Inventing the seashore: the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Promenade

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Contemporary Urban Landscapes
of the Middle East
The role of urban landscape projects in the cities of the Middle East has
grown in prominence since the mid-twentieth century, with a gradual shift
in emphasis from the private sphere to projects with an increasingly more
public function. The contemporary landscape projects, either designed as
public plazas or public parks, have played a significant role in transferring
the modern Middle Eastern cities to a new era and also in transforming to
a newly shaped social culture in which the public has a voice. This book
considers what ties these projects to their cultural and political context and
what regional and local design elements and concepts have been used in
their development.
Mohammad Gharipour is Associate Professor at the School of Architecture
and Planning at Morgan State University in Baltimore, USA. He obtained
his master’s in architecture from the University of Tehran and his Ph.D. in
architecture and landscape history at Georgia Institute of Technology, USA.
He has received several fellowships and awards and published six books
including Persian Gardens and Pavilions: Reflections in History, Poetry and
the Arts. He is the founding editor of the International Journal of Islamic
Architecture.
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Contemporary Urban
Landscapes of the
Middle East
Edited by Mohammad Gharipour
Downloaded by [University of California Berkeley] at 14:34 17 May 2016

4 Inventing the seashore
The Tel Aviv-Jaffa promenade
Elissa Rosenberg
In 2013, the Green Forum, an umbrella organization of forty environmental
groups in Tel Aviv, circulated a petition opposing the renovation of the city’s
seaside promenade. The plan proposed to connect the promenade with the
beach below using sections of bleacher seating in place of the existing retain-
ing wall, in order to improve access to the beach and provide new gathering
spaces facing the sea. The architects’ goal was to create “a place to develop
a new beach culture that doesn’t exist today in in the city.”1 The plan was
opposed because of its encroachment on the beach and its potential environ-
mental damage (Figure 4.1).
Figure 4.1 The first phase of renovations to the Lahat Promenade were completed in
2013. and included new seating, shade structures and paving. (Photo by
Aviad Bar Ness, courtesy of Mayslits Kassif Architects.)
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68 Elissa Rosenberg
The protection of the beach is one of many issues that environmental
groups are battling in Israel in the face of intense development pressures in
a densely populated country with diminishing open space. Environmental
advocacy is a relatively recent phenomenon that has been gaining momen-
tum. But the promenade controversy has stirred up familiar tropes. Its por-
trayal by the press as a battle of concrete versus sand recalls images that
have characterized the planning debate of Tel Aviv’s seashore since its earli-
est years. The contrasting narratives symbolized by these images not only
relate to environment issues, but also by extension to the privatization asso-
ciated with development. “Natural” has been conflated with “public” in the
popular imagination. By adding more pavement (and wood), the new plan
was perceived to strengthen private commercial interests on the beach and
limit public access. Historically, the sandy beach of Tel Aviv has not only
been viewed as a natural resource, but also as a democratic urban ground to
which every resident – and visitor – has a basic right.
Tel Aviv was the site of Israel’s first planned public beach and promenade,
and it remains a paradigm for Israeli seaside urbanism.2 The city first devel-
oped inland, with its “back to the sea,”3 and reached the shoreline only
gradually over the course of its expansion. Tel Aviv’s relationship to the sea
has always been full of contradictions. The seashore has been the site of con-
flicting pressures and opposing visions since the city was first established.
Though marginal and neglected for many years, the beach now plays a cen-
tral role in defining the city’s identity and its secular, relaxed leisure culture.
Mediating between the city and the sea, the promenade, or “tayelet,” has
become a significant public space for residents and tourists alike.
This chapter examines the design, use, and meaning of the promenade
as a public open space in light of the complex historical relationship of the
city to its seashore, and as result of the more recent effects of Tel Aviv’s
globalized metropolitan culture. The planning of the seashore is discussed
in terms of the increasing urbanization of nature that has occurred in the
context of changing planning frameworks. It will consider how, in the ongo-
ing process of inventing itself as a city from its founding in 1909, Tel Aviv
has invented – and reinvented – its seashore as the site of a changing leisure
culture that has shaped the character of the city.
The founding of Tel Aviv and the Geddes plan
The mythic narrative of Tel Aviv’s birth, a recurrent theme that has been
engrained in the Israeli cultural imagination through visual art and litera-
ture as well as popular culture, portrays the city as emerging from a sandy
tabula rasa. This narrative is more ideologically driven than historically
accurate. Tel Aviv developed as a suburb of Jaffa, an ancient harbor city
that was a thriving commercial center during the late Ottoman period. It
was described at that time as a “city full of life and prosperity surrounded
on all sides by orange and lemon groves and trees.”4 With the rapid growth
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Inventing the seashore 69
of the Jewish population in Jaffa in the late 19th century, the first Jewish
neighborhoods, as well as new Muslim and Christian neighborhoods, began
to be built outside the city walls.5
The traditional historiography of Tel Aviv marks the city’s founding only
in 1909, with the construction of the neighborhood of Ahuzat Bayit; the
goal was to found a modern Jewish urban neighborhood in which the new
Hebrew culture could develop. The narrative of “the city of the sands”6
gave a mythic quality to the city’s founding, signaling the radical newness
and utopian aspirations of the Zionist project. This image not only elides
the complex relationships that existed between the new Jewish neighbor-
hoods and the Arab city of Jaffa, but it also erases its former fertile and
varied landscapes. Maps and narrative descriptions of the time reference the
luxuriant gardens and productive landscapes of groves, orchards, and vine-
yards that surrounded the city of Jaffa, and on which sections of Tel Aviv
were to be built.7 Thus, the founding myth of the city of Tel Aviv ex nihilo
served to disengage it from Jaffa and its maritime identity, and from its own
physical landscape context, in which the sea was a dominant presence.8
In contrast, everyday life in the emerging city of Tel Aviv reflected a dif-
ferent relationship to the sea. The early neighborhoods did not front the
seashore; nonetheless, the beach became a popular focus of Tel Aviv leisure
culture. The city has a subtropical Mediterranean climate, with short mild
winters; long, hot, humid summers; and no rain for half the year. Before
urban parks existed in Tel Aviv, the beach was one of the few outdoor spaces
to provide respite from the stifling heat. In 1921, the British Mandate gov-
ernment formally granted Tel Aviv autonomy as a municipal jurisdiction, and
one of the early initiatives of the new municipality was to grant concessions
to bathing establishments as a source of revenue.9 Hot and cold bathhouses
were established, and cafes, clubs, and small hotels began to line the beach.10
In 1922, a luxurious Odessa-style seaside restaurant called the Galei Aviv
Casino, designed by well-known architect Yehuda Megidovitch, opened on
the beach at the foot of Allenby Street (formerly called the Derekh HaYam
or the “Sea Road”). Allenby was realigned to connect with the beach.
