Israel is an extreme case of pressures on land resources due to the rapid population growth in a highly dense country, and the need to allocate substantial space for the security establishment. Hence centralized regulatory planning is one of the main factors determining land use and land cover. As a result of neo-liberalization financialization has become a central tenet of Israeli planning in the past couple of decades. In this paper I explore the implications of the financialization of planning in Israel for land use and land cover changes. In particular this paper will assess the implications of the practices introduced due to financialization for urban renewal, sprawl and allocation of land to employment, as well as for open spaces and agriculture. Specifically, this paper shows that financialization results in excessive planning that has adverse implications for agricultural land and open spaces, and consequently for biodiversity. Moreover, these effects differ over space, increasing spatial inequities between the core areas, and particulalry the Tel-Aviv metropolitan region and the more peripheral aeas in the north and south of the country. Thus while studies of land use and land cover changes tend to focus on the physical driving forces such as population growth this paper argues that ideological framing is central to understanding the form and drivers of land use change.
Mots clés : financialization|planning|sprawl|open spaces|agricultural land
A104019EF