Meirav Aharon - GutmanTechnion - Israel Institute of Technology | technion · Architecture
Meirav Aharon - Gutman
PhD
About
37
Publications
6,578
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
118
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Meirav Aharon - Gutman currently works at the Architecture, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. Meirav does research in Spatial inequality
Advance technologies as new medium for social impact assessment (SIA)
Social planning
Urban sociology
Ethnography in cities
Crime and terror
Cities and religious
Additional affiliations
October 2005 - October 2010
Publications
Publications (37)
Time is the main axis for understanding the functional, economic, and social aspects of self-organized redevelopment. When such processes are intensive and are conducted contemporaneously by large numbers of urban agents on different spatial and temporal scales and as a result of different motivations, urban planning is fragmented into multiple sim...
Numerous studies have discussed urban regeneration from the perspective of the displacement of long-time residents in disadvantaged communities. However, under certain circumstances, urban regeneration occurring on the outskirts of high-demand areas can enable middle-class and lower-class apartment owners to leverage their apartments as financial a...
Complexity theory has become a conceptual framework and a source of inspiration for Smart City initiatives. In addition to many other conceptions, the Urban Digital Twin (UDT) became both a concept and a tool for generating the revolutionary act of data-driven 3D city modeling. Indeed, the UDT has increased the ability of planners to make decisions...
Urban regeneration and its implications for issues such as housing, gentrification, and homeownership have been researched by numerous theorists, practitioners, and policy makers. However, this article challenges the perception that urban regeneration is primarily a policy driver that leads to the displacement of residents, and by proposing an inve...
The urban research community tends to view gentrification-based displacement as the primary demographic impact of urban regeneration. This study reopens the discussion by asking whether urban regeneration in Israel does indeed work to the detriment of local homeowners, or whether it expands their opportunities for social mobility. By employing a mi...
Whereas the literature largely assumes that original residents are displaced from their communities following the implementation of market-oriented housing regeneration, this study indicates that such housing regeneration can also enable lower-middle class homeowners to turn their homes into an economic springboard. First, we argue that the social...
This article explores the spatial and social relationship between theatre and the city through the case study of Acre, a mixed peripheral city in Israel. Despite the numerous studies dealing with artistic activity in the city, we still lack a clear, systematic method for understanding art’s role in urban space. This study attempts to overcome this...
Virtual reality environments have created new opportunities for visualizing social spaces in three dimensions, which enable addition of a vertical dimension. This creates a topographical landscape based on socio-economic characteristics of the urban system. Quantification of the socio-economic disparities between city pairs in relation to the spati...
This article offers exploration of one spatial aspect of crime in the divided city: the disproportionate concentration of crime events along the Jerusalem’s former socio-historical border (known as ‘Green Line’) that is clearly reflected in a spatial analysis of crime. Offering insight into this phenomenon, an ethnographic investigation reveals the...
Based on the case study of a Fringe theatre festival in a peripheral city in Israel, this article identifies and analyzes a moment of change in power relations between a peripheral city and the country's central city. It offers an alternative perspective to urban discourse, which analyzes art projects in peripheral cities as duplicating colonial re...
In recent years, Lefebvre's concept of rhythm analysis has been implied in various ways to critically examine how rhythms are formed, disrupted, and reformed through different urban venues. One theme that this body of knowledge has yet to comprehensively examine, however, is how changes in the urban sphere impact the spatial rhythms of religious in...
This study explores the relationship between art and urban boundaries using the case study of a fringe theatre festival in the Israeli mixed-city of Acre. While mixed cities today are understood as agglomerations of enclaves, maintained and reinforced by boundaries, urban designers and artists have used art as a culture-led regeneration strategy th...
Based on fieldwork conducted in a seam line neighbourhood in Jerusalem, this article contributes to the ongoing discourse on art in public spaces as a generator of urban renewal. The article suggests that re-thinking this convention from a Global South perspective would enable us to critically discuss the relation between art in public spaces and u...
By employing Max Weber's concept of objective possibility, this paper offers a theoretical conceptualization of a methodological approach to studying roads not taken in diversified cities. The paper incorporates Weber's insight from the viewpoint of socio-historical analysis into an analysis of urban environments. In search of 'other' possibilities...
By employing Max Weber’s concept of objective possibility, this paper offers a theoretical conceptualization of a methodological approach to studying roads not taken in diversified cities. The paper incorporates Weber’s insight from the viewpoint of socio-historical analysis into an analysis of urban environments. In search of ‘other’ possibilities...
Recent years have seen the Israeli state investing considerable efforts in the alleviation of unprecedentedly high inter-regional inequalities. Improved transportation networks intended to better connect peripheral residents to centrally located opportunities have been at the heart of this policy known as ‘periphery cancellation’. In this article,...
This article tackles a gap in our understanding of holy cities by proposing an approach that accommodates both the centrality of these cities in a religious sense and their socioeconomic peripherality from state-capitalist system perspective. Through the combined use of urban survey and ethnographic fieldwork in the case of the holy city of Safed,...
