Hannah sent us this one — she and Daniel took a little getaway to Ashdod, and she came away feeling like it's a city with a ton of wasted potential. Big city, some restaurants, some things happening, but none of the charm you actually want in a beach town. Her question is basically: what makes a charming beach town or city? She's picturing something like a Greek village tumbling down to the sea, or a Cornwall, and wondering — are there examples like that but at the scale of a bigger city like Ashdod? How could it be built in a way that brings in pedestrians and business with traditional urbanist principles, rather than this sort of aspiring Miami thing? And she's asking about all the Israeli beach cities — Eilat, the whole lot — that feel like prosperous development towns rather than places with any real historical character or charm. So what are the magic elements, and what could actually be done?
This is a fantastic question, and it gets at something that's been bugging me about Israeli coastal development for decades. Let's start with what Ashdod actually is. Ashdod was founded in nineteen fifty-six — it's not an ancient city that grew organically, despite sitting near the ruins of biblical Ashdod. It was planned from scratch as a development town, an ayarat pituach, and specifically as Israel's deep-water port to replace the one they lost in Jaffa in forty-eight.
It was a logistics decision that happened to have a beach attached.
And that's the original sin right there. The city was laid out with the port as the organizing principle, not the waterfront. When you look at the master plan from the fifties, it's essentially a modernist grid dropped onto dunes with a port at one end and residential blocks radiating outward. The beachfront wasn't treated as the civic heart — it was treated as the edge.
Like building a house with the front door facing the garage.
That's it. And this is true of most Israeli coastal cities planned in the state-building era. They were built for function — housing immigrants, providing industrial capacity, securing the coastline — not for charm. Charm was a luxury the young state didn't think it could afford.
The question becomes: can you retrofit charm onto a mid-century planned city? Or are you stuck with the DNA?
I think you can, but you have to understand what charm actually is from an urban design perspective. It's not just "old buildings and narrow streets." Charm is a byproduct of specific design choices that most twentieth-century planning explicitly rejected.
Walk me through those choices.
Let's start with the big one: the relationship between buildings and the street. In a charming place — whether it's a Greek island village, a Cornish fishing town, or even the nice parts of Tel Aviv — buildings form a continuous street wall, built right up to the sidewalk, often with zero setback. The ground floor has doors and windows facing the street. There's a clear distinction between public and private space, but they're in constant conversation.
Mid-century tower-in-the-park planning. Buildings are set back from the street, surrounded by undefined green space that nobody uses, with parking lots facing the sidewalk. The ground floors of residential buildings often have nothing — maybe a storage room, maybe a blank wall. There's no conversation between the building and the street because the building turned its back on the street.
The architectural equivalent of someone scrolling their phone while you're trying to talk to them.
And this isn't just aesthetics — it has real economic consequences. Jane Jacobs wrote about this in the sixties. When you have a continuous street wall with active ground-floor uses, you get what she called "eyes on the street." Pedestrians feel safe, they linger, they window-shop. When you have a tower in a lawn with a parking lot, pedestrians feel exposed and bored, so they don't walk, so businesses don't open, so there's even less reason to walk.
The death spiral of the stroad.
Which brings us to the second element: the street network itself. Charming places almost universally have fine-grained street grids with small blocks. Think of Barcelona or the North End of Boston — blocks that are maybe sixty to eighty meters on a side. You can turn a corner every thirty seconds. Every walk feels like exploration.
Ashdod's blocks?
The superblock model that was fashionable in mid-century planning. You've got vast residential complexes with internal pathways that don't connect to anything, surrounded by wide arterial roads designed to move cars at speed. The pedestrian experience is one of crossing hostile infrastructure to get from one isolated pod to another.
You're walking across a six-lane road to get to a shopping center with a parking lot the size of a small country.
That's the third element: the retail model. Charming places have fine-grained retail — lots of small shops, each with its own storefront, its own identity. You get variety, surprise, personality. Ashdod, like most Israeli development towns, went all-in on the enclosed shopping mall and the big-box retail strip. The mall internalizes everything — all the storefronts face inward, away from the street. The street outside becomes a dead zone of parking and loading docks.
The mall is basically a street that's been turned inside out and had a roof put on it.
Climate-controlled, which in Israel is a real draw. But it kills the public realm. When all the commercial life is inside a private building, the street ceases to be a place where things happen. It becomes a conduit.