The three-story building included a winter garden and rooftop cafe that
attracted the city’s intelligentsia and public figures. Public transportation
was also provided from this time, making the beach accessible to residents
of Jaffa and southern Tel Aviv, and people would take to the street, walking
to the seashore “row by row, or in groups or couples, along Allenby Street,
which was long and full of life.”11 By 1924 there were some forty hotels by
the beach. According to accounts from 1929, a thousand bathers used the
beach daily, and several thousands came on Saturdays.12 At that time,
One could enjoy food, drink and dancing in one of the numerous cafes,
buy corn, soft drinks and ice cream from the seashore peddlers, play
different sports, bathe and swim, hire a deck chair or just walk along
the beach.13
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70 Elissa Rosenberg
Figure 4.2 The Tel Aviv shoreline in 1932, with the casino at the foot of Allenby
Street. (Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Divi-
sion, Washington, DC.)
Despite the popularity of bathing, swimming areas were limited. The Tel
Aviv sand beach was a short, narrow strip between the Arab neighborhood
of Manshiya to the south and Mahlul to the north, an area of temporary
housing located on a sandstone (kurkar) bluff. Industrial uses, including a
tannery and silk factory, were also located along the shore in this area.14
The city experienced rapid growth following the transfer of Palestine
to British rule after the First World War. Its population more than tripled
between 1922 and 1932, from 12,392 to 52,240.15 Existing neighborhoods
were eventually linked together as lands continued to be purchased, and
the city expanded to the north and to the west toward the sea. Recurrent
outbreaks of violence between Arabs and Jews in 1921 and 1929 triggered
the migration of thousands of Jaffa Jews to Tel Aviv.16 The transformation
of Tel Aviv from an ad hoc collection of neighborhoods to an emerging city
with coherent spatial conception occurred in 1925 when Patrick Geddes, the
renowned Scottish planner, was hired by the Tel Aviv municipality to create
a plan for expansion of the city for a projected population of 100,000. Ged-
des produced a report outlining the planning principles that would structure
the city’s physical form and provide the basis for new civic culture. Geddes’s
urban vision was shaped by Garden City concepts; but unlike the idealized
Garden City planning of Ebenezer Howard, Geddes’s regionalist approach
was more nuanced and responsive to existing conditions, adapting to the
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Figure 4.3 Geddes Plan, 1926. (Courtesy of Tel Aviv Municipal Archive.)
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72 Elissa Rosenberg
topography and natural features, the complex patchwork of existing roads
and new Jewish neighborhoods, and to the existing fabric of Jaffa. The plan
created an infrastructure for urban expansion, addressing circulation, block
types, parcels, and the creation of a “central city feature,” an acropolis-like
cultural center located on one of the topographic high points of the region.
His distinctive urban block was based on a hierarchical irregular grid that
was inflected to the topography and existing road pattern. Primary streets
(the wider “mainways”) were distinguished from the interior streets (the
slower residential “homeways”). Each block was arranged around central
open spaces that contained community facilities. Within these blocks, the
scale and configuration of the individual parcel was established, modeled on
the image of a “garden village”; buildings were to be freestanding, two-story
buildings with front yards and vegetable gardens in the rear.17
Despite Geddes’ attunement to Tel Aviv’s physical landscape setting, the
seashore was not a central feature of his plan, neither as generator of the
city street system nor as a significant public amenity. He had proposed that
the city expand northward along the Mediterranean coast to the Auje (now
Yarkon) River rather than inland to the east; yet the city plan was not ori-
ented toward this increasingly long coastal edge. Only a limited number
of east-west mainways connected the city fabric to the sea. In 1935, the
national poet and local resident, Chaim Nahman Bialik, would critically
observe of Tel Aviv: “There are no long, straight streets, prospects, that
extend to great length to give a sense of urban grandeur. In particular, hiding
the view of the sea from several streets was a mistake from the beginning.”18
Geddes recognized the sea’s climatic effect on the city and oriented streets and
buildings to allow sea breezes to penetrate the urban fabric.19 Except for this
environmental strategy, his recommendations for the shore remained site-specific
and local, minimally intervening in existing conditions and land uses. These
included a proposal for an urban square surrounded by shops – a “good wide
Public place”20 to be located at “Casino Place” at the foot of Allenby Street,
where a thriving cafe culture already existed. He proposed to create a nature
preserve on the site of the Muslim cemetery located on a cliff overlooking the
sea north of the beach. Brief mention is also made to the development of a
“Sea-shore Drive” that Geddes predicted would some day run along the shore
from Jaffa all the way to the Auje River alongside existing industrial uses.21 This
idea was not fully developed; it was not tied into the urban circulation system
or to the bathing culture that already existed on the beach.
Geddes’s report provided the basis for a physical plan that was developed
by the City of Tel Aviv’s technical department and approved in 1926 by the
city council and by the planning board of the British Mandate in 1927. The
plan’s street and block structure was implemented as the infrastructure for
the expanding city. By the 1930s the population had tripled again with the
influx of immigrants prior to the Second World War. Because of increased
housing demand, the plan was later amended in 1938 to provide higher
density. The garden village houses of the original plan were replaced with
freestanding four-story apartments set within the Geddesian parcel, which
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Inventing the seashore 73
were eventually designed by European trained émigré architects in the inter-
national style.22 Although his plan was not fully realized, the city’s basic
structure developed as a result of Geddes’s vision, establishing the unique
scale and vitality of the Tel Aviv street and its role as the center of urban
social life.23 But the character of the seashore was left to future planners to
develop.
Inventing the beach: the first promenade
Improving the seashore had become a municipal priority by the early 1930s,
a period of increasing economic growth and relative prosperity. Public advo-
cates and planners had high ambitions for the seashore, imagining it as the
basis of European-inspired leisure culture – a Tel Aviv “Riviera.”24 European
seaside resorts had originated the mid-18th century along the North, Baltic,
and Mediterranean Seas, founded as commercial ventures that shaped a new
form of seaside urbanism.25 Resorts promoted the health benefits of the sea
air and salt water, and typically incorporated musical and theatrical enter-
tainment, casinos, dancing, parties, and a variety of curiosities such as zoos
and aquariums. The promenade was its iconic centerpiece; walking along
the shore was key feature of the seaside holiday, allowing the visitor to take
in the sea air and gaze at the spectacle of the sea. It is to these well-known
European exemplars – of Nice and Naples, as well as Odessa, the birthplace
of many of the cultural elite and city founders – that Tel Aviv planners
looked in their desire to transform Tel Aviv into a Mediterranean resort city.
