12/7/07 Nation to Community

Jerusalem is the end of my charrette journey. Jerusalem is also an apt place to try to make sense of what I have experienced during the last week. One day of course does not do this city even remote justice. But like everything else in Israel the time walking through this ancient and now modern urban center affords an opportunity to both confirm stereotypes, shatter them and bring to conclusion my thoughts about Kiryat Shmona. I am fortunate to be met by former Urban Studio employee, architect and urban designer Michal Braier who now lives and works in Jerusalem, and she graciously spends the day showing me this ancient City. During the course of the day I tell her what I have been doing in Kiryat Shmona and she tells me about what she is working on in Jerusalem. I find there is much in common.

First we overlook the City as a whole from the Mount of Olives. Most impressive here are the views back towards the Old City and below to the tens of thousands of Jewish graves climbing the sides of this hill. In the distance there are more hills and Michal points out the partially completed barrier fence that is gradually cutting off Arab and Palestinian areas from the city proper. part of her work involves working in these locations. Like an incomplete Berlin wall it snakes over hills and at times right through neighborhoods and down the middle of roads. As we walk from east to west and north to south Michal also points out throughout the day the locale of the 1967 border with Jordan that was dissolved by history’s events. Between these two lines you are in the zone of very current affairs and there is a sense of tension. While one can go anywhere between these lines and there is no immediate threat there is also a consciousness of place versus safety that we maintain; once we do a u-turn on a street, another time we circle around to reach our destination. Both time Michal utters that maybe this is not the best way to get to our destination. This is not that different then the care one takes as a stranger in any other big city but here the issues seem magnified by the certainty of larger concerns.

We move on from the Mount of Olives to the Old City proper and find ourselves moving down narrow passageways, often covered, towards the Western Wall and Temple Mount. The Old City is a living city, a religious theme park, a middle eastern market place, a holy religious compound containing churches, mosques and temples and it is all piled up and compressed together behind five hundred year old defensive walls. Here and there because of the constant shifting grade there are sudden vistas outside the ancient walls to settlements on the surrounding hills. There are also everywhere the backdrops that are the props of the evening news. The difference here versus watching it on TV is that in person these familiar sights resist a singular newsworthy narrative. Jerusalem is cacophonous and multi-layered and in person the City and its people resist definitional singularity.

Christian quarter, Muslim Quarter, Jewish Quarter and all color of nationalistic variations come together in the Old City. The ancient mixes with the new and as much as anything else the sound tells the story. First the light tap of feet moving down the stone pathways though the market ways and by the stalls. Many of the people in the Old City are moving en mass to rhythms based upon religious devotion. There is also the broadcast of prayers over speakers from the Dome of the Rock and Al-Asqa Mosque that are heard before they are seen. Upon broadcast more feet move from the market to the mosque. Later in the day there is the siren calling the observant to Shabbat. There is also the ring of church bells. Towards noon two-thirds of the shops are shuttered, some left open and guarded by young children. While a third of the stalls remain open we do not buy anything, just continue to walk, look and listen to the emptying market.

We pass through security to get to the large plaza that fronts and slopes down to the Western Wall or The Kotel. Again I am struck by the simultaneity of the space. We are standing below the Dome of the Rock at the foundation of the Temple. Islamic prayers float above us. People of every stripe and color move about. We move right up to the last fence and face the 2000 year old wall before us; men to the left and women to the right. There is intense devotion observed in this precinct and I do not feel it is proper to go any closer though there is no real reason to stop. We head back into the maze of the city.

Back within the market streets, most only fifteen feet wide, we circle around and past stalls and through passages and up and down stairs looking for the the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. This site is at best a ten minute ambling walk from the Western Wall but it takes us longer to find our way what with wrong turnb and a sense of increasing disorientation. In movies and history all of these sites, perhaps for dramatic effect, seem very far apart and separated by open space and vistas. Maybe they were thousands of years ago but now they all sit on top of each other. The navel of the world, David’s Temple, Mohammed’s ascent, Jesus’s crucifixion, all these occur within yards of each other and the proximity requires willing understanding, immediate grace and patience if it is ever to be untangled.

While everyplace in Israel is clad in the ubiquitous local rock, in Jerusalem the presence of creamy limestone seems even more prevalent. Sometimes it is smooth. Other times cleft. Still other times shot or lined. It comes as pavers, slabs and bricks of every shape and size. It is stacked, clad and laid on every horizontal and vertical surface. The pale combinations and degrees of yellow, ochre and white is ubiquitous. Giant retaining walls support the hills of the city. Ancient buildings are created by progressively smaller blocks establishing walls, columns, vaults and arches. The stone is the one thing that creates a sense of continuity for me. Everything else is a jumble. Perhaps understanding how we commonly build provides a gateway to some type of larger understanding.

During the day Michal explains the complexity of attempts by both Arabs and Jews to legalize properties in outer parts of Jerusalem where much of the construction is done without permits. Michal reveals her own efforts in this endevour and her frustrations of moving through a bureaucracy that is infinitely more complex than anything I have ever encountered. And of course it is complex because what is at stake with each permit granted are ever shifting definitions at the most local level of national territory and competing definitions of justice. Sometimes it is best to get a permit as quickly as possible to ensure that a neighborhood is not taken over by a different group. Sometimes it makes most sense to delay a permit forever to ensure that a pre-existing claim is not revealed. The variety of situations property by property is endless and the trust that must be struck to work in these situations has to be difficult to obtain. I admire Michal’s persistence and sense of fairness. In this work claims of community comes up against national stability and from my distance as a foreigner nationalism in Jerusalem of course typically trumps community. Or does it always and until the end of time?

