The Plan - Zvi Efrat

Everything will be systematically worked out in advance. In the elaboration of this plan, which I am capable only of suggesting, our keenest minds will participate. Every achievement in the fields of social science and technology of our own age and of the even more advanced age, which will dawn over the protracted execution of the plan, must be utilized for the cause. Every happy invention that is already available or will become available must be used. Thus the land can be occupied and the State founded in a manner as yet unknown to history, with unprecedented chances of success.

— Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat, (The State of the Jews,) 1896

The great revolution is not over yet, and its essential functions have barely begun. In the near future we must lay foundations that will stand for decades and possibly centuries to come. We must shape the character of the State of Israel and prepare it to fulfill its historical mission.

— David Ben-Gurion, The War Diary, January 1949

As it is – crowded, heaped up and frantic at the center, diffused, dissociated and monotonous at the margins, the fabricated space of Israel is a ‘manner of land occupation and state founding without an historical precedent.’ Contrary to common belief and to visual impression, it was not born of haphazard improvisation, emergency solutions or speculative entrepreneurship and certainly not of spontaneous diachronic development – but rather of the unprecedented objective to put into practice one of the most comprehensive, controlled and efficient architectural experiments in the modern era.

Indeed, this is Israel’s singularity among nation states. It was ‘systematically worked out in advance,’ formulated a-priori by means of arithmetic, planimetric and demographic formulas, drafted in pencil, ink and watercolor by planning professionals from various disciplines, who were called upon to actualize Ben-Gurion’s prescript ‘to transform the country, the nation, our entire modes of life;’ or to put it in a more technical language, to engineer and re-design (no less) the country’s geographic, ecological and agronomic mold – its patterns of urbanization, socialization and employment, the overall framework of production and service, the character of its public life as well as its patterns of domestication in the new Israeli state. An all-encompassing planning ambition such as this is not self-evident even in the context of its own period – one that revered the ‘planning sciences’ and perceived mega-architects, infra-engineers, macro-economists and sociology-masters as the omnipotent agents of progress itself.

Precedents for the Israeli Project can be foundin Stalin’s Five-Year Plan ,the Soviet Union, in the American New Deal infrastructural projects and public works of the 1930s, in the German National-Socialist regional plans for the occupied territories of Poland and in the post-World War II British schemes of New Towns. However, its sweeping vision, exceed all instrumental models and circumstantial explanations, is rooted in the utopian imagination and the topian (to use Martin Buber’s neologism) praxis of the Zionist Movement. These roots call for some elaboration, so as to re-enact the bedding upon which the Master Plan of Israel was drafted immediately upon the ‘outbreak’ of the State.

The very notion of HaMiph’al HaZioni (the Zionist Enterprise or the Zionist Project) enfolds the highly institutionalized, explicitly synthetic and actively constructive nature of the process of land appropriation (or re-appropriation) and nation-building by the Jews in the twentieth century. Any attempt to ‘normalize’ Zionism by over-emphasizing aspects such as spontaneous immigration, organic settlement or market forces, misses the point: the artificial essence of Zionism, the grounding of its rhetoric on the notion of ‘negation,’ ‘inversion,’ ‘synthesis’ or ‘combination;’ its self-definition as a constrained, corrective, redemptive (Ben-Gurion even used the notion of ‘messianic’) intervention in historical time and geographic space. In this context, centralized planning is the ultimate trope that binds Words and Things; it is the Zionist spirit itself, emanating from layers of fictional prose, ideological manifestoes or programmatic protocols and printed on the landscape over and over again with every new spatial move or architectural object.

The most conspicuous use of centralized planning – not merely for territorial organization, but rather as an apparatus molding new ethos  is manifested in the consistent efforts to shift the political, cultural and economic weight from the city to the countryside and from the center to the periphery. As a rule it may be said that in its first fifty years, the Zionist movement devisedand developed a range of pioneering models of agricultural settlement supported by sophisticated logistics of manufacture, organization and marketing, but never imagined, planned, or actually built a cityIn fact, the modern metropolitan city was consistently portrayed in both literary utopias and direct propaganda as an anathema to the Zionist concept of land redemption – a parasitic growth threatening to undermine the fundamental values of the re-emerging Hebrew civilization.

Thus, revolutionary objectives, totally controlled planning and a well-coordinated course of action had characterized the Zionist Enterprise from its very outset. However, the country’s crucial ‘conversion’ was obtained with the founding of a sovereign state. The end of the British Mandate in 1947 and the ensuing administrative vacancy, the War of 1948 and the ruinous grounds created, the exchange of refugee populations during the war and immediately following it, the confiscation and nationalization of over ninety percent of country’s lands, the emergency legislation (most of which is still valid today) and the austerity decrees, the virtually absolute monopoly of Mapai (Israel Labor Party) over all State and Histadrut (Federation of Labor Unions in Israel) apparatuses, the moral and material support provided by the world’s superpowers for the new state (specifically, the budget allotted for development, which was separate and equal in size to the comprehensive national budget) – all these came together to provide an opportunity and ostensible legitimization for a project of construction (and obliteration) more daring than any of its literary precedents.