From the beginning there was a fundamental tension between private
interests and the public claim to the seashore. The seashore was perceived
as “a natural gift,” a basic public resource which every resident was enti-
tled to use: “the secret of (the seashore’s) allure lay in the residents’ sense
that together they all owned the beach.”26 In Tel Aviv’s early period before
the existence of municipal parks, the beach functioned as the city’s main
recreational open space. In his call to improve the seashore in the early
1930s, Chaim Nahman Bialik emphasized its public recreational role, citing
the lack of public parks: “Since we don’t have boulevards . . . or parks yet,
where will we go?”27 In 1933, the city launched a competition for a sea-
shore plan. The competition brief underscored the public role of the beach,
which was especially important “in the absence of squares, parks and other
adequate public spaces.”28
None of the competition schemes won, however, and instead Mayor Diz-
engoff commissioned French engineer and developer Claude Gruenblatt to
develop a large-scale reclamation project.29 The Gruenblatt Scheme, as it
was known, proposed the reclamation of 350,000 square meters of land
from the sea for the speculative development of a tourist center, promoted as
a source of revenue for the city. The proposal included hotels, recreational
amenities and residential buildings, focused on a central public garden, and
bounded by a new promenade twenty-five meters wide. The project, which
was approved by the municipality and the British Mandate government in
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74 Elissa Rosenberg
1936, immediately sparked an emotional public debate over the future char-
acter of Tel Aviv’s seashore. The Gruenblatt Scheme was opposed on the
grounds that it would deny public access to the sea, destroy the city’s natural
beach, and block the sea breezes.30 Citizens organized a protest and submit-
ted a petition against the plan. Given the lack of a culture of public partici-
pation in the planning process, this citizens’ protest was unprecedented and
attests to the intensity of popular sentiment for the seashore.31 Gruenblatt’s
plan was never implemented, yet it set the terms for a debate that continues
to polarize the planning of the seashore to this day, pitting development
against preservation and private commercial interests against the right to
public access.
The first promenade was built following this controversy, based on the
plan of city engineer Ya’akov Ben Sira (Shiffman) for “the improvement
of the seashore” in 1939–1940. Unlike Gruenblatt’s proposal, the plan by
Ben Sira envisioned the beach as a public space. But, according to Ben Sira,
in order to thrive as a public urban space, the spontaneous qualities of the
beach must be ordered and controlled.32 The plan addressed “the need for
the separation between the city and the beach by an engineered structure
that would serve as a frame for the city.”33 The promenade was meant to
instill a sense of decorum by creating a clear boundary between the city
with its social codes and the permissive zone of beach culture. Along with
separating the city and the beach, the plan was to bring order through a
zoning approach that separated the various beach activities. The beach was
not viewed as a single, monolithic space. The “water, sand and sun” were
treated as discrete zones, each associated with distinct and usually conflict-
ing activities, cultures, and codes (Figure 4.2).34
The functional separation of the activities of swimming, sunbathing, and
walking implicitly suggested the separation of the distinct social groups that
were associated with each realm. Ben Sira proposed to relocate the bath-
houses and other structures that had filled the beach in order to provide
more space for bathers and open up views of the sea. A new public space
was created based on the newly constructed sea view that came into being
as a result of clearing the beach. At the same time, as Azaryahu and Golan
noted, “The decision to avoid construction on the beach area reinforced the
special status of the beach as a sphere of nature. The promenade was thus
the interface between ‘nature’ and ‘civilization.’ ”35
The first promenade was an artifact of this binary conception of city and
nature, but by spatializing the boundary between the city and sea the prom-
enade participated in both realms, supporting an urbane seaside culture
of walkers. From this landscaped space of planting and seating, one could
watch the sunset and experience the sea without having to touch the sand. Its
design language, consisting of formal rows of trees and benches, highlighted
its sense of urbanity. The formal language of the promenade continued in
London Park, where a series of paved terraces joined the promenade with
the urban street above.36 The invention of the promenade as a mechanism of
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Inventing the seashore 75
separation effectively preserved the radical difference between the city and
the beach, intensifying the experience of beach as an open untouched space
of nature, while allowing for a new form of leisure culture to take hold
(Figures 4.4, 4.5 and 4.6).
Figure 4.4 View of the new promenade, 1941. (Photo by Zoltan Kluger, courtesy of
JNF Photo Archive.)
Figure 4.5 Early view of the promenade. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints
and Photographs Division Washington, DC)
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76 Elissa Rosenberg
Engineering the seashore: traffic, sewage, and sand
The beach underwent a long period of decline beginning in the 1950s. The
government declared a ban on swimming in the Tel Aviv beaches in 1950
due to the contamination of the water.37 Tel Aviv’s new sewerage system
included six new sewage outfalls that released the city’s untreated sew-
age into the sea.38 With the closing of the beaches the promenade became
increasingly marginalized and neglected. The decline of the seashore had
become a municipal issue by the late 1950s, and large-scale planning efforts
were directed toward its revitalization. The election of the Labor Party
to municipal government promoted new alliances between the national
Labor government and municipal agencies, creating a new structure of
state-municipal development corporations charged with project-oriented
urban redevelopment.39
The Tel Aviv planning discourse of the 1960s was influenced by both
worldwide trends and local ideology. During this period Tel Aviv, like
many Western cities, experienced negative growth, losing population to
its expanding first-ring suburbs. This trend was reinforced by the national
planning policy of “population dispersal,” established in Aryeh Sharon’s
1954 National Plan, the goal of which was to distribute the population in
order to attract settlement to the periphery.40 This dispersed pattern, along
with the growth of car ownership, made traffic engineering a key issue that
began to dominate the planning discourse. Urban renewal, based on the
wholesale clearing of neighborhoods, was adopted as an urban panacea.
This policy served a political agenda that neatly aligned with private
commercial interests.41 It was also consistent with the traffic engineering
approach that introduced wide arterial roads to the existing urban fabric.
