Whose City is it? On Urban Planning and Local Knowledge in Globalizing Tel Aviv-Jaffa

This article focuses on the variety of images, perceptions and social constructions about a city articulated by the different ‘actors’ which use and shape globalizing urban settings. The actors in focus are mainly the planners (representing the authoritative aspects of planning and city management) and the residents of the city (those who enjoy or are adversely affected by different planning visions and projects). Planners mainly use their professional knowledge, which they obtained from formal education. Residents built up their perceptions and images of the city in a more intuitive way, from their daily routine practices in the city. Following this, the article explores the intricate and sometimes complicated relations between the various types of knowledge involved in the planning process with the aim to find out whose perceptions of the city are incorporated in the planning processes. Focusing on knowledge as a base for formulating cityscapes stems from a personal position and experience as planners, as members of a planning team, nominated by the Tel Aviv Municipality to devise a ‘new strategic plan’ for the Central Bus Station (CBS) area in the city. The article begins with a short introductory background, describing the social and economic situation of Jewish residences and non-Jewish labour migrants of the CBS area in Tel Aviv. It then outlines some theoretical frameworks regarding the different perceptions of this area by the different ‘actors’ involved in its production. The article concludes with some insights regarding the ways that globalizing cities are planned and managed.     

Rural ethos and urban development: the emergence of the first Hebrew town in modern Palestine

Since the late nineteenth century, the Zionist movement emphasized ruralism not only for the pastoral areas of Palestine, but also for its urban centres. This paper explores the emergence of Tel Aviv, the first Hebrew town, in the light of the Zionist rural/pastoral ideology and within the late nineteenth century discourse on city planning. It discusses early Tel Aviv’s rural images and the various means that were implemented by local and international planners, Zionist cultural agents, volunteer organizations and residents in order to materialize the green vision for the first Hebrew town. This paper argues that till the mid‐1930s, the development of Tel Aviv discarded the common modern dichotomy of nature/culture or pastoral/urban, proving that the development of the rural, agricultural landscape and the construction of the urban metropolis were complementary facets of the Zionist dream.     

Garden cities in the Jewish Yishuv of Palestine: Zionist ideology and practice 1905–1945

The Garden City Movement is recognized as a dominant forerunner of modern urban planning. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the broad popularity and selective adoption of Garden City concepts in Zionist circles and the Jewish Yishuv (Community) in Palestine, to document their implementation in Jewish urban settlement in Palestine, and to follow their local evolution into the creation of a unique urban fabric. We show how the Garden City ideology and its implementation in England and Germany influenced the Zionist movement, its leaders, and settlers in Ottoman and British Mandatory Palestine, and led them to adopt and adapt concepts of the Garden City model as the ‘national paradigm’ of the new Jewish urban planning in Palestine. The planning was influenced by Garden City ideas, with modifications to Ebenezer Howard's original model made to suit local traditions, public demand, and Zionist goals. The application of the message of the Garden City movement to the physical model beginning unintentionally with the building of Ahuzat Bayit (Tel Aviv) in 1909, created a guiding principle for Jewish urban development in Palestine from 1905 until 1945, and continues to exert its influence on current planning. In conclusion, the article adds a dimension to the emerging picture of early twentieth-century Zionist settlement in Palestine as a laboratory for implementing novel planning ideas of international importance.     

Reconstruction and planning in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer South African War: the experience of the Colony of Natal, 1900–1910

The idea of ‘reconstruction’ is now well established in the historiography of South African planning. Particular attention has been paid to ‘reconstructionist planning’: during and immediately after World War; in the apartheid era; and, in the recent context of post-apartheid development. The centenary celebrations of the Anglo-Boer South African War (1899–1902) are, however, directing attention to the programme for the reconstruction of the previous Boer republics that was initiated by the imperialist proconsul, Lord Milner, and is the subject of ongoing controversy. Natal was not a direct target of Milner's programme but the aftermath of conflict in this British colony was linked to important socio-economic and spatial transformations. The idea of ‘town planning’ was only in an embryonic form at the time but ‘post-war reconstruction’ in Natal included interventions in the shaping of urban and rural space that provided the basis for future programmes of reconstruction and planning, including that of racial ordering under apartheid. For example, the system that developed in Durban to finance the construction and administration of segregated municipal housing for Africans was later exported to the rest of South Africa and became a major feature of the National Party's programme of ‘township development’.     