Only a few weeks after the Declaration of Independence, during the War of 1948 and as a means of pushing forth its goals, Arieh Sharon, a Bauhaus graduate and one of the prominent architects of Israel’s Labor Movement, was commissioned to establish the governmental Planning Department.3 Within about a year, this department presented an overall master plan for Israel (known as the Sharon Plan) and provided the political leadership of the time a powerful tool for molding a new landscape and dictating the shape of things to come. Professionally speaking, the Sharon Master Plan is by no means an innovative document. Rather than original ideas, it presents an assemblage of models, theories and experiments, some of which had been developed locally during the British Mandate era, mainly by members of the Settlement Reform Forum; others were imported from Europe as ready-mades and abruptly naturalized. In fact, the Plan is unique only in its scope – in its ambition to put forth at once a single layout, a single vision, a single stately concept at a scale of 1:20,000. Such ambition could have remained anecdotal – too rational, instrumental and progressive or alternatively, too dreamy, ritualistic and reactionary – had it not been implemented verbatim, almost entirely, often by short-cutting standard planning procedures; always through the systematic reproduction of zoning doctrines, building typologies and construction methods.

While it had no statutory status (or perhaps, precisely because it did not have to face legislation procedures,)4 the Sharon Plan instantly, within less than a decade, transformed from a principles document to a mega-project embracing dozens of cities and towns and hundreds of rural settlements ex machina; extensive woodlands, national parks and nature resorts ex fabrica; networks of roads, electricity, water, ports and factories ex nihilo. Soon after the official publication of the plan in 1950, Sharon and his team of planners realized that they had provided the government with an all too readable building manual. In spite of their enduring commitment to overall centralized planning and their loyalty to the party, they made efforts to slow down the literal application of their plan on ground.

However, the genetic code they had devised on paper in their laboratory had already been cloned and disseminated throughout the country, proving its durability in vivo, even under the most adverse conditions.

The pressing national task assigned to Sharon and his team of planners was providing temporary housing solutions for the masses of new Jewish immigrants and settling the country’s borderlands, in order to stabilize the 1948 cease-fire lines, prevent territorial concessions and inhibit the return of Palestinian war refugees. The planners accomplished this by drafting a statewide network of civil frontiers composed of transit camps and outpost agrarian settlements, as well as by re-settling deserted Arab villages with new Jewish immigrants (mainly those coming from Asia and North Africa.) Concurrently, a long-term mission was outlined: preparing a plan for ‘the country’s intense and comprehensive development, which would reach all its corners.’

Just one year after it’s processing began, the first draft of the Sharon Plan was presented. Its objectives were targeted towards a local population of 2,650,000 inhabitants (a target obtained in 1966,) which would be dispersed throughout the country, thus adjusting the ‘anomaly,’ or the ‘colonialist pattern,’ as the planners dubbed the development of the Jewish community in the country during the British Mandate (upon the establishment of the State of Israel, two thirds of the Jewish population was concentrated in the three large cities: Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa. Eighty-two percent lived along the coastal plane. The Sharon Plan aim was that only forty-five percent of the urban population would dwell in the big cities, while fifty-five percent would settle in the new medium-sized and small towns.)

De-territorialization (effective upon the local Palestinian population but by and large futile vis-‡-vis veteran Jewish population) and de-centralization (according to the strategic precept of using civilian settlements as military outposts de jure or de facto, a precept developed already in the early pre-state days and valid to this day) – formed a consecrated cause, which dictated all moves and procedures of the national plan, even if at times they were inconsistent with professional discretion, even if they entirely failed the test of economic logic, even if they turned the ‘melting-pot’ rhetoric against itself and created, in effect, severe geographic and social segregation between veteran residents and new immigrants. Mass immigration was both the problem and the solution. The problem: since the immigrants’ predispositions regarding the choice of their place of residence were known in advance and considered by the authorities a threat to the Zionist settlement policy. Thorough studies of the colonization patterns in ‘New World’ countries carried out by the planning committee, indicated that in Israel too, without decisive state intervention, the first generation of immigrants would undoubtedly choose to crowd the coastal cities, thereby deepening the Mandatory ‘anomaly’ even further and accentuating the emptiness of the rural regions. The solution: since, were it not for the statistical body of new immigrants, the historical opportunity to re-invent the Israeli space would not have emerged. Indeed, in spite of the considerable propagandist endeavors invested by the government in the attempt to induce a population migration to the periphery, it was clear to leaders and planners alike that the Sharon Plan would not be voluntarily implementable. Eliezer Brutzkus, one of the senior conceivers of the Plan, described its achievements post factum vis-‡-vis the relevant model – namely, the construction enterprise of the new workers’ towns in the Stalinist Soviet Union:

Truth be told, these results were obtained here too, against the free will of the settled subjects, namely the immigrants, through a method whose underlying principle was ‘straight off the boat to development regions.’ We must not forget the basic fact that the creation of the New Towns, and the settlement of the peripheral regions, was done primarily through directing the new immigrants, and only marginally by attracting the ‘veteran’ population.

