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Outdoor advertising: Jerusalem should follow Tel Aviv's lead ... and copy Paris

April 1, 2012, 5:29 am
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For about four years now I've been cringing at sights like the following:




It's true that after a while you can get used to things that once drove you nuts. I guess some of the shock value of these Jerusalem Municipality advertising installations has worn off by now; but I still think they are ugly, strident, vulgar, and altogether inconsistent with the subtlety and refinement that I associate with Jerusalem. I also think that they have, for the most part, been inappropriately placed. Moreover, they are not very effective at their appointed task -- delivering commercial and cultural information -- for reasons that I will set forth later in this post.

I used to have a theory about how these ad installations got authorized to begin with. The fact that they first appeared under the mayoral administration of ultra-Orthodox Uri Lupoliansky made me think it was an encroachment of the pashkevil aesthetic into parts of Jerusalem where that aesthetic didn't belong. Now, Lupoliansky did get a lot of flak from the ultra-Orthodox community for trying to clear the streets of unauthorized posters in haredi strongholds like Mea Shearim -- but it was also during his term as mayor that these formal ad installations began to appear throughout Jerusalem, including in the non-haredi parts of town. The two phenomena -- the Mea Shearim cleanup and the citywide oudoor advertising free-for-all -- were apparently two sides of the same coin, the latter being an "authorized" communication channel that supposedly kept the former in check.

Whether the introduction of municipal ad installations had the desired effect of keeping unauthorized posters off the walls of Mea Shearim, I don't really know -- but I tend to doubt it. Whatever the outcome on that side of town, I had never noticed a problem with bandit billboards on, for instance, Emek Refaim St. (in the lively and heterogeneous German Colony), and so I consider the placement of ad installations there to constitute an introduction of visual pollution where there had been none before:


Stately entrance to old Templer cemetery, Emek Refaim St. -- an appropriate site for commercial advertising?
 Basically, at the time of their initial appearance I regarded these Jerusalem advertising boards as manifestations of a warped aesthetic sense, combined with a drive to inject money into the city coffers by any means, fair or foul. And I wanted the installations gone.

Well, I still want them gone; but in the meantime my attitude toward outdoor publicity/advertising has gained a bit of nuance. I've come to recognize that different cities, and different parts of the same city, can take different approaches to advertising. At one end of the spectrum, New York's Times Square can hardly be imagined without its giant billboards. By contrast, Los Angeles has banned digital billboards and multistorey signs. And at the opposite end of the spectrum, Sao Paulo, Brazil, via its Clean City Law, has rid itself altogether of billboards, posters and bus ads.

And then there's Paris with its Morris columns:

Jeune femme traversant le boulevard -- Jean  Béraud (via Wikimedia Commons) 

A more up-to-date version:

via Wikipedia
In 2006 considerable public controversy was generated by a Paris Municipality decision to "unclutter" the public space by reducing the number of its iconic poster columns, which since the 19th century have been considered a major and inexpensive medium for publicizing cultural events in the city. What is worth noting is that the Parisian pillars have been historically dedicated to the purpose of supporting the arts -- not of enriching the municipality, as appears to be the case with today's Jerusalem ad installations.

It's also worth noting that the Morris columns of Paris, with their "crown" detail, etc., are designed with an obvious concern for aesthetics. Not only that, but the very concept of a three-dimensional pillar display, rather than a flat "screen-like" expanse, has something distinctly human, tactile and fun about it. This was brought home to me recently as I took a good look at an object that had been lying around my house since my oldest son was a toddler -- a cardboard stand-up street scene that could serve as a child's primer on the New Urbanism:

The street scene (apparently a European import) features an advertising pillar (far left), and you can see how, under the right conditions, outdoor advertising might contribute just the right degree of liveliness to a street environment, without being overwhelming or vulgar. In this image, if you look closely, you can make out two children playing peek-a-boo around the column. Now picture a real-life street scene, in which well-dressed Parisians glide around a cylinder of this kind in an elegant pas-de-deux as they scan it for news. It almost looks like a form of two-way communication.

Although I spent time in Paris as a student many moons ago, I somehow never thought to connect those Morris columns with the Jerusalem ad installations that have sprouted like poisonous mushrooms around the city over the last four years. They are so different visually that I simply couldn't place them in the same universe, although technically they both fall into the categories of street furniture and outdoor advertising media.

The pashkevil connection aside, what I find so objectionable about the Jerusalem ad installations is the sheer lack of humanity evident both in their design and in their deployment.