Perhaps what is most impressive about Israel is that in the space of 60 years they have built a nation complete with national institutions, infrastructure and a deep sense of purpose. By all accounts and observation this exercise has reached an advanced state and Israel, for all its cultural uniqueness and specificity, is similar in its state of development to many other first world countries. Most remarkable is the sense of stability and well-being that one experiences despite the daily pressures of difference and conflict that are everywhere around.

My sense is that a turn towards the organization of local issues as represented by the Kiryat Shmona charrette as well as the struggle of Arabs and Jews to legalize individual properties in contested territories of Jerusalem is a reflection of an emergent reality that if nurtured carefully portends well for the future despite the difficulty and sometimes terror of the present. A public design charrette such as the one in Kiryat Shmona is an opportunity for people to empower themselves with plans and take control of their own future, to stop relying on edicts from above telling them how and where to live everyday life. Likewise, the desire to obtain legal status, or not, of an individual property is also an attempt to define fixity before a public eye, to stake a local claim that all see and can not deny, in essence a first step towards community rights within a context of shifting boundaries. While the latter is more complex than the former both bespeak involvement in the nitty gritty details of urbanism.

Perhaps for too long there has been an assumption that larger issues of national import within this mixed up modern world as exemplified in Israel and adjacent Palestine sort themselves out, or not, within the halls of global diplomacy . The proposition of the charrette or the obtaining of an individual building permit is that the modern world can also be addressed through the exigencies of local community planning. The promise of the Movement for Israeli Urbanism is that it offers though the charrette an additional way of bringing diverse people together to create dialogue for their future based upon everyday as well as strategic needs.

The everyday does not exist outside of the context of the strategic but for a long time only strategic necessities prevailed in a town like Kiryat Shmona and the town gradually declined. Strategic concerns certainly shape modern Jerusalem and this city too struggles. Now for many reasons both cities have opportunities to address their respective futures through increased community actions of many types. The Movement for Israeli Urbanism facilitated this opportunity in Kiryat Shmona and in the process I think shifted ever so slightly the terms by which urban development and nation building proceeds in Israel. I feel that this is a hopeful direction for it has the possibility of building and bridging understandings amongst people, institutions and government and I am privileged to have been invited to participate in this first design charrette in Israel. I hope my small contribution to this action facilitates a path forward.

12/6/07 Charrette Conclusions

The final day of the charrette was divided for me into three different activities; refinement of the bus station plaza and development site plan with my design colleagues Alla and Elan and my economic planning colleague Juda, a journey to the countryside surrounding Kiryat Shmona with the two other foreigners, Neil and Anna, and participation and observation of the final public meeting.

Alla, Elan, Juda and I sat down first thing in the morning and quickly responded to the critiques of the previous night and established a phased approach to development that would realize a bus plaza and much smaller development program in the first phase of development and the full program as proposed by the developer in a latter phase. All of our principles regarding development that fit the Kiryat Shmona context remained intact amongst us at and at the same time we felt we could positively respond to the concerns of the citizens that the project was too large and the concerns of the critic that we were not being realistic enough. I left Alla and Elan to work out the details and prepare perspectives, got in a car with our tour guide Zvi and headed north - to the border with Lebanon and Syria.

Zvi is nine years older than I am but in the course of the first few minutes of our drive we learn that he is a former paratrooper and had fought in the 1967 and 1973 wars that largely define Israel’s expanded borders with its neighbors. I wanted to see these borders, feel them really, and Zvi was probably as good a guide as you could get to take you to Israel’s edges. Kiryat Shmona is directly below the border with Lebanon and across the Hula Valley (please excuse my spelling, I am sure it is hideous) from the Golan Heights. A twenty-minute ride and you are passing the last outposts of Israel, the suburbs of Metulah, and heading directly for the former checkpoint with Lebanon.

Zvi drove right up to the last gate and we got out of the car. The scene is a bit surreal. In front of us is a Lebanese Village on a hill. Behind us in morning haze, an Israeli suburb on a hill. In between an abandoned factory and checkpoint. First you look one way and see a calm scene of single-family houses winding their way up a hillside, an Israeli version of Santa Clarita, California, all red tile roofs and stucco walls. Then you look the other way at the more organic algorithm of multi-generational houses that define the cluster of the Lebanese town. There is nothing particular to in this place, only the occasional bird. There really is nothing. It is no place and it is empty. You are standing in a void between two places staring at each other. It is not paranoiac but it is intensely factual. The mountains have a lot of gray radars and listening gear on them. Closer examination reveals numerous fences, defensive positions, all the stuff of conflict yet it is quiet and while there is no sense of immediate threat it is easy to see how there could be a type of long-term mental diminshment of confidence if one lived here.

But Zvi is full of energy and positive attitude. We jump back into his car and head over to the Golan Heights towards Syria. Zvi is friends with a certain Israeli Captain who runs the main checkpoint at the Syrian border and he wants to introduce us to him. Along the way, as we climb in elevation, he points out old borders, the remains of a medieval fortress on a commanding perch overlooking the old path to Damascus that could be right out of Harry Potter’s Hogwart’s, uncleared mine fields, the remains of tanks from the 67 war, newly minted vineyards, bombed out Syrian military bases sitting empty for forty years; he also takes us on quick jaunts in and out of the small Israeli, Druse and Arab villages and towns that spot this fruitful, yet rocky and barren landscape. We reach the heights, the land flattens out and we pull over. Zvi points out a white United Nations observation tower and we get back in the car and head for it.

