Tel Aviv Coastal Strip Program

Strategic design for a regenerative urban coastline

Role:Urban Strategy & Program Development (in-house architect, Tel Aviv Municipality)

Scope: Urban Masterplanning & Design

Site Area: 14 km (8.7 miles)

Client: Tel Aviv–Yafo Municipality

Location: Tel Aviv coastline

Context

Tel Aviv’s coastline is one of the most symbolically charged and physically contested stretches of urban space in Israel.
At once public and privatized, ecological and built, sacred and touristic - it demanded a new kind of thinking: not a masterplan, but a living framework.

As in-house architect in the city’s urban planning division, I co-led the conceptual and strategic development of the program alongside architect Rotem Trebitsky (then municipal colleague, now CEO of the Israeli Institute for Innovation).
We collaborated with Prof. Yasha Grobman, who was commissioned by the city to contribute ecological, marine, and systemic insight into the program’s spatial proposals.

Our aim was not to design a vision from above - but to listen from below.

User Experience & Role

My core responsibility was to ensure that the proposed public realm would feel welcoming, legible, and humane.
From strategic program zoning to fine-grained decisions such as where rest points occur, how different uses interface, and what rhythms the user experiences while moving along the shore - my work focused on designing the how, not only the what.

I led the interior-functional logic of many proposed elements: choosing materials that age gracefully near salt and sun, proposing informal use zones without fences, and sketching temporary structures that feel essential - not imposed. The coastline was not a place to frame. It was a continuum to participate in.

Strategy

Rather than impose a linear narrative, we worked with distributed, site-specific layers:
micro-ecologies, user behaviors, infrastructural conflicts, sensory thresholds.

The result was a modular system of interventions, tuned to the varying DNA of each segment of coastline:

Floating decks, snorkeling trails, marine classrooms
Restored dunes and reef habitats
Soft mobility paths and ephemeral urban installations
Shaded resting points, civic water access, sensory experiences that shifted with tide and season

The coast became not a background - but a collaborator.

Outcome

The project reframed the coast as a civic ecology:
a place that teaches, hosts, absorbs, and evolves.
Its value lies not in grand gestures, but in the softness between them.

We offered the city a new grammar -one where urban design listens as much as it speaks.
Where sand and stone, people and tide, are part of the same negotiated space.

It is not a promenade. It is a conversation - between sea and citizen, time and tide.