Planetizen Newswire
Keep up with essential planning news and commentary, delivered to your inbox every Monday and Thursday.
Israel
If vaccinations are key to ending the pandemic, Israel may get there first as it has the highest rate by far of any nation. Paradoxically, it also has the world's second-highest rate of daily new COVID-19 cases.
The New York Times
Coronavirus infection, hospitalizations and most recently, deaths, are declining, but public health experts warn that more transmissible variant strains of the coronavirus threaten to overwhelm hospitals in the next few months.
CIDRAP News
Data from millions of cellphone customers will be used to locate and alert individuals who may have come into contact with people carrying the virus.
The New York Times
Just in time for United Nations World Wildlife Day, a new initiative in Israel has launched to identify deadly road crossings for animals by harnessing data collected from the Waze app.
The Jerusalem Post
Over the last several decades, researchers have examined how our cities deplete natural resources and change the climate and ecosystems of their surrounding areas. But new evidence shows that such impacts aren't a purely modern phenomenon.
Smithsonian
An historic agreement between Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians aims to slow the disappearance of the Dead Sea and stabilize the supply of drinking water for all three groups.
Los Angeles Times
Last month, hackers were able to shut down Haifa's Carmel Tunnels toll road, a major thoroughfare in Israel's third-largest city, in two days of cyber attacks. The attacks should come as a warning for our increasingly automated infrastructure.
Jalopnik
More than five years ago, the collapse of overinflated housing markets brought the global economy to its knees. Though some countries are still struggling to recover, the bubbles are back in others. Here are 5 of the world's largest housing bubbles.
Quartz
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is bound up in intersecting issues of place, history and geography, among other things. Two Israeli architects believe architecture and urban design can help lead to an agreeable solution.
Smithsonian
A Palestinian village near Jerusalem boasts old stone-walled farming terraces and irrigation channels from Roman times, but planners of Israel's separation barrier in the West Bank want to build a route through the rare historical landscape.
The Washington Post
JoAnn Greco explores Tel Aviv's trove of neglected Bauhaus treasures, which date to the growth of the brand-new Israeli city as a haven for Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.
The Washington Post
Over the past two years, German funding and Israeli philanthropy led to the construction of solar installations for Palestinians living in "Area C" in the West Bank. Now Israel says the panels are illegal and wants them demolished.
Spiegel Online
New details and a visualization from Cornell University's winning proposal to create a "game-changing" applied sciences and technology campus on New York's Roosevelt Island.
BetaBeat
Israel has announced the approval of 1,100 housing units to be constructed in occupied East Jerusalem, which is claimed by the Palestinians as their future capital.
Al Jazeera
Amid the backdrop of Mahmoud Abbas' application for Palestinian statehood, Jesse Fox critiques the Israeli premier for his antiquated plan to fast track sprawling suburban developments into Israel's rapidly diminishing open spaces.
Sustainable City blog
A proposed 20-mile bridge would span the Red Sea to connect Egypt and Saudi Arabia -- connecting Arab states and reducing reliance on land passage through Israel.
Der Spiegel
The Israeli kibbutz, long a bastion of modest communal living, is being co-opted by suburban-style development that wants the benefits of socialist coexistence and single-family homes, writes reporter Shanee Shiloh in Ha'aretz.
Ha'aretz
A landscape urbanism biennale in an unlikely suburb of Tel Aviv offers its working class citizens a look how their city can change for the better.
The Architect's Newspaper
Urban Fabric, a landscape architecture and urban design firm in Israel, uses recycled tiles, benches and more in their park designs.
Ha'aretz
Capitalism and bourgeois values built the city of Tel Aviv, which stands today as an outlier in Israel, according to this article.
City Journal