The road to the checkpoint gradually goes from a modern two lane highway, to a two lane paved road, to a two lane dirt road, to a rutted dirt road passing in and out of rock abutments that are meant to slow down tanks. We pass the United Nations compound and are told that this is a popular posting for the Canadian, Polish and other foreign troops that are quartered here. I wonder what they do other than try to avoid getting in the way. Up ahead we see the watch towers and the border crossing point and Zvi heads straight for it at almost break neck speed. At the last moment he pulls his car to a quick stop in front of the Israeli position, jumps out and runs at a trot into the compound.

There are a lot of fences, gates and low buildings. Through the gap in the gates we can see the Syrian flag on its pole flapping. I see an Israeli women soldier moving a bucket full of liquid in the compound, as if she is about to mop the terrace. No one else is in sight except a guard in a watch tower. I am sitting in the back seat of a car looking at the reality of this crossing that can not be crossed, while our guide is negotiating some type of hand shake and wave with some officer that he thinks has a relative in the US , or maybe he was born in the US. There is mostly quiet, like at the border with Lebanon, just quiet. You are sitting in a field and all the world’s troubles are focused symbolically in the form of opposed forces right in front of us but all that is happening is that someone is cleaning up. Yet, if I got out of the car the wrong way I could be noticed and would I raise alarm? Perhaps this is the way paranoia begins in a place that is otherwise beautiful. I turn to Neil and Anna and ask, “what the hell are we doing here”? We all laugh and then see Zvi running back to our car. Apparently the Captain is away at lunch and visiting will not happen today.

Next we head to a winery where we drink quite a bit and then off to an Arabic roadside diner where we eat quite a bit. Afterwards we head to Rosh Pina, a place we have heard about all week, an historic village on a hill that has been restored. To get to Rosh Pina you have to first pass through the “new” Rosh Pina at the base of the original town’s hillside and adjacent to the roadway. Here are a series of small shopping centers and gas stations that are more or less the model that our critic from the previous night seemed to be championing. They are busy but mostly colorless and characterless, the international architecture of consumption that is very quickly boring. For the first time all day the silence of the countryside is broken and the fact that it interrupts my thoughts is annoying. I am glad to head up the mountain to the older part of town.

Historic Rosh Pina is just over a hundred years old but its importance is based on the fact that it is one of the first communities founded by Zionists escaping Europe in the 1880s. It came to the notice of one of the Rothschilds who sent money and support. It is also one of the first places where Hebrew was reconstructed as a modern language. Given its importance in the history of Israel I am struck at how fragile it seems, lonely against the landscape, a little village loop of stone houses on a hillside. Because of the time of year, it is windy and cool, no one is here. We pretty much have the town to ourselves. The street that runs up the hill is being uncovered, the asphalt of recent years is being stripped away to reveal limestone pavers. Set within the pavers are a grid of black basalt. I am struck at how permanently these people built in contrast to the small towns of the American West which often times were largely exploitive and cheap. The people who came here had no intentions of leaving. In Kiryat Shmona, all week we had been struggling to recapture that type of spirit but it was hard to find, at least amongst the townspeople. A thousand rockets had fallen on their town two years ago and we were architects and planners.

Back in the car we head down the hill and into the fields that border the Jordan River. This river is pretty small but the agriculture that comes up against it is vast. Huge swaths of apple trees, plum trees, pistachio trees, and crop fields seem way out of proportion to the size of the river. We stop again and Zvi talks to a farmer. He talks about buying more harvesting equipment. He too has no intention of leaving. Again it is very quiet while Zvi talks to the farmer. We drive mostly silent, forty-five minutes north through the valley back to Kiryat Shmona and the charrette.

One of the main reasons I came to Kiryat Shmona is I like going to places that you would never ordinarily plan to go to. I always sense that you have a better feeling for a place if you end up in that place’s no place. I think our drive gave us a better sense that this is hardly a no place but after several days of listening to townspeople express frustration with the situation in both the specific and global senses the larger situation of the borders makes one empathize with those who feel at times overwhelmed. The quiet of the land and events surrounding it are large and formidable.

At the charrette things are quickly coming to conclusion. Drawings are being pinned up. Others are being rushed to completion. I help Elan redraw his diagrams and then we go downstairs and await the final presentation. The scope of the completed work is impressive. The lobby of the community center is covered with drawings and diagrams and charts framing all the efforts. Once again eighty or so people gather and once again the City Manager begins the evening.

We are expecting fireworks. We were told the previous evening that the townspeople are going to gather together and come out and protest the City Manager and the developer proposal. We design strategies to defuse hostility. But when the City Manager speaks, for the first time all week he has a conciliatory tone. Maybe it was the breadth of the work before him that had a sense of palpability previously absent that created his positive feeling. Maybe he figured that it would be in his best interest to avoid a useless fight. Regardless, his word were about thanks, learning, and doing better. I admit I dismissed these comments as formalities, a way for the manager to move on to the business of business as usual, the creation of no place as usual.

