No abstract

Planning theory, laws, and systems are essentially procedural in that they focus on the process of planning and decision-making but do not deal with the substance of the decisions nor their impact on cities. They emphasize the role of the many (f)actors that shape the built environment rather than the resultant properties of the built environment itself. This is true both for the rational comprehensive theory of the 1960s and the 1990s postmodern theory of communicative planning theory. In this article we claim that current planning weaknesses, on the one hand, and viewing cities as complex self-organizing systems, on the other, require re-linking planning theory, law, and administration to the substantive qualitative relations between the various urban elements. We then introduce, first, an example for theorizing such an `Urban Code' that turns the spatial relations into a planning rule and, second, a suggestion for a planning system that is responsive to these qualitative relations and is capable of updating them.

To enable better social integration, intergeneration programs should be developed to decrease ageism, and in order to make communities more age-friendly, there is need to facilitate accessibility to services and public spaces.

The Israeli planning system, like many other Western systems, is a regulatory system, meaning that statutory land-use plans are attempts at both setting long-term planning policy and defining planning rights. However, planning in Israel faces a growing gap between its official structure and what is actually implemented. Mainly, an inconsistency exists between the formal top-to-bottom approach of the system and the flexible dynamics that occur in practice. In this paper I focus on the prevalent local zoning amendment procedure and examine its background as well as its implications. Based on this, the paper claims that in Israel, the tension between certainty and flexibility in planning creates a spatially disturbed behavior, which actively tests the bans and limits of existing possibilities.