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Israel 2010
Felice Maranz
The pioneers' vision of Israel foresaw thriving cities, small towns and verdant rural settlements. But the cities are taking over, and the Israel of 2010 may well be woefully short of open green space. Urban sprawl is threatening to devour the country's landscape.
"There will be lots of lanes, hamburger joints, gas stations. It'll be just like the United States." That's how one Housing Ministry employee wryly describes Highway 6, a new toll road slated to slice through the middle of Israel, from Beersheba in the south to Yokne'am in the north.
Highway 6 could open to traffic as early as 2001. If it does, it will be one more sign of the Americanization of the Israeli landscape. Top government planners estimate that over the next 20 years, the country's population will skyrocket to 7 million, from the present 5 million. That includes Soviet aliyah; it doesn't include the territories. Plans by officials and developers to meet the needs of the next generation include shopping malls, industrial parks and highways, with the four major urban centers Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and Beersheba playing critical roles. As big cities get bigger, and closer together, Israel 2010 will probably look a lot like Los Angeles 1992.
Israel's pioneers envisaged a balance of big cities and small towns, interspersed with rural settlements. But today, says Bezalel art institute architect Michael Turner, former director of Jerusalem's urban planning unit, "We all lack a vision. There are no Ben-Gurions or Herzls, and we don't respond to fantastic people who are visionaries."
If there's no vision, it's not for want of planners. At the national level, the Housing, Interior and Environment ministries and the Israel Lands Authorities are working together to craft a national master plan. But their multi-volume blueprint for Israel's development, completed in March, focuses on the larger issues: energy needs, water resources, transportation networks, demographic patterns, and so on. Each individual city is left to plan its own development. Business interests may then alter the city's plans. The result is urban sprawl.
"In the future you will drive from one place to another without knowing where one city starts and another ends," says Israel Kimchi, a researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies. And as Israel's cities expand, today's problems will only worsen. Sewage, water purity, traffic snarls, and disappearing green spaces will become even more pressing concerns. One of the most crucial issues, says Valerie Brachya, head of the Environment Ministry's planning department, will be the lack of land. Everybody wants a house with a garden, but that clogs up land that could be used for parks or nature reserves.
A possible solution for saving land: building underground. "It must happen," Brachya insists. "When you have space pressure, one way to go is up. The other is down. There are big environmental advantages: You save on heating and cooling and you save space. If it's noisy, smelly, ugly, if it doesn't need natural lighting stick it underground."
Going underground doesn't erase the specter of mass, faceless urbanization. Yet the country's planners don't seem fazed by the notion of Israel as a megalopolis. At the Housing Ministry, director of the department of urban planning Sofia Eldor briskly sums up the government's master plan: "It's important to expand to three centers Haifa, Beersheba and a great unified metropolis of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem together. Tel Aviv will continue to suburbanize. We want to direct it toward Jerusalem, with the new city of Modi'in in between."
But architect Turner is horrified by this vision of Israel's future, and hopes the next generation will have the chance to change it. Otherwise, he says, "we risk turning Israel into a banal, homogeneous country."
TEL AVIV A planned rapid transit system copies London's Underground Tel Aviv-Jaffa wins the American Dream prize, a great metropolis that neither sleeps nor slumbers, ringed by miles of urban sprawl. And Israel's future L.A. on the Mediterranean is set to keep on going.
The city, which lies at the heart of a 138-square-kilometer (55-square-mile) coastal strip containing almost 1.8 million people, anticipates a population jump from the current 350,000 to roughly half a million. To meet the demand, says Deputy City Engineer Baruch Yoscovitz, "We are in the process of approving and planning 45,000 housing units in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. Almost 20,000 are in the final stage of planning."
Clusters of new units will fill the city's open spaces, including a new "town" between Derekh Haifa and the sea, north of the Yarkon River, made up of 25,000 dwellings that will house 70,000 to 80,000 people. In the city center, plans to add 4,000 units include tacking new stories onto existing buildings, and tearing down small houses to put up bigger ones. If you're planning on moving to the classy Kikar Hamedinah neighborhood, you might want to wait for completion of 300 units planned to replace the circular lawn, one of the few available green spaces inside the city.
The city's look won't change much; nothing too radical is on the drawing boards. "We're emphasizing the existing structure," says Yoscovitz.
What will change radically is transportation. In 2012, people living in Tel Aviv may be enjoying a Light Rail Rapid Transit system, with routes within the city, and lines to suburbs Bat Yam, Ramat Gan and Petah Tikvah. The train is a kind of advanced trolley; similar ones operate today in Germany. They're intended to replace buses; since they're electrified, they're quiet and don't pollute the air.