We've got three strikes: buildings that ignore the street, blocks that are too big, and retail that's been vacuum-sealed into malls. What about the waterfront itself?
This is where it gets almost tragic, because the waterfront is the one asset that should be impossible to ruin, and yet. In a charming beach town, the waterfront is porous — streets run right up to the water, you catch glimpses of the sea from inland, you can walk along the edge and feel connected to both the town and the water. There are places to sit, places to eat, places where the public realm meets the natural one.
The waterfront is largely blocked by a wall of high-rise hotels and residential towers. The beach exists, and it's actually quite nice, but accessing it often means walking through a gap between buildings or navigating a pedestrian bridge over a highway. There's no seamless transition from city to sand. The most valuable real estate in the city is treated as a private amenity for the buildings that front it, not as a public good.
The beach is basically a backyard for the lucky few.
Even the public beach areas often lack the basic infrastructure of a charming waterfront — the promenades with cafes, the public plazas, the shade structures, the places where you'd actually want to spend an afternoon. It's sand, a lifeguard station, and a parking lot.
Which brings us to Hannah's question about what could actually be done. And I want to push on this, because it's easy to say "tear it all down and start over," but Ashdod is a city of two hundred twenty-five thousand people. It's not a blank slate.
Right, and this is where the retrofit question gets interesting. There are actually some good models for this. Let me give you a few examples of larger cities that have successfully created charming beachfront urbanism without being small villages.
Not a small town — a major city of one point six million people. But its waterfront transformation for the ninety-two Olympics is one of the great urban design success stories. They took an industrial waterfront cut off from the city by rail lines and warehouses, and they reconnected it. They built the Barceloneta boardwalk, created public beaches, opened up the street grid so neighborhoods that had been cut off from the sea suddenly had direct access. And critically, they didn't just build a tourist zone — they integrated the waterfront into the fabric of the existing city.
They didn't treat the beach as a separate destination. They treated it as an extension of the neighborhood.
And the Rambla del Mar — this wooden pedestrian bridge connecting the harbor to the Maremagnum shopping area — it's not just functional, it's a place. People go there to stroll, to sit, to watch the boats. It's infrastructure as public space.
What's another one?
Nice, in France. The Promenade des Anglais is arguably the most famous waterfront promenade in the world. It's seven kilometers long, wide enough for pedestrians and cyclists, lined with those iconic blue chairs, and — this is key — the city doesn't turn its back on it. The buildings facing the promenade have retail at ground level. The streets of the old town connect directly to it. You can be in a dense, narrow medieval street one minute and on the beachfront the next.
Both of those are big cities, not fishing villages.
The charm doesn't come from being small. It comes from the design vocabulary. Narrow streets, continuous street walls, active ground floors, public space that feels like it belongs to everyone, a waterfront treated as the civic living room rather than a private viewing platform.
Let's get specific about Israel. What's actually possible?
Before we get to solutions, let me mention one more thing about the development town history, because it matters for understanding the constraints. The ayarat pituach program wasn't just about urban planning — it was about social engineering. These towns were built to house primarily Mizrahi immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, often placed in peripheral locations, with limited economic opportunities beyond low-wage industrial labor. The physical design — the housing blocks, the lack of public amenities, the car-dependency — wasn't an accident. It was a reflection of how the state valued these populations.
The built environment encodes a kind of social hierarchy.
And when you talk about retrofitting charm into Ashdod, you're not just talking about adding some planters and calling it a day. You're talking about undoing decades of planning decisions rooted in a specific vision of what kind of city Ashdod was supposed to be and who it was supposed to serve.
What's the retrofit playbook?
I'd break it into five moves. Move one: reconnect the street grid. You can't tear down the superblocks, but you can cut pedestrian connections through them. You can take those internal pathways that currently lead nowhere and connect them to the surrounding streets. You can narrow some of the arterials, add mid-block crossings, make the pedestrian network as fine-grained as possible within the existing footprint.
You're basically performing acupuncture on the street network — inserting connections where they're missing.
That's exactly the right metaphor. Small, targeted interventions that change how the whole system behaves. Move two: reorient buildings toward the street. This is harder because you're dealing with existing structures, but there are policy tools. You can change zoning to allow ground-floor commercial in residential zones. You can offer tax incentives for owners who convert blank ground-floor walls into storefronts. You can require new construction to build to the property line with active uses at street level.
For buildings that are already there with their backs turned?
