White City, Black City: Sharon Rotbard and the politics of architecture in Tel Aviv – CityMetric

A Bauhaus-inspied building in Tel Aviv. Image: israeltourism via Flickr.

In 1994, the city of Tel Aviv held a festival dedicated to the Bauhaus architectural style. There was a conference, which attracted academics from all over the world; there were exhibitions and symposiums. There were even special celebratory stamps.

The mood was optimistic: in 1933, the Berlin Bauhaus school had been closed down by the Nazis, but now its architects, and the architecture they produced, had found their new home in Israel. Tel Aviv may have been a young city – it was only founded in 1909 – but it had culture and heritage aplenty.

Sharon Rotbard, a young Israeli architect and writer fresh from his studies at the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris, was asked to write an article on the Bauhaus festival for a local publication. “The piece I wrote was very critical of the campaign”, he says 20 years on, over a patchy Skype connection. “It annoyed many of my friends. I was trouble-fête, spoiling the party. I found a few cracks in their nice story.”

Commemorative stamps from the Bauhaus conference.

In 2005, those cracks found their way into a full length book on Tel Aviv and its architecture:White City, Black City, published in English for the first time this month. In it, Rotbard examines the relationship between Tel Aviv and the Arab city it was built outside, Jaffa – the “black city” of the book’s title. The two are allegedly one city, known as Tel-Aviv-Yafo; but the north and south are distinct, with different demographics, levels of wealth, and, of course, architecture.

The book’s first part examines the White City. It focuses on the celebration of Bauhaus, and the modernist ideals of the Israeli city first aired in 1994 (despite the fact, as Rotbard points out, that only four of Berlin’s Bauhuaus architects ever emigrated to Tel Aviv).

The second tells the rather less happy history of Jaffa. Rotbard’s research shows how Sir Patrick Geddes, Tel Aviv’s main architect, designed the city in such a way as to prevent Jaffa, which was then the largest city in Palestine, from expanding to the north. To make matters worse, in 1948, Jaffa found itself at the centre of a clash between Israeli forces and the Muslim Brotherhood. The conflict saw the city’s centre all but destroyed; it ended with the city reduced to the status a southern suburb of Tel Aviv under strict militia law.

The city remained in ruins until the 1960s, when it was rebuilt as a tourist district, filled with museums and souvenir shops and inhabited Tel Avivian artists. Israeli military are still stationed across Jaffa, and rates of violence and crime are high.

Image courtesy of Pluto Press.

Rotbard’s interest in the untold story of the “black city” was sparked in the late 90s, when he bought a piece of land in Shapira, a neighbourhood on the border of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, where he planned to build his own house. As he worked on his designs, he realised just how contrasting the two cities were, and began walking around to observe the differences. “I love to walk, and as I started noticing the contrasts between the two areas, I became obsessed. I concluded that something was being hidden: kept in silence.”

It was during these walks, Rotbard says, that he realised he needed to undertake a “politicisation of architecture” in Tel Aviv. In the afterword added for the English edition, he writes that the resultant book was “written in anger”  in response to the “mental iron curtain” dividing the city, and what he perceives as constant injustices against its southern residents.

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In the years since White City, Black City was first published, some progress has been made in the relationship between the two sides of the city, but not enough to merit a rewrite. The “White City” has gone from strength to strength: “Now, Madonna and the Rolling Stones tour there. It’s the ‘coolest city in the world’, the ‘most creative city’”, Rotbard says.

Meanwhile, rising real estate prices in Tel Aviv and new luxury developments in Jaffa are pushing out poorer people to other cities. An influx of refugees from South Sudan, Sudan and Eritrea to Jaffa led to a 2010 rabbinical decree in Rotbard’s Shapira neighbourhood, stating that Jews could not rent or sell apartments or houses to “infiltrators”.

“In the Middle East, everything is about territory – about finding a home”

Nonetheless, the book was widely read and reviewed in Hebrew, and was reprinted 13 times. Rotbard says it encouraged a more critical approach to Tel Aviv’s planning policies: “People started to understand that the issue was both urban and political.”

Now, Rotbard hopes the translation will be read abroad as a wider allegory for divided cities all over the world. In the afterword to this edition, he notes:

These local conflicts that divide Tel Aviv and Jaffa may seem far away, beyond the seas, borders, and airport checkpoints. Nevertheless…. I think that many of the processes, encounters and conflicts encountered in my city concern directly other scales and other regions too… [It raises] questions such as whether we are to live together or separately, in one city or two.

Rotbard has an almost obsessive interest in the way books, history and cities interact. When he first moved to Shapira, he found that the neighbourhood, while older than Tel Aviv by around ten years, warranted only a single paragraph’s mention in a book on the area.

He responded by forming a local group to write a history (Neither in Jaffa, or in Tel Aviv, eventually published in 2009, by collecting together stories and interviewing older people in the area. The episode also left him, he says, with a growing conviction that “If places aren’t documented in books they might be demolished or disappear”.

Rotbard today. Image: Roy Boshoi.

It’s reasonable to assume that, by “books”, Robard here means any kind of permanent, collective history or narrative, fed by architects, planners, and government and political forces alike. When Tel Aviv’s romanticisation of the Bauhaus movement and the “White City” are examined, it seems clear that those who produced and sustain that narrative have the same fear, and are marking their territory through an architectural narrative.

