Smart & Sustainable Urbanism

Hadera Sea Quarter

Master-planned community in Haifa, Israel

©LEITERSDORF BEN-DAYAN

SUSTAINABLE URBANISM

THROUGH SMART DESIGN, LOCALIZED INFRASTRUCTURE, AND COMMUNITY-BASED DATA

BY RAFI RICH

Israeli cities designed for inclusive, long-term growth use dynamic data-based regulations, flexible and mediumscale infrastructure, and cultural-based processes.

Rafi Rich

CEO, SUiTS – Smarter Urban iT & Strategies

Petach Tikva, Israel

Rafi Rich is an architect, urban planner, and co-founder of SUiTS, Smarter Urban iT & Strategies. He has spent 20 years promoting urban innovation, resilience, and sustainability with cities, governments, and organizations through a synergy between technology, data, policy, governance, and community. He also created MidCityLabs, a think tank focused on secondary cities and the built environment of the developing world.

Urban planning—the tools, the regulations, and methods—is the same as it was 100 years ago, and this has to change. Instead of continuing the path of fashionable smart cities, at SUiTS, we focus on fixing and disrupting civic planning. Our process combines governance, policy, regulation, data, and technology with an emphasis on how we can create stakeholder co-creation and co-management of our cities focusing on four key points:

No city can be smart without creating

and maintaining trust. From 2014 to 2016, I worked for the City of Tel Aviv in developing a smart energy and infrastructure road map. After the first stage, we decided we needed pilot projects to understand what we had to do and then scale up.

We chose a neighborhood called Maoz Aviv in the northern part of Tel Aviv with about 500 units and 25,000 people. The buildings are pretty old, and some of them are quite neglected. But people love this place because of how the open spaces and buildings combine with one another.

After we finished the sketches and got the budget, we went to the community to see how we could begin. And the community said no. Why? Because we didn’t include them in the ideas. We didn’t ask what they wanted or how they would create such a system. They wanted to be a partner.

Urban innovation should be based on the local culture and community and substantial problems and opportunities.

We have to determine the problems and opportunities within a specific area.

In 2018, we were part of a plan for Ofakim, one of the poorest cities in Israel. As part of the housing strategy, the Israeli government is creating large communities between 5,000 and 10,000 units throughout the country. The mayor of Ofakim asked me, “How can you make sure no one will be left behind?”

We created a connection between the old and new parts of the city by designing a circular road as a sort of “necklace of innovation,” using the route for reskilling innovation hubs, networking places, and data hubs connected through a system of shared autonomous vehicle lanes.

We also designed a network of secondary roads that would enable last-mile lanes for micromobility and walking, and all of these were connected with broadband.

Cities should implement policies that

inspire collaborative innovation. We might have the greatest ideas, but if we don’t find a way to inspire people to collaborate and change their behavior, we won’t create change.

We designed a neighborhood in Hadera with 12,500 units, 1,500 hotel rooms, and a vast commercial strip. It was dubbed the smartest and most sustainable master plan in Israel. Of course, we have all the solutions you would dream of in a smart city, but we also had to create a sense of community.

Plans should reflect uncertainty through

data-based flexibility. We might have great solutions for today, but they might not be relevant tomorrow. So plans must be flexible and based on data. In the existing way of planning, we have a master plan that defines the land use, guidelines, and conditions for development. Then we go into detailed plans; then we design our buildings. But we added a step: evaluating the infrastructure, services, and use of these services based on data collected from the community. We then assess the impact, user engagement, and demand and change the urban design, land use, etc., accordingly.