Beersheba has many streets that look just like Rotenberg Street. Running through the heart of an older neighborhood, they are so derelict and ramshackle that the local residents have long abandoned any hope of living in a pleasant, well-tended and green urban space. Volunteers from the Making a Street project have now entered this grim reality to take up the challenge. For three hours on Jan. 13, student volunteers together with local residents turned the street around by revitalizing the community garden, creating a street cinema, building paths, painting murals and sidewalk paintings, and even setting up a neighborhood inn and creating hanging gardens.

That was the fourth time that the “Making a Street” group has completely turned a local street in Beersheba around, and on March 24, they’ll be doing it again to yet another street in the neighborhood. The project is part of an international “place-making” approach, which has been gaining a foothold also in Israel, where local residents take responsibility for the spaces in which they live, instead of waiting for the establishment to improve conditions for them. The person who brought this refreshing approach to Beersheba is Matan Saad, 28, who studies Urban Planning at Beersheba’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

This last event on Rotenberg Street was part of a growing trend in which students are getting involved in the life of the city. Some of them are even settling down there once they finish their studies. “Ten years ago, Beersheba used to empty out over the weekend, because everyone went home to their parents. Today, any student who goes home to his parents every weekend is considered an oddball,” Saad said. “What has been created here is a positive, beneficial framework that enables people and provides them with happiness. It is a bit different from the pervasive mood across the country. It is a framework that has a distinctly 'Beersheba' character about it. It couldn’t exist in any other city.”

“This is not the result of the social protests. It really isn’t,” Michael Cherniak, a resident of Beersheba's Gimmel neighborhood, told Al-Monitor. “The people who live here weren’t part of the social protests. They aren’t middle class. We’re talking about the weakest neighborhoods.” While the people he is talking about might tend not to participate in collective efforts and in fact, are perhaps in no rush to volunteer for the benefit of their communities, the students from "Making a Street" have succeeded in recruiting them nonetheless. Some 350 students and local residents participated in the Rotenberg Street event, including about 120 people who participated in the actual work.