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This paper explores how local culture may curb the homogenizing forces of globalization in the diffusion of planning ideas. Given that the built environment is constructed both physically and culturally, this paper draws a comparative case study of territorial planning and the creation of new towns in Israel and Brazil in the mid-twentieth century. The private colonization scheme in northern Paraná state, in Brazil, and the Physical Planning in Israel were both based on widely influential ideas collected in the Greater London Plan 1944. Although the resulting regional strategies were similar, their urban forms differed largely due to their unique modes of being-in-the-world. While the Israeli new towns acclimatized the physical aspects of garden cities for ideological reasons, the Brazilian new cities stuck to a more practical gridiron layout. As a conclusion, this study illustrates how culturally sensitive projects gave local form to ideas and models that had been diffused through global interconnectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the Crete Development Plan, prepared in the mid-1960s by a team of Israeli and Greek planners and funded by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in the context of post-Second World War development. It discusses the export of professional knowledge in the micro-/macro-political contexts of national and international processes. Analysis of controversies within the Israeli team draws attention to incongruities and dissonances between regional concepts and their applications. It emphasizes how professionals interested in democratic and participatory processes used data sources to guide implementation, but also had to rely on mediated information, were removed from actual decision-making and thus were not directly responsible for the implementation of such decisions. The paper highlights the political role of expertise in post-Second World War development, and the ambivalent position of international experts serving both their countries’ and their own professional goals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A border is an ideological socio‐cultural construct by which communities define and defend their territory. But what are its formal and spatial configurations? How is the border architecturally conceived and perceived? This paper investigates these questions through analysis of three border typologies – the door, the bridge and the gateway – fostering a new discussion of architecture as a border‐making practice. It also relates to how architects and planners contribute to conflict, and to ethnic and physical barrier‐making by not being fully aware of the cultural and political implications of their actions. These ideas are discussed in the context of Israel/Palestine and the dynamic of the demarcation and separation between Israelis and Palestinians since the early twentieth century. It focuses specifically on the border zone between Tel Aviv and Jaffa, the Menshiyeh quarter. By examining border‐making from architectural and urban perspectives, the paper expands the political‐historical discussion of Israeli boundaries and clarifies the relationships between conflict (destruction), architecture (construction) and the everyday life of groups and individuals in today’s world of modern nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1970s, while the rest of the world was undergoing recession, vast economic growth in Iran, leading to fast urbanization, generated a growing international building market in which Israeli construction firms and architects also participated, benefiting from the good bilateral relationships at the time. To examine the experience of Israeli architects working in Iran and how it influenced their professional practice, this paper focuses on two projects planned and built simultaneously by Israeli teams. The Navy project was comprised of three massive housing estates and public amenities for the Iranian Navy's troops and families on the coast of the Persian Gulf. The Eskan Towers in Tehran was a complex of residential luxury towers and a commercial centre catering for the Iranian elite. Review of these cases indicates that national knowledge was not always the basis for transnational planning, and that the international arena itself became the source of knowledge and flow. In the Navy project, the architect derived his ideas from professional practices acquired back home, while in the Eskan Towers project the team was confronted with the free-market economy and a globalized practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to examine post-war planning and reconstruction of the historic Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem from 1967 to 1975. It focuses on the role of conservation of cultural heritage in determining the quarter's character, on the interaction between ‘top-down’ national and municipal planning and grassroots initiatives, on deviations from planning and declared policies, and on historical and geographical factors affecting restoration. Public opinion, individual initiatives, and response to immediate needs were more decisive in determining the character of the reconstruction than much of the planning. Intentional and unanticipated spatial changes within the Jewish Quarter and in its relationships with surrounding areas had a particularly profound effect on its character. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The landscape's continuity makes it a most efficient means for shaping the cityscape. Contrary to architecture/planning periodical historical approach, it is argued that the urban landscape's dynamic requires a fresh outlook in order to portray its time-space linear structure. The paper examines the city of Haifa in transition from colonial to the nation-building era through the landscape production mechanism that this article calls erascape. The investigation shows how this mechanism arises from political agenda to become a powerful agent in constructing Haifa's socio-cultural relations. Examining the remaking of Haifa Old City enables one to understand landscape production strategies as interplay between professionals (architects and planners), administrators and politicians operating in the transformative making of colonial and national cityscapes. Landscape production, as embedded through design knowledge and planning procedures, is examined in maps, drawings, diagrams and sketches, in official and private correspondence, in laws and regulations, and as it appears in historical photographs and exists in today's spatial experience of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the development and crystallization of urban-planning-and-renewal outlooks in Israel in view of the tension between physical renewal and social rehabilitation. The focus on the coalescence of early Israeli policy (1960-1975) reveals a gradual and protracted process in which the concept of social renewal trickled into the agenda of policymakers and experts. We argue that in the Israeli case, the belated arrival of the 'bulldozer