תפיסת מקום, דימוי תקשורתי, תדמית וקשר למקום: המקרה של ערי הפיתוח בנגב המערבי: המקרה של ערי הפיתוח בנגב המערבי

These days the State of Israel celebrates sixty years since the founding of 38 Development Towns. The term refers to the new suburban communities, which were projected and built during the 1950s, remote from metropolitan areas, in order to provide permanent housing for the large influx of immigrants. The towns were designated to expand the population of the country's peripheral areas and to ease development pressure on the country's already crowded urban centers. Nowadays the ideology behind the establishment of these Development Towns has almost been forgotten. What is left is their name which has become part of their identity, implying small peripheral communities, many of them with social and economical problems. The purpose of this study was to analyze the identity formation of these small towns in the light of two interrelated issues: 1. the self-image of the community and the residents' perception of the Development Town components and how they relate to each other, namely, how different population groups perceive the image of Development Towns, and 2. the self-perception of these groups toward the same place. In order to examine these issues the research focused on two groups of populations: those of Development Towns in the Western Negev (Israel's southern periphery), as compared with those in urban conglomerations in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area.