Zionist Architecture and Town Planning. Nathan Harpaz
of size limitation as well. In relation to a community’s size Howard designed the greenbelt, an effective town planning device to control growth that could be applied for different purposes: agriculture and rural life preservation, natural and heritage conservation, recreation creation, or pollution protection.21
The urban form of the garden city is an important topic in this study, as some activists of the Zionist movement, in particular Davis Trietsch, promoted the garden city model and perceived it as an idealistic and advanced form of town planning. Tel-Aviv was founded in 1909 after the European model of the garden city. After World War I, Tel Aviv lost its original garden city design and rapidly became a crowded metropolitan. The garden city idea is discussed in the Levy plan of 1920, and it also influenced the formation of new types of rural Zionist settlements.
Patrick Geddes (1854–1932), a biologist, geographer, educator, political activist, and urban planner, had an enormous impact on modern town planning.22 In 1879 Geddes first encountered the social theories of Frederic Le Play and they greatly influenced him, making him aware of the effects of environmental and geographical factors on existing social structures.23 French scholars influenced Geddes in many other ways, for instance, the geographical concept of regionalism, which would lie at the core of his urban studies. Geddes was impressed by Auguste Comte’s evolutionary development of science, which placed the social sciences above mathematics, logic, physics, chemistry, and biology.24
Geddes’s busy mind developed three-dimensional “thinking machines” that synthesized knowledge from geography, economics, and anthropology. These thinking machines attempted to show the interrelatedness of different areas within the social sciences. Geddes was also interested in civics, which concerns relations between individuals and the environment. He saw the earth as a cooperative planet where people should be taught how to properly treat their environment. Specifically, Geddes’s web of life aimed to educate children, to improve people’s physical quality of life by using new biological knowledge to produce better medicines, and to understand humans’ influence on ecology. These ideas led to his notion of Eutopia, a utopia that was realizable here and now.25
While Ebenezer Howard was working with his garden cities movement, Geddes looked at problems of existing cities in order to link social reform and the urban environment, not only in small towns, but also in larger urban areas.26 In 1918, Geddes became involved in the Zionist movement, turning his interest to Jerusalem and Palestine. After five years of traveling back and forth between India and Dundee College in Scotland, the prospect of working in Jerusalem seemed to him a culmination of all his dreams.27 While working with David Eder (1865–1936) of the Zionist Commission, he suggested a comprehensive survey of Jerusalem that would evaluate the past and present as well as future possibilities, wanting his architectural style and good city planning to encourage the integration of Palestinians, Arabs, and Jews. Geddes received the commission’s permission to plan the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and his plan made use of his ideas about synthesizing knowledge and promoting an intimate relationship between university, city, and region. Geddes left his mark on the university with the building of the Dome, which he envisioned as a sign of unity.28 In 1925, Mayor Meir Dizengoff asked Geddes to submit a master plan for Tel Aviv. Geddes’s plan, which called for Tel Aviv to be a European garden city, outlined the development of the northern part of Tel Aviv (since the southern part had already been built up); it was approved in 1929 and influenced the shape of the city for years to come.29
There were four major features of the Geddes plan for Tel Aviv. The first component was the grid of streets: major streets running from south to north, intersected by widely spaced east-west secondary roads and wide green boulevards, with minor streets penetrating the large blocks. The second element was the design of large city blocks for domestic dwellings, including standardized, mostly detached buildings, each with a maximum of two stories and a flat roof. The third feature was the design of each block of dwellings around a central open space, and the fourth was the creation of a concentration of cultural institutes to function as a civic center. 30
Geddes did not follow his contemporary planners with the attempt to separate the old cities from their “cities of tomorrow,” but “he closely knit together the new Tel Aviv with the original neighborhood of Ahuzat Bayit (later Tel Aviv), the ancient city of Jaffa, and the latter’s outlying neighborhoods.”31
Another unique chapter in modern town planning is the urban solution for working class housing. The Industrial Revolution in nineteenth-century Europe created a crisis in proper living conditions for the rapidly developing cities. Some solutions for working class housing during the nineteenth century provided cooperative housing promoted by factory owners near their work sites. Such solutions failed to create healthy environments because they were too close to the polluted factories, and they generated dependency and conflicts between workers and factory owners.
Other solutions, utopian in nature, like the garden city or the industrial city, were too idealistic and difficult to implement (as was discussed in the previous review of the garden city). The German garden city movement before World War I dealt with working class housing and models for such projects were already presented at the Third German Applied Arts Exhibition in Dresden in 1906. Architect Max Taut produced simple workers’ cottages set in functional gardens. These types of dwellings depicted idyllic workers’ homes that were the opposite of those lived in by the majority of German workers in overcrowded cities. The issue of workers’ housing came also to realization through the activities of the German garden city movement before World War I. In the first establishment of the garden city of Hellerau near Dresden, Richard Riemerschmid, the chief designer of the project, designed the general plan, the factory, and the first row-house developments for workers. Riemerschmid used two concepts in his plans for workers’ housing: different “types” of models and the use of standardized materials.32
After World War I the development of housing accommodations for the working class focused on the urban environment, with the implementation of modern town planning and architecture. While unique developments can be identified in each European nation, there are striking similarities in five major factors that had an impact on working class housing between 1880 and 1930. The most critical one was the poverty of urban working class families. Low wages of European workers resulted in low rent housing and poor living conditions. The second factor was the fact that the building industry could not provide low cost units because of insufficient profit and unattractive investment. The third factor involved the increasing organization of the working class, as labor unions and the new social democratic political parties granted the working class electoral power. These new political entities put pressure on governments to develop state initiatives for housing solutions. The fourth factor was the ideology behind private property and the traditional family. The fifth element was the emergence of a permanent and growing government bureaucracy, which rapidly developed its own interests.33
Historically, at the beginning of the twentieth century elite groups acknowledged that the problem of working class housing could cause social instability. Given this fear, building regulations were established and tax incentives were offered to builders, but politicians hesitated to intervene with the private market, and