Sheva have failed. Its extreme desert climate, culture, and socio-political conditions have not allowed the development of a traditional city core. In reaction this new plan for Beer Sheva proposes a de-centralized urban scheme, in which the city is fragmented into distant neighborhoods, allowing the desert to flow through it. The existing urban inner city voids are expanded to a point where they become continuous; creating an ‘ocean’ of desert space in which the island-like neighborhoods are scattered. This ‘ocean’ of unclaimed land becomes a transient public space. Within it designated collective areas/zones are formed, each inscribed with a new temporal program, with its own
cycle –timeframe of activity: desert agriculture, recreational area, temporal tent housing and more. The city’s existing public buildings are incorporated within these areas, mediating between the neighborhoods. From an environmental, ecological point of view – these continuous inner voids prevent the city from becoming one large mass, allowing the desert and at the same time the city to 'breathe'. The native nomad Bedouin tribes take part in activating these spaces, as places of passage from one part of the desert to the other.

Project area: 117.5 sqkm
Total recovered public space: 40 sqkm

Project Team: Yonatan Cohen, Kate Snider