The Parisian pillars are not intended for view by drivers, but by pedestrians (their invention pre-dates the auto, after all). Even when they are placed at intersections (as in one of the above photos), they clearly are meant to catch the eye of the human being crossing the street, not the driver waiting for the light. And (at least based on a scan of images -- and there are lots of them -- via Google) they are by no means placed exclusively at intersections.

By contrast, the Jerusalem installations are pretty consistently situated at intersections, including many that get very little foot traffic:

Hebron Rd.-Shmuel Meir Blvd.

 Several things are worth noting about the above photo, but at present I will focus on the fact that this is an intersection at the city's periphery that hardly anyone crosses on foot -- meaning that the advertising here is intended exclusively for drivers waiting for the light to change. Yet, except for the most boldly-printed headlines, no driver, sitting across the road from the installation, can possibly read what is written on those posters. This is typical; I have noticed it at many intersections around the city. The ad installations are supposed to be doing double duty by targeting drivers and pedestrians alike.  Yet they fail miserably with regard to drivers, as they do not take human visual capabilities into account! Those responsible for the installations' design and placement seem to have thought they were going to be communicating with windshields, not with people.

(Given this inefficacy, it's really too bad that the lovely pastoral view of an olive grove had to be sacrificed to the municipal advertising imperative.)

My favorite, of course, is when the ad installations are positioned near traffic circles. Apparently, drivers are expected to crane their necks to make out what's written on the posters while they're driving around the circles:

Traffic circle at entrance to Har Homa. You can't make out anything on those ad boards while you're whizzing past ...

Yet I would argue that even when the installations are placed in spots with heavy pedestrian traffic, they are not particularly effective. It's true that on a busy street like Emek Refaim, people will definitely stop to look at them. But you have to step back awkwardly in order to focus on the text of the posters ...  


... risking collision with other people at a teeming intersection, and then shield your eyes from the psychadelic glare. The installations, jam-packed with posters superimposed each on the other, in eye-blistering colors that clash both with each other and with the otherwise stately and graceful Jerusalem landscape, are simply not scaled for the human eye at street level.

What is more, they take up an awful lot of visual "space." Unlike Morris columns, which attract attention but do not overwhelm, the Jerusalem ad installations are a form of visual hijacking. Look at how the view of a lovely Old Katamon house and its garden is obstructed by -- not one, but two -- installations:


Here an ad board disrupts the tranquillity of a residential Baka street:


The above intersection, Efraim and Gideon streets, is just a couple of blocks away from both Emek Refaim and Derech Beit Lechem -- two major commercial hubs that have certainly received their share of ad installations. Couldn't the Municipality have let this quiet little street slumber in peace? Or do they think the Day-glo colors contrast elegantly with Jerusalem stone?

And, what about the local residents who have to look out their windows at the backs of these things, or the pedestrians who have to accept these grey and lifeless metal backsides as part of the streetscape:



It's nice to know that Ariel, the Jerusalem muncipal company that is responsible for these eyesores, takes pride in the installations' aesthetic caliber.

On its website Ariel doesn't bother to name either the company to which it has contracted the twice-weekly changing of the posters, or the "sponsor" that it "recruited"  several years ago to "replace 300 old and broken-down installations around the city, at a cost of millions of shekels, in exchange for advertising rights to the upper portion of the installations." [emphases mine -- Julie@walkablejlm]

The term "recruited" struck me as intriguingly vague. Isn't this the kind of service that a municipality would normally  publish a tender for?

I did some digging, and came up with the following:

In 2008 the Jerusalem Municipality did issue a tender for the provision of outdoor advertising/street furniture services -- after a lengthy period in which such services had been provided by multiple companies on a short-term contract basis. Jerusalem was, at that time, following the lead of Tel Aviv, which had recently entered into an agreement with a multinational outdoor advertising company following a tender process. The idea was that various local and international companies would submit their bids, and that Jerusalem would end up with a professional, aesthetically-pleasing and unified municipal street furniture "style", provided by an organization with proven design expertise.

However, the tender caused an uproar in the Israeli outdoor advertising industry, as its conditions seemed to automatically disqualify local competitors and leave the playing field open solely to large foreign companies -- necessitating intervention on the part of the Israel Anti-Trust Authority.

I haven't, as yet, been able to trace the entire train of events that succeeded the tender's publication and the subsequent outcry; what is certain, however, is that a few months after the tender was published, it was cancelled. None of the foreign companies that might have been expected to submit bids, did so. Why? Well, apparently there was something irregular about the Jerusalem tender itself. Among other things, the time period stipulated for the provision of services -- 15 years -- was considered unusual in the industry, and made the tender an unattractive proposition for the relevant firms.

