Research on urban mega-projects (UMPs) has primarily focused on their characteristics, stakeholder dynamics, and social and environmental implications, often using qualitative descriptions, while their spatial and temporal patterns remained underexplored. This study aims to address these gaps by defining distinct types of UMPs and establishing threshold values for each; presenting an urban-intensity index developed to highlight the role of market-driven, neoliberal urban development approaches in shaping the nature, location, and impact of these projects on the urban environment; and analyzing UMPs’ temporal and spatial distribution patterns across the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. A unique database of all UMPs constructed between 1976 and 2020 in that area was used in this examination. Through GIS mapping and analysis, the study investigates the development of these large-scale projects at macro (metropolitan) and micro (urban) levels. The findings reveal that while UMPs are not a new phenomenon, they have surged in prevalence over the past 2 decades, with 88% of projects completed since 2000, 77% of those since 2000 are classified as high-intensity. Spatially, 67% of UMPs are concentrated in Tel Aviv and adjacent cities, while 35.7% are located outside the metropolitan core, including 32% in neighboring cities. This study makes a threefold contribution: it introduces a quantitative, longitudinal approach to UMP research, establishes threshold values for smaller countries, and develops a novel index designed to assess the urban intensity of high-rise UMPs. Its extensive database and findings offer valuable insights for both stakeholders involved in UMP planning and development.

This article presents a qualitative methodological framework for exploring global socio-technological innovation in urban youth’s appropriation of public space. The proposed framework attempts to provide a heuristic approach for urban and youth studies scholars to better understand urban youth as key actors in the hybridisation of urban public space, without forgetting that access to and need for public space is not equally shared. Addressing gaps in intersectional youth studies and public space research, we propose a flexible, transdisciplinary approach based on intersectionality, starting questions and methodological principles. Designed to be flexible and adaptable to varying urban contexts, the proposed framework requires only minimal consensus on core concepts such as relational space and youthhood as a relational, intersectional category. Its main aim is to encourage collaboration between geographically diverse research teams to stimulate future studies on socio-technological changes in the appropriation of public space by youth around the world.

This special issue examines the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on migrants' access to rights, services, resources, and spaces in cities across Europe, Asia, North America, and the Middle East. In this introduction, we first briefly situate the problematic of migrant in/exclusion in cities within the migrant urban scholarship. We then advocate for adopting the conceptual lens of urban citizenship to investigate this problematic of migrant inclusion, belonging and claim-making for, in and through the city, especially at times of crisis. After a brief discussion of the relevance of investigating impacts of crises on potential transformations of urban citizenship, we provide an extended overview of the eight articles' main themes and findings.

This short intervention starts from observing a persistent, if not growing, framing of migration research – in CMS and beyond - through a concept of crisis. We contend that such an unreflexive framing, or what we call ‘crisisology’, is deeply problematic due to the reproduction of a highly skewed and binary understanding of migration. We argue that a more spatially and temporally relational approach is needed in order to dismantle such binarism. In making our argument, we first review existing critical and reflexive research on migration and crisis, while pointing out the ongoing limitations, or blind spots, of this work in moving beyond crisisology. We conclude by briefly outlining what a spatio-temporally relational approach to studying migration and ‘crisis-ness’ would entail thematically, methodologically, and conceptually.

Scholarship on scientific mobility has long emphasized the structural and agentic difficulties faced by female researchers, especially in the male-dominated STEM disciplines. With notable exceptions, studies ignored the experience of early career female academics who travel internationally for professional reasons, including the various factors of support, which they draw on before and during relocation. This article examines narratives of Israeli PhD graduates who pursue an international postdoctoral fellowship (IPDF). Based on interviews with 24 female researchers in STEM disciplines who took up IPDF in North American universities, it explores the main support factors they draw on and examine their role in the relocation process. Our findings suggest that three factors were particularly instrumental; first, the support of their partners or husbands and, sometimes, their nuclear families, who were willing to make personal, social, and professional sacrifices for the mobility to materialize. Second, the support, both emotional and material, of their (post)doctoral advisors, and other academic colleagues, in their home or host institutions. Finally, prior experience - or familiarity - with academic or other forms of international mobility, were also salient. By analyzing the role of factors, which researchers rely on prior to and during their professional voyage, the study contributes to the field of academic mobility, nuancing the practical experience of ‘travelling’ (female) scientists. In so doing, it contributes to a better understanding of the pivotal, yet understudied, role of partners, families, and colleagues in academic mobilities, which could potentially reduce gender-based gaps in professional trajectories of early career scientists.

