LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE'S LACUNAS Case Studies of Public Design from Tel Aviv-Jaffa

Urban environmental rehabilitation and urban renewal schemes are significant processes for competing cities’ administrations, developers and citizens. They increase the weight and importance of landscape architecture in the urban planning arena. However, socially vulnerable populations frequently experience urban environmental improvements as a cause to displacement and segregation. Urban scholars conceptualized some of these urban phenomena green/ecological gentrification. Through case studies from Tel Aviv-Jaffa, the paper discuss the share of landscape architecture in socially-challenged schemes, the ethical dilemma between the social and the environmental and the field’s means to envision and evaluate its detrimental social impact.

NAAMA MEISHAR is a Landscape Architect and holds a Ph.D. in philosophy. She teaches in the Landscape Architecture Program in the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa. Her research cover ethics in landscape architectural design and discourse; ethical dilemmas of social and environmental distributions in urban planning; urban environmental histories and landscapes’ political ecology. She has exhibited in architecture and the art world and curated exhibitions in art and landscape architecture. Meishar is a board member of BIMKOM – Planners for Planning Rights, an Israeli human rights organization.