And then a most remarkable thing happens. A women, a small town shop owner who is clearly impacted by any project that anybody might imagine comes forward before any of us have a chance to say anything and begins to read from prepared notes and thank us. She thanks us for coming to her town. She thanks us for listening to her. She thanks us for giving her hope after all the rockets and despair that maybe there is a better future. She thanks us for creating an opportunity to speak up to the City and take charge. I got up and took a picture of her while she was making this speech because I was astonished. After all the name calling and fights and cynicism somebody got it, that everybody who worked on the charrette did want the town to be a better place, not a no place on a helpless border.

And then another person got up and said basically the same thing. And a third person. Each of these people I recognized. The transformation from cynics to believers was right there before us. After twenty or so minutes of testimonials we were finally given the chance to present the once again revised proposals and plans. And when it was over things became even warmer. One by one the townspeople stood up and said “wonderful”, “you listened to us”, “you have suggested something that can make us proud”. I think in retrospect that even the City Manager constructed a different narrative that evening and his remarks at the outset were an indicator of a new realization and possibility for his town.

The Minister of Building for the norther region then stood up and stated both how impressed he was and how he would assure that the infrastructure portions of the plan would move forward. He reiterated that the merchants and tenants were still on the hook. They still had to march forward together and organize. But unlike the beginning of the week when there was no capacity to imagine these people getting together and moving forward in a common urban purpose that would cause them to stay in this place, things for the moment at least were very different.

I left Kiryat Shmona an hour later and headed for Jerusalem. We probably created a set of expectations that is way too high and I hope my friends at the Movement for Israeli Urbanism will be able to find some modest means to create some implementable next step, to continue the spirit of progress. We uncovered something hopeful in a place that is under the threat of forces that are a global and grinding fact manifested by closed borders way beyond local control. Yet also uncovered was a common human desire for betterment that if nurtured just a little bit seems so able to bloom in this place.

12/5/07 Success

The morning began with a successful conversation made up of a planner, an anthropologist, an architect, a lawyer/politician (a former member of the Knesset) and myself. After the travails and personal crises of yesterday, people came back to the charrette hall with a new willingness to work. I spent the morning tackling the larger principles that could guide a plan for the center of Kiryat Shmona. The main goal we developed for the area around the civic plaza, the Zahal Square, is as follows:

Concentrate youth, cultural, elder, and small local businesses at the south side of the downtown.

Based upon this we developed a series of recommendations including reusing vacant buildings before building new buildings and the primacy of small-scale improvements to catalyze activity and local identity. A third, to restrict commercial activity in the civic square area to local businesses and a fourth, to encourage a framework of local entrepreneurship for people of all ages were meant to further reinforce the idea that by reinforcing the local environment in this portion of the downtown the revitalized town would in turn create a unique local identity that in and of itself would become the basis of a sustainable economy that both benefits of the people that live here and through this type of local uniqueness attract tourists.. This is all of course music to my everyday urbanist ears. Perhaps this could be called do-it-yourself (DIY) urbanism, and potentially suffer from well meaning amateurism, but in this situation where for so long there has been a disconnect between townspeople, government and institutional entities it seems worthwhile to create self-governing mechanisms as a first step.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of our principles discussion was the discourse surrounding the opening and closing of businesses on Saturdays. I cannot begin to fully understand the complexities of the social and religious relationships surrounding this issue and the ways that this affects local commerce, the success of individual stores and the ability of Kiryat Shmona to compete with surrounding towns and even kibutzes. Suffice it to say that Kiryat Shmona is mostly closed on Saturday, which is generally accepted. But given that many people have also suggested that the town should be more open on Saturday and that most if not all of the team is secular, one of the planners who has been working on the charrette issues for many months suggested, and our group adopted, a recommendation that first actions to implement any plan can not be based upon actions or programs that depend for success of Saturday use. This was felt by all to be a critical recommendation that would help gain public acceptance of the charrette work and ideas.

Public design is always sensitive and diverse groups always have differences that need to be brought together through negotiation and compromise. I have no idea if this attempt at sensitivity in Kiryat Shmona will be helpful to the promulgation of our ideas. I do know that it is a new experience for me to deal in such a direct way with the nexus of urban design, context and religion, and that this nexus is not easily or quickly settled and even if it is settled not guaranteed to be stable, and like all things here requires humble patience if there is any expectation for success.

In the afternoon, I worked with the group developing principles and ideas for the reuse of the bus terminal site. Again there was great cooperation between the traffic engineers, a young architect, the economist, a student and myself. Everyone enjoyed working together and new ideas for the redevelopment of this site were quickly generated. Every other work group seemed equally enthused and cooperative and by the time of the evening presentation a great deal had been accomplished and unlike the day before there was a great spirit of unanimity – all had crafted a plan that was both principled, consistent throughout and all seemed to feel strongly and confidently that it was correct for this time and place.

The evening presentation was before a distinguished panel of professional and political guests. Citizens also came forward, though not in great numbers as the final presentation is scheduled for tomorrow. Also in attendance was a leading Israeli cultural and architectural critic. The presentations reflected the spirit of the day. From my perspective a wonderful vision that was at once cultural and physical was presented within a compelling framework of modest and implementable ideas and recommendations. I presented the bus terminal work and in the process suggested publicly that the existing development plans were very unfortunate and that we hoped the principles we had developed would be used as a basis for further negotiation to ensure a higher quality effort on both the part of the city and the developer.

