Calcalist, Anat Danieli, 05.03.2020
Planning in Israel is not transparent to the public on the Internet: Only about one-third (35%) of planning information - from building permits to establishing huge neighborhoods - is available to residents on the designated sites and the regular search engines. This means that about one third of the information (65%) is not available to the public in Israel at all.
These findings come from a study by city planner Jesse Fox, a doctoral student at the Porter School of Environmental Studies at Tel Aviv University, who examined the transparency and availability of planning information in major cities in Israel. The study was conducted under the guidance of Prof. Yuval Portuguese and Prof. Yitzhak Omar and his highlights will be presented in the framework of "Planning a Balance Matter", the annual conference of the Association of Planners to be held today and tomorrow in Sderot.
The study was carried out in search of design information on websites and search engines in the 25 largest cities in Israel, where more than half of Israel's population lives.
The examination was done by searching as it would any Israeli resident;Through the municipal website or a Google search, for example, word combinations such as city outline plans (TEMAs), new neighborhood plans, city building plans (BBAs), building permit applications, urban renewal plans and bicycle paths and parks. The results show that the planning information pertaining to each citizen is lacking in transparency and accessibility. The search was conducted on two dates: early 2019 and January 2020, to track changes in transparency and accessibility of information in about a year. The cities were also ranked in the study, according to the level of information availability in the various policy areas (for example, an outline or evacuation plan). Between the two dates, the overall average of all cities rose slightly from 32.4% to 35.4%.
Search in three steps
In recent years, many cities have carved out the transparency issue, but it seems to be missing. Availability of public information planning has a huge impact on the ability of the citizen to influence planning and policy-making processes. The Planning and Building Law in Israel requires the local committees to operate a website, publish plans that come to the committee, publish planning and construction announcements, as well as an annual report on their activities. The Planning Administration has a control unit for the local committees and publishes a report on the subject.
Over the years, the Planning Administration and local authorities have created tools to increase transparency, but these require understanding and skill. The Administration's “Available Planning” system allows searching for programs by number or search terms, but these are not necessarily understandable to those who are not proficient in the field. Some municipalities such as Tel Aviv or Ramat Gan have GIS maps, which include different layers of planning information. But the research shows that these do not really succeed in making information accessible to the public in a way that understands what is happening in their environment through a web search.
The search process in the study had several steps: first, a program was searched on the municipality's site, if a general search was not performed with the program's name on Google, and if no information was found there, a search was also done on the municipal site. "If at all stages the information is not found, it means there is no transparency and the reasonable resident will not find it," Fox said.
According to the study, only slightly more than half (53%) of the city's building plans are accessible on the Internet. These are programs that allow building permits to be issued. In addition, only half (50.4%) of the overall outline plans for cities were found in research conducted in the study. These are plans that show the planning vision for cities and include population growth expectations in a few decades and the corresponding planning. Independent committees in local authorities can approve detailed plans (IAs) that match the outline plan - and thus expedite processes without having to be approved by the district committees. These plans have raised criticism for not being sufficiently considerate in establishing infrastructure such as transport and public institutions.
As for information on urban renewal - which has a major impact on the residential environment of cities, on property rights, or on the merit of its purchase - it is also partially available: thus, only 37% of the plans for eviction were found in the search, and in the 38 , With 46% of programs found on the network.
Not only information on construction plans is hard to find. Information on parks and bike paths is also almost inaccessible. Only 15% of urban bike lane programs appeared in January 2020 and 16.3% for parks. Even where bicycle trail programs were updated, such as Tel Aviv, they were from 2013 and are not relevant today.
Plans come off the site
According to Fox, Ramat Gan and Tel Aviv present relatively detailed information on planning and the future of the environment through GIS maps, which include layers of programs: from opening a portfolio to populating form."It allows the public to monitor the construction processes. For example, if you move into an apartment and do not want to be built. " But most cities only allow program-specific search without such layers.
Haifa is the only local authority out of 25 that maintains a permanent online mechanism for sharing residents with planning and urban policies, such as Elevation and Land Use Policy 38. However, Fox said these plans drop off the site once the public consultation process is over.
The transparency and accessibility of planning information is of great importance to each of us, but based on research, they do not appear to exist in a way that can serve the public easily and effectively. Thus, a person wishing to purchase an apartment may find it difficult to understand what is planned in their home environment and how it will affect the value of the property they are interested in.
purchase. Residents are also unaware of any major planning procedures being promoted around them, whether these are large neighborhoods or parks that are planning to set up or demolish.
Awareness of transparency in planning arose in the public following the rapid construction promotion processes - which lacked vital information for the public, such as the National Committee for Accelerated Planning of Preferred Complexes (the IDF) and the roof agreements where the state allows a budget to develop infrastructure in exchange for the promotion of housing development by the local authority. For housing and huge neighborhoods. These criticized the lack of infrastructure in them, especially transport. Thus, in 2017, a great social protest arose in Petah Tikva against the establishment of 12,000 housing units on the Sirkin camp ground for fear of a transport problem.
The Planning Administration said in response: "The Planning Administration works towards transparency and accessibility of planning information, including the control of information on local authorities' websites. Such comprehensive research should be brought to the attention of the Planning Administration before it reaches the media."