Legendary American environmentalist Bill McKibben is paying the region a visit in early September. On Monday, September 7th McKibben will speak at 9.30 AM in Beer Sheva, in Israel’s Negev. Exact location TBA. Born in 1960, McKibben founded the 350.org…
One of the most pressing needs in countries with little open space is to make urban life desirable enough that city folk won’t want to flee to the suburbs. But in Beer Sheva, a strange phenomenon is underfoot – suburbanization…
In Constructing a Sense of Place: Architecture and the Zionist Discourse (Ashgate, 2004), architect and planner Haim Yacobi has compiled a fascinating collection of essays on how the Israeli landscape was born. The book begins with the 1934 Levant Fair,…
According to Lebanon’s Daily Star, the war-ravaged southern town of Bint Jbeil is remaking itself as a suburban summer getaway for expatriates who left over the last three decades of strife. Suburban living has made deep imprints across the Middle…
As a geography Master’s student at Beer Sheva’s Ben-Gurion University, this semester I took a class in environmental law and policy with Alon Tal (we profiled him here). Our final project was to work on a green plan for Rahat,…
Beer Sheva, the long-suffering capital of Israel’s Negev desert, just broke ground on the biggest shopping mall in Israel. Like the other seven malls of Beer Sheva, this $180.5 million complex will continue to suck business out of the dilapidated…
If you’re in the South today and haven’t yet seen An Inconvenient Truth, the Watermelon series of six “Green and Red” lectures at Beer Sheva‘s Ashan Hazman cafe/bookshop kicks off with a movie screening and discussion (in Hebrew) at 7…
If you are planning to be in Beer Sheva next week, make it Thursday and drop by the Earth’s Promise community garden for a festival of Ethiopian culture. Earth’s Promise founder Isaac Hametz started the garden about a year ago…
If you’ve been wondering about the skyscrapers threatening to carve up Tel Aviv, or about the atrociously planned residential towers of Beer Sheva (see right), or even if you just want to hear about urban planning in general, then check…
As mentioned earlier this week on Green Prophet, Beer Sheva’s new mayor Rubik Danilovich has big plans for this city of 200,000 on the northern edge of Israel’s Negev desert. He hopes to rebrand Beer Sheva through hiring a major…