The clearing of the two shoreline neighborhoods that had bounded the
promenade until now – the former Arab neighborhood of Manshiya to the
south and Mahlul, the Mizrahi immigrant neighborhood to the north –
provided new opportunities for large-scale land assembly, suggesting new
programs and scales of development. A new central business district was
planned to replace the cleared neighborhood of Manshiya aimed at uniting
Tel Aviv with Jaffa.42
If until now planners approached the seashore as a self-contained area
along the city’s margins, by the 1960s it was now seen in its larger physical
context, playing a role in achieving wider urban and ideological goals. In
contrast with Ben Sira’s conception of the promenade as a means of separat-
ing the city and the sea, the seashore was now imagined as the monumen-
talized centerpiece of ambitious urban megaprojects and multilane roads
that erased the existing urban fabric and created it anew. Not all of these
plans were realized, although they shaped the urban vision that would influ-
ence the eventual redevelopment of the seashore promenade, its adjacent
tourist-based development, and a six-lane road along the shoreline.43
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Inventing the seashore 77
Fundamental to the revival of the seashore was the engineering of its two
primary elements: water and sand. The development of the seashore was
enabled by two new infrastructural systems. The first was the decades-long
installation of a new city-wide sanitary sewer system that diverted city waste
to a new treatment plant located south of the city. By 1965 the first two seg-
ments of a new trunk line had been completed, allowing the removal of two
outfalls at the sea. The seawater was pronounced “clean” and the beaches
were reopened that year.44 The full system was not fully on line until 1982.45
The second significant public works project concerned the systematic wid-
ening of the sand beaches via the construction of eight breakwaters during
the 1970s.46 This promoted the accretion of sand that effectively widened
the shoreline to a strip averaging eighty meters wide. This reclaimed land
not only added depth to the beach; it also provided the minimum dimen-
sions required to widen the promenade and add a six-lane shore road.
In 1968 a joint state-municipal development corporation (Atarim) was
established to develop tourism in Tel Aviv and “bring life back to the sea-
shore.”47 By this time tourism was already taking hold, as evidenced by the
fact that leading international chains began to build high-rise hotels along
the seashore. Private recreational facilities were built, including a marina
and a swimming pool.48 Atarim was charged with coordinating the plan-
ning of the seashore, as well as providing the public infrastructure of roads,
parks, and beach services in order to attract private investment along a
4.3-kilometer strip from Jaffa to the Yarkon River. Its stated mission pur-
ported to balance the needs of residents with the provision of tourist facili-
ties, based on projections of one million annual tourists per year by 1980.49
The goal was to leverage private investment for the development of public
facilities. A team of four Tel Aviv architectural offices was hired to produce
an overall plan, headed by the office of Ya’akov Rechter.50 The centerpiece
of the plan was the design of a new promenade to connect these new ameni-
ties and give the seashore a new identity. The old structure was demolished
and the first segment of the new wider promenade opened in August 1982,
followed by the second phase in 1984, which was later named the Lahat
Promenade after Mayor Lahat, who guided its development (Figure 4.7).
The new promenade established a coherent identity along its length
through its distinctive paving pattern, reminiscent of Burle-Marx’s Copaca-
bana Beach in Rio, and its curvilinear form, which offset it from the city
street grid. The railing was removed and replaced with low planters along
its edge, creating stronger visual spatial continuity with the beach. Access to
the beach occurred at the stairways and ramps located at regular intervals,
aligned with existing city streets. The streets terminated in public overlooks
set on the roofs of the cafes that were located at each entrance, accessed
from the beach level below the promenade. In contrast with the first prom-
enade’s rhetoric of separation, the Lahat Promenade was based on a vision
in which the beach was an integral part of the city and its infrastructure. An
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78 Elissa Rosenberg
analogous large-scale process of development and reconstruction was being
applied to both the city and the sea.
The character of the seashore had been substantially changed. With the
completion of the promenade, the beach once again became a public desti-
nation and a lively center of activity for local residents after many years of
unsanitary conditions and public neglect. The small-scale businesses, bars,
and restaurants that had lined the street next to the promenade were gradu-
ally replaced by a row of hotels, and high-speed traffic now filled the newly
widened road adjacent to the promenade. The foundation was laid for a
growing international tourist industry focused on the beach.
Despite intensive private development, the beach preserved its public
character. Atarim maintained a delicate balance between its dual mission of
promoting tourism through attracting private investment and upholding the
public right to the beach. For Rechter, these goals were not in conflict but
Figure 4.6 Robert Capa, “The Promenade, Tel Aviv Beach,” 1948. (Collection of
the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Photo: Elad Sarig)
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Inventing the seashore 79
rather mutually supportive. He claimed that “towers on the beach are a good
thing, and the commercial activity and tourist activity along the beach is some-
thing that many cities are proud of.”51 Interestingly, he cited the examples
of Monaco and Nice, models that had been continually evoked by Tel Aviv
planners since the 1930s.52 Atarim took the position that the hotels needed
the additional height in order to minimize their footprint, so that views to
the sea and the circulation of air could be preserved between the buildings.53
Access to the beach remained free; Atarim proposed removing the fencing that
blocked public access and argued against charging flat entrance fees unless
they were based on specific services: “People should be free to use services as
they wish, and if someone just wants to sit on the sand – that’s their right.”54
Figure 4.7 Lahat Promenade designed by Rechter Architects – aerial view. (Courtesy
of Haratapuz hagadol blog – Tel Aviv blog)
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80 Elissa Rosenberg
The growth of tourism and the increasing commercialization of the beach
did not erode the basic public right to the sand. The beach evolved into an
active recreational space; in addition to swimming, sunbathing, and surfing,
it became a magnet for pickup sports such as volleyball and paddleball. Reg-
ular meetings of folk dancers, drummers, prayer services, yoga practitioners,
and a variety of other groups created new traditions and informal communi-
ties associated with the beach and promenade. The beach supported a num-
ber of subcultures and identities, with separate beaches assigned to religious
Jews (offering an alternating schedule of gender-separated swimming), gays,
and even dog owners. The design of the Jaffa section of the promenade
adapted to local social patterns; taking advantage of the natural topog-
raphy, the promenade was organized into grass terraces to form outdoor
rooms that accommodated the gatherings of large extended families, typical
to Jaffa culture (Figure 4.8).55 A pluralistic public culture had evolved on the
beach, perhaps more so than in any other public space in the city.
From beach to waterfront: globalization,
locality, and connectivity
Since 2000, the Lahat Promenade has expanded to the north and south,
linking Tel Aviv with Jaffa and its neighboring towns. A series of new devel-
opments along its length have added a new dimension to the promenade,
affecting its urban role and its performance as a public space. The promenade
has expanded beyond the beach to create a continuous urban waterfront. It
Figure 4.8 Giv’at Ha’aliya beach in Jaffa, designed by Giler-Lederman Architects
as grassed terraces to accommodate families and small group activities.
