District Planning and Building Commission South has announced the approval of the overall outline plan for the city Beer Sheva. The plan offers an addition of over 34,000 housing units that will address a population of over 400,000 residents. In addition to the housing units, the plan includes an addition of about four million square meters for employment areas, about three million square meters for industrial areas, about 2.7 million square meters for public buildings and about 370,000 square meters for tourist areas.
The starting point of the plan, according to the plan documents, is that the city is not dense enough: TMA 35 set Be’er Sheva a minimum density of 8 housing units per dunam, while the current average (net) urban density is about 1.5 housing units per dunam. “The large land reserves in its jurisdiction allow, quantitatively, the realization of any development goal, but the plan offers a strengthening of the relative advantage of the city in its vicinity, namely being a provincial capital of a variety of settlements, and the only one among them with signs of urbanity.”
One of the important goals of the plan is to unify the disconnects created by the modernist planning of the city. The intention is that Be’er Sheva currently consists of a collection of detached neighborhoods. The program offers a continuous, climate-adapted, shady street network, with a preference for public transportation and walking at the expense of the private vehicle. The civic center of the city, is defined in the plan documents as a “diamond in the crown.” The intention is to intensify construction in the area, which already includes the City Hall, the District Court, the Government Quarter and the main transportation complex. Reger Boulevard, which for years was the northern entrance to the city, is defined by the plan’s editors as the city’s main apartment.
The plan was prepared by a team of planners led by architects Ami Shinar, Miron Cohen and Linor Lenkin. It should be noted that work on the plan began in 2013, the plan was approved by the District Committee in 2015, the deposit discussion took place in 2017 and the publication for the deposit in 2019.