The Soviet project, efficient as it was in constructing and inhabiting, top-down, hundreds of new provincial towns and edge cities, was not the only model from which the Israeli planners drew inspiration.7 The rehabilitation projects of Western Europe after World War II, especially the new satellite towns around London founded by the British Labor Government, were also thoroughly analyzed by Sharon and his team (the planner Sir Patrick Abercromby, the ‘father of the New Towns,’ was even invited to Israel and met with Ben-Gurion.) In the Israeli laboratory – and this is the enigma of its proletarian charm – a new paradigm was created, based on the unlikely marriage of a suburban Garden-City in a Western Welfare-state and a peripheral industrial town in the outskirts of the Bolshevik Empire. This juxtaposition embodies the two formative paradoxes ingrained in the Sharon Master Plan: The attempt to concoct, synchronize and monitor a rational mechanism for ‘organic,’ ‘regionalist’ and quasi-historical settlement; and the unequivocal ideology of anti-urban urbanization (as many towns and as little urbanity as possible).

The basic tool, suggested by the Plan for achieving this original construct, was the re-division of the country into twenty-four districts, designed mathematically to contain an equal number of residents. The districts were determined according to geographic characteristics and were planned as arrays of agricultural settlements clustered around central villages and served by a regional town. Size, dimension, and amount (of population, of area, of employment) were perceived as reliable criteria for obtaining the desired interactions between center and periphery, city and country, industry and agriculture.

Over four-hundred agrarian settlements were founded during the State’s first decade according to the Master Plan’s guidelines, but its epitome was the creation of the district town – the infamous Development Town – whose optimal size was the subject of lengthy academic discussions among the planners. Ultimately, the preferred model was of an intimate town, housing between twenty-thousand and fifty-thousand residents, assumed to be exempt of the disorientation, alienation, social injustice, speculative realty and other urban malaises associated with the cosmopolitan city. (Was it also a return, mutatis mutandis, of the repressed Shtetl still haunting the planners?)

In order to prevent at all costs the development of unruly colonization and socialization patterns typical of New World countries, the Sharon Plan chose to emulate the European historic layout, whereby the majority of the population dwells in small and medium-sized towns integrated into the agricultural hinterland, and only the minority lives in the big cities. The origins of this hierarchic web lie in pre‑industrial agrarian culture, and reflects centuries of moderate organic growth.

The planners of Israel tried to squeeze this process into a single heroic decade, backing their ambitions with intricate pseudo-scientific theories that analyzed the link between settlement patterns and endurance during times of crisis. (An especially authoritative model for the Israeli planners was the ‘Theory of Central Places,’ formulated by German geographer Walter Christaller through his 1939 doctoral research.)

Such a general attitude of activating a regressive revolution, or a pioneering Old World, may be discerned not only in the dispersal of towns and settlements on the map, but also in the attempt to base the architecture of the towns themselves on a conceptual crossbreeding between mechanistic planning methods striving to render the traditional city more efficient in terms of mass housing and motor vehicle traffic on one hand, and more picturesque conceptions on the other, willed to tone down the city by deconstructing it into small, autonomous communities, protected from street life, zoned off from industrial sectors and wrapped by green pastoral surroundings. The planners believed that through critical study of urban history they had managed to develop an innovative method for ideal city planning, as could be gathered from the writings of Eliezer Brutzkus:

The structure of the New Towns is determined by their division into Neighboring Units. This method differs from conservative methods of urban planning still prevalent in the old cities in Europe as well as in Israel. These cities are built as a monotonous continuum of houses, streets and residential neighborhoods, dragging on endlessly and making the lives of their residents gray and dull. [The author goes on to explain the conceptual superiority of cities such as Ofakim, Kiryat Shmona or Ashdod, over Paris, Berlin, or Vienna.]

