Eleventh International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

This case study explores Kibbutz “Shiluvim,” which was hard hit during the great economic crisis of the 1980s and did not recover fully from it. This led to the exodus of younger members so that only 60 members remained. Morale and social relations among the remaining members were low and the kibbutz began to disintegrate. In order to survive, the kibbutz decided to absorb new members. In the first stage, it took in a group of 30 families that had been evacuated from their land. Those in this group, whose ideology differed from that of the veteran kibbutz members, were given full rights as members in the cooperative association. In the second stage, a few years later, a new neighborhood was established to house some 200 additional families. In this way, groups of people with different – and even conflicting – ideologies, interests, cultures and backgrounds were integrated into one community: veteran founding members, members of disbanded communal settlements, young urban families intent on realizing their dream of a private home with a garden. Each group had different ideological values, a different status in the kibbutz in terms of ownership of production means, different perceptions of what constitutes a community, and different understandings of how a rural community should be managed. Therefore, they requested community mapping after which an intervention program would be implemented in order to build a new common community identity.