Urban Healing
Most of the medical centers in Israel are located in the urban fabric. These medical complexes are mostly situated at the interface of residential, commercial, and employment areas. However, despite their central location, they are enclosed and isolated from the city, acting as a barrier to surrounding neighborhoods’ urban continuity. This project will explore the relationship between medical complexes and the city, and how to synergistically integrate medical complexes into the urban environment, to create rich urban spaces and places where medical care coexists harmoniously with nature and with the human environment.
The traditional paradigm of the hospital as a building or complex that is isolated from the urban environment is beginning to change. Studies show that the population living around hospitals is often marginalized and does not have access to adequate medical care. Despite the physical connection between the hospital and the neighborhood, it does not translate into addressing the neighborhood’s needs. The approach that pushes patients and the elderly out of consciousness and the urban space exacerbates social and economic gaps and harms the urban space. The built environment is not just a landscape; it is an active player in our lives. Buildings, streets and public spaces all affect our behavior, our mood, and our health. The hospital, as a medical center, is an especially sensitive focus for these effects. Architectural solutions that connect the city to medical centers have the potential to optimally rehabilitate patients, while also rehabilitating urban “edge spaces” and generating urban and social resilience.
The project reviews the typological evolution of the hospital and the relationship between the development of medicine and technology and the design of hospitals, and its effects on the surrounding city. The evolution of medicine has influenced the planning of public space and the functional design of hospitals. In this project, I propose a paradigm shift, in line with technological development, towards a “flexible” and dynamic design that reaches out and integrates with the urban space. A hospital cannot be perceived as a static element, but rather as a living and uncontrollable organism that is influenced by the space and influences it. In this project, I study the space of the Bat Galim neighborhood in Haifa and the needs of Rambam Hospital which is located in it, and propose urban renewal that integrates urban spaces that will meet the needs of the neighborhood alongside the needs of the hospital and the city, while safeguarding the privacy of patients and intimate public spaces within the neighborhood and along the coastline.
