Sooner or later, the planned luxury hi-rise complex will go up in Tel Aviv's Kikar Hamedina. An area that could have been transformed into a vibrant, accessible part of the city will instead become an exclusive venue for the wealthy.
wJust 100 kilometers from Kikar Hamedina, some 30,000 Bedouin Israeli citizens in the Negev are soon to be forcibly relocated from their current place of residence as a result of a government decision that was made without their participation.
These are just two random examples that show the straight line that connects spatial injustice and social injustice in Israel. When the people demand social justice they are also demanding a revolutionary change in Israeli planning policy. In the protest tents, they identified this link almost from the very beginning. The committee formed by academics Yossi Yona and Aviya Spivak to examine socioeconomic issues raised by the protest movement - an alternative committee to the official government-appointed Trajtenberg one - also addressed planning policy.
A multidisciplinary think tank, headed by Dr. Emily Silverman of the Technion, is one of several teams formed as part of the alternative committee, and includes dozens of geographers, architects, urban planners, transportation experts, and legal experts, representatives of social justice and equal rights in planning organizations and others. The team discusses key issues that prompted the protest: lands, housing, planning, as well as transportation - a key area that has a far-reaching impact on equitable distribution of space and the division of resources.
Over the last few days, the team has been immersed in discussions over the Salameh document, drawn up by teachers, graduates and architecture students at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, in conjunction with professionals in planning and architecture. This is an ambitious attempt to propose a general outline "ahead of a new spatial agenda in the State of Israel," perhaps as a paraphrase of "toward a new architecture" coined by Le Corbusier. The document, which was sparked reactions ranging from broad support to harsh criticism, comes out against Le Corbusier's planning principles, which are responsible, it argues, for quite a few of the planning debacles in Israel and in the world in the 20th century and up until today.
The document is the result of the "Model Shikun" planning workshop which coalesced together with the protest tent dwellers on Rothschild Boulevard and was held several weeks ago at an extension of the Bezalel Academy located at 60 Salameh Street in Tel Aviv.
At the workshop practical solutions were formulated for the housing crisis and for changing the face of planning in Israel in order to enable a just and sustainable distribution of space. Among its authors: Dan Hasson, Shira Glitman, Assaf Mann and Yuval Yasky, the head of Bezalel's department of architecture. This group is not part of the alternative team but given the interest in the document, Yasky was invited to join the team. The document was also sent to the Trajtenberg committee and was released as a printed booklet and on an Internet site.
The Salameh document points out the errors that have been and are being made today in national planning, errors that are responsible for issues raised by the protest movement, such as the cost of living, the housing crisis and inequality in the distribution of land reserves. The document proposes a rethinking of all aspects of the planning process. "The planning policy in Israel is failing and archaic," the authors declare. "Accelerated procedures will not help; reforms in one or another bureaucratic body are insufficient. The cognitive map of the decision makers needs to be changed and in its wake, the physical map of Israel."
The Dan city stateThe document questions both the population dispersal policies of the 1950s and the principle of the four metropolitan areas (Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Be'er Sheva ) in the current national master plan. Instead, the authors declare the State of Israel a single metropolitan area; a city state, the State of the Dan Region.
Israel is a small country, the document reminds us. Its area and population do not justify investing in intensive development of a few metropolitan areas where each one tries unsuccessfully to be more of the same thing, another Tel Aviv.
Instead of waging a Sisyphean battle in the Dan Region, like the one that has been underway since the early days of the Zionist movement, the document proposes a different way: strengthening the main metropolitan area and making it more dense in order to enable more residents, and not just the well-to-do among them, to move closer to the employment, education, culture and leisure and entertainment centers. And at the same time, to help the peripheral cities distinguish themselves from the center and create a real alternative to intense urbanism.
"The peripheral cities are fertile ground where it is possible to have a variety of mixed housing solutions and to encourage development of unique communities and residential options with varying degrees of density, hi-rise and medium-rise, dense construction and single story housing, instead of transforming them into areas of suburban desolation," write the authors of the document.
Promoting the peripheryThe Salameh document also comes out against the popular trend of attracting "strong populations" to new neighborhoods in the peripheral cities, as well as weakened areas in the big cities. The trend, which mayors support, in effect harms these cities, increasing the gaps between different segments of the population and dilutes the city centers and the existing neighborhoods. In contrast, the document recommends strengthening the existing neighborhoods in the peripheral cities, and nurturing a local and communal identity and culture. The peripheral cities, according to the document, can be a desirable choice and not a default option. To move ahead with this new agenda, it is necessary to make changes in the planning and construction law in order to enable flexibility in planning, mixed uses and "evolutionary" planning that is able to cope with changing circumstances and needs.
The Salameh document sparked a wide range of responses, including sharp criticism from some. Prof. Oren Yiftachel of Ben-Gurion University, who coined the term, ethnocracy, and together with Sandy Kedar, recently coined the term "spatial justice," call it as a technical document that sees planning as "a professional tool devoid of values." They charge that its authors are "Tel Avivians" who are oblivious to half the country's population that does not live in the Dan Region.
The document does indeed lack critical jargon and the word justice does not appear in it, nor does "weak population segment," unrecognized communities, Arab or Bedouin. Undoubtedly this a weak point, a result of the ongoing disconnect of the architectural discipline from the critical social - and also political - discourse that is closely connected to their work. Despite the weak points, the document is first of all an admirable step away from the architectural bubble. Its authors are young and concerned architects who question planning conventions that create injustice and unfairness just as the protest movement itself questions conventions in other areas. The document proposes a way to achieve many of the objectives of the social revolution based on a belief that better planning will make it possible for all of its diverse population to live a better life in this country.
