Reading the city
through data.
An urban design studio at the SCE Negev Department of Architecture, exploring the city through data, digital tools and design. Combining GIS, spatial analysis, simulation and speculative design, students investigate urban transformations across the Global South and translate research into spatial strategies and design interventions.
How can an architectural reading of Global South urbanism be built from spatial data and architectural representation — and what does it reveal?
A position, and a way of reading.
Not from theoretical definitions, but from the urban space as it exists: its fabrics, its systems, and the relations between built environment, infrastructure, society and ecology.
Data and drawing are one process of reading, not two stages.
Read spatially: population density and multiplicity · institutional mistrust and uncertainty · inequality · spatial and economic disparities · informal and traditional practices.
What the studio
produces.
Twelve groups, twelve cities, one folded sheet each — same size, same fold, same frame.
Move the pointer across the sheet to turn it · Drag the bar to open it
47 × 32 cm · 6 columns × 2 rows, printed both sides.
Read across
the twelve.
Thirteen themes recur across the twelve sheets. Every dot is a sheet that took one up, in the colour that group printed its cover in — and every dot opens it.
The studio
Urban design here is a research tool, not only a planning action. What emerges is not a model to replicate, but a spatial condition that lets the existing urban order be reworked.
Course
Urban Design in the Digital Age · Third year
Department of Architecture · SCE Negev
Department