The Urburb – a neologism referring to the mesh of the urban and suburban – characterizes the great majority of residential areas in contemporary Israel.

As a repercussion of one hundred years of modernist planning, the Urburb is a fragmented mosaic composed of the early- 20th century garden-city, agrarian settlements, mid-20th century social housing, and the generic residential typologies of the past two decades.

 

This hybrid manifests the conflicting demands of the modernist machine functioning in the old-new land: to create small egalitarian communities while accommodating a large and diverse population; to spread throughout the country while converging and closing-in; and to reconnect to the land via a top-down planning system that treats the surface as a clean slate.

 

In order to explore these dynamics, the Israeli pavilion is transformed into a contemporary construction site furnished with four large sand-printers, accompanied by a video and sound piece that transforms the Urburb patterns and plays them like a music box.

 

The site and the sand-printers delineate the story of one hundred years of modernist planning in Israel, in diverse scales shifting from national and urban master plans to those of single buildings.

 

One of the founding principles of the Bauhaus movement was the creation of relational spaces; furniture was designed to relate towards the buildings that would contain them, the buildings were designed in order to functional within neighborhoods, coordinating urbanization with industrialization, in the elaboration of a unified national space.

 

The printers are organized according to this methodology, each one examining planning on a different scale, according to the top down approach that characterizes development in Israel; the country, the city, the neighborhood, the building. 

 

 

 

The Country

 

Israeli suburbanization – on a national scale - is not the result of a gradual process but a reflection of an intrinsic disposition. From the very beginning of renewed Jewish settlement in Eretz-Israel at the second half of the 19th century, the city was never an option.

 

Beginning with the founding of early rural settlements and new Jewish neighborhoods outside the walls of the old cities, the anti-urban sentiment, and the longing for a rural-agrarian way of life, became both the bourgeois dream and a concrete reality.

 

This frame of mind persisted after the State’s establishment with Prime Minister

avid Ben-Gurion’s commissioning of the ”Sharon Plan.” Employing familiar strategies of suburbanization, the plan cast a scheme of new towns scattered on a grid covering the
entire country.

 

The plan failed to disperse the population, but laid the groundwork for the Urburb of today.

 

 

 

The City

 

The fragmented nature of of Israeli cities is a direct product of the Sharon Plan’s bias against big cities, encouraging their sub-division into a number of ”neighboring units,” small independent entities disconnected from historic city centers and existing neighborhoods, which result in increased segregation, detachment, and urban sprawl.

 

These phenomena are perhaps most explicity visible in Jerusalem; from the first segregated neighborhoods built outside the old city walls in 19th century, through Henry Kendall’s British plan of 1944, construction in Jerusalem has always been characterized by de-centralization coupled with an ideological desire to build as a mode of laying claim, a tendency echoed throughout the country. 

 

 

The Neighborhood

 

The ”Neighboring Unit” scheme, used by Henry Kendall in his 1944 plan for Jerusalem, was expanded by Arieh Sharon for planning all the new towns in Israel 1944, From Henry Kendall, Jerusalem: The City Plan, Preservation and Development during the British Mandate, 1918-1948 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1948)

 

When the plethora of new neighborhoods that both splinter and expand cities are seen from above, their real identity is revealed; the picturesque floral shapes, intricate geometric patterns, and the twisting line drawings testify to the abstracted nature of produced space

in Israel.

 

Pushing the modernist tool-kit to the extreme manifests its hollowness; from the state’s ”minimal” and equalizing answer to the housing needs of the new immigrants, to the creation of a unified bourgeois identity crafted by the real-estate market – a sheltered life-form in an ”urban” building situated at the heart of a ”rural” area.

 

The uniformity that modernism enforced in the name of social equality has thus become the standard that is happily embraced by everyone.

 

 

 

The Building