Livre - City - Time

The 2010 Bat-Yam Biennale is based on existing municipal projects. These plans involve lengthy periods of construction that usually create disruption and distress in daily life, while waiting for a "better future". Roadwork, construction, renovation, paving, roads closed for resurfacing…urban space is a constantly shifting entity. While the permanent "flexibility" of urban reality allows for dynamic evolution, it also lends a sense of uncertainty to everyday life. The 2010 Bat-Yam Biennale invites projects that examine the city’s “flexible” nature in relation to both infrastructures and resources, offering innovative uses for spaces that are under construction, transforming them into functional, temporal urban spaces. The Bat-Yam Biennale functions as a laboratory through which attitudes in and towards urban space are examined. Urban Action 2010 continues the urban action begun in the first biennale , in which Hosting was the theme. The Biennale was initiated by Shlomi Lahiani, mayor of Bat-Yam and Dr. Martin Weyl, director of the Beracha Foundation. Urban Action 2010 focuses on the tension between the temporary and the permanent, between the planned and the experienced. The Biennale examines the occasionally tense relationships between the city’s attempt to create order through long-term plans, and the everyday chaos that is the product of that process. Our goal is to encourage spaces and situations that function from within the state of a given temporality, drawing energy from this very flexibility. The Biennale will examine whether it’s possible to encourage urban situations that use temporality and change as their raw materials. The Biennale asks whether the state of temporality can become a statutory classification. Urban actions will strive to change patterns and attitudes, promoting partnership of the residents with the city. The Biennale also redefines relationships between residents, planners, stakeholders and the municipality. Proposals will focus on the zones defined by the municipality’s current and future infrastructure-focused projects; these municipal projects are planned for implementation by 2010.