(Courtesy of Albatross)
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Inventing the seashore 81
is no longer characterized by the singular gesture and strong urban identity
of the Lahat Promenade that was closely tied to the beach. The large-scale
urban operations of the 1960s and 1970s, including the reconstruction of
urban neighborhoods and the engineering of the beach, have been replaced
by a more project-based approach. The extension of the promenade to the
north and south now connects new projects on sites of deindustrialized pub-
lic works, including the decommissioned port of Jaffa to the south and the
port of Tel Aviv to the north, as well as the formerly inaccessible waterfront
edge surrounding the Reading power plant. The redevelopment of these
areas follows global patterns of waterfront development and has added a
new post-industrial character to the promenade.
During the 1980s the outward flow of Tel Aviv’s population to the sub-
urbs was reversed, and young singles and middle-class families began to
return to the center city. This new interest in urban living, which mirrored
global trends, provided the impetus for a wave of renovation and the even-
tual gentrification of many of Tel Aviv’s historic neighborhoods. The 1985
Tel Aviv master plan (known as the Mazor Plan) reflected and supported
these trends by recognizing the significance of the city’s quality of life, his-
toric architecture, and cultural capital. This approach to urban revitaliza-
tion was more modest than in previous decades and was based on enhancing
the existing urban fabric and preserving architectural resources as opposed
to wholesale urban renewal–style redevelopment. This interest in preserva-
tion, which first emerged as early as the 1960s, was now fully developed as a
revitalization strategy. During this period, in an effort to continue to attract
the middle class, the city encouraged development projects that enhanced
the quality of life, including luxury high-rise residential towers as well as
new forms of leisure spaces.56
Recent developments along the shore reflect these demographic and cul-
tural shifts, as well as larger global trends. With the advent of deep-water
container port technologies in the 1960s, traditional urban ports became
obsolete.57 New uses were sought for these derelict urban sites, resulting
in a worldwide wave of waterfront redevelopment. Places of production
were converted into places of consumption, creating new commercial lei-
sure centers that shared a common set of formulas.58 Ports have been ideal
sites for creating a unique brand of postmodern consumer culture. Their
large-span industrial architecture has been exploited to “merchandise his-
tory,”59 to cultivate niche markets and offer flexible space for cultural and
commercial facilities. The postmodern waterfront is thus characterized by a
basic paradox: it draws upon local history and unique architecture to create
place identity, while adhering to a generic globalized pattern common to
waterfront redevelopment worldwide.60
The Tel Aviv port, located just north of the central beach, operated until
1965 when a container port opened in Ashdod. In 2003 the port facility
and the adjacent former Levant Fairgrounds were redesigned as a commer-
cial and leisure center based on the waterfront model.61 Cafes now line the
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82 Elissa Rosenberg
enclosed basin, and the historic hangar buildings have been redesigned as
upscale restaurants, shops, galleries, performance spaces, and a farmer’s
market. An extensive undulating wooden deck was built along the sea-
wall, which has become a haven for cyclists and skateboarders (Figure 4.9).
The Jaffa port has emulated the extraordinary success of the Tel Aviv port,
with the reuse of hangars as galleries, shops, and restaurants set within the
historic port area.
These two port projects are a product of increasing globalization of archi-
tectural production. But as sociologist Uri Ram has argued, rather than
viewing globalization as a force that creates universal cultural uniformity
and erases local difference, it is more accurately understood as a two-way
street in which local culture provides an opposing vector to the homogeniz-
ing forces of globalization. In his words, local culture “suspends, refines or
diffuses the intakes from globalization so that tradition and local cultures do
not dissolve; they rather ingest global flows and reshape them in the diges-
tion.”62 Ram’s argument offers a framework for understanding the hybridity
of the new leisure culture at the ports as local variants of the global water-
front phenomenon, even if its local idiom tends to reflect a symbolic expres-
sion of social reality and not its deeper structural relationships.63
The architecture of the Jaffa Port renovation offers a local reinterpreta-
tion of the postmodern waterfront typology through the lens of the site’s
layered history. Memory and history were the generators of the design of
the promenade at this section, which was conceived in response to the dis-
covery of the destroyed Ottoman city wall,64 as well as the later historical
Figure 4.9 Renovation of the Tel Aviv port and promenade by Mayslits Kassif,
Architects. (Photo by Adi Brande)
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Inventing the seashore 83
layer represented by British port architecture of the 1930s, reflected in the
industrial detailing and choice of materials.65 The port’s former use as an
active fishing harbor is also accommodated in the design of the new sea
wall, which provides places for fishing in order to retain the harbor’s origi-
nal local character and function. The fishing economy, however, has a fragile
coexistence with the globalized consumer culture of the waterfront. Despite
the port’s unique historic setting, the sense of locality has become, in Ram’s
terms, more symbolic than structural.
The Tel Baruch section of the promenade near the Reading power plant
(2009) is another example of a postindustrial reuse.66 Here, the sense of
locality is invoked through the design of the landscape (Figure 4.10). This
section extends the promenade to the north of the port through the formerly
fenced, inaccessible land of the Israeli Electric Company, setting it within a
naturalistic park planted with low, nonirrigated coastal vegetation. As in
many derelict industrial sites, the lack of access over a long period had the
effect of preserving the site’s unique ecology and allowing volunteer species
to flourish amid the original kurkar rock formations. Against the looming
backdrop of the electric plant, a 1930s icon of modernist industrial architec-
ture, this section of the promenade was designed to amplify its local shore-
line qualities by restoring the native Mediterranean coastal environment,
which has been all but erased elsewhere along the promenade.
In addition to the phenomenon of Tel Aviv’s postmodern waterfront, two
further themes are related to the promenade’s expanded role: first, its met-
ropolitan scale and the associated discourse of connectivity; and second, the
promenade’s infrastructural role as a space of movement. The promenade
has been reshaped by a metropolitan conception that defines it as a regional
connector. Originally designed to be experienced from east to west, in a
sequence from the city to the sea, the promenade is now a linear system
that is experienced along its north-south length. Current plans call for the
extension of the promenade to the north and south to form a continuous
fourteen-kilometer urban edge that will eventually link neighboring cities
Herzliya to the north to Bat Yam in the south. This new scale is a function
of a recent metropolitan discourse that emphasizes the value of connectivity
and shared regional resources. It also reflects a new physical reality in which
sprawling urban growth has effectively blurred the boundaries between Tel
Aviv and its adjacent communities.
