Israel’s urban and settled space is in a state of flux, replete with tensions and contradictions. On the one hand, worsening trends of inter-communal hostility and segregation can be seen in the cities, alongside repeated calls to divide the space among separate identity groups. On the other hand, various groups in Israeli society actually share public space, and as a result of processes of internal migration and changes in the labor market, many urban spaces in Israel are becoming more heterogenous on multiple parameters: national, religious, class, and ethnic. The deep diversity of Israeli society produces many challenges for life in a shared space, at the center of which are totally different approaches to public space, privacy, the body and gender relations, worship, consumption patterns, and the meaning of religious and national symbols. However, despite the aforesaid complexity, alongside struggles for resources and control, the intersections between the fragments of Israeli society in the urban space also generate unique coalitions, hybrid identities, and new communities of meaning. Therefore, the spatial diversity in Israel presents not only challenges and difficulties but also opportunities for social and political change.

Consequently, the question of how to manage shared life in Israel requires thorough examination, both theoretical and empirical. Most of the dominant theories of urbanism that deal with cities and diversity sprang up in Anglo-American contexts and in liberal-leaning spaces. As a result, they include mainly post-colonial research prisms or prisms that focus on race and class relations. These prisms fall short at identifying the variety of logics of global urban space in general and of Israel in particular. They fall short especially when applied in the context of the multiple social categories in Israel and the deep cosmological rifts between and within these categories. These rifts, linked to the axes between religion and secularization, liberalism and conservatism, elitism and populism, and so on, are not addressed in the existing interpretive frameworks whose point of departure is a liberal view of space and social diversity. Therefore, the Israeli reality calls not only for an expansion of the existing interpretive frameworks but also for an addition to the interpretive toolbox of alternative frameworks, such as the post-secular perspective or the post-liberal framework of thought.

On the basis of this rationale, this research group addresses the urban and settled space in Israel and the social diversity within it, with the aim of developing empirical research and a new, relevant theoretical interpretive framework.