The effect of episodic volunteering on well-being is understudied, and more so the experience of episodic volunteering for members of different ethnic groups. The Good Deeds Day (GDD) is an international, one-day annual volunteering event. Drawing on the case of Israel, we examine the relationship between participating in GDD, and the differential well-being of Jews and Arabs. We conducted a pre and post survey of 162 participants and interviewed 18 individuals (six Arabs) after volunteering in the event. We found statistically significant increases in well-being following volunteering, which were not different for Jews and Arabs. These results were supported by the themes emerging from the interviews with volunteers. The Jewish group discussed place attachment with respect to the national scale, while among Arabs the change was predominantly related to the local scale. The results of this study can inform researchers, policy makers and charity organisations in taking contextual factors into account when designing or studying episodic volunteering events.

The role of civil society actors in urban citizenship had been recently examined by scholars. This article provides an investigation of how such actors interfaced with the local state during the pandemic to facilitate migrants' urban citizenship, namely their place-based rights and resources. It focuses on migrant-serving organizations (MSOs), which are understood as key agents of migrant urban citizenship-making. Drawing on empirical research in Berlin, Copenhagen, and Tel Aviv, we argue that while the three cities were impacted by similar national responses to the pandemic, varied local governance contexts, in conjunction with national migrant regimes, resulted in different urban responses. These differences were characterized by the distinct mediation practices of MSOs: bricolaging, bridging and building. While our article brings a more nuanced understanding of how urban citizenship landscapes are (re)produced in times of crises, the act of identifying and describing the three modes of mediation practices contributes to the theorization of the ways in which civil society helps to shape urban citizenship.

In this article, we explore urban citizenship-making processes for a status-less group during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the case of migrant-serving organizations that aid African asylum seekers in Tel Aviv, we argue that urban actors found opportunities during the crisis to support migrants' urban citizenship, by providing access to rights and services that positioned them more than ever as deserving urban subjects. However, as these were enacted gradually, patchworked together, and with little public or political debate, we contextualize them as a phase in an incremental process of migrant urban citizenship-making, which has unfolded over the last two decades. We draw on interviews with Tel Aviv-based actors who worked to address pressing needs of the asylum seeking community during the pandemic, among them migrant-serving NGO workers, community activists, and city officials. We analyze the important advances made through incremental actions, while pointing to some of the challenges. We argue that the incremental process may have improved asylum seekers' access to urban rights and services during the pandemic, but it also failed to institutionalize change and confront systemic exclusions that reinforce their marginalization, thereby missing a window of opportunity for fundamental (urban) citizenship transformation that opened during the crisis.

This article explores the assimilation of second-generation migrants from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) who grew up in Israel's social and geographic urban periphery. Their upbringing in peripheral towns and neighborhoods exposed them almost exclusively to Mizrahim (Oriental Jews), a stigmatized minority group whose members make up the overwhelming majority in those locations. We argue that their interaction with members of this group resulted in an alternative process of assimilation, which we term Hitmazrehut (Orientalization). Children of migrants, who were unaware of the historical stigmatization of Mizrahim and their culture, conceived of Hitmazrehut as their only viable trajectory of assimilation into what they erroneously perceived as the Israeli mainstream. However, embracing Mizrahi socio-cultural practices, including consumption and production of ethnic culture, religious traditions and romantic partnerships, did not lead to their downward assimilation, as the model predicts. Rather, it allowed second-generation Russian-speaking migrants to fit in and attain social and economic mobility by assimilating sidewards, into the growing Mizrahi middle-class.