The expanded scale is also a result of the changing speed of movement
along it. The culture of the leisurely stroll that gave rise to the promenade
has been supplanted by a sports culture of jogging and cycling that has
animated it in new ways. This transformation has created a new open
space typology of linear parks that has been proliferating worldwide on
postindustrial sites such as abandoned rail lines and viaducts, canals, and
other disused transportation corridors.67 The park’s linear form and met-
ropolitan scale encourages it to operate as flexible infrastructure. Land-
scape designer Diana Balmori observed the new adaptable urban potential
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84 Elissa Rosenberg
of the linear greenway, as distinct from the traditional urban park, whose
length and linear form allowed it to cut through multiple urban neighbor-
hoods making it more accessible as well as more socially and function-
ally diverse.68 The contemporary Tel Aviv promenade has come to assume
multiple identities and functions in accordance with its varied local site
conditions, while forging a new form of connectivity along the city’s edge
that was never successfully achieved within the urban fabric itself. The
city’s goal of creating a continuous, uninterrupted path along the shoreline
has had a significant impact in promoting more socially diverse use of its
open spaces, particularly evident in the flow of movement between Tel
Aviv and Jaffa. The promenade has become a shared space between Arab
and Jewish communities based on movement and the informal social mix-
ing it promotes.
Conclusions
The interstitial nature of the urban seashore, caught between the city and
sea, points to an inherent tension in the historic meaning of this space. The
binary conception of city and nature, a legacy of modernism, had been a
potent force shaping its meaning. The struggles over the planning of Tel
Aviv’s promenade reflect competing claims on the seashore: on the one
Figure 4.10 Coastal plantings along the Tel Baruch Promenade near the Reading
Power Plant designed by Braudo Maoz, Landscape Architects. (Photo
by Oyoyoy CC BY-SA 3.0, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
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Inventing the seashore 85
hand, as a space that plays a strategic role in the urban plan; on the other
hand, as the city’s “other,” a natural space that remains separate from the
city, outside the norms and everyday routines of urban life, subject to natu-
ral forces and processes.
The deeply held sense of the public ownership of this natural resource
helped to establish a populist, democratic public culture on the seashore,
which was effectively Tel Aviv’s first public open space. The Tel Aviv prom-
enade was first conceived in the 1930s as a mediating element that provided
an interface between the city and the beach. This simple zoning conception
of the promenade as a separator between urban social codes and beach cul-
ture changed with advent of the urban megaproject – characteristic of urban
renewal of the 1960s in Israel and beyond – that was couched in the ambi-
tious rhetoric of uniting Tel Aviv and Jaffa. The Lahat Promenade was the
product of the large-scale planning of this period that sought to integrate the
seashore into a larger urban vision. It depended on a new scale of operation
that included regionally scaled engineering systems to treat Tel Aviv-Jaffa’s
greatly increased sanitary waste, and a system of breakwaters to nourish and
widen the beaches.
Over the last twenty years, a new discourse of connectivity, articulated
in the context of a metropolitan vision, gave the promenade a new infra-
structural role as a space of movement. The promenade developed into a
continuous linear system for walkers, joggers, and cyclists – no longer solely
associated with the beach, but rather with a more varied set of conditions
along the shoreline that include the postindustrial commercial centers in the
former ports of Tel Aviv and Jaffa. The expansion of the promenade into a
metropolitan waterfront has created a new hybrid leisure culture, reflecting
globalized patterns, while expressing locality through a return to local his-
tory and indigenous coastal vegetation. The changing design and planning
of the Tel Aviv promenade continues to reframe and reinvent the seashore
and its meaning for the social life of the city.
Notes
1 Architect Ganit Mayslits, of the office Mayslits-Kassif Architects, for the renova-
tion project is quoted by Noam Dvir, “The Beach Returns to Tel Aviv,” Haaretz,
March 17, 2010, http://www.mouse.co.il/CM.articles_item,1042,209,47055,.aspx.
2 In 1933, the British architect Clifford Holliday planned a seaside promenade
for the city of Netanya, north of Tel Aviv, which was designed, along with
the “King’s Park,” named for King George VI, by landscape architect Shlomo
Oren-Weinberg. The park opened in 1937.
3 This phrase has gained currency in Tel Aviv historiography, deriving from art
historian Gideon Ofrat’s analysis of Israeli painting. See Gideon Ofrat, Back
Turned to the Sea (Tel Aviv: Omanut Israel, 1990) [in Hebrew]. For this theme
in Israeli poetry, see Hanan Hever, “They Shall Dwell by the Haven of the Sea:
Israeli Poetry, 1950–60,” Mediterranean Historical Review 17 (2002): 49–64.
See also Sigal Barnir and Yael Moria-Klain, eds., Back to the Sea: Israeli Pavil-
ion, The 9th International Architecture Exhibition Venice (Jerusalem: Keter
Press, 2004). The Israeli song about Tel Aviv by Meir Ariel, “With Its Back to
the Sea,” further popularized this idea.
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86 Elissa Rosenberg
4 Eli Schiller, 1981, quoted in Mark LeVine, Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel
Aviv, and the Struggle for Palestine, 1880–1948 (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 2005), 77.
5 The first neighborhood was Neve Tzedek, built in 1887, followed by Neve Sha-
lom, Mahane Yehuda, Achva, Ohel Moshe, Mahane Yosef, and Mahane Israel.
For a history of Tel Aviv see Yaakov Shavit and Gideon Biger, The History of
Tel Aviv (1909–1939) (Ramot: Tel Aviv University Press, 2001) [in Hebrew];
Maoz Azaryahu, Tel Aviv, Mythography of a City (Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 2007); Nathan Marom, City of Concept: Planning Tel Aviv (Tel Aviv:
Babel, 2009) [in Hebrew]; and Mark LeVine, Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa,
Tel Aviv, and the Struggle for Palestine, 1880–1948 (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 2005).
6 This is the term that Mayor Dizengoff used in the 1930s to describe the mythic
beginnings of the city.
7 A parallel can be seen in the European settlers’ ahistorical perception of the New
World landscape as fundamentally empty – a “raw nature, a cultural vacancy
untouched by history waiting to be filled by migrating Europeans.” See Leo
Marx, “The American Ideology of Space,” in Denatured Visions: Landscape
and Culture in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stuart Wrede and William Howard
Adams (New York: MOMA, 1991), 62–78, 63.
8 Many scholars have taken issue with this founding myth. See Mark LeVine,
Overthrowing Geography, 75–83, 121–151, 154–158, for a critique of the myth
of Tel Aviv’s “miraculous birth from the sands,” which he claims is central to
the city’s identity and self perception as a new city and center of the renewal of
Hebrew culture, separate from Jaffa.
9 Maoz Azaryahu and Arnon Golan, “Contested Beachscapes: Planning and
Debating Tel Aviv’s Seashore in the 1930s,” Urban History 34 (2007): 278–295.
