About
28
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Introduction
A Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell Tech, researching the social effects of urban renewal projects on the elderly population. During my PhD I served as a lecturer at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, based in Haifa. My PhD explored the linkage between urban renewal and art and the manner in which local identity, spatial (in)justice and social (ex-in)clusion are forged or deconstructed by artistic activity in cities. More specifically, I focus on artistic interventions in contested cities and the ways in which they affect and are affected by urban segregation patterns and boundaries. I combine my research interest with my background as an architect and artist. Graduated summa cum laude BA and MSc in Architecture and Town Planning from the Technion IIT.
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (28)
Based on our research characterizing New York City (NYC)’s
pandemic urbanism by exploring its new sidewalk ballet, this
chapter ponders the future of NYC after the COVID-19 pandemic.
We focused on this sidewalk ballet to capture the experience
of being in the city during the first year of the pandemic
and analysed changes to the sidewalk and urban...
Situated and shared experiences can motivate community members to plan shared action, promoting community engagement. We deployed and evaluated a communal extended-reality (CXR) bus tour that depicts the possible impacts of flooding and climate change. This paper describes the results of seven community engagement sessions with a total of N = 74 me...
This research turns the spotlight to the deregulation of once publicly funded affordable housing. Through a microsimulation that follows the conversion from affordable to market-rate units on Roosevelt Island New York, we estimate the expected demographic changes each year between 1976 and 2070. The simulation combines information from the American...
This study examines motivations, definitions, methods and challenges of evaluating the social impacts of smart city technologies and services. It outlines concepts of social impact assessment and discusses how social impact has been included in smart city evaluation frameworks. Thematic analysis is used to investigate how social impact is addressed...
This paper presents an empirical and experimental investigation into the mineralogical content within earth materials and its role in building and human metabolism.
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...
The COVID-19 pandemic, travel restrictions, and social distancing measures have made it difficult to observe, monitor, or manage urban life. To capture the experience of being in New York City during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, we used a novel method of remote ethnography to interview people who were walking the city. We developed the...
This article explores and characterizes the pandemic urbanism of NYC during the first year of COVID-19. It analyzes changes to the sidewalk and the urban lifestyle using a novel method of remote ethnography: the integrated use of Zoom video conferencing and GPS smartphone tracking to interview participants as they walked and filmed the city. The da...
This article challenges neoliberal urbanism discourse by asking: How can neoliberal urban redevelopment leave room for the social? It joins the research community that explores the tensions between neoliberal urbanism and socially-oriented development. To this end, it observes Roosevelt Island (RI) as an example of a neighborhood within the neolibe...
The privatization of once publicly-funded affordable housing is the primary tool for preserving and maintaining affordable housing. This process, however, is quietly creating urban migration patterns that are altering the demographic profile of cities with cumulative change that we cannot fully estimate at this stage. There is growing need for a gr...
The Roosevelt Island Digital Twin is a smart planning tool
which combines a 3D model of the physical characteristic of
the island (buildings, roads, parks, etc.), with socio-economic
data and demographic information. It is a virtual
representation of the island with layers of data and analysis
that can be added to physical visualizations. The model...
The effectiveness of social distancing as a disease-slowing measure is dependent on the degree of compliance that individuals demonstrate to such orders. In this ongoing research, we study outdoor pedestrian activity in New York City, specifically using (a) video streams gathered from public traffic cameras (b) dashcam footage from vehicles driving...
Informed by pioneering urban sociologist Robert Park, this study proposes a new layer of investigation of urban practices: the analysis of art projects. The unique story of Ashdod, a coastal city in Israel’s southern periphery, made it a fascinating case study for Project Ashdod, a multiscale art intervention. Ashdod, Israel’s first planned city, w...
An applied research that produces a toolbox for decision makers.
Developing a data driven tool for visualizing and predicting the
socio-economic implications of urban redevelopment processes using
3D Geo-spatial, Agent Based Model.
As I write these lines while working remotely from my 23 rd floor apartment on Cornell-Tech's Roosevelt Island campus, I gaze out at the surreal emptiness of the Queensboro Bridge during the COVID19 outbreak. The cherry blossoms are in full bloom, a handful of go-getters are taking a morning walk on the water promenade, and the tram just left the t...
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...
A theatrical event in which the audience becomes participant in the research and the research tool serves as a mechanism for organizing the performance. Within it the boundaries between exhibition, representation, story, dance and research blur. During the performance, the participants' fear stories are interwoven with the researcher's fear story,...
The common perspective on centre–periphery power relations views central cities as the source of cultural authority and legitimacy, the influence of which peripheral cities passively accept. By following theatre artists’ trajectories in the peripheral Israeli city of Acre, the article challenges this perception of the periphery as fundamentally inf...
This is a socio-spatial research that explores the reciprocal relationship between art, urban space and the public., It suggests that this three-headed intersection, forms a conceptual framework for deciphering the unique urbanism of the city in which they takes place. The research expends the theoretical discourse regarding this relationship beyon...
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...
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...
As part of the DPU summerLab workshop series, the workshop “Inhabiting Edges” took place in Nicosia, Cyprus, during September 2017. The workshop was led by Camila Cociña and Ricardo Martén (DPU) and Silvia Covarino (Girne American University), and aimed to explore and critically understand the history and politics of Cyprus’ borders, navigating the...
As part of the DPU summerLab workshop series, the workshop “Inhabiting Edges” took place in Nicosia, Cyprus, during September 2017. The workshop was led by Camila Cociña and Ricardo Martén (DPU) and Silvia Covarino (Girne American University), and aimed to explore and critically understand the history and politics of Cyprus’ borders, navigating the...