approach', and the consolidation of the local urban-renewal approach at a time when policymakers and planners in Europe and North America were shifting away from slum demolition, combined with local social circumstances and changes in social policy, ultimately prompted Israeli policymakers to focus on preserving existing communities and favouring residents' co-optation into the process. This analysis of the encounter between Western perceptions of the city, and the consolidating urbanity of 'new' states that attained sovereignty after World War II, yields an additional point of view on processes that characterized urban renewal in the second half of the twentieth century. This analysis elucidates the international nature of urban renewal and the reciprocal relations between ideas and knowledge that took shape in the Anglo-American world and those of local legislators and experts elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to describe the evolution of statutory planning in Palestine and its later use during the Israel occupation in the West Bank to control Palestinian development. This statutory planning legacy began under British Mandate and Jordanian rule. The British Mandate (1920–1948), which extended British Town Planning Acts to Palestine, created the machinery that drew up district and local plans in Palestine based on these laws. The plans introduced land zoning, which restricted development in rural Palestine. While retaining the plans, the Jordanian regime that followed the British Mandate made some changes by legislating new planning laws which replaced and amended the British planning acts, defining the planning authority and the planning system. The Israeli occupation continued the control over the development of the Palestinian West Bank, by amending the planning system through authorizing the issue of military orders designed to serve Israeli interests. Regarding the legacy of the Mandatory plans, the Israelis continued to use them as an effective tool for controlling land use by Palestinians. These district plans, although prepared half a century ago under different circumstances, have probably achieved the same goal of controlling the development of a native people, while giving the central regime (colonial or occupation) an effective instrument and mechanism for implementing policies and achieving aims likely to contradict the interests of the native people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the Sharon Plan, Israel's celebrated New Towns programme and a central ethos of early statehood. Conventional wisdom unequivocally identifies it with the renowned Bauhaus-graduate Arieh Sharon and the progressive spirit of architectural modernism. I reveal, by contrast, how the plan drew on an obscure blueprint devised by an urban planner, Eliezer Brutzkus, in the context of the Peel Partition Plan in 1937. The Peel Partition Plan proposed, for the first time, to divide Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, based on population transfer. Brutzkus reacted to the new horizon of a Jewish-only statehood by devising proto-national mass urbanization plan, based on the 'comprehensive planning' of a land emptied of its Arab majority. In 1948, this plan was updated and canonized as the Sharon Plan. This previously unexplored thread re-situates Sharon's modernist feat within the longer-term history of Zionist colonization and dispossession. Further, Brutzkus drew on geoeconomic and demographic planning policy tools, rather than on architecture and design. As such, this case demonstrates the importance of attending to disciplinary multiplicity as a vital part of the period's legacy, rather than collapsing it under the blanket term of architectural modernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ayalon route is an infrastructural corridor serving as the principal northern and southern entrance to the city of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, bundling together multi-lane expressway, railway tracks, and a flood regulation canal. Its planning history, changing from a meandering seasonal river to Israel busiest traffic route, was a lengthy and incremental process, generating several plans by different planning agencies with different ambitions. Since the inception of the idea to implement a highway on what was described as 'natural opening' – the beds of the Ayalon (Musrara) river, this area became a landscape of opportunity, inciting social imagination among urban planners, municipal and national officials who used the road as an organizing device for the development of the city and the nation. This historical research explores the co-production of urban planning and transportation planning, not as rivalling forces but as coproducing processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The massive destruction of historic city centres during the Second World War was used, first in Britain and then in the rest of Europe, by contemporary architects and planners for justifying a modernist ‘clean slate’ approach to urban reconstruction; for them, war was ‘a blessing in disguise’ that could be exploited for adopting revolutionary planning concepts. In 1948 Tel Aviv, similar justifications were used for the total demolition of Manshiya, a centrally located ‘slum’ neighbourhood which allegedly suffered extensive and irrecoverable war damages during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. This article argues that contrary to common perceptions, the 1948 Manshiya demolitions were not a ‘complementary’ act obligated by the destruction of war, but rather a deliberate exploitation of wartime confusion and misinformation in order to launch an ambitious (and illegal) ‘modernization’ project for the whole area of southern Tel Aviv. Unlike European post-war urban reconstruction, in Manshiya, war was deliberately used by Tel Aviv’s leadership as a camouflage for a large-scale planned ‘civilian’ destruction that realized town planning ideals in their most radical form. This made the events exceptional not only in the backdrop of the 1948 War, but also in the local history of urban planning as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The typical Tel-Aviv ‘house’ and its resulting urbanscape are the products of the convergence between the plan prepared for Tel-Aviv in 1925 by Patrick Geddes, advanced architecture practice brought to Palestine by European trained Jewish architects, and social, economic and political realities regulating the developing city during the British Mandate. The Geddes plan is examined as a reflection of the period’s planning efforts and their influence on urban land development. The consequences of the plan are critically investigated to show how, aided by administrative and architectural efforts, it facilitated real estate development which promoted the consolidation of a specific housing type. Thus, despite its utopian aspiration for a green communal city, the Geddes plan did not contain, and perhaps even supported, the capitalist development of Tel-Aviv, carried on up to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]