This article explores the geopolitical significance of public religious institutions and the ways in which it has corresponded to changes in their urban environment. Based on a spatial analysis and ethnography of urban synagogues in the northern Israeli mixed city of Acre that were established and constructed by communities of Jewish immigrants fro...
ערי קודש מייצרות מרכזיות דתית ומהוות אבן שואבת מבחינה כלכלית, פוליטית וחברתית. עם הקמתה של מדינת ישראל חל שינוי במעמדן של ערי הקודש שבה והן הפכו לערים פריפריאליות. המושגים היחסיים "מרכז" ו"פריפריה" איבדו מכוחם והפכו למושגים אבסולוטיים, תלויי תרבות, המתארים מציאות עירונית ובה בעת משעתקים אותה. באמצעות מחקר אתנוגרפי עירוני שנערך בקרב חסידות ברסלב בצפ...
דיון על מקורות כוחה של תל אביב במסגרת נייר עמדה שגובש ע"י המרכז לעירוניות ים תיכונית, בת ים והוצג בפני הוועדה אשר אשר דנה באיחוד בת ים ותל אביב
In this paper we examine a struggle waged by production line workers at a formerly state-owned factory located in Israel’s northern periphery. Intially an attempt to prevent the closure of the privatized factory, it soon became an all-out struggle through which production line workers deployed their peripheral location and ethno- class identities t...
This article describes and analyzes the social construction of the urban space of an immigrant city, with a special focus on ethnic enclaves, by bringing together the languages of urban design and urban-social research. The case of Ashdod has brought me to question the existing theoretical toolbox of social research, with its discourse of segregati...
This paper aims to open a new space for understanding political culture “after orientalism”, in polycultural – liberal societies. Relying on 3 years of ethnographic research (2001-4) at the Likud chapter in immigrant city of Ashdod, I am presenting here ethnography of citizenship in action. My argument is that at the meeting point between citizensh...
Studies from the field of cultural sociology often examine the production of ‘high culture’ and how it shapes social inequality. The connection between high culture and social inequality learn from the experience of hegemonic-urban elite groups (DiMaggio:1991). This article offer ethnography of a plan of second generation of Jewish immigrants from...
עיר הלאום המודרנית אשדוד רוויה במופעים תרבותיים-פוליטיים הנתפסים כאישור נוסף לתיאוריה הרב תרבותית. במאמר זה, הנשען על המסורת של סוציולוגיה ואנתרופולוגיה אורבנית, תחום דעת המבקש לקשור בין מבנים פיזיים למבנים תרבותיים, אטען שחרשי התרבות, מפיקי הזיכרון מקרב הקבוצות החברתיות באשדוד אינם מבקשים להיבדל וליצור חלופה לנרטיב המרכזי. שלא כצפוי, פעולות הזיכרו...
Zoning was central to Modernist town planning. In Israel, it is impossible to understand the spatial culture without first understanding both the rationale of zoning and the life strategies of the immigrants who populated the towns. This paper outlines the relationship between planning theory and the practices of the inhabitants of Ashdod, Israel....
Both politicians and academic researchers have focused on the Oslo peace agreements, generally emphasizing the “New Middle
East” and “Transnationalism.” Less attention has been paid to social and economic changes affected by the process of peace-making.
This paper examines the reality that was created from below and asks what the peace process mean...
Projects
Projects (3)
To contribute to the theoretical discourse on urbanism through its
manifestations at the intersection of artistic activity, space, and the public.
2. To add to the empirical knowledge about urbanism in peripheral mixed cities,
and in doing so to join the discussion on other, less known models of urbanism.
3. To propose an interdisciplinary discussion among the social sciences, urban
studies, and art research. This will be done by employing a methodology from
the field of architecture (super-positioning) as a research tool for integrating
data collected by research methods from these (usually) three separated fields
of knowledge.
Social planning is an integral component of the process of town planning, bringing to the table a fundamental analysis of issues such as demography, inequality, health, and family size, to name just a few. However, very often social surveys have little effect on the outcome of town planning. As a result, decisions regarding the future of cities are currently relate primarily to the built environment. Social surveys fail to generate relevant professional infrastructures for shaping spatial policy in a direct and meaningful way.
The aim of the proposed study is to mainstream social planning within the realm of town and regional planning. This will be accomplished by using an innovative technology – the virtual sand table – as a visual means for better understanding spatial-social relations. I claim that advanced technologies, especially the environment of virtual reality (VR), create new opportunities to enrich our toolbox and to better address the challenges of social and spatial integration. The virtual sand table uses a dynamic 3D simulation within a unique laboratory known as VizLab, which facilitates a VR environment with 3D visualization and produces an immersion experience. This simulation will enable the movement of elements and resources in space, while dynamically analysing the significance of real-time actions. Our preliminary results illustrate how this unique 3D modelling system integrates the spatial and the social into a single layer referred to as social topography - a concept we reintroduce here as the visual language of the new dynamic virtual sand table. Thus, the virtual sand table with its strong visual component is bound to become a new medium for social planning that will ensure the consideration of social problems in master plans. This proposal’s innovation lies in bringing together an advanced VR platform with 3D simulations and creating an interface between these and a theory of social planning.
