Healing the Patchwork: Landscape Strategies for Israel’s Fragmented Housing Models

Since its establishment, the State of Israel has experienced rapid demographic growth, leading to continuous emergency-oriented planning and construction policies. Fast housing solutions, based on repetitive planning templates, often resulted in cataloged, enclosed urban environments detached from their local context. While such patterned planning provides efficient, low-cost, and rapid solutions, it has also created a “patchwork city” – a mosaic of fragmented residential environments, each with a distinct spatial character, disconnected from one another, reinforcing and perpetuating Israel’s social divides.
Givat Olga, located on the outskirts of Hadera and surrounded by rich landscape systems, embodies the weaknesses of template-based planning. The neighborhood’s gradual development through Israel’s three dominant planning models (the Linear Template of public housing blocks, the Carpet Model of detached private houses, and the Complex Model of inward-facing high-rise tower complexes) has produced fragmented open spaces, unequal access to urban services, and neglect, resulting in spatial inequality.
Now, with large-scale residential densification and urban renewal plans underway, Givat Olga faces a unique opportunity to shift to a new planning paradigm. This project proposes to weave together the disparate patterns through an urban-landscape infrastructure, reinforcing the relationship between community, landscape, and environment, while laying down a flexible “soft” framework to absorb new populations.
By tightening weak spatial links between fragmented built areas, highlighting local spatial qualities, and optimizing urban systems for demographic growth, the project introduces a new model: local, sustainable, and spatially just – a reimagined vision of Israeli residential environments.