What is one to make of all this?

Was the original tender a farce? I wouldn't want to hurl accusations without having all the facts, but something doesn't add up.

It's not clear to me who is currently responsible for designing, erecting and determining the placement of Jerusalem's ubiquitous ad installations, and whether they are also responsible for the graphical end of things. As far as I can tell, the company that appears to be in charge of designing and deploying the posters plastered on the installations is Diyuk Advertising & Distribution,  a company whose website proclaims the availability to prospective clients of 300 ad installations "throughout the city" -- "Eeeeeverybody can see you" [כו ו ו ולם רואים אותך] !

Who is Diyuk Advertising & Distribution? Diyuk was founded in 2005 by Udi Moshe Cohen, "after a decade of experience in outdoor advertising and broadsides [מודעות רחוב]in the ultra-Orthodox and religious sector, as well as in the secular sector which has traditionally had less exposure to the broadside medium" [emphasis mine -- Julie@walkablejlm]

Basically, Diyuk is a pashkevil company that got a good gig: bringing the Mea Shearim pashkevil look to all parts of the city. Although they don't list the Jerusalem Municipality as one of their clients, and are not mentioned on Ariel's website, what can one conclude from the "Shiltei Yerushalayim" page of their website, but that they are the de facto operators of the municipal ad installations? It's not clear to me whether Diyuk was actually responsible for deciding on the installations' infelicitious flat-screen format and idiotic placements, or whether Ariel should get credit for this. But they certainly appear to be responsible for the overall look.

Compared with the Jerusalem Municipality, the Tel Aviv Municipality exhibits both decent taste in its choice of outdoor advertising format, and relative transparency.

Tel Aviv, in 2010, contracted with JCDecaux, the company that currently handles Paris' Morris columns, to replace its old ad installations with columns in the Parisian style. Actually, a photo taken from the JCDecaux website shows a rather plain metallic cylinder, somewhat reminiscent of a cola can and decidely less attractive than its Parisian counterpart:


But no matter. It's a whole lot better than what we've been used to in Jerusalem. And the Tel Aviv Municipality doesn't seem to feel the need to keep its contractor's name a secret. The municipality published a tender, which was duly won by a large and experienced international company in the street furniture/outdoor advertising industry. The fact that JCDecaux was the only contender doesn't bother me too much; at least the process was open and transparent, unlike the mysterious "recruitment" that took place in Jerusalem.

This lack of transparency, and the sheer ugliness and inefficacy of the Jerusalem ad installations, may have been consistent with the Lupoliansky administration's unprofessionalism; I certainly didn't expect any expansion of the phenomenon under Mayor Barkat. Yet the installations have proliferated since he entered office.

Should a local company that does shoddy work be preferred to a multinational that demonstrates professionalism? I don't think so -- certainly not where Jerusalem's visual environment is concerned. Of course, it would be great if a local company -- whether ultra-Orthodox, national-religious, secular, Christian, Muslim or Bahai -- acquired professional skills in the outdoor furniture/advertising sphere even remotely comparable to those of a company like JCDecaux. (Just compare Diyuk's website with that of JCDecaux, and decide which company you would rather have in charge of outdoor advertising in the Israeli capital -- the holy city of Jerusalem.)

To sum up:

If the Jerusalem Municipality wants to provide a platform for the effective transmission of information related to culture and the arts, it would do well to adopt -- as Tel Aviv has done -- the kind of column or pillar format that works so well in European cities, and to place these columns in shopping districts, near community centers, in public plazas and on sidewalks that are wide enough to accomodate them -- thereby targeting pedestrians in areas where there is heavy foot traffic. The flat ad installations currently in use, positioned at all sorts of intersections where they often block views of attractive architecture and greenery, are absurdly ineffective at conveying information to drivers, except in those instances where the entire space is devoted to a single large commercial ad. The attempt to target both pedestrians and drivers (and to communicate both cultural and commercial information) using the same format was ill-conceived, to put it mildly. And (again putting it mildly) the Jerusalem Municipality would do well to display rather more transparency regarding its choice of service provider in the area of street furniture/advertising.
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A Memorial to Bad Urbanism on Derech Beit Lechem

May 25, 2012, 12:41 am
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Derech Beit Lechem, or Bethlehem Road, is a long street that runs through Jerusalem's Baka and Talpiot neighborhoods, parallel to the thunderous traffic artery of Derech Hevron. Derech Beit Lechem, though itself a busy thoroughfare in parts, would not normally be called "thunderous" (a car word) but rather "bustling" (a people word). When one talks about Derech Beit Lechem one tends to draw on a lexicon of chicness and boutiques, cafes and gentrification.