10 Shavit and Biger, The History of Tel Aviv (1909–1939), 37.
11 Maoz Azaryahu, “Cultural History Outlines of the Tel Aviv Seafront: 1918–48,”
Horizons in Geography 53 (2001): 97 [in Hebrew].
12 Shavit and Biger, The History of Tel Aviv (1909–1939), 39.
13 Anat Helman, “European Jews in the Levant Heat: Climate and Culture in
1920s and 1930s Tel Aviv,” Journal of Israeli History 22, no. 1 (2003): 81.
14 Mayor Dizengoff initially envisioned the seashore as an industrial zone, and a
silk factory and tannery were built, which are referred to in Geddes’s report.
Only later did Geddes recommend the development of the beach as a leisure
area, recognizing its tourist potential. Quoted in Shavit and Biger, The History
of Tel Aviv (1909–1939), 40.
15 Gideon Biger and Elie Schiller, “The Geography of Tel Aviv,” Ariel 48–49 (1989):
19 [in Hebrew].
16 See Mark LeVine, Overthrowing Geography, for a detailed history of these
events and their effect on the development of Tel Aviv.
17 For a discussion of the Geddes plan, see Nathan Marom, City of Concept; Neil
Payton, “The Machine in the Garden City: Patrick Geddes’ Plan for Tel Aviv,”
Planning Perspectives 10 (1995): 359–381; Volker Welter, “The 1925 Master
Plan for Tel Aviv by Patrick Geddes,” in Tel-Aviv, the First Century: Visions,
Designs and Actualities, ed. Maoz Azaryahu and S. Ilan Troen (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2011), 300–326; and Yodan Rofe and H. Schwartz,
“Vision, Implementation and Evolution of Patrick Geddes’ Urban Block in Tel
Aviv,” in Regional Architecture in the Mediterranean Area, ed. Alessandro Bucci
and Luigi Mollo (Florence: Alinea Editrice, 2010), 483–491.
18 Chaim Nahman Bialik, Yediyot Iryat Tel Aviv (June 8–9, 1934), quoted in Yael
Moriah and Sigal Barnir, In the Public Realm: A Tribute to Avraham Karavan
(Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum, 2003), 96. [in Hebrew].
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Inventing the seashore 87
19 Patrick Geddes, Town-Planning Report, Jaffa and Tel Aviv (Tel Aviv Historical
Archive, 1925), 21. While Geddes’s prescient climatic approach is often praised,
Marom notes that his approach contradicts current thinking; he sought to maxi-
mize the north-south orientation of the streets in order to maximize east and
west exposures of the building façades. Today, the conventional wisdom is to
maximize east-west street orientation to allow the penetration of breezes from
the sea. Marom, City of Concept, 59.
20 Geddes, Town-Planning Report, 18.
21 See Iris Graicer, cited in Rachel Kallus, “Patrick Geddes and the Evolution of
Housing Types in Tel Aviv,” Planning Perspectives 12 (1997): 294, who specu-
lates that Geddes’s acceptance the industrial uses along the seashore was influ-
enced by Meir Dizengoff, Tel Aviv’s mayor and Geddes’s client, who favored
industry over recreation.
22 This became the typical Tel Aviv apartment building, retaining the front set-
back garden, and a small private garden in the rear. For a discussion of Tel Aviv
housing in relationship to the Geddes plan, see Kallus, “Patrick Geddes and the
Evolution of Housing Types in Tel Aviv,” 281–320.
23 For an analysis of the street as the locus of public life as opposed to the urban
square in the Geddes plan, see Rofe and Schwartz, “Vision, Implementation and
Evolution of Patrick Geddes’ Urban Block in Tel Aviv,” 489.
24 See for example, Moshe Roitman (Amiaz), “On the Question of the Beach in Tel
Aviv,” Yediot Iryat Tel Aviv 1, no. 2 (1937): 46–47, Tel Aviv Municipal Archive
[in Hebrew].
25 For a discussion of European resort development and the promenade, see Franck
Debié, “Une Forme Urbaine du Premier Âge Touristique: Les Promenades Lit-
torals,” Mappemonde 93, no. 1 (1993): 32–37 [in French], http://www.mgm.fr/
PUB/Mappemonde/M193/PROMENAD.pdf; and Alain Corbin, The Lure of the
Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750–1840 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994).
26 Azaryahu, “Cultural History Outlines of the Tel Aviv Seafront” 100.
27 Bialik quoted in ibid., 102.
28 The competition brief stated: “Today the seashore is used as a place of rest and
relaxation, outings, sport and leisure for the city’s residents and for many visi-
tors. In the absence of squares, parks and other adequate public spaces, the
beach has double significance.” Shavit and Biger, The History of Tel Aviv, vol. I,
40. The beach was the only large public leisure area in the city until the Levant
Fair opened in 1934 and included an amusement area. During the 1930s, two
large municipal parks were planned: Meir Park and Independence Park. A com-
petition for the first urban square also took place in 1934, which was won and
built by architect Genia Aurbach.
29 See Maoz Azaryahu and Arnon Golan, “Contested Beachscapes: Planning and
Debating Tel Aviv’s Seashore in the 1930s,” Urban History 34 (2007): 278–295;
and Tali Hatuka and Rachel Kallus, “Mediation Between State, City, and Citi-
zens: Architecture along the Tel Aviv Shoreline,” Journal of Architectural and
Planning Research 24 (2007): 23–41.
30 Azaryahu and Golan, “Contested Beachscapes,” 289. See also Hatuka and Kallus,
“Mediation Between State, City, and Citizens,” for a discussion of this proposal.
31 Azaryahu and Golan, “Contested Beachscapes.”
32 Ya’akov Ben Sira (Shiffman), “Plan for the Improvement of the Tel Aviv Seashore,”
Yediot Iryat Tel Aviv 6–7 (1938–39): 150, Tel Aviv Municipal Archive (Hebrew).
33 Ibid.
34 Roitman, “On the Question of the Beach in Tel Aviv,” 46–47.
35 Azaryahu and Golan, “Contested Beachscapes,” 293.
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88 Elissa Rosenberg
36 London Park was designed by the city gardener Avraham Karavan and opened in
1942. Its formal design was uncharacteristic of his work, which included numer-
ous parks in Tel Aviv. The park was named for the Londoners who had lived
through the Blitz during WWII.
37 Yaron Balslev, “The Pollution and Purification of Tel Aviv Sea Shore, 1909–1982,”
Horizons in Geography 78 (2012): 112.