You can build liner buildings — smaller structures that fill the gap between the tower and the street. You see this in Vancouver, where they wrap the bases of residential towers with townhouses that have front doors and small gardens facing the sidewalk. It transforms the pedestrian experience without demolishing the tower.
Like putting a friendly face on a grumpy building.
Move three: break up the retail monopoly of the mall. This is partly a zoning issue, partly an economic development issue. You need to make it legal and financially viable to open small storefront businesses. That means allowing mixed-use everywhere, reducing minimum parking requirements that make small retail impossible, and potentially using public money to subsidize ground-floor commercial space in new developments.
Because right now, if you want to open a cafe, your only option is to rent space inside the mall, where the mall operator controls your hours, your signage, everything.
The mall captures all the spillover benefits. In a healthy main street, the bakery benefits from the foot traffic of the bookstore next door. In a mall, the mall operator captures that synergy through rent. The public realm gets nothing.
Move four is the waterfront itself. This is the biggest opportunity and the biggest challenge. You need to create a continuous public waterfront promenade that runs the length of the city. Not just a sidewalk — a proper promenade, wide enough for walking, sitting, lingering. Lined with shade structures — critical in the Israeli climate — and with concessions, cafes, public art, places to sit. And you need to punch visual and physical connections from the inland neighborhoods straight to the water.
Instead of the beach being hidden behind a wall of hotels, every street that hits the coast becomes a view corridor.
Where there are existing buildings blocking access, you can create public easements — pathways between buildings that are open to everyone. It's not ideal, but it's a start. The key principle is that the waterfront is public land and it should feel public. Nobody should feel like they're trespassing when they walk to the beach.
Move five is the hardest and most important: you need to make it legal to build charming things. Most of what we describe as charming — narrow streets, buildings close together, mixed uses, small storefronts, apartments above shops — is literally illegal to build under modern zoning codes. Minimum lot sizes, setback requirements, parking minimums, single-use zoning — these rules make charming urbanism impossible by design.
The first thing Ashdod would need to do is legalize its own charm.
And this is a political problem as much as a technical one. The existing rules benefit incumbent property owners. Changing them requires a coalition that wants change. But it's not impossible — cities all over the world are doing it. Minneapolis eliminated single-family zoning. Portland legalized fourplexes and sixplexes. Auckland upzoned most of its residential land. These aren't radical cities — they're just cities that realized their rules were producing outcomes nobody wanted.
You're saying the magic elements aren't actually magic. They're just the accumulated effect of a thousand small design decisions that prioritize the pedestrian experience over the car, the public realm over the private enclave, the street over the parking lot.
And here's the thing — Ashdod actually has some assets that make this more plausible than in many places. It has a real beach, and a long one. It has a port that brings economic activity. It has a population that's relatively young and growing. It's close to Tel Aviv. The raw materials are there.
Does it have the political will?
That's the trillion-shekel question. And I think this is where we have to be honest about the Israeli context. Israeli planning culture is deeply technocratic and deeply car-oriented. The Ministry of Housing, the Israel Land Authority, the various planning committees — they think in terms of housing units delivered, not places created. The very structure of how land is allocated and developed favors large-scale, top-down projects over fine-grained, organic growth.
Even if the municipality of Ashdod wanted to do all of this, they'd be fighting uphill against the national planning apparatus.
The development industry, which has optimized itself for the current rules. The contractors know how to build residential towers on large parcels with underground parking. They don't know how to build five-story mixed-use buildings with retail at grade and apartments above. The entire supply chain — from financing to construction to marketing — is set up for the thing we don't want.
Which makes me think about Eilat, which Hannah also mentioned. Eilat is interesting because it's a beach city that was explicitly built for tourism, and it still managed to be charmless.
Eilat is a perfect case study in what not to do. It's a city that exists entirely because of its beach and its climate, and yet the urban form completely squanders those assets. The hotel zone is a strip of large-footprint resorts that turn their backs on each other, each one trying to be a self-contained destination. There's no main street, no public square, no sense of place. You could be at a resort in Eilat and have no idea what country you're in.
It's the generic international anywhere.
Because it's so car-dependent, you get this bizarre situation where people fly to Eilat for the beach and then spend their vacation driving from the hotel to the mall to the underwater observatory. The pedestrian experience is an afterthought.
What would you do differently if you were starting Eilat from scratch?
