Geography Department Seminar: The new urban relations of residential large urban developments (LUDs)

Abstract:

The unprecedented mode of large-scale urban developments (LUDs) requires vigilant attention. The embedded challenges engendered by such a scale of urban development can be unpacked by examining residential LUDs. This paper presents residential LUDs not only as the new urban policy but also as distinctively different from the surrounding residential urban fabric, thus constituting new socio-spatial urban relations and a new urban experience. It engages with recent frameworks that are centered on the new dominant dimensions of height and volume of LUDs but focuses on the processes and the socio-spatial relations that generate these distinctive urban spaces and have produced them. This presentation, then, will identify the forces, actors, and components that are involved in different aspects of residential LUDs and to examine the external and internal socio-spatial relations that are generated by this form of development from the perspective of envisioning of space (by planners) and the production of space (by developers and users). More specifically, this research portrays the new living experience that characterize living in high-rise residential projects built in the last two decades in cities in Israel, experience that stretches from bodily experience, to spatial practice, and to new relations with people and space. Data collection is based on morphological data (i.e., GIS, plans, and aerial photos) and textual data (i.e., interviews with planners, developers, residents, and minutes of planning committees meeting minutes).  The research innovates in its delineation of the phenomenon of LUDs by proposing residential LUDs as a meaningful unit for analysis and by looking at residential LUDs as a unit with mass and volume rather than as focusing on their height alone. Moreover, this study unpacks the heterologous socio-spatial relations introduced by residential LUDs and are produced by them and offers a prism for understanding the city and urban development in a different way.

Seminar Organizer: Prof. Tovi Fenster