38 On the creation of a joint sewage plan for Tel Aviv and Jaffa, see Nahum Karlin-
sky, “Jaffa and Tel Aviv before 1948: The Underground Story,” in Tel Aviv, The
First Century: Visions, Designs, Actualities, ed. Maoz Azaryahu and Ilan Troen
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 138–164; and Balslev, “The Pol-
lution and Purification of Tel Aviv Sea Shore.”
39 Other projects included Atarim Square, a large elevated commercial center built
along the seashore on the site of the razed neighborhood of Mahlul. The city also
promoted preservation-oriented tourist development during the 1960s, with the
historic restoration of the old quarter of Jaffa as an artists’ quarter of studios,
shops, and restaurants coordinated by the Jaffa Development Company.
40 For a discussion of the Sharon Plan, see for example Ilan Troen, “The Trans-
formation of Zionist Planning Policy: From Rural Settlements to an Urban Net-
work,” Planning Perspectives 3 (1988): 3–23.
41 See Nathan Marom, City of Concept, 257–299, for a detailed analysis of the Tel
Aviv 1964–1968 master planning process, led by architect Tsion Hashimshoni,
and the increasing influence of private interests during this period.
42 The City Center was the subject of an international competition held in 1962
for a large mixed-use mega-project for Manshiya, formerly a northern neigh-
borhood of Jaffa that was conquered during the War of Independence. After a
long period of neglect, the neighborhood was slated for demolition and recon-
ceived as a new central business district that would link the recently merged
cities of Tel Aviv and Jaffa. The competition process, its political agenda, and
an analysis of the winning schemes are reviewed by Taly Hatuka and Rachel
Kallus, “Loose Ends: The Role of Architecture in Constructing Urban Borders
in Tel Aviv-Jaffa since the 1920s,” Planning Perspectives, 21 (2006): 23–44; Zvi
Elhyani, “Seafront Holdings,” in Back to the Sea. Israeli Pavilion, The 9th Inter-
national Architecture Exhibition Venice, ed. Yael Moriah-Klain and Sigal Barnir
(Jerusalem: Keter Press, 2004), 104–117; and Nathan Marom, City of Concept,
who discusses the project as a real-estate bonanza, dubbing it “Moneyshiah.”
For a discussion of the project’s ideological role, see Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, “The
Architecture of the Hyphen: The Urban Unification of Jaffa and Tel Aviv as a
National Metaphor,” in Tel-Aviv, the First Century: Visions, Designs and Actu-
alities, ed. Maoz Azaryahu and S. Ilan Troen (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2011), 373–405.
43 Only several office towers were realized as part of the Manshiya project and the
plan was highly criticized by the former city engineer, Ya’akov Ben Sira (Shiff-
man), Tsion Hashimshoni, and others. The central business district was later
redesignated further east near the Ayalon highway. Marom, City of Concept,
315–318.
44 Balslev notes that this was far from the case, as untreated sewage was still flow-
ing into the sea in the southern portion of the beach, where the third phase of
the system was still to be installed. The festive reopening of the Tel Aviv beaches,
he suggests, was politically motivated as it occurred during an election year. See
Balslev, “The Pollution and Purification of Tel Aviv Sea Shore,” 117.
45 Ibid., 118. Until the tertiary treatment plant was completed in 1982, the waste
was piped to a primary treatment plant nearby in Reading that then flowed to
the sea.
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Inventing the seashore 89
46 The breakwaters were developed following the recommendations of Italian plan-
ner Luigi Piccinato, who was commissioned in 1963 to prepare a plan for the
Tel Aviv seashore. An experimental breakwater was first installed in 1970, and
following its success, seven additional breakwaters were built along the shore
from north Tel Aviv to Manshiya over the next ten years. Shavit and Biger, The
History of Tel Aviv, vol. III, 100.
47 Atarim meeting minutes, “A New Shoreline for Tel Aviv,” Tel Aviv Municipal
Archive, 1974 [in Hebrew], 1.
48 The first six- to nine-story hotels began to appear in the early 1950s. In 1965 the
Hilton was built, and additional hotels were built along the beach in the 1970s
in the former area of Mahlul. The marina was built in 1970 south of the break-
water. Shavit and Biger, The History of Tel Aviv, vol. III, 100.
49 Ibid., 6.
50 These were Nadler, Nadler and Bickson; Niv and Reifer. A. Yasky and Y. Rech-
ter, who led the team.
51 Doron Rosenblum, “The Tel Aviv Shoreline: A New Look,” Davar, February 19,
1971.
52 Ibid.
53 Danka Harnish, “Tel Aviv Could Lose the Sea,” Davar, April 9, 1971.
54 Atarim meeting minutes, Tel Aviv Municipal Archive 75/31–32, October 15, 1982.
55 This section of the promenade in the Ajami neighborhood is called Giv’at
Ha’aliayah and opened in 1993. It was designed by architects Giler-Lederman.
56 Marom, City of Concept, 329–341.
57 See Glen Norcliffe, Keith Bassett, and Tony Hoare, “The Emergence of Post-
modernism on the Urban Waterfront: Geographical Perspectives on Changing
Relationships,” Journal of Transport Geography 4 (1996): 123–134.
58 Ibid.
59 See Christine Boyer, “Cities for Sale: Merchandising History at South Street Sea-
port,” in Variations on a Theme Park, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1992), 181–204.
60 Norcliffe et al., “The Emergence of Postmodernism on the Urban Waterfront.”
61 The winners of the Tel Aviv Port competition were architects Mayslits Kassif
with Galia Yavin.
62 Uri Ram, The Globalization of Israel: McWorld in Tel Aviv, Jihad in Jerusalem
(New York: Routledge, 2008), 197.
63 Ibid., 199.
64 The promenade section “City Walls” was designed 2001–2003 by architects
Eitan Eden and Eyal Ziv for the Atarim Corporation. In the end, the Ottoman
wall could not be restored, and it was represented metaphorically as a marking
in the paving. Personal communication, Eitan Eden, 2008. See also Hatuka and
Kallus, Loose Ends.
65 The pavers, for example were carefully chosen to emulate those used in British
railroad stations of the period. Personal communication, Eitan Eden, 2008.
66 This portion of the promenade was designed by landscape architects Braudo-
Maoz.
67 See Amita Sinha, “Slow Landscapes of Elevated Linear Parks: Bloomingdale
Trail in Chicago,” Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes:
An International Quarterly 34 (2014): 113–122.
68 Diana Balmori, “Park Redefinitions,” in The Once and Future Park, ed. Debo-
rah Karasov (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), 39–45.
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