Mind the Child

The Project brings light to the neglected Southern Tel Aviv neighborhoods; Hatikva, Shapira and Nave Shanaan, where asylum seekers make up the majority of the population. Due to the fact that asylum seekers work long hours per day to maintain their living, a phenomenon called “children’s warehouses” has emerged since 2010; improvised inappropriate nursery centers in which two caretakers host 30-40 children in a dense space for long hours. Despite the fact that five death cases of toddlers occurred in 2015, and that a budget of 56 million shekels was given to Tel Aviv’s municipality to solve the problem and raise appropriate kindergartens, only 5 kindergartens were built, claiming that no enough spaces were found, and warehouses still exist today. Therefore, the Project realizes the urgency of the above mentioned issue and develops a systematic solution and a strategy to exploit building potentials in these neighborhoods, calling for acting immediately to replace “children warehouses” with appropriate spaces that enhance children’s development. The project zooms into a specific zone in Nave Shanaan as a study case to show one optional design solution for the issue, offering a complex of three buildings: Children live-in light weight tower  , connected to a Nursery Center that includes housing for single mothers and caretakers, built on an existing housing building , and families’ social housing.