First, I'd make the beachfront entirely public, with a continuous promenade and no private development between the promenade and the sand. The hotels would be across the street from the beach, not on it. Second, I'd lay out a real street grid with small blocks, not a series of disconnected resort compounds. Third, I'd put a proper main street perpendicular to the waterfront, connecting the beach to the rest of the city, lined with shops and restaurants and shaded sidewalks. Fourth, I'd ban surface parking lots anywhere within a kilometer of the beach.
Since we can't start from scratch, what's the retrofit for Eilat?
Eilat is harder than Ashdod because so much of the beachfront is already locked up in large resort properties. But you can do some things. You can create a public boardwalk that runs the length of the hotel zone, even if it means routing it around existing buildings. You can require that any redevelopment of a resort property includes public access easements. You can invest in the inland neighborhoods to create a real city that exists beyond the tourism monoculture.
That's an interesting point — the tourism monoculture is itself part of the problem. When a city exists only to serve visitors, it loses the texture of everyday life that makes places interesting.
The best beach towns are places where people actually live, not just places where people vacation. Santa Monica has a functioning downtown. Barcelona's waterfront neighborhoods are real neighborhoods. Even in smaller places like Cornwall, the charm comes from the fact that these are working communities that happen to be beautiful — not stage sets built for tourists.
The prescription for Ashdod isn't to become a tourist destination. It's to become a better place to live, and let the tourism follow from that.
And this connects to something underappreciated in Israeli urbanism debates. There's a tendency to think about cities in terms of what they lack relative to European or American models, rather than what they could become on their own terms. Ashdod doesn't need to be Santorini. Santorini is a volcanic caldera with a specific geology and history that can't be replicated. Ashdod needs to be the best version of Ashdod.
Which is what, in your mind?
A Mediterranean port city that treats its waterfront as a public asset, that has walkable neighborhoods with mixed-use main streets, that integrates its diverse population into a shared public realm, and that builds on its existing strengths — the port, the beach, the young population, the proximity to the center of the country — rather than trying to import someone else's idea of charm.
I want to dig into something you said earlier about the social dimension, because I think it connects to Hannah's observation about these cities feeling like "prosperous development towns." There's something about the development town legacy that's about more than just wide roads and bad setbacks.
There absolutely is. The development towns were designed to be places where people were housed, not places where people built communities. The planning was top-down, technocratic, and largely indifferent to the people who would actually live there. And that legacy persists in the built environment. When you walk through a neighborhood of identical housing blocks arranged in patterns that don't relate to the street or to each other, you feel that indifference. It's in the concrete.
It's the architectural equivalent of being processed rather than welcomed.
Charm, real charm, is the opposite of that. Charm says: someone cared about this place. Someone thought about how it would feel to walk down this street, to sit on this bench, to look out this window. It's not about being quaint or old-fashioned. It's about the built environment communicating that the people who live here matter.
The retrofit isn't just physical. It's almost psychological. You're trying to change what the city communicates to its residents.
To do that, you need to involve residents in the process. The most successful urban transformations I've seen — the High Line in New York, the Superkilen park in Copenhagen — started with community engagement. Not a public meeting where planners present a finished plan and ask for comments, but a genuine co-creation process where residents help define what they want their city to be.
Which is hard to do in a planning culture that's as centralized as Israel's.
It's hard everywhere. But it's essential. Because charm can't be imposed from above. It has to grow from the bottom up. You can create the conditions for charm — the zoning, the infrastructure, the public spaces — but the actual life of the place has to come from the people who live there.
What's the one thing you'd do first, if you were mayor of Ashdod tomorrow?
The waterfront promenade. It's the highest-impact, most visible intervention, and it creates a constituency for further change. Once people experience what it's like to have a beautiful public waterfront, they'll demand more. They'll ask why their neighborhood doesn't connect to it, why the street leading to it is so unpleasant to walk, why there aren't more cafes along it. The promenade becomes the proof of concept for a different kind of city.
It's something that benefits everyone, not just tourists or wealthy residents.
A public waterfront is the most democratic space a coastal city can create. It belongs to everyone. And in a city as diverse as Ashdod — you've got longtime residents, Russian-speaking immigrants, Ethiopian Israelis, French olim, a growing Haredi population — a shared public space that everyone can use and feel ownership of is not just an amenity. It's a form of civic glue.
I'm thinking about the practical steps. You build the promenade. How do you pay for it?