Design of the system is finished. A civilized little map of stations, just like the Paris Metro or the London Underground, has already been printed. The Bat Yam line could be operational in two years, the whole system in 20; Yoscovitz says it depends on "decision-making in the Transportation Ministry." Later, far in the future, once the routes are well-established, the city might stick everything underground.
Other ideas planners toss about, says Yoscovitz, include "closing the city off to traffic altogether, or charging people for entering the city, with an electronic gate where you pay by credit card. We don't want toll booths, we want a cheap and automated system. We're learning from Norway, Scandinavia, and Singapore, where there are highly automated systems. On the other hand, we are very cautious we don't want to kill the city."
New residents and commuters are going to need jobs. Not to worry, he says, Tel Aviv is going to stay "the real central business district of the country, with banks, insurance, and finance. We're building, and rebuilding the commercial districts." Plans include moving offices from residential areas into new projects, like the massive Shalom Center, a $220-million, 150,000- square-meter complex built on 33 dunams (81/4 acres) near the Central Bus Station. Construction, due to start before the end of 1992, should last 12 years.
Yoscovitz would like specialized centers for particular industries where designers, suppliers, manufacturers and customers could meet under one roof. "We can't compete with countries like China," he says. "Israelis are not all that industrious; labor isn't so cheap. But we can follow the example of northern Italy, where you have the highest level of design."
Also in the works: extending the existing two-kilometer seaside promenade over the six-kilometer distance from Jaffa port in the south to the Yarkon Park in the north. Green spaces are planned all the way to Bat Yam, just past the city's southern limits.
Approval of a grandiose project to build two giant pyramid-shaped towers, situated in the water outside the city, like the fabled Colossus of Rhodes, would change the seafront forever. Titled "The Gates of Israel," the 35-story towers are to house luxury apartments and a five-star hotel. The project is funded primarily by Frankfurt businessman Yosef Buchman, who
also donated the controversial Agam fountain in Dizengoff Circle. Designer Moshe Safdie hopes the towers will become a symbol not of Tel Aviv, but of the country as a whole.
The project entails destroying the old Dolphinarium, the existing structure on the site halfway between the Tel Aviv marina and Jaffa port, and building a bridge into the sea. "The project is very controversial," says Yoscovitz. "It totally changes the seashore and the view of Jaffa from Tel Aviv." If it gets built, it will bring Tel Aviv even closer to the glistening skyscraper cities in the U.S.
JERUSALEM
Is aimless sprawl substituting for a grand vision? Building Jerusalem has always been more a matter of politics than of rational urban planning. Through the centuries, rule over the city switched hands countless times, and each new regime put its own distinctive mark on the physical development of the city.
The latest spurt of development has proceeded in a city reunified in the wake of Israel's victory in the Six-Day War, and has involved the construction of a ring of new neighborhoods on the perimeter of a city with enlarged boundaries. The political point: to establish facts on the ground by reinforcing the city's Jewish majority and assuring that Jerusalem could not again become a divided city.
As the city expanded over the ensuing 25 years, strategic considerations remained primary, says architect David Kroyanker, author of several books on Jerusalem. "There has been no real planning. What we have ended up with is urban sprawl."
Jerusalem in the year 2010 is likely to still be facing a similar fate, expanding rather than fundamentally changing. City engineer Elinoar Barzacchi, who implements plans crafted by a combination of the City Council and urban planning professionals, says, "We want more tourism, more hotels, more commerce, and we need to make the city center more attractive." But when pressed on a concept of the city as a whole, Barzacchi comes up short. "I'd like to see better infrastructure," she offers. Hardly a creative vision for the nation's capital on the cusp of the 21st century.
"Things are happening too fast," charges Tzipi Ron, spokeswoman for the Society for the Protection of Nature. "All the open spaces are being closed off and all the green hills ruined." What's more, she claims, the city jumps from one project to the next, without bothering to step back and assess the impact. The answers, she says, aren't "another shopping mall, another
road."
But the mall seems to be a fad that's caught on. Three major shopping centers are already under construction in different parts of the city: The mall at the Manhat project, which also includes housing, a zoo and a 15-acre, $50-million industrial park, will be completed next year. Next to the Old City's Jaffa Gate, the Mamilla project, with its 120 shops, cinemas, restaurants, and hotel, should be finished in two or three years. And the Talpiot Industrial Zone, expanding month by month, has taken off as a consumer mecca. On the top floor of yet another mall, still under construction in Talpiot, patrons are already flocking to a state-of-the-art complex of seven movie theaters.