The machine in the garden city: Patrick Geddes’ plan for Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv is a pedestrian‐scaled city of neighbourhoods supportive of an active civic life. This despite a building fabric clad exclusively in International Style garb, an architecture said to be antithetical to humane urban life. The city's success lay in the tightly controlled and binding plan provided by Patrick Geddes in 1925. Applying both a variation of the ‘super‐block’ — in a manner that actually fosters the growth of communities — as well as a platting strategy responsible for the development of a distinct building typology, Tel Aviv has managed to resist anti‐urban propositions. These characteristics, coupled with Tel Aviv's narrow streets, its interstitial spaces and its extensive planting produce a city that even proponents of traditional urbanism could applaud.     

Town planning and socialist realism: new Academic District in Wroclaw (Poland) – unfinished projects from the 1950s

Socialist Realism was the standard method in Polish architectural design and urban planning between 1949 and 1956. This was a special period in Polish history – a time of intensive post-war reconstruction, introduction of a planned economy, and creation of a new political and social order. Socialist Realism was undoubtedly a ‘political style’, a tool for communist propaganda. Yet, in urban planning, apart from its excessive monumentality and axial symmetry, it was mostly dominated by universal models. These stemmed from the requirements to create clear compositional systems, use urban areas rationally, distribute housing, industry and commerce complexes functionally, and to pay attention to proper hygiene. Strong emphasis was also placed on the need to build new ‘centrally located social complexes that would dominate the space’ in historic cities, one of which is discussed in this article. The new Academic District was a visionary concept and attempts were made to bring it to life in Wroclaw – the largest city in the so-called Recovered Territories that became part of Poland after the Second World War. Due to the scale of the development, its estimated cost, and the political changes that took place in Poland in 1956, only a small part of the new district was built.     

Walls,enclaves and the (counter) politics of design

This paper focuses on the political role of urban design in the transformation of urban and rural, central and peripheral, formal and informal landscapes in Israel. Based on design anthropology methodology, the political role of urban design in the production of aesthetic objects and landscapes that signify the control over individuals and communities will be explored. As this paper suggests, such a new form of political influence is hidden beneath an aesthetic and user-oriented façade, making it even more dangerous than previous more direct actions, such as gated communities separated from public space by stone walls. The paper’s interdisciplinary approach that is rooted in anthropology, design, architecture and politics will also point out some similarities between specific sites that are often considered different, namely Tel Aviv’s global and privatized gated communities on the one hand and the unrecognized Bedouin villages in the peripheral Negev region on the other. It will be argued that these similarities are the product of the politics of militarization, privatization and social fragmentation that are translated into urban design practices from ‘above’ via state and municipal planning policy as well as formal design, and from ‘below’ through informal and often unauthorized construction initiated by marginalized communities.     

Multi-spot zoning: A chain of public–private development ventures in Tel Aviv

The paper discusses the cumulative aspects of flexible planning’s engagement with massive public–private (PP) development ventures, tracing five ventures in Tel Aviv–Jaffa and analyzing each as a link in a chain of planning precedents. As in many other instances that materialized in this city, each venture was based on a spot-zoning elaboration of a planning deal that balanced cost and benefits for PP agencies. In each test case, public benefits and properties were bargained and official policies were modified. Neo-liberal policies have escalated planning flexibility, linking local multi-spot zoning with extreme luxury and increasingly high buildings. However, as citizens’ criticism progressively questioned the legitimacy of PP planning, a judicial debate is now taking place concerning the definition and function of spatial planning. Focusing this debate and the urban planning tradition that led to it are proposed here as a way of evaluating the concrete assets of urban PP planning today.     

