Modiin, Safdie, and the Suburb That Was Meant to Be a City

Logosofia no Dia a Dia · Oct 12, 2026 · 47m

Israel is projected to grow by three million people in fourteen years, and most of that new fabric will be laid down after the car. What went wrong in Modiin — the best-documented Israeli new city that was explicitly designed to be urban and became a bedroom community — and what would it take to build differently? This episode digs into Safdie's own planning guidelines, the code that produced coherence across dozens of developers, and why the form was right while the life was wrong. Then: land, approvals, financing, transit, and the regulatory reforms moving through the Knesset right now…