The Neighboring Units mentioned above (or the ‘eggs’ as they were called in the professional milieu) are the structural organizing principle of the New Towns. In theory, they were intimate urban sections with biomorphic contours that rejected orthogonal grids and endowed the ‘instant’ towns with elasticity and vibrancy. In reality, the separation into autonomous units created a jumbled grouping of disembodied organs containing a limited variety of housing types and self-contained in terms of commerce, education and leisure services. The town is a cluster of neighboring-units, assembled around a civic center with municipal institutions. The developing town aggregates modular units, thus preserving its neighborly character. The size of each unit was determined in relation to the estimated capacity of schools and kindergartens, the optimal dimensions of the commercial center, and the desirable length of paths in the neighborhood. The units were planned in such a way that would separate motor traffic from pathways within the neighborhood, enabling pedestrian access to all daily services at a distance of up to 250 meters without having to cross the street. The smooth, plexing lines of the units, the abundance of open space within and between them, the placement of education and recreation facilities at the heart of the units amidst lawns or woods, the distanciation of industrial areas from living quarters and their separation by green belts, the design of repetitive social housing on undivided land, rather than normative parceling and speculative construction – all these forge the most deceptive illusion of all: the new Israeli town was meant to be a blown-up kibbutz based on homogenous community, collective and egalitarian, without private capital or unanticipated market forces. However, unlike the kibbutz, or even the pre‑State Workers’ Housing Cooperative in the well-established towns, which were created as exclusive and hegemonic structures by and for the members of a social avant‑garde movement, the New Town came into being superficially and coercively – a professional and bureaucratic doctrine forced upon a population of unsuspecting newcomers used as passive subjects of a national experiment. With the foundation of the first New Towns, it became apparent that the progressive zoning principles and the generous ‘ecological’ aptitude simply do not work. The detached, sparsely populated, ready-made towns weighed down disproportionately on the national budget due to the huge amounts of infrastructure they demanded. The supply of capital and entrepreneurship (both from public and private sources) required the creation of jobs in those out-of-the-way locations and lagged behind the pace at which the immigrants were sent to the New Towns (in Kiryat Shmona, for instance, the first factory was built a full decade after the town was created.) Veteran urban population remained in the cities and ignored the national challenge. The veteran agrarian population of the kibbutzim already had a well-organized marketing network of its own (including such monopoly cooperatives as Tnuva and Hamashbir,) had no use in the services provided by New Towns, and completely discounted the planners’ regionalist vision. The vast expanses that had been water-colored green on paper, were totally incongruent with the climate, the water resources and the maintenance facilities in the country, and in reality became dead zones, severing the urban fabric. The autonomous, inward-looking units and the separation of motorways and pedestrian paths, obstructed the development of street-life. The ‘alienation, degeneration and low quality of life’ in the big city, so consistently denounced by official state propaganda, were replaced in no time with homogeneity, remoteness, and deprivation. Criticism soon took over the prophetic positivism of the professionals. During a retrospective discussion on the planning of the New Towns that took place in 1964, architect Yitzhak Yashar concluded:

There was an industrial world, there were enormous cities, but they sought dispersal there. It was in the center of London – where you cannot go in and you cannot go out, where traffic and noise are tremendous, where there is neither sunlight nor greenery – that the concept was born. The very same idea – not only in its qualitative but also in the quantitative sense, in its formal sense – was shifted to Beer Sheva. And in Beer Sheva, where one searches longingly for traffic and commotion, for a bit of social gathering – there, in the middle of the desert, we solved the problems of London […] but obviously, what is good for five or eight or ten million people – is catastrophic when you have a mere ten thousand in the desert.

Fifty years after its official publication, the Sharon Master Plan remains valid. The vision of colonization and modernization laid out by the plan has, for the most part, been implemented. The country has developed at an unprecedented rate of growth. The New Towns – a well-intentioned hybrid of imported urban theories and physiocratic local ideology – still exist more or less as they had originated: barren Garden-Cities, lethargic Work Towns, bypassed regional centers, homogenous melting-pots, underdeveloped urban odds and ends still struggling to preserve their special Class A tax-reductions status, granted by the various governments to ‘areas of national preference.’ Just as the citizens of these New Towns played a historic role in realizing the logistic reversal of the fifties, they have fueled the so-called Political Turnabout of the seventies (when the Labor Party lost its hegemony for the first time) and the cultural revolution of the nineties. With each metamorphosis, their distance from the heart of the country only increased. However, the Israeli cultural and territorial vortex is still sweltering. Once the big sell-out and redevelopment of State-owned agricultural lands is over, and once the political settlements beyond the Green Line will be forced to return to the legal boundaries of the State, the peripheral Garden-Cities of yesterday will undoubtedly become the most desired land reserves: the last option for suburban ‘quality of life’ so revered by a society that never really coped with its own socialist-agrarian rhetorics and never really sublimated the values of liberal urban life.

Zvi Efrat is Head  of the Architecture Department at the Bezalel Academy of Art & Design  - Jerusalem, and a practising architect.