Echoes of Empire: British Mandate planning in Palestine and its influence in the West Bank today

Almost 70 years after Great Britain gave up its Palestine Mandate, Regional Plans prepared under the Mandate still survive – as live statutory documents that are used to justify planning decisions. Behind them lies a story of how planning is unavoidably tied up with land, with rights, and with power. This article outlines the history of the making of these Plans, explores what the planners of the Mandate epoch thought they were doing, shows how the Plans have been used ever since, and provides an update in the light of a recent UN Habitat Mission to study the planning system under the Israeli occupation. The Plans were the output from the activity of the Mandate government’s ‘Town Planning Adviser’ in the late 1930s and the 1940s – during the period of both the Second World War and the worsening Jewish/Arab violence that led to war in 1947. It was very much a case of the ‘export’ of town planning from urban and industrial Britain to a society which was primarily rural. The Mandate Plans continue to be used in the formal process by the occupation authorities, but selectively: a selectivity which, unfortunately, the Mandate Plans enable by their flexibility. This bites directly on how Palestinians in the West Bank live – ‘the history in the present’.     

Historical continuity and post‐1945 urban redevelopment: the example of Lee Bank,Birmingham, UK

The reconstruction of British cities following World War II is characterized by a marked gap between the rhetoric and the reality. Visions for ideal cities, in particular those growing out of the modern movement in architecture, were diluted and warped by the ‘messy’ business of reconstructing actual cities, filled with real people whilst operating within democratic structures. This paper examines elements of this confrontation of the ideal and the real, by looking at the context for changes to the urban fabric within a single housing estate in Birmingham, self‐nominated ‘second city’ of Britain. The overarching theme is of historical continuity and change – the extent to which the urban fabric has been destroyed and remade. As such, the paper examines not only the nominally ‘modern’ post‐war reconstruction, but also how a contemporary, ‘post‐modern’ phase of redevelopment is dealing with the city form created in the 1950s and 1960s.     

Gaston Bardet: post‐war champion of the mainstream tradition of French urbanisme

In post‐war France, Gaston Bardet was the defender of a tradition of urbanism that began in Paris in the 1900s with Marcel Poëte’s teaching of urban history and which is reflected in the pages of pre‐war and wartime Urbanisme. As the processes of reconstruction threatened the historic fabric of many French towns and cities, Bardet attacked what he saw as the soul‐less ‘machinisme’ of Le Corbusier’s vision of the city adopted by Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). Drawing on the older tradition, Bardet set out a social approach to urbanism at three levels: first were his proposals for planning to play a part in the spiritual regeneration of society; second was his attempt to develop an approach to regional planning, checking the growth of the giant city to promote instead smaller towns and a sense of community; third was his keen engagement with the spatial qualities of urban design. In the early 1950s, Bardet’s ideas, unlike Mumford’s comparable ‘bio‐technic’ ideal, were dismissed by modernists as old‐fashioned and, perhaps, tainted by the values of the Vichy regime. But Bardet remains important as a champion of the ideas that animated so many of the wartime plans that provided the basis for France’s post‐war reconstruction.     

From the Cold War to the warmed globe: planning,design-policy entrepreneurism,and the crises of nuclear weapons and climate change

Faced with two existential threats – nuclear war and climate change – planners have responded by proposing sweeping reforms for city-regions, often deploying the newfound rationales to re-package earlier ideas about ‘the good city’. This paper analyses how mid-twentieth-century planning discourses regarding Cold War urban dispersal in the USA might help us understand contemporary conversations about urban climate change adaptation. We apply Kingdon's Multiple Streams Analysis and his concept of policy entrepreneurs to show how planners frame problems and shape policy agendas. We propose a subtype of ‘design-policy entrepreneurs’ who use the spatial and visual tools of planning and design to advocate for preferred policies. By analysing the rhetoric and visual representations made by planners and designers from 1945 to 1965, we examine how they repurposed long-standing ideas about urban deconcentration into ‘dispersal for defence’ proposals. Such proposals for dispersing urban settlements into separated and ‘self-contained’ units received a dysfunctional partial acceptance: housing and transportation legislation embraced the dispersal part but resisted the complementary elements aimed at limiting damages from nuclear attack by concentrating development into distinct nodes. We conclude by asking how the perils of such partial policy-making success might play out on the terrain of climate change adaptation.     