There are a few models. One is tax increment financing — you designate the waterfront district, and the increased property tax revenue from rising values pays for the infrastructure. Another is requiring developers who build along the waterfront to fund the public improvements as a condition of approval. A third is straight public investment, justified by the economic returns — better waterfronts increase tourism, increase property values, increase quality of life, which attracts and retains residents.
None of this requires demolishing the port or turning Ashdod into a Greek fishing village.
Not at all. The port is actually an asset. Working waterfronts are interesting. People like watching ships come and go. The problem isn't the port — it's that the port and the city have nothing to do with each other. You could create a waterfront promenade that goes right up to the port boundary, with viewing areas where people can watch the cranes and the container ships. That's genuinely compelling urbanism. It's not Santorini, but it's real, and it's Ashdod.
There's something almost freeing about that. The idea that you don't need to fake history or import someone else's aesthetic. You just need to make the city work for the people who live there.
That's the deepest urbanist principle there is. Jane Jacobs wasn't writing about how to make cities charming. She was writing about how to make cities work. The charm is a side effect of the functioning. When streets are safe, when sidewalks are busy, when shops are thriving, when people know their neighbors — that's when a place feels good to be in. The aesthetics follow from the social and economic vitality, not the other way around.
The answer to Hannah's question — what are the magic elements — is that they're not magic at all. They're just good urban design, applied consistently.
Fine-grained street networks. Buildings that face the street. Shade and seating. Storefronts instead of malls. Eyes on the street instead of parking lots. And above all, a planning system that allows these things to exist.
I do want to push back on one thing, though. You've been talking about this as if it's purely a design problem with design solutions. But there's a cultural dimension here too. Israeli beach culture is not Mediterranean promenade culture. It's not the Italian passeggiata or the Spanish paseo. It's more... I don't know how to put this charitably.
Say it uncharitably.
It's parking lot, cooler, boom box, disposable barbecue, leave the charcoal on the sand. It's a beach culture that treats the beach as a place to consume rather than a place to be.
That's fair, and I think it's partly a chicken-and-egg problem. If the beach is only accessible by car, and the only amenity is sand and water, then of course people are going to bring everything they need and treat it as a day-use consumption site. If you build a beautiful promenade with cafes and shade and places to sit, the culture shifts. People start coming for an hour instead of the whole day. They walk instead of drive. The beach becomes part of daily life rather than a weekend expedition.
You're saying the built environment shapes the culture, not just the other way around.
And we have Israeli examples of this. The Tel Aviv port area — which was a derelict industrial zone twenty years ago — was transformed into a boardwalk with restaurants and shops and public spaces, and the culture followed. People go there now to stroll, to sit, to people-watch. It's not the Promenade des Anglais, but it's a real public space that works.
The Herzliya marina area, for all its flaws, at least created a waterfront promenade that people actually use.
These things exist in Israel. They're just the exception rather than the rule. The question is whether we can make them the rule.
I want to circle back to something Hannah mentioned in her prompt — this idea of "aspiring Miami." Because I think she put her finger on something. There's a specific aesthetic that Israeli beach cities seem to default to, and it's this sort of glass-tower, car-dependent, air-conditioned-lobby, zero-street-life thing. And Miami is actually a good comparison, because Miami Beach has some charming Art Deco urbanism and also some of the most soulless condo-canyon development on the planet.
Miami is the cautionary tale and the success story rolled into one. South Beach, with its Art Deco district, is one of the most charming beachfront urban environments in the United States. Low-rise buildings, continuous street wall, active ground floors, wide sidewalks, Ocean Drive as a public promenade. And then you go north of about Twenty-third Street, and it's exactly what you described — glass towers in a lawn, no street life, the beach hidden behind private development.
The difference between South Beach and North Beach isn't climate or geography or even wealth. It's the design vocabulary.
South Beach was built before modern zoning, under the old rules that allowed — in fact required — buildings to meet the street. North Beach was built under the new rules that incentivized towers in parks. Same city, same beach, completely different outcomes.
What you're saying to Ashdod is: you can choose which Miami you want to be.
It's not too late to choose. Ashdod is still growing. There's still land to develop. There are still policy decisions to be made. The city isn't frozen in amber.
Let me ask you about a specific challenge that we haven't addressed. Israel's coastal cities are all built on a relatively narrow coastal plain. Ashdod has the port at the north end, the beach running south, and the residential areas stretching inland to the east. The city is long and narrow along the coast. How do you create a walkable urban fabric when the geography pushes everything into a linear configuration?
