Courses

Urban and Regional Geography

An under-Graduate and Graduate course, Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Israel, 50 students.

The course exposes to students, different perceptions of urban and regional geography, their changes over the years, and their impacts on variegated processes that undergo within urban and regional systems. The classes in course define and discuss basic concepts that regard urban and regional geography and demonstrate them through conspicuous examples regarding Israel and the world.

The topics of the course include urbanization and urban development in the develop and the developing world, the industrial city, the city under the post-industrial era, the impact of information technology on contemporary urban systems, globalization processes and their influence on the urban space, the regional city and the reciprocal relations between the city and the region, the metropolis and the megalopolis. The discussions in the class emphasize the significance of urban and regional planning issues, that regard the major topics in which the course deals with.

Land-Use Planning – Principles and Quantifying

A graduate compulsory course, Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Israel, 60 students.

The course focuses on introducing systems of land uses and their functioning at the urban and regional scale. It instructs the reciprocal relations that exist between various urban systems and their land use patterns; The course also teaches and emphasizes the relationships between land use and the main stakeholders in space, such as households, firms, and institutions; The effect of the socio-economic structure of the population and its employment base on the demand for different land uses, and on the land uses’ spatial location.  And finally, the course instructs the role that the planning program (‘Programa’) has in the overall apparatus of physical planning. Under these variegated topics, the course provides tools and planning methods used to allocate and determine the location and functioning of various land uses at different spatial levels. The course’s methods combine theory and empirical demonstrations that regard the preparation of land uses’ programs in the space.

Planning Studio No. 4: Metropolitan and Regional Planning.

A compulsory studio course, Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Israel. Graduate, 60 students. Responsible lecture: Professor Karel Martens.

A final studio in the program of Urban and Regional Studies, where students deal with the strategic planning of regions and metropolitan areas. The emphasis in the course is placed on coordinated planning, that regards social, economic, physical, institutional and natural contexts and systems. The course also deals with the need for considering concentration and decentralization decision-making apparatuses, and competences of implementation.