This vocabulary mainly describes the section of Derech Beit Lechem that extends between Rivka Street (near "Tsomet HaBankim") and Yiftah Street. There is considerable urbanist consciousness in that part of town; Baka activists have garnered media attention by protesting planned changes in traffic patterns that would, in the words of architect and Baka resident David Guggenheim, "have destroyed the delicate urban fabric" of Derech Beit Lechem.

There is, however, another Derech Beit Lechem -- one whose urban fabric is not so delicate: the Talpiot Industrial Area end of the street, between HaTenufa and Derech Baram. On this stretch of Derech Beit Lechem, one side of the street features old industrial buildings ...


... flanking a forlorn, vacant lot where the infamous Versailles wedding hall disaster occurred eleven years ago yesterday, on May 24, 2001. No one, apparently, wants to build something new here:

Site where the Versailles wedding hall once stood, now offering a direct view of the ubiquitous Holyland project.

The opposite side of the street, on this stretch of Derech Beit Lechem, houses some of Jerusalem's poorer residents, in a compound of decrepit shikun buildings (1950s-era mass housing for immigrants) currently slated for urban renewal:



And it is on this side of the street, directly across from the now-desolate space where the Versailles disaster occurred, that a "memorial garden" has been created in honor of the disaster's victims:


Is it just me, or does this "garden" seem wholly inappropriate, whether as a memorial to the casualties of a collapsed dance floor, or as a feature of a street where, after all, human beings continue to live and go about their business? Well, I guess if I thought it was just me, I wouldn't be writing this post, would I?

Here's what I think is wrong with the Versailles memorial site:

1) It has a distinctly military-cemetery feel, as though the designer (architect David Guggenheim -- the Baka activist mentioned above) thought the site was meant to commemorate a battle where heroic warriors fell, rather than a civil disaster. Those tall, straight-arrow cypress trees standing at attention under the brutal midday Mediterranean sun, surrounded by a stark grey concrete wall bearing the names of the fallen ... This military ambience is all wrong, given the civil nature of the incident.


2) The site is unsuited to an area where, as I noted above, people live, play, work, and pursue everyday activities. Basically, a large chunk of public space was hijacked and turned into something that no one can use. This isn't a cemetery, it's a street. Would David Guggenheim want something like this on his end of Derech Beit Lechem?

To be more specific about why the memorial is unsuited to an area where people live and "do stuff" (as opposed to a military cemetery or some kind of national battlefield park):

-- The "garden" is shadeless, meaning that no one can spend time there during normal daytime hours. Wouldn't it have been more meaningful, a more fitting remembrance of the departed, to have planted some shade trees, and arranged them in an inviting way, with some benches under them, creating what we refer to in Hebrew as a pinat hemed -- a "cosy corner" that would have elicited gratitude from local residents and passersby, and, perhaps, have stimulated actual contemplation of the names of the disaster victims -- rather than concealing them?


-- The overall layout is such that one can't be in the site; one is forced to
walk around it. As I said: a hijacking of public space. One can speculate that Guggenheim intended something deep by this: perhaps the set-up of trees-mounted-on-a-platform, upon which we gaze as outside observers, was meant to evoke the moment just before the dance floor collapsed beneath the wedding revellers -- a moment that was captured for posterity on video, and viewed by many thousands of people.

Whatever visual metaphor Guggenheim had in mind, it does not, in my view, justify the removal of a public space from public use. The local residents didn't cause the disaster. Why should they not have the use of their street in its entirety, and in aesthetically pleasing form?

And if the site of the catastrophe itself -- directly across the street from where the memorial "garden" was installed -- has lain desolate for the past decade, wouldn't that have been the logical venue for a monument of some kind?

-- Also, what's with the grey, blank wall on the outside of the memorial? 


Not that it was necessary or desirable to have this grey starkness on the interior walls, either -- but how can one justify putting a blank wall directly across from what is, essentially, a nice, modest, pleasantly dense and human-scaled stretch of multifamily dwellings:


The Versailles disaster, in which 23 people perished and 350 or more were injured due to "quick and dirty" construction methods and owner negligence, demonstrated one kind of price that society pays when the needs of actual human beings are treated with cavalier disregard by those responsible for our built environment.