Debates on urban reconstruction through reclamation of traditional water scenery in 1940s Tokyo

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government, seeking to break an impasse in its state-sponsored war-damage reconstruction efforts after the Second World War, presented proposals in the late 1940s to reclaim centuries-old canals in its central area to dispose of wartime rubble and create land for redevelopment. The Government also received a proposal forwarded by Japan’s professional baseball association to reclaim a scenic pond in central Tokyo and build a baseball stadium there, and it responded favourably. Two canal reclamation projects were realized, but the pond reclamation was eventually abandoned. These reclamation proposals provoked debates of varying intensity over the loss of traditional scenery as part of urban reconstruction. This paper examines those debates and interprets their meaning within the history of Japan’s city planning. It notes the awakening of concern for land use planning after reclamation – in particular, the preservation of locations of scenic value – in the context of urban reconstruction. The paper also considers the limited nature of civic space for public discourse and debate over planning proposals and a collusive aspect of the inter-governmental relationship in city planning. It also considers the attitudes towards reclamation displayed by Hideaki Ishikawa, the principal planner of Tokyo’s war-damage reconstruction plan.     

Democratic design experiments in urban planning – navigational practices and compositionist design

In the field of urban planning, public participation and inclusion of citizens have been practised and researched for many years. However, a focus on co-creative urban planning practices seems to have gained more focus over the last decade and calls for new urban planning practices, which allow experimentation and imagination, and at the same time take its outset in the existing networks in the city (such as visions, strategies, regulations and practices) when planning for the future. In this article, we investigate how a compositionist design programme can be translated into the practices of urban planners. We find that the notion of ‘democratic design experiments’ in many ways meet the demands of the increasingly complex field of urban planning and set out to explore how such a design programme can be applied in practice. We suggest ‘navigational practice’ as a way of describing how urban planners deal with ‘drawing things together’ in urban space and introduce ‘sensitivity’, ‘staging’ and ‘mobilization’ as interconnected elements of this practice. We exemplify the significance of these navigational practices by analysing two democratic design experiments in the area of urban waste management in Copenhagen. The article concludes that compositionist design is a powerful contribution to the framing of urban planning projects and that navigational practice can be a productive way of operationalising democratic design experiments in the urban context.     

Ruins and Revival: Paris in the Aftermath of the Second World War

Although many devastated European cities have been studied, the bombing and reconstruction of key industrial sites and certain suburban residential zones in greater Paris have received little scholarly attention. Using archival sources, this article explores both destruction and reconstruction, and traces how homeless families shared apartments or endured years of ‘temporary’ accommodation in huts and other shelters. Post‐war economic planning in France privileged the restoration of industrial and commercial sites; rebuilding of housing by the state, by housing co‐operatives and by individual property owners received less support and progressed far more slowly. Today, the visual legacy of reconstruction is easily confused with that of completely new post‐war apartments; however its origin, if not its architecture, is distinctively different and merits recognition in its own right.     

Skills,Conflict and Spatial Planning in Northern Ireland

This article investigates the power of ‘walls’ to constrain thought and silence diverse voices of reason within planning. Using die Mauer (The Berlin Wall) as a linking metaphor, this article juxtaposes mid‐1950s planning in a spatially‐ and ideologically‐divided Berlin (Germany) against Harland Bartholomew's mid‐1950s planning in a racially‐divided Louisville, Kentucky (USA). It then juxtaposes the latter against a mid‐1950s narrative about efforts to desegregate housing in Louisville. This juxtaposition reveals that some people in Louisville used the Cold War divide between East and West to reinforce the long‐standing racial divide between blacks and whites. Moreover, it reveals that, by deferring to Cold War‐related racial politics that could not be questioned, Bartholomew's technical approach to planning silenced other voices of reason and thereby reflected and reproduced the race‐inflected politics of the Cold War divide. The article concludes by briefly considering what Bartholomew might have done differently in the context and by exploring what this juxtaposition of stories implies for planning in the context of the contemporary ‘war against terrorists’.     

