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.