The article explores investment decisions made by Israelis who purchased or intended to purchase a residential property in Poland. Specifically, it focuses on their set of motivations to invest there and the extent to which their ethno-national or other types of affinity with the country played a role in their decision. Drawing on interviews with (Jewish) Israeli citizens, we argue that their Choice to invest in Poland was not only financial but influenced also by strong emotional connections to the country, a combination we term 'sentrumental' (instrumental and sentimental). We contend that the decision of Israeli Jews to buy property in Poland, against the historical backdrop of the traumatic experience of Jews there, is highly contentious. Analyzing the discursive strategies they use to explain, indeed justify, their unorthodox decision, we show how their emotional ties to Poland often conflict with its controversial history and their own personal identities. It is this conflict, we conclude, that makes Israeli Jews with various biographical ties to Poland an inherently ambivalent elective diaspora.

PurposeWelfare reforms introduced conditionality into cash transfers often by diverse welfare-to-work programs achieving its vast legitimization. Meanwhile in-kind poverty alleviation policies maintained their universal character in the forms of national budgeting of municipal services. Utilizing justification work, the authors aim at showing how conditionality of in-kind support is replacing universalism. The authors ask which justification work assist administrators in shaping the relationship between in-kind and cash transfer and the changing meanings of poverty alleviation practices.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with senior administrators in Israeli local governments analysing them along principles of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2010). Further, seeking to elicit the justification work, the authors added some guidelines from the discourse interaction approach.FindingsThe findings identified administrators' justification work as taking two major shapes. The first is an emphasis on conditionality in their in-kind support projects, which is limited in time, contingent upon co-operation and sometimes even enhancing choice for those in need. The second is the manifestation of pride anchored in the skilful budget management enabling the achievement of conditional in-kind support projects based on the effort involved.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors did not prompt the interviewees for the proportions of specific categories, such as whether they are attending and benefitting of the in-kind support programs. This is a limitation of this study that prevented the authors from contrasting perceived achievements against the actual coverage of their projects.Practical implicationsIt is important that government funding is increased for municipal anti-poverty policies engaging municipal administrator in the struggle for full and better coverage so that capability deprivation is combatted by a combination of cash transfer and quality social services that are universal and at the same time secure mentoring and supervision to all households in need.Social implicationsFuture research should present the analysis that associates different budgets of each city with its anti-poverty polices and its different socio-economic ranking. Critical social-policy scholars may apply this study’s findings in future analyses of municipal administrators' power position as reinforced by national level policy makers, particularly when introducing controversial policies.Originality/valueAnti-poverty policy and the specific combination between conditional cash transfers and in-kind support have been explained at the level of political–economic decision making. The authors conceptualize the need to explain anti-poverty policy by focussing on municipal administrators’ embedded agency, particularly around controversial issues. By building the professional self of municipal welfare administrators, inter alia by ignoring past meanings of in-kind support as depriving recipients of autonomy, conditionality is extended into in-kind services.

AbstractThe chapter explores the use of religious ethical discourse to support more or less restrictionist state policies toward asylum seekers. Drawing on the cases of Israel and Poland, it examines how religion-based ethical narratives are mobilized instrumentally by political actors to advocate pro/anti-asylum policies. In recent years, both countries experienced a large inflow—or threat thereof—of asylum seekers from developing, Muslim-majority countries in Western Asia or Africa, which elicited a heated public debate. In addition, they both have relatively homogenous populations, and maintain an ethnicity-based citizenship regime (jus sanguinis), as well as strong relations between state and (institutionalized) religion, either Catholicism or (Orthodox) Judaism. Finally, a dominant narrative of national victimization is salient in both countries, which is critical for understanding the political debate over asylum policies. In light of these similarities, we analyze the political discourse in each country during the peak years of the crisis in order to show how religious arguments were employed to support pro/anti-asylum policies. We use secondary data obtained through the written and electronic media, showing that in both countries, the “otherness” of newcomers intersected with historical narratives of ethno-religious and national victimization, shaping a binary political discourse concerning the desired national policy toward asylum seekers. The paper concludes by drawing lessons about the ways in which ethical religious arguments shape contemporary migration discourse and policy.