And other major development projects are under way. Binyanei Ha'umah, the convention center near the entrance to the city, is being vastly expanded although construction has been temporarily halted while a Roman military camp, discovered during excavation, is studied. A trio of towers one of which, at 19 stories, is claimed to be the city's tallest building is currently going up downtown.
Construction has begun on a revamped government complex alongside the Knesset, to include a new Prime Minister's Office and the Foreign Ministry. The first building in the complex, the new Supreme Court, is due to be completed soon.
Work on a $100-million City Hall complex, concentrating all municipal offices in one square at the corner of Jaffa Road and Rehov Shivtei Yisrael, is in progress, refinanced after the city's loan from Canada's financially ailing Reichmann brothers fell through.
And the Russian Compound, today's local police headquarters and the site of a dismal detention center and several court buildings, is also to be revamped.
For the malls to succeed, notes Israel Kimchi, a Hebrew University professor of geography and a researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, "the economic base in the city has to change, to raise the level of purchasing power."
The current trend, however, is towards an even poorer population, as the well-off, the young and professional, and the secular leave the city.
"Over the past 10 years," says Kimchi, "100,000 people left the city. And although 90,000 people took up residence, they were mostly the ultra-Orthodox, and Arabs moving into East Jerusalem."
One way of attracting young professionals and raising living standards is to "go high-tech," says Erel Margalit, one of the principal players at the Jerusalem Development Authority, a corporation responsible to the Finance Ministry that was set up in 1989 for strategic planning in Jerusalem. Margalit hopes to create 30,000 high-tech positions by the year 2000 in several industrial parks, including Manhat and the already-existing Har Hotzvim, which will double its size from 35 to 70 acres in the coming few years.
To get to these new jobs and malls, City Hall, the Jerusalem Development Authority and the Ministry of Transportation recommend adding 172 kilometers to the city's road system by 2010, including major byways transecting residential neighborhoods in order to unsnarl traffic.
But residents near these proposed roads are far from thrilled. "They're bringing more cars into the city instead of creating good public transportation," says Lottie Schweig, a member of a citizens' committee objecting to two four-lane roads slated for open space in the German Colony. Fellow committee member Ehud Halevy fears a city cut apart by highways: "If that's what I want," he says wearily, "I'll move to Los Angeles."
HAIFA Apathy at City Hall and residents' contented complacency keep change at bay "Haifa was Herzl's dream city, transformed in his 1902 classic utopian novel "Old New Land" from a tiny, desolate town to a bustling international port. Pieces of the dream came true: Houses do cover the slopes of Mt. Carmel, and the port enjoys brisk trade. Other elements, however, of Herzl's dream like "liveried Negro footmen" serving passengers in horse-drawn carriages and sheikhs from across the Middle East peacefully doing business in the city never materialized.
Herzl, at least, could vigorously conjure up a vision of the city's future. Today's leaders aren't exactly following his example. Asked for a vision of Haifa 2010, Hava Law-yone, the city official in charge of long-range planning, sighs and pulls a crumbling map from a desk drawer. It's the city's current master plan, and it's dated 1967.
Reasons for the seeming apathy abound. The city physically has no room to expand. It's bordered by the sea and steep mountainsides; the heavily protected Carmel park and nature reserve to the southeast is off limits for development, and, so, for now, are nearby army bases. Mayor Arye Gurel's office has been riddled with scandal and budget crises for several years, and Haifa has been largely overlooked by a national government focused on other priorities.
Still, there are plans on the drawing board, like an addition to the city's power plant and a beefed-up intra-city transportation network. The Carmelit, the country's only subway, was recently renovated and will be extended. Law-yone would like to see greater use of the city's port; the sea, she says, "is Haifa's potential." Haifa intends to sink 10 million shekels (about $4.1 million) into development along the shore, with Law-yone dreaming of a tourist attraction a la New York's South Street Seaport or San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf.
Nonetheless, critics are frustrated by the slow pace at City Hall. "It's very hard to talk about what will be," says Shoshi Zeisel-Perry, manager of the Haifa branch of the Society for the Protection of Nature. "Haifa hasn't decided what it wants, or where. There are plans, but nobody does anything about them. Haifa is just waiting. We're like Sleeping Beauty."
Zeisel-Perry argues, for example, that preservation of the city's historic sites is not a priority. She charges that none of the buildings in the German Colony in the western part of city, constructed by the Templars in 1868, are being preserved. "The only reason the neighborhood is still standing is because they built it so well."
