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Surroundings / Shutter, stop sobbing
By Esther Zandberg

Sometime in the mid-1970s, when Tel Aviv was undergoing a serious urban crisis, with its houses peeling and its residents fleeing from it almost in disgust, "it was easy to think that this city, the one in which 'plaster is falling / a shutter is sobbing / a bus is dying,' is, as the poet said, 'a city without a concept,' a random collection of continuing mishaps, united primarily by the total absence of advance planning," writes architect-sociologist Nati Marom in his excellent new book, Ir im konseptzia, metakhnenim et Tel Aviv ("A City with a Concept, Planning Tel Aviv"). The book, which surveys and analyzes the history of urban planning in Tel Aviv from the 1920s to the 1980s, was recently published by Babel (in Hebrew), and adds an important and unusual layer to the growing shelf of books about Tel Aviv.

A city without a concept? "That of course is a mistake based on appearances," continues Marom, shattering the captivating myth of Meir Wieseltier's famous poem. This myth became deeply rooted in the collective consciousness, and was welcomed by people from all walks of society, including the city fathers and its professionals, who seem to have pounced on it as a lifesaver that explained their failures.
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"An overall worldview, big ideas, determined opinions, and plans, lots of plans, were at the basis of Tel Aviv from the moment it was founded as a city in 1909, and even earlier," writes Marom. "During its 100 years of existence, many plans were prepared for Tel Aviv - 'overall plans,' 'master plans,' 'city plans,' 'strategic plans' - which together formed a consistent process of preplanning in an attempt to provide an answer to the question: What kind of city will Tel Aviv be?"

How did it happen that with all the plans and concepts, Tel Aviv is seen as one big mess?

Marom: "First of all, I think this impression was formed due to a misunderstanding or lack of knowledge of what planning actually is. Usually, people relate to planning in physical terms only - in other words, to buildings and their physical deployment in space. But planning is first and foremost a concept, a mechanism that creates conceptual structures that exist before any actual concrete construction: We delineate spaces, catalog social groups, set borders, create hierarchies, decide what is included 'inside' and what remains 'outside,' what is essential and what is superfluous, where we should invest and what to neglect. The activity of planning is particularly effective in a city that is coming into being, like Tel Aviv in the first decades. All these aspects, the economic and social as well as the political, are invisible to our eyes and to our awareness, to the point where it is easy to dismiss planning as though it doesn't exist."

Is there something about the physical nature of Tel Aviv that "conceals" the planning?

"The relative uniformity of Tel Aviv and its buildings, which is actually proof of planning, is seen as something banal or ugly, and therefore is ostensibly proof of lack of planning. The signs of aging and the physical deterioration of the city are also seen as proof of lack of planning, and that's also what Wieseltier does in his poem "Yesh li simpatia" ("I empathize"). As though 'falling plaster' were proof of the absence of a concept or of lack of planning. It's possible that the perception of the 'mess,' and perhaps even the mess itself, stems from the fact that the city has changed its planning concept every two decades, more or less, whether because of changing circumstances and needs, or a change in concepts of planning worldwide. That's an expression of very active planning, perhaps over-planning. All in all, I think that Tel Aviv has coherency, and a great deal of it."

The gap that divides the city

The planning of Tel Aviv, like the field of urban planning in general, "suffers from poor public relations," says Marom, offering another explanation for the sense that the city lacks planning and the lack of understanding of, or tolerance for, its existence.

"Its urban planning has not yet experienced what happened in the last 20 years to its architecture, when they suddenly discovered 'Bauhaus' and the 'White City' and began to understand it differently," he says. "Perhaps the attitude toward planning will change too. I'm not saying that Tel Aviv was planned perfectly, without mistakes, but I'm trying to demonstrate that a great deal of thought was invested and there is a cumulative wealth of plans and concepts. Perhaps the retrospective look at the first 100 years will serve as a starting point for a more sober look at the next century."

Marom, 37, is a graduate of the architecture department at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, where he now teaches. He took his master's degree at University College in London, where he wrote about Israel's planning policy in East Jerusalem since 1967. He subsequently wrote a report called "The Planning Deadlock" for the Bimkom: Planners for Planning Rights association, in which he pointed to the demolition of homes in East Jerusalem as an inseparable and deliberate part of the planning policy. His new book is based on his doctoral thesis, which he is now completing in the department of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University.

"The big questions in Tel Aviv in the 21st century are also historical ones," Marom says. "The claims by young Tel Avivians that they have no place in the city, the attitude toward privatizing public space, and the entrepreneurship that determines the agenda already existed in the 1920s and the 1930s and the 1980s, and therefore the historical perspective is an essential tool for understanding things today."

The gap between the well-to-do center and north of the city on one hand, and the poor neighborhoods of Jaffa, the south and the east on the other, has also been there from the beginning of Tel Aviv's planning history, and has only became more permanent and more profound over the years. The Geddes plan in the 1920s - the first comprehensive urban plan for Tel Aviv, which turned into a kind of formative planning myth - was forced to deal with this gap, Marom says, but to a great degree perpetuated it, too.

Geddes wrote that in Tel Aviv, there was a gradual and almost unconscious change from bad planning in the south to better planning in the north. But instead of bridging the spatial, geographic, social and economic gap, his plan actually became the basis for the distinction between the planned city and the unplanned city, between the north and the south, between "good" and "bad." The gap continued from one generation to the next in Tel Aviv, from concept to concept, from one master plan to another and from one mayor to another, and it remained there in spite of mayoral promises to heal it.

"A profound gap divides the city into two separate parts: the center and north of the city on one side, and Jaffa and the projects and suburbs and transit camps on the other," declared mayor Mordechai Namir in 1960. "Building a bridge between the two sides is the new administration's main project." Years later, mayor Shlomo Lahat reiterated this idea, saying that "one of the main long-term policies we want to adopt can be expressed in the words, 'with our face toward the south.'"

Preference for the city center

But declarations are one thing and plans are another. The ambitious master plan for Tel Aviv (the Shimshoni plan) promoted by Namir in the 1960s, writes Marom, not only missed an opportunity to bridge the gap, but was responsible for exacerbating it, by allowing the artisan and industrial zones to continue spreading to Menashiya and in the direction of the Ayalon Highway, "thus causing the erosion and disintegration of residential neighborhoods all across the city, further separating the southern and eastern parts of the city from the center and the north."

Nor did the plan for the city center promoted by Lahat in the 1980s (the Mazor plan) turn its face and its goals to the south, as he had declared upon taking office. Instead, according to Marom, it created "a rehabilitative preference for areas in the city center at the expense of affirmative action for the southern neighborhoods and presented a socially reactionary approach, unrelated to the 'good intentions' of the planners."

What are the chances of not repeating past mistakes?

"City planning today involves almost no planning of new cities; it operates within existing cities. And the more built up and crowded Tel Aviv is, presumably the less room there is for new concepts. In my opinion, it is not necessary to give up concepts or to make do with regulatory and statutory planning; creative and participatory planning should be promoted. Today, there is no room for tabula rasa concepts as in the 1920s, or for the elimination of poor neighborhoods as in the 1950s. It is time for new concepts that are more suited to an existing, concrete city, and which relate to the situation as it is and not only as it should be."
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