Our guest is renowned architect and urban planner Prof. Tali Hatuka. She is described as an Israeli architect and urban designer, and teaches in the Faculty of Social Science (and formerly at the Department of Geography, now defunct) at Tel Aviv University. She also directs the Urban Design Laboratory at TAU. Tali is the winner of the 2012 Rechter Prize for Young Architect. She often writes on the connections between spatial design and architecture, social issues and violence, as well as industrial urban planning and ways to insert industry and manufacturing into urban space. Her laboratory seeks to challenge, refine and update knowledge in the field of urban planning, in Israel and around the world. By engaging in housing, employment, urban renewal and urban landscape, the laboratory offers new directions of thought on human living environments. It was founded in 2009 and since its inception, the laboratory has been engaged in refining the knowledge, methods, and toolbox available to the planner, architect, and geographer. Through a process of creative and critical development, the connections between the social and physical aspects of the city are explored and experimental strategies are examined for policymakers in matters of urban planning and design. As a mediation framework between practice and theory, the laboratory serves as a place for the production and dissemination of knowledge and promotes collaborations with authorities, communities, and researchers in the field of urban renewal and design. We discussed the interface between planners and policy makers.

Picture Tali Hatuka - Ofer Vaknin