תשתית ותרבות: הזכות לצמוח

How can Arab cities grow in ways that strengthen their connection to the land and make local identity and residents’ everyday lives the foundation of their urban expansion? The project begins with a reading of the transformations that have shaped the Galilee landscape, tracing how infrastructure, afforestation, nature reserves, and settlement development have influenced the expansion of Arab cities and their relationship with their surroundings. It examines how these elements have, over decades, defined the limits of growth, fragmented urban fabric, and altered connections between city and land. This historical and spatial reading provides the context for a proposal that explores how local culture and everyday practices can guide urban expansion. Tamra becomes the setting for this vision: a city where agriculture remains embedded in the landscape, economy, and collective memory. The project proposes a westward urban extension that reconnects the built fabric with agricultural land and Wadi Tamra, bringing housing, work, and learning into a connected urban environment. The proposal is organized around centers that bring together commerce, education, research, and agricultural production, linked by a network of public spaces and pedestrian and cycling routes. Within this fabric, markets, workshops, and shared gardens are integrated with residential and public buildings, placing agriculture at the heart of urban life as a productive, cultural, and social activity. Infrastructure takes on a civic dimension as mobility and services become connected to places of gathering, exchange, and everyday interaction. At the architectural scale, the project reinterprets the hawsh, a shared courtyard; the mastaba, a raised outdoor seating platform; and the hakura, a cultivated garden adjoining the home. These spatial forms organize relationships between privacy and collective life, and between buildings and land. They inform an architecture that responds to contemporary needs while maintaining its connection to the local context. Infra Culture presents a vision for Tamra’s growth in which land, culture, and everyday life become foundations for planning. The right to grow encompasses the city’s capacity to expand and develop in ways that express its community and sustain its relationship with place.