The bus terminal site ended up being a major point of discussion amongst both the experts and the citizens. With one exception the citizens that attended expressed strong opposition to the development plan. Amazingly the City Manager told everyone that there was nothing they could do about it, there was nothing he could do about it, and though announced only ten days ago the project was a done deal. I have never seen such a nonresponsive approach to the public by an official. What happened next was even more amazing. One of the invited guests, the chair of a planning council responsible for development in the central part of the country stood up in this public forum and publicly berated the City Manager, telling him in no uncertain terms that claiming that there was nothing he could do was simply in abrogation of civic responsibility There was something crackling about the way this women accused the manager of weakness. Something hopeful. My translator at this point told me he thought the City Manager would cry. This of course did not happen yet this was a wonderful democratic moment. It gave me a sense that the charrette process was achieving its goals of awakening a new sensitivity to urbanism, indeed good urbanism in Israeli cities.

A side note; the journalist and critic broke her silence at one point and stated strongly that she thought our attempts to be contextually sensitive, incremental and act in a small-scale manner on the civic center and the bus terminal site was useless. She stated that there was nothing special about Kiryat Shmona center, that the only hope was the big shiny project proposed by the developer, that the developer’s surface parking lot was a wonderful invitation for people to finally stop and shop in this town, and that the developer’s plan deserved support. Maybe I lost something in translation. Maybe this was populism Israeli-style from a person who commands great respect and critical authority. Maybe all my Southern California mini-mall enthusiasms have finally come back to haunt me. After a day of collectively seeking and gaining unanimity amongst our team and after three days of listening to local people describe the need for something intensely local all I could think of was one of the most influential books on urbanism ever written, “The Death and Life of American Cities”, and how it’s author Jane Jacobs, a crackling women who stopped a freeway from destroying New York City’s Greenwich Village, must be rolling over in her grave.

12/4/07 Difference

Here I am presenting my office’s Santa Barbara Transit Center Feasibility study to the charrette team in Kiryat Shmona. You might wonder what the relevance of presenting a bus terminal plan with mixed uses in a very particular American environment has to do with the very different ethos of a small northern Israeli town on the border with Lebanon. As I was presenting this I kept thinking about the concept of “difference” and how it works towards our collective advantage or disadvantage in this charrette process.

Our charrette ran into walls today. On the one hand much progress was made with regard to drawing plans, establishing programs and putting things into detail that previously were abstract. At the same time patience was stretched thin as different disciplines sought to express primacy of professional purpose.

The group was broken down into two. Four concepts were reduced to two. One group concentrated on developing a plan that revitalized what is called the “Boardwalk”, an inward looking network of north south alleys and parking lots at the back of buildings that could be transformed into a connected pedestrian oriented mews that runs the length of the Kiryat Shmona downtown. This series of spaces already connects the market at the north end of the central district to the civic center at the south, Zahal Square, but it is very disconnected, underdeveloped and its promise as a pathway unrealized.

The second group, of which I was a member, sought to create stronger east west linkages to connect surrounding residential neighborhoods to the downtown core. While this group also felt charged to realize the promise of the Boardwalk, there was a critical difference from the program of the first group. Our team was to orient its new major concentration of commercial activity not inward towards the Boardwalk but outwards towards Tel Hai, the major roadway that connects Kiryat Shmona to the rest of the country.

This is the road, now boulevard and highway, that used to be the “Main Street” of the city. The goal of orienting the retail to this boulevard is to see whether or not it is possible to give this throughway a pedestrian orientation, giving a reason for people driving through to stop their cars, visit the city and of course leave their money in the shops and restaurants.

The focus of my efforts was an existing giant bus depot in the center of the north south central city axis. My objective was to quickly generate a plan that would link this vacant area to its immediate surrounds. If successful I thought that my proposal for the site could be used as a foil for a development already suggested for the same site.

I find it impolite to state just how bad the proposed scheme is that the City is considering. Perhaps one could best describe it as economically flawed - it proposes to place in one location as much retail as already exists in the downtown thus sucking the life out of the rest of the city - design flawed, it only orients to the highway like a giant strip center, includes a vast surface parking lot that places the retail back away from the sidewalk and is cut off from all other activity in the downtown  - all this and to boot it is ugly; imagine 1980s style flat metal architecture with strip windows.

As I began to diagram other ideas an initial type of difference emerged. The planner of the leader of our group told me that I could not configure a bus terminal radially because the geometry would never work. He said this with terrific sincerity and certainty. Others also were concerned that placing a senior housing building adjacent to a bus terminal as proposed by one of the student members of the team (a terrific idea in my opinion) was impossible, this type of adjacency could never work we were told.

In this last regard, my office has recently completed a feasibility study for the City of Santa Barbara where we did propose housing next to a new bus facility and the bus facility itself is based upon a radial concept. Santa Barbara is one of the most high-quality environments in the United States, the most expensive housing area in the United States and utilizes the same size buses as one commonly sees in Israel. If it is good enough for Santa Barbabra isn’t it good enough for Kiryat Shmona? I was asked to present my projects after lunch to the team and I quickly inserted the Santa Barbara study into the presentation.

People were indeed curious when I showed them the Santa Barbara project. From a technical standpoint differences were bridged. In this case at least difference based upon common practice could be overcome by the distribution and clarification of information. When the work resumed after the short presentation we proceeded with a scheme incorporating ideas that were new here but old hat in the United States.

