The field of urban design combines various disciplines including landscape architecture, design, geography and environmental sciences, sociology, culture and heritage and economics. The urban designer works from an understanding of the relationship between the human scale and the scale of the built space, between natural systems and the man-made environment. The city is the living environment of the majority of the world’s population, and of over 90% of Israel’s residents. The program treats the entire country as an urban field, and one of the goals of the program's studies is the development of tools to deal with the processes of population density, while providing a response to infrastructural needs, addressing cultural and social diversity and the consequences of the climate crisis. Studies in the program are based on a series of theoretical and practical courses, at the core of which are the laboratories which serve as applied research groups. As part of the laboratories, a multidisciplinary teaching team defines an issue in a given urban space, which is then studied from its various sides, after which a planning proposal is developed that meets the challenges posed by the research group. The program’s collaborations add a practical side to the studies, as well as introduction to the responsible authorities and people working in the field of planning. Among the prominent collaborators are the Jerusalem Municipality, the Ministry of Construction and Housing and the Planning Administration, the Union of Urban Engineers, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), TU-Delft, and other leading universities in the world. The Program in Urban Design is intended for architects, industrial designers, city engineers, city planners and city architects alongside humanities and social sciences university graduates and Bezalel graduates from a variety of departments – a mix that reflects the multidisciplinary essence of the studies and makes for a broad-minded group of learners with diverse knowledge and experience. Graduates of the program influence the urban space in Israel. They integrate into diverse positions in the public sector at the national and local levels, in architectural and urban planning offices in the private sector, as entrepreneurs, in teaching and research positions in academia and in the third sector – in projects that combine environment, society, community and welfare and work with special populations in the urban space. The program has two specialization tracks:

City and Landscape and Conservation and Heritage.