Faculty Directory

Yodan Rofè is an architect and holds a Ph.D. degree in City and Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley. His research interests include Neighborhoods in Urban Theory and City Planning practice, Cognition and Feeling in the Built Environment, Urban Space and Street Design, and the connection between Transportation and Land Use. Together with Allan Jacobs and Elizabeth Macdonald he has written The Boulevard Book: History, Evolution, Design of Multiway Boulevards published in 2002 by MIT Press.

From 1999 to 2003 Rofè was Head of Urban Design at Israel's Ministry of Housing. In that capacity he was responsible for supervising the planning of new urban neighborhoods throughout the country, created and coordinated the sustainable development program of the Chief Architect Department, and initiated the rewriting of Israel's Urban Street Design Guidelines as a joint project of the Ministries of Housing and Transportation.

In 2004 he founded, together with Irit Solzi and Dror Gershon, the Movement for Israeli Urbanism (MIU), inspired by the CNU, the CEU and ideas for Urban Renaissance in the UK. Yodan was program coordinator of MIU's three congresses, and is responsible for preparing its charter and its "planning and urban design tool-kit."

Yodan is currently a researcher in urban planning and design at the J. Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research and teaches at the Albert Katz School for Desert Studies, the Geography Department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Azrieli School of Architecture and the Porter School for Environmental Studies at Tel-Aviv University. On sabbatical this year at University of Michigan, he will be teaching UP 518 – Physical Planning Workshop.