Climate Adaptation Plans (CAPs) usually include a section on urban resilience, in which policymakers are expected to address human needs created or exacerbated by climate-related emergency events. However, the urban resilience sections of CAPs tend to remain under-developed, with welfare-related risks often overlooked. Until recently, there has been limited acknowledgement of the barriers preventing the positioning of human need at the core of CAPs. To conceptualize and understand the impact of such barriers, this study used an agenda-setting approach. We examined the incorporation of vulnerable populations' needs into CAPs drawn up by municipal authorities in Israel, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a prompt for the assessment of barriers to agenda setting and lessons learned. Drawing on twenty interviews with senior administrators in Israeli municipal authorities, we identified three administrative barriers hindering the integration of vulnerable populations' intensified needs into CAPs. The barriers were created by disparities between confidence in their succeesful emergency management and their knowledge of unmet needs; between acceptance of responsibility and access to training, resources or impact; and between local initiatives and reliance on national funds. Overlooking administrative barriers is bound to leave scholarly understanding of the slow pace at which CAPs translate lessons learned from human crises into policy, limited or lacking.

Mobile academics have traditionally been conceived as cosmopolitan subjects who favor cultural diversity and search for new professional opportunities abroad. Their return to the homeland could therefore be interpreted as a sign of parochialism, which narrows down their professional opportunities and limits their exposure to global resources. In this article, we compare returning and non-returning academics with respect to their parochial and/or cosmopolitan tendencies. Drawing on a sample of 223 Israeli Early-Career Researchers (ECRs), we examine their cosmopolitan—or otherwise parochial—propensities and assess the effect they have on their return decisions. We use statistical tests to analyze the effects of cultural orientation, attachment to the homeland-based national community, and patriotic feelings on their propensity to return. Our findings suggest that in comparison with their co-nationals who opted to remain abroad, returning ECRs exhibit higher levels of parochialism, reflected through inter alia stronger communal dispositions and patriotic attachment as well as geographically limited job search.

Migration industry has recently emerged as a lens through which to theorise the intertwinement of non-state actors who aim to provide diverse migration-pertaining services. However, while much of their work is done in and through cities, consequently (re)forming variegated urban landscapes, scholarly literature has thus far neglected the nexus between cities and the migration industry. In this special issue, we begin filling this gap by exploring the significance of migration industries – as a resurgent concept and an area of research from migration studies – for understanding the urban. We start by reviewing the urbanisation of migration studies, highlighting its key limits. We then move on to introduce the migration industries debate, pointing out its existing implicit urban dimensions. We proceed by elaborating our main argument about why and how migration industries provide an especially productive lens for urbanists to consider. Specifically, we stress the three key analytical vantage points that the attention to migration industries enables us to see as central to contemporary city-making. These are its political-economic embeddedness, the urban-constitutive nature of trans-local connectivities, and how business-driven city-making dovetails with more serendipitous, bottom-up shaping of the arrival city. Each of these points also describes how individual papers speak to them. We conclude by briefly outlining a research agenda for migration industries that is thoughtfully embroiled in the (post-)pandemic urban.

Through exploring the spatial conditions and materializations of caring practices and relations, this chapter aims at developing an urban(ized) understanding of care. It thereby seeks to interweave care debates into conceptual debates in urban studies and planning theory. The chapter discusses the tension between fields of care and 'uncare' as an analytical lens to situate care debates—and the ambivalences unfolding around them—within broader theoretical debates on cities, urbanization, and urban life. By taking a spatial perspective and by fostering an understanding of care geographies, three perspectives are developed: 1) How the scale of analysis and research in urban theory contributes to a wider understanding of the changing landscape of care; 2) how moments of presence and of encounters in public space allow both the acknowledgment and alteration of caring infrastructures; and 3) how care and crisis are fundamentally linked, and how care perspectives bear a potential to move analytical prisms beyond crisis-centered narratives.

The paper examines the nexus between skills mismatch, educational/industrial policies, and brain circulation in Israel. Focusing on the field of life sciences (LS), it argues that migratory movements of highly educated Israelis are fueled by vertical (inadequate level) and horizontal (inadequate type) skills mismatches. It shows that whereas many so-called bio-brains migrate due to being underqualified (lacking postdoctoral training), their return is often delayed or prevented altogether due to shortage of academic positions and the incompatibility between their fields of (academic) specialisation and the (industrial) jobs available in the country's small LS industry. Drawing on primary and secondary qualitative data, the paper analyses the structural forces and agentic articulations behind this migration paradox, which sees departing bio-scientists who are underqualified for academic positions becoming (potential) returnees who are largely overqualified and inappropriately trained for industrial jobs. The paper concludes by highlighting potential avenues for research on the links between skills mismatch and international mobility.