I was now having a very good time, placing my faith in the power of information as I drew away and mostly tuned out the rising din of yelling going on all around me. Later, when we all gathered after our nightly public meeting there was a collective meltdown, which I mostly observed since most of it was in Hebrew. Though the conversation of our late-night gathering was supposed to be about what we had heard and how we might move forward, instead there was a difficult conversation where people accused each other of ignoring their respective professional areas of expertise, ignoring local culture, most specifically the religious differences between religious and less religious people in the town, and generally tension associated with the difficult task of translating complex sociological goals and objectives into drawings and plans.

For an hour the team, or what what left of it in terms of spirit, had more of a self-therapy session than a planning or design session. What was curious to me was that both Americans, Neal and I, expressed over and over during this conversation that we saw the discursive conflict as being positive, a way of exploration that would lead in and of itself to solutions. Many of our Israeli colleagues continued to press the point that professional differences demonstrated mutual lack of respect and an impossibility to move forward.

In the United States, within the charrette situation, there is now a tradition and trust that the charrette itself is a safe zone for the expression of sometimes contradictory ideas and that the process itself will lead - sometimes blindly lead - to the construction of a consensus. Those of us who do charrettes are used to hearing competing visions, do not associate them with professional truths, and accept that the search itself is as important as the product. Perhaps at its worst these types of assumptions lead to the papering over of differences and mediocre solutions. But in the end I have concluded for myself that if the process is transparent and all parties to the process are equal then the solutions and recommendations of what is produced are a reliable indicator of what is right; in essence an ethical basis for the production of the City.

Our colleagues here do not have this tradition, at least within urban design, and are naturally a bit suspicious of putting their faith in a process as opposed to a plan with assurances. This is also a type of difference between professionals in Israel and the United States. In discussions later in the evening some of us agreed that for charrettes in the long run to be successful in Israel that trust in the process itself would need to become more of a norm and that this would not happen until more charrettes were promulgated. At the same time I do leap to surely premature conclusions on how these differences I observed also shape issues in this small country far more important then the best way to orient storefronts to maximize local commerce.

Still, by the end of the hour of intense discussion all were talking again, bridges had been built, and delicate means found to resume work the following morning. I volunteered to work with the group that was most disappointed in the overt architecturalism of much of the work product. I at least am convinced that conversation and exploration of difference where all feel safe can lead to more than just agreements to disagree, it can lead to higher quality of design and higher quality of urban life.

12/3/07 Work

While previous days were about touring, learning and listening, today thoughts had to be put into action. I was not sure when I was invited if this truly was the first public design charrette in Israel but I was assured by many people today that it was – and this simple fact of being first made the day more exciting and more challenging.

While I have participated in many design charrettes, my colleague Neal has by his account done more than 100, none of our Israeli architect, planner, transportation engineer, economist, geographer and landscape friends and none of the citizens who came for the summaries had ever done anything quite like this before. As a result this was a great opportunity to see if the charrette is culturally delimited by a different national experience, or even useful once borders are crossed.

In the United States there is a 35-year history of organizing and planning public design workshops of every type. Truth be known, I rarely see the public design charrette as a useful tool unless the parameters of the problem are very specific and already defined in public (this is the AIA formula and for good reason; trying to define specific issues to discuss can be debilitating if not vetted and agreed to before hand). In Kiryat Shmona we are fortunate – or I suppose unfortunate – to be faced with something that is specific, a deteriorating downtown where decision after decision has made things worse. Yet the public and the professionals are starting with abstractions, there is no mandate to solve a specific problem we are seeking to define both the specific problem we can address in the downtown as well as solutions in one intensive session.

Our organizers, the Movement for Israeli Urbanism, adhered fairly rigorously to a conventional form of charrette which first engages in listening exercises (with the public on 12/2/07), then utilizes the skills of a wide range of experts to generate alternative proposals, then through an public and intensive discursive and iterative process winnows down the proposals, and finally through more public input arrives at a consensus approach. Our work on this first day was to generate many ideas very fast and for the most part we were very successful.

Still, during the course of the day it was interesting to watch people alternatively get excited, bored, frustrated and even angry as ideas and consequential ideologies were tested. What I find in this type of situation is that the best approach is to settle the mind and ego down and let ideas percolate and just draw as fast as you can. In essence the act of drawing allows images to speak to issues of policy and ideology. In a charrette people do not need to agree with you, you do not need to agree with other people, you just need to get the idea on paper, use visuality as a means of getting to the esssence.

It works. At our table four people came together who had never met each other before this workshop – a town planner from a kibbutz, a town planner from a rural community, an architect and urban designer born in Russia and working in Jerusalem, and me. Though at first there was some tension, we never had to disagree as long as we just kept putting the ideas down on paper until they got clearer and clearer. The plan could emerge on its own through drawing and visualization. As the day wore on I found that there was nothing particularly culture-bound about this process – it translates to a different place and society with ease.

In the evening again close to a hundred people gathered to review the concepts. Each person was given the opportunity to comment on each of six concepts. The discussions were rich and even heated at times. While I would say that Israelis as a whole themselves more vivaciously and intensely then others I have worked with in the United States and Germany, overall the spirit of give and take, with the assistance of good facilitation, allowed for a rich exchange of ideas and the ability to more clearly understand the community’s point of view, allowing for further sharpening of ideas tomorrow.

