Urban freestyle

As a street artist who grew out of a passion for adding color and form to the gray street, I view the street as a living canvas meant to serve as a central, human, and diverse stage of life. But the street is no longer a street. The monotonous replication of uniform construction has turned it into a predictable and homogeneous space: identical facades stretching endlessly, ground floors stripped of content, sidewalks without shade or greenery, and environments that do not invite lingering or encounter. In recent years, in an attempt to address the challenge of density, a standardized construction model has been applied nationwide, producing streets that do not invite life—streets of mere passage, not experience.

The Site | I chose to locate the project in the Neve David neighborhood of Haifa—a place where I used to paint extensively as a child. Today, those same streets are increasingly neglected as the neighborhood undergoes urban renewal. Neve David reflects the tension between the need to address density and the risk of turning neighborhoods into yet another faceless replication. My personal connection to this place makes it a natural starting point for exploring ways to create dense yet human urbanity—an urbanity that does not erase the neighborhood’s character or reduce it to just another link in the monotonous chain spreading across Israel.

The Vision | The goal is to propose an alternative that prevents Neve David from becoming another repetitive, monotonous neighborhood. I suggest a model of a dense yet dynamic neighborhood, one that relies on the interplay of order and chaos, the multiplication of ground-floor levels, and the creation of diverse spatial passages. The vision is to restore the street to being a true street—a lively, human, and accessible space that sparks interactions and generates a new, inspiring urban experience.