CLIMATE CHALLANGESNew Lab Studies How Cities Can Survive Extreme Climates

By Yulia Karra

The Negev Urban Research Lab (NUR) in Beersheva, the unofficial capital of the Negev desert, is the first of its kind in Israel. 

Although NUR is one of 10 similar labs operating worldwide under the MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s City Science Network, it is the only one located in a desert.

The new lab is a collaboration between the City Science Group, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), the School of Design and Architecture at Sami Shamoon College of Engineering, and several government ministries.

Urbanism in Extreme Climate
“It was a cross-office decision to fund this as a center for urban innovation in the Negev specifically,” says the lab’s director, Merav Idit Battat, an architect. 

Through advanced technology, NUR will focus on providing solutions to urban and spatial issues in all parts of the country. But the geographical location of the lab will put an emphasis on solving “immediate and direct” problems facing Beersheva and the surrounding areas.

“The problems that we will solve here are going to affect a lot of cities globally because we’re talking about challenges like extreme climate, population density and multiculturalism,” says Yonatan Cohen, NUR’s director of technology.

Cohen, also an architect by trade, spent a decade doing research at MIT. 

“Currently our focus is understanding urbanism within this environment and developing coping tools that are scalable and can help address similar problems in other places around the world as well,” adds Cohen.

Made in the Shade
Battat says that the lab’s mission is not necessarily to solve all the problems, which she says are “way too big,” but rather “to bring together data and technology, so that we’ll have more tools to make better decisions in the future that will improve the lives of the people in the area.”

Battat and Cohen tell ISRAEL21c that apart from climate analysis, the lab is also learning from existing architecture in the Negev, both modern and historic. 

Beersheva’s Old City is comprised almost entirely of structures built during the 400-year rule of the Ottoman Empire.

“The grids in the Old City are tilted 45 degrees, northeast to southwest,” explains Cohen.

“This creates constant shade; the buildings are also all at the very edge of the block so you get additional shade. The streets are rather narrow to create ventilation.”

Cohen notes that creating shade is an integral part of city planning in a desert climate. 

“Obviously we want as many trees as possible, but there’s only a subset of species of trees that would flourish in extreme weather.”

He adds that they are also analyzing construction materials that would best mitigate and absorb heat while leaving as small a carbon footprint as possible. 

“The goal is to re-check the data year after year to make sure that the decisions we made at day one were correct, or see how we can tweak them better.”

What is a Well-Planned City?
“Tel Aviv and Haifa are very advanced with technology; Tel Aviv is comparable to New York in the way they run the technological operations,” explains Cohen.

“But you can’t build in Beersheva the same way you would build in Tel Aviv,” he notes, adding that different geographical areas call for different planning approaches. 

Cohen says it is therefore hard to determine whether a city is planned well without thorough research.

“Jerusalem, for instance, is very well planned; but that’s considering the fact that there’s been a lot of planning, from the Romans to the present day,” he explains. 

Battat says that cities with a rich history often have to integrate older structures into their new plans, which makes the issue of good or bad city planning relative. 

“Everything evolves, and each planning period represents the time it was built in, the fashion and the discourse of the time. Some planning can survive for centuries, and some would make adaptation in the future very difficult.” 

Disaster Planning
Recent wildfires in Los Angeles raised questions worldwide about not only climate change, but also the issue of disaster planning for urban areas to minimize potential damage. 

“I just heard a lecture yesterday about how you plan cities for disasters like a nuclear bomb,” notes Battat. 

“You plan for earthquakes, you plan for war, you plan for floods, you plan for everything. But sometimes it turns out you either planned badly or the world changed. Los Angeles was probably a mix of both, but we’re not fire experts,” she explains. 

Because it’s impossible to make a city catastrophe-proof, the best option is to simply build more resilient cities.

“The city is a dynamic creature; it’s changing all the time,” says Battat. “I think we shouldn’t focus on how to think of everything from the beginning, but how to create a more adaptive city over time.”

Yulia Karra is staff writer/reporter at ISRAEL21c. This article is published courtesy of Israel21c.