The Versailles disaster "memorial garden" demonstrates another cost that we incur, as a society, when those responsible for our built environment disregard the needs of actual human beings. No, no deaths are likely to be directly caused by an ugly and unusable memorial garden. But I would argue that negative urban features such as these have a cumulative effect. They make it seem okay to do inappropriate things with the street; to design and build inappropriately. They alienate us from the street, with devastating effects on our quality of life and long-term health. Twenty-three fatalities in one shot is indeed a terrible tragedy. But when, as a society, we adhere to a lifestyle in which the street is a place to be avoided, we suffer health consequences that, though more insidious, reach much farther.
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Brander Park and Gardens, City Center -- a Jerusalem Playground Review

July 16, 2012, 11:19 pm
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I recently had the pleasure of visiting a renovated playground in the city center -- the "revitalized downtown Jerusalem" that I sometimes mock in a spirit of contrarianism. This wonderful new playground definitely creates an incentive (which I previously found lacking) to go downtown with the kids ...
Name: Brander Park and Gardens
There is a plaque identifying the park's donors as  Dr. Jerome and Mrs. Frances Brander of Atlantic City. On maps, however, the area seems to be called Meir Sherman Garden. When the conundrum has been resolved, Gd willing, I will update.

Location: King George Street, downtown Jerusalem (adjacent to Independence Park).

Transit:Egged lines 4, 4A, 7, 7A, 8, 8A, 9, 9A, 17, 17A, 19, 19A, 21, 21A, 31, 031, 32, 032, 38, 74, 75.
Shade: There's plenty of shade in this park, making it quite usable at all hours of the day, even when the sun is at its harshest. In addition to the many trees scattered throughout, some of them quite old and venerable ...



... there is the welcome addition of a large artificial shade structure covering a selection of attractive, new-style "dynamic" play equipment.


Obviously these shade structures cost money and one can't expect that every corner of a playground will be encompassed by them. Still, it's kind of a shame that this line of cool and varied swings is so entirely exposed to the sun -- I doubt one can use them comfortably after about 9:00 a.m.:


All in all, though, this is a well-shaded playground/park, where at least half of the play equipment is sufficiently shaded for mid-day use, and where comfortable picnic spots can always be found:


Play equipment and features:

Play equipment seems to have its own fashion trends, which wax and wane. A few years ago every new playground in these parts featured a climbing/slide structure with tunnels and turrets, a kind of all-in-one facility around which the entire play area revolved -- like the department store on which a mall is "anchored."

Over the last couple of years, however, things seem to have evolved. My first inkling of the changing times came on a family trip to Zichron Yaacov two summers ago, where we were enchanted by what seemed to us a wonderfully original playground full of strange kinetic-dynamic-futuristic play structures of a kind we had never seen before.

Now these structures are popping up here in Jerusalem as well. The novelty hasn't worn off yet -- maybe it never will:










As noted above, an entire section of the playground is devoted to the swing concept in a variety of ultramodern incarnations. The swings are attractive and fun -- for older children; none is suited to a toddler, unless she's in someone's lap ...



There's a separate toddler play area with some nice features, including this sleek bouncy snake:


The train structure is very attractive, but was in full sun and hot to the touch at around 10:30-11:00 a.m. when we were there:



Other notable features and amenities:

-- Bicycle racks

-- There's a regular water fountain near the toddler play area, and a more "advanced" one off the older-child area -- the water is chilled, and the fountain has a bottle-filling installation:


-- Rarity of all rarities in Jerusalem playgrounds: a restroom. My son tried to get in but couldn't figure out how. I have no idea whether it works, is cleaned/maintained, etc. Nor do I want to be the one who checks this out. Perhaps an intrepid reader will care to update me on this, for the benefit of the wider public ...


-- Brander Park leads directly into the larger, open green space of Jerusalem's well-known Independence Park, an area suitable for picnics, ball-related activities, gatherings, etc. Independence Park has no play facilities per se and I never thought of it as a full-service attraction in and of itself for kids, but nowadays it makes a nice, relaxing side-trip when everyone has tired themselves out on Brander Park's exciting play equipment. Of particular interest is the man-made water feature -- small pools and streams, mainly in shade, that attract kids like flies and offer adults a cool and refreshing interlude amid the downtown bustle:






 
But don't bring your bathing suit, or drink the water. It might embalm you:



Age range: Toddler through adult:


Snack factor: Many restaurants, cafes, bakeries and convenience stores a short walk away on Jaffa Rd. and along the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall; a kiosk selling ice creams/ices, snacks and cold drinks (as well as less child-oriented items such as lottery tickets and cigarettes) is located at the park's Meir Shaham St. entrance.

Schmooze factor: This is not the kind of playground you go to in order to meet up with a regular crowd of neighborhood moms and childminders -- a valuable feature of certain other playgrounds that I have reviewed.. Brander Park is downtown, so it gets a more transient and varied clientele, and that is its strong point and brand differentiation. One sees locals of all stripes, tourists, plenty of dog-walkers, etc.