To the contrary, counters Law-yone, 100 buildings in the German Colony are slated for preservation, just one site among the 230 city-wide designated for rehabilitation. But work is going slowly because the city's preservation unit has only three employees.
Another critic charges that lackadaisical planning is slowly tarnishing the city's beauty. "Things are not being planned with sensitivity to the landscape" the line of the shore, the mountain's sudden plunge into the sea, the surrounding lush green wadis and creeks says Ruth Enis, chair of the landscape architecture department at the Technion, located in the city. New buildings, she says, are ruining the vista of Haifa's magnificent, curving panorama. "Slowly, tall buildings are closing off the view."
On the other hand, a city notorious for its air pollution is getting better due to public awareness and greater use of low-sulfur fuels. But, says Zeisel-Perry, "the problem won't be solved until industries put in scrubbers. The equipment is expensive, but eventually, there won't be a choice."
The real reason for the slow pace of development may be that Haifa's residents are content. The city is breathtakingly beautiful, its citizens relatively well off. "The state doesn't need to give us much, so Haifa
isn't high on its priority list," says Law-yone. "And people like the city." Even Zeisel-Perry doesn't mind if Haifa stays just like it is. "Without an addition of land," she says, "the city just won't grow." And that's fine with her. "Who says we need to be Tel Aviv?"
BEERSHEBA An international airport and a race track would transform the desert In "Bugsy," Warren Beatty, playing gangster Bugsy Siegel, stands in the middle of a dust cloud and dreams of building the city that became Las Vegas. Beersheba has mayor Yitzhak Rager, a man who looks into the shimmering heat and endless desert and sees a city that could be great.
"I have no doubt that the Negev is the future of Israel," says Rager, his voice cordial, sitting on a couch in his cool, carpeted office. "There is no other way. Even if we didn't like the idea, this is our destiny. But we love the idea."
He talks of a city of half a million, up from the current 135,000. Expansion will be northward, along a grid like Manhattan's. The city must grow in that direction; bordering the city on every other side are army bases, a prison, industries producing toxic wastes, deep ravines. There's also a network of high-tension wires which are too expensive and difficult to move.
But the mayor's vision has been hampered by the new government. Rager, a Likudnik, who once served as president of Israel Bonds in the United States, is disgusted with the decision to freeze building in his city, a move attributed in part to the region's high unemployment. So what, the mayor says. "What comes first, the egg or the chicken? Do you first create jobs, and then bring the people, or do you bring the people where the need and the vision dictate?
"The government now wants to concentrate those who need jobs in the center of the country. That's a lot of bull. There are no new jobs in Israel, period. You can get to Tel Aviv from here in an hour and 20 minutes. If you must use government money to create jobs, why not here?"
He's convinced that there will be plenty of jobs in the city in the future. The high-priority development status granted by the government last spring will help. In addition, says the mayor, "foreign companies will set up shop here for the difference in salaries. You can hire a fully qualified engineer in Beersheba for less than $40,000 a year. You'd never get that in Europe."
Rager has been plugging away at two national projects for his city. The first, moving munitions plants out of the heavily populated center of the country and putting them near Beersheba, may be pushed forward following the accidental blast that killed two people and injured 47 at an arms plant near Herzliyah in July. His second scheme: to build the country's international airport of the future.
"I believe we'll have peace with our neighbors," he says, "and this will bring hundreds of flights here. Nobody is giving this a thought. What's going to happen in 10 years? We'd better start building Israel's Kennedy Airport now." Meanwhile, Beersheba is jumping. Cranes and bulldozers are everywhere; four new neighborhoods are under construction. "Twelve thousand units are now under construction. One neighborhood alone aims for 100,000 people in 25,000 units by 2010. Two years ago, the neighborhoods were just hills in the desert. Now, we've conquered the desert."
Landscaping innovations suitable for the climate are in the works; a project to plant cactus gardens in the city's public areas is under way, thanks to a large donation from the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia, where Beersheba's sister city Wuppertal is located.
Work is under way to reinstate the Beersheba-Tel Aviv railroad passenger service; the mayor expects the long-dormant line to be operating late this year. There was a plan to build a super fast train line, so that in the next two decades, you could live in the Negev and commute to Tel Aviv in just 45 minutes. The money was allocated by the Ports and Railways Authority, but in March the government voted to cut the funding.
For now, the mayor is working on another dream. Like Bugsy Siegel, he believes people will come to the desert to gamble. "I'm personally pushing for a race track," he says. "One hasn't been built yet, for religious considerations but the government is a big gambler, sponsoring huge state lotteries." Maybe a generation from now, Saudi sheikhs will land in Beersheba's new airport, and head for the casinos.
1992
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