This may have something to do with how young the city is, and how much it has to gain from asserting itself.  Rotbard tells me that, in conflict-torn Israel, and other parts of the Middle East, “It’s all about territory – about finding a home, even while evicting others from theirs.” That’s why the role of architects and planners is central in creating that home – or, as Rotbard starkly puts it, “finalising the occupation”.

Above all else, the book centres on the fact that cities have narratives, and the promotion or questioning of those narratives is always in someone’s interests. As Rotbard puts it: “The relationship between what we build and what we tell is crucial to our understanding of cities.”

When we forget or remember; demolish or conserve, we’re always choosing one story over another. It would be naive to think that those choices are anything but political.

White City, Black City is out now from Pluto Press. 

By Barbara Speed
Original post

The Destruction of Mecca – NYTimes

WHEN Malcolm X visited Mecca in 1964, he was enchanted. He found the city “as ancient as time itself,” and wrote that the partly constructed extension to the Sacred Mosque “will surpass the architectural beauty of India’s Taj Mahal.”

Fifty years on, no one could possibly describe Mecca as ancient, or associate beauty with Islam’s holiest city. Pilgrims performing the hajj this week will search in vain for Mecca’s history.

The dominant architectural site in the city is not the Sacred Mosque, where the Kaaba, the symbolic focus of Muslims everywhere, is. It is the obnoxious Makkah Royal Clock Tower hotel, which, at 1,972 feet, is among the world’s tallest buildings. It is part of a mammoth development of skyscrapers that includes luxury shopping malls and hotels catering to the superrich. The skyline is no longer dominated by the rugged outline of encircling peaks. Ancient mountains have been flattened. The city is now surrounded by the brutalism of rectangular steel and concrete structures — an amalgam of Disneyland and Las Vegas.

The “guardians” of the Holy City, the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the clerics, have a deep hatred of history. They want everything to look brand-new. Meanwhile, the sites are expanding to accommodate the rising number of pilgrims, up to almost three million today from 200,000 in the 1960s.

The initial phase of Mecca’s destruction began in the mid-1970s, and I was there to witness it. Innumerable ancient buildings, including the Bilal mosque, dating from the time of the Prophet Muhammad, were bulldozed. The old Ottoman houses, with their elegant mashrabiyas — latticework windows — and elaborately carved doors, were replaced with hideous modern ones. Within a few years, Mecca was transformed into a “modern” city with large multilane roads, spaghetti junctions, gaudy hotels and shopping malls.

The few remaining buildings and sites of religious and cultural significance were erased more recently. The Makkah Royal Clock Tower, completed in 2012, was built on the graves of an estimated 400 sites of cultural and historical significance, including the city’s few remaining millennium-old buildings. Bulldozers arrived in the middle of the night, displacing families that had lived there for centuries. The complex stands on top of Ajyad Fortress, built around 1780, to protect Mecca from bandits and invaders. The house of Khadijah, the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad, has been turned into a block of toilets. The Makkah Hilton is built over the house of Abu Bakr, the closest companion of the prophet and the first caliph.

Apart from the Kaaba itself, only the inner core of the Sacred Mosque retains a fragment of history. It consists of intricately carved marble columns, adorned with calligraphy of the names of the prophet’s companions. Built by a succession of Ottoman sultans, the columns date from the early 16th century. And yet plans are afoot to demolish them, along with the whole of the interior of the Sacred Mosque, and to replace it with an ultramodern doughnut-shaped building.

The only other building of religious significance in the city is the house where the Prophet Muhammad lived. During most of the Saudi era it was used first as a cattle market, then turned into a library, which is not open to the people. But even this is too much for the radical Saudi clerics who have repeatedly called for its demolition. The clerics fear that, once inside, pilgrims would pray to the prophet, rather than to God — an unpardonable sin. It is only a matter of time before it is razed and turned, probably, into a parking lot.

The cultural devastation of Mecca has radically transformed the city. Unlike Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo, Mecca was never a great intellectual and cultural center of Islam. But it was always a pluralistic city where debate among different Muslim sects and schools of thought was not unusual. Now it has been reduced to a monolithic religious entity where only one, ahistoric, literal interpretation of Islam is permitted, and where all other sects, outside of the Salafist brand of Saudi Islam, are regarded as false. Indeed, zealots frequently threaten pilgrims of different sects. Last year, a group of Shiite pilgrims from Michigan were attacked with knives by extremists, and in August, a coalition of American Muslim groups wrote to the State Department asking for protection during this year’s hajj.

The erasure of Meccan history has had a tremendous impact on the hajj itself. The word “hajj” means effort. It is through the effort of traveling to Mecca, walking from one ritual site to another, finding and engaging with people from different cultures and sects, and soaking in the history of Islam that the pilgrims acquired knowledge as well as spiritual fulfillment. Today, hajj is a packaged tour, where you move, tied to your group, from hotel to hotel, and seldom encounter people of different cultures and ethnicities. Drained of history and religious and cultural plurality, hajj is no longer a transforming, once-in-a-lifetime spiritual experience. It has been reduced to a mundane exercise in rituals and shopping.

Mecca is a microcosm of the Muslim world. What happens to and in the city has a profound effect on Muslims everywhere. The spiritual heart of Islam is an ultramodern, monolithic enclave, where difference is not tolerated, history has no meaning, and consumerism is paramount. It is hardly surprising then that literalism, and the murderous interpretations of Islam associated with it, have become so dominant in Muslim lands.

By ZIAUDDIN SARDAR
Original post