Seating: Seating has been handled thoughtfully and generously throughout the park, whether in the form of wooden benches (a fair number in shady spots), a circular stone bench surrounding the main play area, or stone tree and shrubbery platforms that do double duty as seating:



Multiple uses within the park: Brander Park certainly has much to offer within its borders, especially if those borders are extended to include Independence Park. It has several play areas (suited to different age groups) that are distinct and intimate yet flow gracefully into each other; lawns for kicking a ball around, picnicking, etc.; steps and platforms that beckon young children to climb on them; the babbling brook of Independence Park; areas of noisy togetherness and spots of repose. You won't be bored here.

Beyond the park: Self-evident, considering the downtown location. In the immediate vicinity, on King George Street, are certain tourist-itenerary items such as Yeshurun Central Synagogue, the Great Synagogue and Heichal Shlomo.

Prior to the renovation, I never considered this playground to be anything that I would travel out of my south Jerusalem comfort zone for. In general, I always regarded downtown as rather child-unfriendly and resented the lack of a worthwhile play area there. I never could bring myself to run errands in the city center with kids in tow. I've hardly been downtown at all these last few years, as most of my needs can be met closer to home (i.e., in Talpiot); in fact my unexpected recent forays there were occasioned by nothing less than the necessity of getting my three year old vaccinated against rabies at the Health Ministry facility at 86 Jaffa Rd. I dreaded the trip downtown with her, thinking that Brander Park, as I remembered it (a rickety old merry-go-round?), would not compensate her adequately for the innoculation experience. In the end I was pleasantly surprised on all counts: the rabies prevention unit is run efficiently and located in a beautiful old building that is worth visiting on its own merits; the little one was enthralled by the shop windows of Jaffa Rd. and the passing trains; and I discovered the Brander Park renovation.

I'm not naive. I know the Jerusalem Municipality didn't have lowly residents like me in mind when it decided to renovate this playground, but rather the tourist population. Yet this is one instance where the locals truly enjoy a collateral benefit. "Mixed-use" has become a catchword of the downtown Jerusalem revitalization scene, but it appears to refer mainly to a mix of commercial, office and hotel/residential space in new high-rises slated for construction. Yet by creating a truly fun place for children in the city center, the planning echelon has done much to enhance downtown Jerusalem's mixed-use status -- without having to reach skyward.
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A contrarian view of Jerusalem's Mayor Barkat

August 19, 2013, 5:48 am
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I express my opinion of the city's wildly popular mayor here at the Times of Israel:

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/mars-and-venus-in-jerusalem/

I point out that Nir Barkat has done nothing for the average resident/citizen, and that normal municipal services have become "favors" that the opposition has to beg for. I also point out that the existing dichotomy between the mega-project/economic growth/tourism-chasing approach versus the resident-services approach has undesirable gender-conflict overtones.
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Jerusalem's Teflon Mayor

October 14, 2013, 5:26 am
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For a very long time I have felt that the media are so mesmerized by Nir Barkat that they simply will not cover any issue that might undermine their favored narrative of Barkat as the clean, civilized, altruistic, shekel-a-year mayor for whom Jerusalem is a “life’s mission.”

While I’m no supporter of Barkat’s adversary in the upcoming Jerusalem mayoral race – Moshe Lion – I don’t think democracy is particularly well served by an exclusive focus on simplistic narratives – haredi “hackdom” versus secular “sanity.” Nor do I think Barkat merits the accolades he has received from both the Israeli and the international media.

Here are some of the questions I think journalists ought to be asking Mayor Barkat, in no particular order:

Why are there so many public and semi-public spaces in Jerusalem’s peripheral neighborhoods for which the Municipality is unwilling to shoulder responsibility?

This is the question that isn’t being asked when journalists inquire about the city’s “cleanliness.” Framing the slum-like appearance of neighborhoods such as Har Homa and Gilo as a matter of “cleanliness” removes the issue from any plane of useful discussion. When the city’s less prestigious neighborhoods complain – rightly so – about dirt and neglect, they are really complaining about something entirely different from garbage pickup.

