Arriving at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, you encounter a first clash of history. At arrivals, it is clear that the current airport is built on the ruins of a 2000-year-old one. This is not the only clash I encountered while travelling through the country on a recent trip. In a 30-minute drive, I experienced a clash of territory, finding myself in continental Europe, Russia, Egypt and Arizona, and all within five minutes of each other. In the public debate, rhetorical figures and ideological positions bring me back into the Deep South of the USA, social-democratic ideals of the 1950s and ‘60s, oriental sensitivism. And then I am not even discussing the trips I took further into Palestine.

It seems that the world is compressed here on a small piece of land, with many of the big issues facing the world today, and by extension architecture and planning, heaped together. Globalism vs. tribalism, market forces vs. public agendas, the way that security issues influence the public realm, authenticity vs. Disneyfication And all this against the backdrop of an intense competition for space, such that issues of density vs. sprawl not only play out on the level of a functional debate, but also on an ideological level.

New Tribalism

This competition for space, this proximity or even juxtaposition of competing, and clashing, land claims, makes Israel an interesting study object for architecture and planning. People have migrated from all over the world to Israel. It has visibly enriched the country. One can see it in the food, in culture, in business, in the public debate. Yet, at the same time, there is a substantial amount of stratification and segregation and even agitation within Israeli society, not only based on nationality, but also religion, geographical origin, economic position, political outlook.

As a reaction to our more and more globalised world, we can find many instances of this new (forced or voluntary) tribalism everywhere, from the growth of ghettos to the development of gated communities in the USA, as for instance described by Robert D. Kaplan’s in Empire Wilderness, but also, more and more, in Europe, once an example of an integrated society.

Gated. And beige

Newcomers from all over the world settle in distinct areas, from which the old inhabitants flee. Bat Chefer is a gated community (of which there are many in Israel) that in almost no way distinguished itself from one in Arizona, including the soaring heat, rows of carefully regulated white dwellings, playground elements based on Harry Potter and a nicely decorated wall. On its Eastern perimeter, the wall, however, had additional fences and a small reservists’ camp. On that side was the Palestinian city of Tulkarem.

Worldwide, segregation is exacerbated by the dwindling role of the public sector in planning and building. Israel’s economy is very liberal, and as a consequence, when not informed by the so-called ‘security concerns’, so is planning. This means malls at any highway exit, with their beige-ness not so much a function of the desert but a tribute to genericism, and mirrored glass windows on the accompanying office structures, housing the same companies as in Orange County.

Theme park for eternity

The only place where the beige is not a function of the global corporation is in Jerusalem, where the building code of using beige stone is designed as proof of the fact that the city has been there for a really long time, as has air conditioning. Jerusalem has been planned by Safdie (the architect who also helped design the Merkava tank) et al in very much the same way as Albert Speer had in mind for Berlin; a theme park for eternity, part of the ‘experience economy’, like Holland Village near Nagasaki, Japan. It is easy to imagine what would have happened if the Zionists had chosen Uganda.

In Israel, the debates that globalism forces on Europe, the United States and the developing countries are fought out for real, on a small territory which is densely populated. Many people say that the situation in Israel is highly politicised and unlike any other place, and that it cannot be discussed without ‘normalisation’. I beg to differ from my Dutch experience.

Going Dutch?

The Netherlands is a country in which politics and ideology have been maximally downplayed in, and separated from, the architecture and planning debate over the last decades, and where in spite of this ‘shortcoming’, myriad useful planning tools have been developed. Its pragmatic, or empirical, approach has found its use all over the world.

When projected onto Israel, this approach will make it an ideal laboratory for architecture and planning, and can provide the much-needed new solutions, not only for the country itself; conflicting territorial claims can be found all over the world, such as economic development versus the environment.

Not only have I encountered this potential during juries at Israel’s architecture schools, where student proposals made me think of possible applications in the Netherlands, also the most specific of situations, Israel’s military planning technology, can be usefully put to work in the Netherlands.

War, the engine

The recent incident involving Gretta Duisenberg, flag wielding wife of Wim, the EU central bank president, proved once again the fine tread one has to walk while discussing anything relating to Israelis and Palestinians. Especially anything that involves territorial issues.

However, as an architect and urbanist, there is much to be learned from the territorial tactics utilised in the Israel-Palestinian war. Not only because of the spatial techniques that are used to deal with the competing territorial claims, but also because the wide spectrum of non-spatial techniques used offers insight into the ‘deep structure’ of planning.

War is often the engine for technological progress, as for instance Paul Virilio and Manuel DeLanda have demonstrated. War has been instrumental in the creation of cities. The Dutch 16^th-century city, for instance, was devised according to the shooting distances of artillery. Carefully devised by mathematicians-cum-urbanists such as Simon Stevin, it was exported all over Northern Europe.

Maps can deceive

Defensive strategies inform the Israeli city as well. The distances and target lines of the one-dimensional war have been replaced by the non-dimensional suicide bomber. A result is the success of the shopping mall and the delivery service, rather than the public square safely inside the city’s walls. And with that, the city, as a place for interaction and emancipation, has become nonterritorial.

Something everybody knows already, but has a tendency to forget, staring blindly at two-dimensional maps and planning documents and drawing arrows suggesting ‘connections’.

That maps can spread disinformation is shown in Khaled Khalil’s article on the ‘unrecognised villages’: to be not on the map means to have no status, no services, no right. That maps can fool people is shown in Eyal Weizman’s article ‘The Politics of Verticality’, in which he describes the three dimensionality of planning the territorial conquest of the occupied territories and the peace proposals, whereas the spin remains two-dimensional.

Other lessons . . .

The sophistication of planning the conflict three-dimensionally is accompanied by a clever system of laws, regulations, and institutions that have been set in place over the past decades with the intention of territorial conquest. It is also too easy for planners in general to forget how this ‘deep structure’ informs the outcome of any proposal. Only by engaging it, can planning function. This lesson, evident in Israel, should be taken seriously by every member of our profession.

On a more mundane level, other lessons can be learned in Israel. One Architecture, my firm, has, for instance, copied the system of bypass roads in a plan for the logistics areas around Schiphol airport near Amsterdam, an area as dominated by the multi-dimensionality of safety zones, just-in-time logistics and competing land claims. By making two road networks, one for lorries and one for normal cars, we have reorganised the area more efficiently, with fewer new roads, greater concentration of synergetic functions, and fewer environmental conflicts.

Understanding sprawl

While maps can hide the complexity of a territory, maps are also a way of communicating its intricacies. By drawing them in the multiples, the different layers and mechanisms, the ‘deep-structure’, of planning are slowly exposed. In the late 1980s, Bruno Fortier attempted to research the development of Paris during the 18th and 19th centuries. At that time, there were no such things as official urban plans and written documents. He painstakingly drew maps of the city, a new map every ten years, in order to discover the mechanisms of urbanisation. Armed with this research, he put his ‘Atlas de Paris’ to use to understand the sprawl of the periphery in the late 20th century, paving the way for the likes of Rem Koolhaas to operate in France.

In this sense, this project might not only be an important contribution to ‘Israel’s obsession with maps’, it might also offer the tools to understand and deal with its current challenges in planning.

This article, written in 2002, first appeared in Territoria magazine.

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