That's actually not a bug, it's a feature — if you handle it right. Linear coastal cities can work beautifully if you run a transit spine parallel to the coast and connect the inland neighborhoods to it with pedestrian-friendly streets. Think of the French Riviera towns — Nice, Antibes, Cannes — they're all linear along the coast, but they work because the train line runs parallel to the beach and the streets connect the station to the waterfront.
Ashdod needs a transit spine.
A light rail or a dedicated bus rapid transit line running north-south, parallel to the beach, with stations every half kilometer or so. Each station becomes a node for denser development, with ground-floor retail and public plazas. The east-west streets that connect the transit line to the beach become the main pedestrian corridors, lined with shops and shade trees.
Right now, Ashdod has a train station that's way out on the eastern edge of the city, nowhere near the beach, connected to nothing by foot.
It's the classic Israeli planning move — put the train station where the land was cheapest, not where it would create the most value. And now the station is surrounded by parking lots and industrial uses, and nobody walks to it. So even the transit investment reinforces car dependency.
Because the planning mindset is still "how do we move cars efficiently" rather than "how do we create places where people want to be.
Which brings us back to the fundamental point: you have to decide what you're optimizing for. If you're optimizing for car throughput, you get Ashdod. If you're optimizing for human experience, you get something else. And the thing is, Ashdod doesn't have to choose between being functional and being charming. The most functional cities are often the most charming, because they work at a human scale. The inefficiency is in the car-dependent model — all that land devoted to parking, all that congestion, all that time spent driving from one disconnected pod to another. Walkable urbanism is actually more efficient. It just optimizes for a different kind of efficiency.
I'm going to play devil's advocate for a second. You've laid out this comprehensive vision — street grid acupuncture, building reorientation, retail reform, waterfront promenade, zoning overhaul, transit spine. It sounds expensive and politically difficult. What's the counterargument? Why shouldn't Ashdod just keep doing what it's doing?
The counterargument is that the current model is also expensive — it's just that the costs are hidden. Car dependency imposes enormous costs on households, on the healthcare system through pollution and inactivity, on municipal budgets through infrastructure maintenance. The mall-centric retail model extracts wealth from the local economy and sends it to corporate headquarters. The lack of public space degrades social cohesion. These are real costs. They just don't show up as a line item in the municipal budget.
The choice isn't between spending money and not spending money. It's between spending money on things that create long-term value and spending money on things that just keep a broken system running.
And I'd argue that the charm retrofit is actually the fiscally conservative position. It increases property values, it increases economic activity, it reduces infrastructure costs per capita, it attracts and retains residents. It's an investment with a return.
You're making the conservative case for walkable urbanism. I appreciate that.
It's the strongest case there is. This isn't about aesthetics or ideology. It's about what works. And the evidence is overwhelming that traditional urban patterns — the ones we evolved over thousands of years, before we decided in the twentieth century that we knew better — produce better outcomes on almost every metric. Economic vitality, public health, environmental sustainability, social connection, even happiness.
To bring this back to Hannah's question: the magic elements are the old elements. The things we stopped doing about seventy years ago.
The things we can start doing again, any time we choose. Ashdod isn't doomed to be charmless forever. It's just waiting for a different set of decisions.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In nineteen forty-eight, the postal authority of what was then Anglo-Egyptian Sudan issued a set of stamps depicting a camel postman. After South Sudan's independence, fewer than two hundred of these stamps were known to survive in circulation south of the new border — making the South Sudanese remnant population of Anglo-Egyptian camel postman stamps rarer than the Penny Black.
That camel must have had excellent route planning skills.
Here's the forward-looking thought I want to leave listeners with. Hannah asked about charm, and we've talked about street grids and zoning and waterfront promenades, but underneath all of that is a simpler question: who is the city for? If the answer is "the people who live there," the design follows naturally. If the answer is anything else — developers, cars, tourists, bureaucratic targets — you get what Ashdod is now. The retrofit starts with that question.
The good news is, more and more Israeli cities are starting to ask it. The planning conversation is shifting. It's slow, but it's real.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for making this show possible. This has been My Weird Prompts. You can find every episode at myweirdprompts dot com, and if you enjoy the show, leave us a review wherever you listen — it helps more people find us. We'll be back next week.