It's not that the places aren't cleaned, it's that the Municipality refuses to take responsibility for areas that the Construction Ministry has finished its role in developing and wants to hand over to the city. The Municipality will clean areas for which it is “officially” responsible. Unfortunately, it drags its feet -- for years on end -- about accepting official responsibilityfor large swathes of land that residents actually use, including playgrounds where the Construction Ministry has already installed play equipment. Thus you have situations where children grow up playing in areas that are (dangerously) full of weeds, garbage and construction refuse, and that lack landscaping, trees, garbage cans, working water fountains, and shade. At first glance the weeds and dirt look like straightforward jobs for the city parks department and trash collection services, but eventually the residents catch on that nothing’s going to happen, no matter how much they complain, because the Municipality “isn’t responsible for these areas.” You, Nir Barkat, have merely perpetuated the cynical municipal policy that existed before you took office -- as residents of such neighborhoods as Har Homa know only too well.

Another, related, problem is that of the “semi-public” spaces between and around apartment buildings in neighborhoods such as Gilo and Ramot – spaces that belong to no-one and everyone and for which the Municipality, again, does not claim responsibility.  The spaces, untended, fill up with weeds and garbage and impart a ma’abara-like appearance to the neighborhoods.  This is a matter that was recently raised in the context of Gilo’s master plan (as noted in a recent issue of Gilaton, the community council bulletin – apparently available only in hardcopy), and it was noted that there is no chance the Municipality will take over these areas as it lacks the funds to landscape and maintain them. Now, the Municipality isn’t to blame for the incompetent way in which these neighborhoods were planned – wasteful sprawl rather than compact efficiency; that is the Construction Ministry’s fault. However, the Municipality does have a responsibility to acknowledge the problem and work to solve it. If money is lacking – get some from the central government (whose faulty planning caused the problem), or actively seek other funding sources. Discuss the issue openly, rather than sweeping it under the rug. Ultimately the solution must lie in effective redevelopment, but that will take a lot of time. In the meanwhile, there’s no excuse for leaving citizens with garbage dumps for neighborhoods.

What is the exact nature of all the new jobs you claim to have added to the city during your term in office?

Chambermaid jobs? Burger-flipping jobs? You claimed you were going to make Jerusalem a biotech hub. Have you? If you had, wouldn’t you be schvitzing about it by now? I often wonder whether the jobs added to the city during your term aren’t simply construction jobs related to your much-vaunted mega-projects -- the Arena, etc. -- whose actual benefit to the city has yet to be demonstrated.

Does your “branding” vision for Jerusalem really accord with the city’s religious and cultural character?

Does a 3,000 year old city sacred to three faiths really need great branding “for people who love cars?" Why must Jerusalem become the sports capital of Israel? Does that suit the basic character of the city? Or does it just suit Nir Barkat, who likes sports and loves racing cars? Is that really building on the city’s existing strengths? Or is it just advancing an agenda of secularizing the city?

What were the exact measures your administration implemented in order to achieve the 4% increase in bagrut (matriculation) eligibility among Jerusalem’s “Zionist” (i.e., non-haredi) school populations, for which you so readily take credit?

Doesn’t that figure merely reflect a recently-publicized national trend toward higher matriculation rates? In the glossy campaign brochure that was recently distributed to households in my area, you also take credit for a 5.6% increase in the number of pupils in the state- and state-religious school systems during your term; but is this increase really attributable to anything you did? Are you the factor behind, say, the influx of young religious and secular families into so unglamorous and neglected a part of town as Har Homa, which now has nearly 20,000 residents? Frankly, I doubt it: that influx might just as well be attributed to societal trends that have nothing to do with you. Worldwide, there is a growing appreciation of the advantages of urban living and an awareness of the downsides of suburban life. Gas prices keep going up, right? It could just be that “Zionist-sector” families are choosing apartment life in Jerusalem’s neglected, underdeveloped peripheral neighborhoods over large private homes in the yishuvim of Judea and Samaria because they prefer greater proximity to jobs (i.e., shorter commutes) and don’t want to be utterly and completely car dependent. Bus service from Jerusalem’s ring neighborhoods into town may not be as frequent as it should, but at least it exists. At least the teenagers who reside in those areas can move around town independently by bus or light rail, rather than needing Mom and Dad to drive them everywhere, or hitchhike.  I know that’s why I’mhere – not because Jerusalem now has a zillion more cultural events than it did before you took office.

The Jerusalem Arena: how did you get the media to ignore the highly critical City Comptroller’s report on the Arena’s outrageous cost overruns (twice the original price!) and organizational/administrative deficits?

The Comptroller’s report is of course available on the Municipality website. But it’s a lengthy and complicated document; not many people will read it. Most people get their information from the media. How is it that the only place on the Internet where one can find coverage of the Comptroller’s report is an Israeli sports website?