Out team proposal veered towards the everyday. We tried hard to work with present concerns and needs and to draw an incremental scheme that was as much careful manipulation of the existing townscape to make it more connected to its surrounds, as it was larger idea to nurture and expand existing situations. When I draw cities I seek to draw a field of activities where open spaces and buildings weave together to create urban encounters that are the opposite of grand. I cannot help myself, I always draw the small moments. In Kiryat Shmona I drew this schema again. Mostly I tried to make strong both visual and physical links east and west across the divide of the newly minted Highway 90, the former Tel Hai Boulevard main street. We called our scheme a “zipper” as it was meant to tie back together what highway engineering had torn asunder. The scheme was a mix of the small-scale moment and the moderate gesture.

Was it good work? In the evening thee public came and looked at all the schemes. I do not see what our team produced as good or bad. It simply contributed to a better understanding on the part of the charrette team and the public as to what might make sense in this situation. For sure some of our ideas will find their way to the final scheme, just as many will not, and this is the way of charrettes. Leave your ego at the door. Public wisdom in democratic conversations is almost always wiser then private passions.

Are there peculiar aspects of doing a charrette in Israel? People from my experience were much quicker to become vociferous but in the end there was no more or less drama then in any other situation of this type I have participated in. The experience seems to translate across borders, seems to have a certain universality. So in the end, the act of work, the act of drawing and making the invisible visible makes the act of thinking and doing so much easier. The charrette brings design intelligence to the public and we as designers once again acted as a medium for other’s ideas and dreams. These can become our dreams too.

12/2/07 K-8 Images

These are pictures from Sunday, December 2, 2007 when we traveled from Tel Aviv to Kiryat Shmona and began the charrette with introductions, meetings with citizens and a tour of the City Center.

12/2/07 Kiryat Shmona

Over one hundred people including citizens, the mayor and a deputy housing minister, and professionals gathered this evening in an auditorium on the outskirts of Kiryat Shmona to begin a five day charrette process that may help determine a new direction for this city’s downtown. I was surprised at how successful the evening went and how hopeful people were for the future of their city.

Kiryat Shmona is set within the beautiful Galilee valley with a high mountain slope rising directly to the west of the site. It reminds me a bit of downtown Aspen where Ajax rises directly out of the streets of the town and indeed ski slopes are located just 25 kilometers north of this Israeli town.

 

The town itself is set on terraces that step down into the valley. Major streets run north south. The main street of the city has been recently rebuilt from a two lane main street into a major divided highway.

Given the constant but fairly low traffic volumes on the street (15,000 trips a day) it seems hard to understand how the leaders of this town allowed their downtown to be severed in two until one hears the explanation; national defense. The troops need to move quickly one way along the divided highway, presumably north, and the population the other. Such are things and hopefully these types of things will never be again - one can only hope.

The promenade that results is nice but remember, this used to be a main street which was totaly lost in the process. To compensate for this rather dubious form of redevelopment, the City has gradually been developing a more internalized downtown that meanders along a broken and non-continuous pedestrian path that runs parallel and to the west of the major highway. At its north end is a traditional open air market covered with steel-formed barrel vaults clad in polygal and open two days a week.

As one walks south from the market you can duck in and out of a variety of building types and open spaces including small lawns, a gas station, a bus station, two shopping malls that are enclosed and dark, parking courtyards and a mostly abandoned town plaza that is surrounded by a theater and abandoned town hall in addition to a lot of vacant storefronts.

While the photos make it look somewhat compelling, photos lie and a sense of abandonment, struggle to survive and neglect permeates it all. Compounding the myriad problems are a lack of linkage to surrounding residential communities, the new main highway which is very difficult to cross, and a scattershot approach to new development where each new project seems to be separate unto itself compounding the lack of synergy within the place as a whole. This is probably one of the most challenged so-called downtowns I have ever experienced and while one can imagine many tactics and strategies for its recovery, it is difficult to imagine that its revitalization will be swift. Into this setting come the professional experts including myself and I hope that most of us are scratching our heads after walking through this place. Yet a place it is.

The views from Kiryat Shmona are great. This is one of the greenest (literally in the sense of the color) places in Israel. It is one of the wettest places here too and a brook ones right through the middle of the city. The town is surrounded by a rich agricultural region; wine country. The area is famous for its cuisine. There are four distinct seasons and by all accounts the region is a popular tourist attraction for Israeli’s. There is the beginnings of a second home market in the surrounding country side and most curiously, we are told that the area is full of artists and in need of galleries.

While I have not seen the artists I imagine that there is probably a correlation between the sense that much of the place feels opnly partially occupied and the burgeoning presence of creative people. While a few creative types were present at the evening’s meeting, most of people were regular folks, shop owners, students, home makers, etc. and with few exceptions they presented a vision of their city when asked that could not possibly have been voiced through the dry analytic techniques of experts.

What I heard was that people needed basics. Streets and sidewalks cleaned, night-time lighting, places for people to go both young and old, active as well as passive recreation, and an orientation of the downtown towards the people that both love here as well as visit here. There was nothing that unusual about the hopes and dreams expressed. What was remarkable was how focused I sensed the range of ideas was, heavy on the management, and how much consensus there was, at least at the beginning of this process.