Jewish Nationalism,European Colonialism and Modernity: The Origins of the Israeli Public Housing System

Since the middle of the 19th century, housing the growing number of Jews immigrating to Palestine demanded resources that were not available to all immigrants. Housing projects were initiated either by Jewish philanthropists or building associations established by leaders of local communities. Numbers of immigrants rose sharply with the increasing involvement of the Zionist national movement in Palestine and the establishment of the British Mandatory regime. Most houses were built then by the private sector, widening the gap among different socio-economic groups. Only after the 1948 war and the termination of the colonial regime, was the newly established State of Israel able to initiate large-scale housing projects, due to its control of former Arabowned lands. The distribution of those lands raised conflicts between different sectors of the Israeli society, such as in the following two cases of public housing projects initiated in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area.     

Australian housing,technological change and the Fordist regime of accumulation

Although the concept of Fordism has been used to explain a range of phenomena in Australian post‐war political economy, there have been few attempts to assess its utility within the field of housing provision. This paper is a preliminary attempt to ‘test’ the Fordist model. It distinguishes between two uses of the concept—a narrow ‘productivist’ approach which focuses on the ‘backwardness’ of the housing industry, and a broader ‘societal’ approach which focuses on the interrelationship between dominant production techniques, patterns of consumption and urban form. The first section examines the fate of post‐war visions of Fordist housing. Following this, the paper suggests that the broader use of the concept—derived from the regulation school of political economy—is useful for explaining the coincidence between suburbanisation, mass consumption, mass production and state intervention after the Second World War.     

Everyday experiences of the modern city: remembering the post‐war reconstruction of Birmingham

This paper examines a key period in the history of Birmingham, a city that was extensively though diffusely bombed during Second World War, but was redeveloped according to Modernist‐inspired planning principles in the post‐war years. Investigating the ‘piecemeal’ reconstruction of Birmingham’s city centre in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, it is argued that the narrative of redevelopment has been thoroughly captured in official accounts which offer a detached view removed from the realities of everyday life. Although there is acknowledgement that encounters between human subjects and conceived spaces are multifaceted, few studies have examined this empirically within the context of the ‘Modern’ city. Drawing on a series of oral history interviews with residents to elucidate citizens’ experiences of this phase of redevelopment, this paper shows that inhabitants often doubted and opposed (and occasionally praised) the planners’ conception of space as they attempted to re‐orientate themselves to the rhythms of everyday life in the ‘new’ city centre. The paper accordingly concludes that the process of modernization provokes an uneasy co‐existence between representation and experience and that there is a need for a broader methodological pluralism in studies in an effort to understand the dynamic relationship between people and the physical environment.     

Architecture for leisure in post-war Europe, 1945–1989: between experimentation,liberation and patronisation

In May, 1960, the Metabolist Group made a stunning debut at the World Design Conference held in Tokyo by presenting visionary proposals for future cities. Metabolism has long been understood within what Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co have called an ‘international concept of utopia’ of the 1960s. Metabolism's vision of the future, however, does not neatly fit into a singular category of modernist utopia. For Japanese architects who witnessed the devastation of war in their teens, it seemed nearly impossible to imagine a technology-driven future without considering the mass destruction of the urban environment, the inevitable consequence of the very embrace of technology that post-war Japan sought as a means to brighten its future. This article situates Metabolism within Japan's specific post-war condition, which was closely tied to global Cold War geopolitics. The Cold War framework allows us to examine the dual sensibility of promise and peril inherent in Metabolism's theory and design.