Sha’ananut: From Center to Periphery to Center – Urban Planning from Tactics to Strategy in Beit She’an

The common strategic planning process today, characterized by top-down planning, presents many challenges, including disconnection from the space and community, broad influence of external political and economic factors, loss of vision validity and relevance due to the lengthy process, and diminished planning quality.

In many cities around the world, groups of planners and city residents have refused to accept this reality. Movements have emerged, and have developed diverse approaches to revitalizing urban spaces and improving the immediate quality of life and community engagement in urban processes. Tactical urbanism, a method attempting to overcome existing planning difficulties, offers a gradual, small-scale, short-term planning approach to create rapid change, while testing interventions in real-time. This approach focuses on the specific place and community, aiming to build partnerships in both the planning and execution phases to create social capital and influence long-term planning.

My project focuses on the city of Beit She’an, a city with a rich history, re-established in 1949 as an immigrant transit camp, and declared a city in 1999. Since then, it has experienced stagnation in public space development, which residents see as a permanent, unchangeable reality, and is reflected in the high neglect of public areas and a lack of belief in a better future for the city and its residents. The “Sha’an.not” project focuses on the old city center and northern employment zone, explores different global planning approaches, and adapts them to the local space and its characteristics. Based on these approaches, I propose a planning toolkit for tactical interventions in the city’s space, in order to provide the static city with an opportunity to take its first steps toward urban improvement, community strengthening, and a new path forward.