With this new book, an English translation of the Hebrew publication from 2008, Tali Hatuka weaves together the history of architecture in particular locations in Tel Aviv with the violence enacted therein. Her use of architectural plans, archival documents, public hearing records, and public responses presents a textured narrative of the city's building history. Avoiding the now well-trodden paths of Bauhaus and International Style architecture, she explores plans for the construction of public edifices instead, such as Kikar Malchei Yisrael (Kings of Israel Square, renamed Rabin Square), the old bus station, and the Dolphinarium. These constitute the three major case-study sections of the book. Hatuka then situates her analysis within recent violence in Israeli history (the 1990s and the first decade of this century), including the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin at the first location and suicide bombings at the other two. These offer Hatuka an opportunity to examine the impact of moments of violent trauma in the city's conception of itself. Though these events are more recent, she then demonstrates that earlier moments of violence led to the original creation of these particular spaces. More recent and contemporary architectural responses follow a tradition that she traces to the early establishment of the city at the beginning of the twentieth century. Thus she considers the construction of Tel Aviv as a response to the violence of 1920–21, and 1929 particularly; the need to segregate from the Arab community of Jaffa; and finally in its broadest possible sense, an authoritarian act by the state and the municipality against the Palestinian population. In turn, the Arab–Israeli conflict becomes the Palestinian response to the aggression of building in Tel Aviv. Subsequent responses in this cycle of violence occur at state and municipal levels but also at the level of individual citizen, alone or through grassroots or lower-level institutional movements.
Hatuka explores the tensions between competing and conflicting groups in a single area, examining the trajectories, places, and aspects of architectural decisions. In revealing the actors behind decisions, and hence their agendas, she opens up a political narrative about Tel Aviv architecture. Taking the view that “the State has had a monopoly on violence” (4) and that structural decisions were made often in response to violent acts, Hatuka claims that this book offers a site for understanding Tel Aviv in the Arab–Israeli conflict (x). “It concentrates on how acts of violence change and affect the production of space and the discourse about space (12).”
Each section examines the architectural history of a location, its usage (both intentional and unintentional), the impact of the moment of violence, and subsequent responses at the architectural and individual level. Along with the recent explosion in studies of the making of space, Hatuka argues that the architectural construction of space affects people. She offers three major categories: (1) physical—location and/or space influences social behavior; (2) behavioral—humans have impact upon the space and affect it; and (3) sociopolitical—politics influences the treatment of space. Through these lenses, she explores the ways in which decisions are made at every level in response to the landscape.
In the second chapter, on Rabin Square, Hatuka focuses on the area as “an arena of rituals and civic congregations” (14), discussing the use of the square for public events, demonstrations, and peace rallies. Having analyzed the broader history behind the square's establishment, she delves into the creation of spontaneous monuments in the wake of Rabin's death, and discusses the later preservation of aspects of these local modes of commemoration in a more formal public memorial at the site. The magnitude of the event, in political terms, affected conceptions of the space, denoting the area as sacred, which subsequently affected public reactions to the notion of placing a multilevel parking lot underneath the square. Yet not all such violence petrifies a location in time and space. Hatuka claims that in general the city's response to the suicide bombings on the Number 5 bus (1996) and at the Dizengoff Shopping Center (1997), the Apropo Café (1998), and the Dolphinarium discotheque (2001), revealed an attempt to return to normality as quickly as possible and to erase any element of the violent trauma on the cityscape: “These attacks were most commonly followed by a rapid resumption of day-to-day routines, repair of the physical damage, and an increase in security measures, all in an attempt to erase the violence from the urban landscape” (12).
Chapter 3, on the Dolphinarium, offers Hatuka a venue to explore the notions of architectural boundaries and the raising and erasing of historical divisions between Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and the sea. The attempts at redeveloping Menshiyeh, the border neighborhood, at various stages in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s revealed changing attitudes to the role of the impoverished locality such that despite a series of architectural competitions “the program for a business center, or bridge, and main motor route along the sea was never implemented. Opposition delayed the preparation of Menshiyeh's master plan and negated the necessity of the whole project” (93). Final decisions in the 1990s were affected by economic considerations of Tel Aviv-Jaffa as a single entity, in which the Arab past became a focus in tourism and representations of the city as cosmopolitan and international, while individual enterprises were turned to for local development projects. The move away from a single coherent municipal plan to one focusing on individual building structures speaks to larger changes in the ideological conceptions of the city. Nonetheless, tensions remained simmering beneath the surface in relation to the Hassan Beq mosque with its own civic history, lying in the heart of this territory.
Chapter 4 focuses on Neve Sha'anan, “a southern neighborhood of Tel Aviv that was developed in the 1920s but has since been perceived as a social, economic, and demographic margin of the city” (125). Neve Shaanan and its environs house the original Tel Aviv bus station. It is an economically deprived area with a large semitransient population of recent immigrants and migrant foreign workers. Many older residents have been in the area for much longer periods of time, but a younger bohemian crowd has dominated the Florentine neighborhood in recent decades, leading to some gentrification. In this chapter, Hatuka deals with debates over public versus private funding for a new bus station following the decline and need for modernization of the older hub and the impact of a suicide bomb on many of these plans. The increasing degeneration of the area, due in part to a criminal and drug-related element, was halted and reversed through citizenry action. In providing possibly the most interesting part of this chapter, Hatuka explores the impact of local residents on architectural decisions; by joining together, they promoted “their own visibility and accelerat[ed] distribution of resources and recognition by the authorities … demanding the sealing of abandoned buildings and general maintenance and infrastructure of the streets, by gardening, paving, lighting, etc.” (158).
Hatuka's position presupposes an inevitable connection between urban space and violence. If the book serves as a case study of urban violence using Tel Aviv as an example, then this rational is interesting in a wider contextual discussion, but is not introduced or developed in the introduction. Significantly for Israel studies, Hatuka neglects situating this book in the burgeoning area of scholarship on Tel Aviv's history and architecture, such that her approach fails to engage in the existing dialogue, and instead seems surprising and not entirely convincing. This impression is heightened by her tone and weak introductory section. Her tendency to make sweeping statements and generalizations that are not explored or supported discombobulate the critical reader. For example: “The British perceived cities as important locations for deploying power technologies by means of which populations could be categorized and controlled” (8), or “As opposed to the new neighborhoods outside the wall in Jerusalem, the new Jewish neighborhood of Jaffa—Achuzat Bayit, later to become Tel Aviv—was conceived as a separate entity” (6). Too many questions arise from such statements for this section to be a satisfying read. While the introduction and first chapter are theoretical by nature, given the intention to establish this book beyond the field of architecture for a wider general audience, more needed to be done to present perspective and to elucidate the subsequent architectural focus of the book. Generally, the introduction suffers severely from an attempt to rush through the background material in an effort to get to the meat of the argument about violence, and this reader, at least, was at times lost.
Despite the flawed introduction and burdensome polemical tone, there is much of interest in this study. The many black-and-white images of architectural plans, maps, and buildings offer a highly technical element to the book, and it is a delight to see models that were speculative proposals, as well as those plans that have been realized in the city's architectural history. Excitingly, it is also worth noting that this is the first volume in a new series on Jewish history, life and culture from University of Texas Press, Austin.
And despite the recent proliferation of critical literature on the city and its construction, particularly in light of Tel Aviv's one-hundredth anniversary, this new work still challenges our notions about Tel Aviv's urban planning.