Unlike Southern California where every workshop brings out vocalized differences of opinion, in this setting, in this room and on this evening there was a sense of unity. No doubt there are other voices out there that most likely were not represented. Still, one had the sense that the constituency for this particular slice of the central city of Kiryat Shmona was well represented and diverse by the people who came.

Tomorrow the group of visitors and experts will start sorting through all the ideas and come up with a range of approaches, social, economic, development and design approaches to address the range of concerns and ideas expressed. Meanwhile there is a sense of expectancy. After many failed attempts at revitalizing a downtown that once was lively, another attempt is underway. Perhaps this one will both learn from the voices on the ground and achieve what other attempts have failed at, to create a stable center for this northern Israeli city.

11/30/07 - 12/1/07 Images

Observations

In this post I will record various statements I have heard in conversation that strike me as interesting in relationship to the task (the design charrette). Everything stated here is paraphrased, and anonymous.

1. In Israel people are willing to listen but once the listening is done, the architects go back and do their thing.

12/1/07 First Impressions

The first afternoon and evening in Israel is coming to an end. Late at night I am writing in the hotel in Tel Aviv after an evening of walking and talking and eating and seeing mostly the older portions of the city. As always the shock of a new place is creating a sense of excitement that I should at this point be able to anticipate but somehow never do.

Neil Payton, who also lives in Los Angeles, and a fellow architect also participating in the K-8 Charrette, and I arrived at Ben Gurion airport late in the afternoon and fairly wooshed through customs. We were greeted by planner and educator Yodan Raffi (I promise to update the spelling of your name). He in turn whisked us to his car. Flying in we could clearly see the outlying districts of Tel Aviv, clusters of high rise apartments, warehouse districts, and freeways. The feeling was akin to something one might see over the outskirts of any large city in Southern Europe.

The drive into Tel Aviv was equally similar to the drive to or from the airport of any large city in a developed nation (the airport itself was a wonderful mixture of various tropes of Louis Kahn vaults and concrete and limestone meets late modernism). The freeway got us there functionally and it was not until we turned off into the streets of Tel Aviv that I knew I had arrived within something unique. I was fortunate to have my impressions shaped by both an able guide, Yodan who knows the city well, and by Neil who has previously studied and written about this town.

In Los Angeles I have grown increasingly interested in the idea that urbanism can be both compact, dense and green (in the sense of retaining that quality of open space that has been a hallmark of Los Angeles “cityness”). Yet I have such difficulty describing this to those that hire us and often seem hidebound, with our default encouragement, to create urban design formulas and guidelines that line the backs of sidewalks with continuous main street type buildings. I always feel that traditional urban architecture as seen in northern Europe or Manhattan, Washington DC or Chicago makes little sense for Los Angeles yet have few precedents to refer to if I want to move in an alternative direction. Perimeter-block urbanism is all the rage in the US and the only question seems to be how dense can it be before the envelope of public patience is stretched to the political breaking point.

What a revelation then to discover the built-form patterns of Tel Aviv, based in part on a city plan done by the English planner Patrick Geddes. In the 1930s he laid out the parameters for a garden city that encouraged both front yard and side yard setbacks along major and minor streets. He also aid out boulevards with park strips in their middles for strolling and public open spaces and squares (many of which will soon be hopefully restored). At the time it Geddes worked on Tel Aviv it was a small city, yet the plan today seems well suited to serve a larger metropolitan population of 2,000,000.

Many of the major street run east to west and capture the cooling breezes off the Mediterranean sea. At the same time the plan both incorporates existing streets and districts established by the German and British colonies as well as streets that pushed northward to Arab towns and villages. It is a paragon of both rationality, idealism, the best scientific thought of its day (that still has eco-relevance in the present) and pragmatism. Today of course these streets are built up but everywhere the sense of urbanism shot through with intimate open spaces and landscape buffers is palpable. Combined with the international style architecture - many of the older four and five-story apartment buildings stand on thin columns or pilotis sweeping the open space under the dwellings - the architecture and urban typology create a unique environment that fits it’s temparate climate and as such is a model that Los Angeles, in its attempt to stay open even as it densifies, could certainly learn from.

Unfortunately in Tel Aviv, despite attempts to integrate old with new, many of the newer higher buildings, indeed skyscrapers, fit uncomfortably within this earlier and idealistic garden-city schema. The older architecture which is limited to 40 to 60 feet in height well makes a dense and lively boulevard scene full of people strolling, sitting at cafes, walking their dogs and generally hanging out into the evening. It also ably forms both busy sidewalks and quiet residential side streets despite the network of landscape and open space buffers that erode the continuity of individual block forms, a continuity that is thought in many circles to be essential for good pedestrian-oriented urbanism. In essence the proportion of buildings to open space is still great enough to maintain urban continuity but open enough to create a sense of airy gracefulness that is compelling in its sense of relaxation. It is my dream of the 45′ high compact, dense and green city come to life.

Based upon seeing this alone I could go home tomorrow and feel that I have observed what previously was an inchoate dream and learned something invaluable that I can now articulate and put into immediate design practice. What is perhaps more of a challenge is that when one is - as one almost always is - humbled by the experience of a new culture and place in comparison to one’s own culture and place, one wonders what if anything a foreigner, indeed this foreigner to Israel, can offer that is as valuable to my hosts as their own urban place is valuable to me.

Unfortunately all these photos are taken at night as the sun sets by 5:00pm at this time of year. Tomorrow - off to Kiryat Shmona.