We all know that mega-projects are generally plagued by cost overruns, but NIS 240 million rather than NIS 120 million is a little ridiculous, no?  You may not have been responsible for problems rooted in the Arena’s original plan, which predated your mayoralty, but you surely bear responsibility for “fast-tracking” a project riddled with problems.

The Comptroller’s report only touches on fiscal and administrative issues; it has nothing to say about the urban vision, or lack thereof, embodied in the Arena project itself.

Is it really wise to put a quasi-Olympic village in Malha? Malha isn’t some outlying area where one might have been able to justify the construction of a self-contained compound, in the style of an office park; it’s a relatively central part of the city (just look at a map!) and might, perhaps, have been developed as a mixed-use neighborhood with an actual street grid (rather than “access roads”), and a range of elements such as housing (maybe even of the affordable variety), community services, street-level retail (including a most desirable “pedestrianization” of the Malha Mall) – the works.

As it is, what are we going to be left with? The Arena is meant to be an all-encompassing sports and entertainment center whose premises visitors will have little temptation to leave on any given occasion. Some kind of retail “power center” is apparently planned for the site. Does anyone expect event-goers to expand their horizons beyond the Arena and explore other parts of the city, shop and dine elsewhere? Will they even bother going to the nearby Malha Mall?

How many mega-projects can one city have going at a time without mucking at least some of them up?

Won’t Cinema City compete with the Sherover Center for Culture that is also meant to serve as a multiplex cinema? And what’s the good old Jerusalem Cinematheque supposed to do? Curl up and die?

How many movie screens does this town need? Even secular Jerusalemites eager for entertainment options that are open on Shabbat can’t possibly go to that many films. Don’t they all have giant plasma screens in their living rooms?

What’s with the fixation on single-use compounds and districts?

We’ve got to have a “historic downtown” reserved for pubs, cafes and boutique hotels, a modernist high-rise central business district (because you can’t do business amidst attractive traditional architecture), a government precinct consisting of superblocks and architectural “icons” that don’t interface with the street, the sports thing in Malha … you guys have a single-use fetish. All over the world urban planners are turning on to the idea of mixing housing, retail, culture, office space and other uses in the same area. Only in Jerusalem are uses still being aggressively separated. Get with it, guys – start reading The Atlantic Cities and other mainstream publications and websites devoted to cities and good urbanism – and start mixing things up!

How did you manage not to take any flak for the Begin Expressway extension?

I’ve noted elsewhere that the Begin extension has been wrongly framed by the media as an Arab-Israeli issue, rather than as a good-urbanism issue. Cities around the world are tearing down their urban freeways, which are now understood to do great damage to the fabric of urban life, and whose existence does not accord with larger societal trends toward reduced automobile dependency. Surely the huge amount of money and engineering knowhow that have been invested in the Begin highway extension could have been used to “fast-track” (no pun intended!) the light rail lines that have been planned for south Jerusalem, and/or greatly increase bus service to that area. Whether one looks at the Begin extension (wrongly) as a national-ethnic affair or (rightly) as an urbanist one, you, Mayor Barkat, have been given a “free ride” (no pun intended!) by the media. How did you manage it?

Why did you chuck Naomi Tsur off your (realistic) list, and why aren’t the media interested?

So far as I could tell she wasn’t very effective, but neither was she very contentious – kind of a yes-woman, right? So her new Ometz Lev party is really a sort of extension of your own party. She siphons off some of the votes that might otherwise have gone to Yerushalmim/Rachel Azaria, and doesn’t hurt you. The media paid a lot of attention to the formation of Ometz Lev, and none to the question of why Tsur and you parted ways. Why wouldn’t the media care?

Why is your Yerushalayim Tatzliach list so singularly undistinguished?

With all the ridicule being showered on the “man from Givatayim,” why isn’t anyone interested in the fact that your list includes a recent immigrant from France who has been in Israel for only 5 years? What qualifications does she have other than being successful in the real estate sphere? And the soccer player – very impressive.


If you build it, will they necessarily come? And if they don’t, will the media remember that you were involved?
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Mall and sprawl at the Israel Museum

October 14, 2013, 5:07 pm
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This past summer vacation I happened to visit the Israel Museum for the first time since, perhaps, 2008. Because my recreational activities tend to be child-centered, and because my older boys would react with grimaces and groans in recent years whenever I suggested a Museum visit, I never got a first-hand look at the Museum’s highly-touted "renewal" until a few weeks ago, when I ventured there with my youngest child. All I could think was: they closed large portions of the Israel Museum for an extended period, and spent $100 million ...  and they couldn't plant a few trees?

It's a daunting task to criticize the Israel Museum, whose collections I'm always a little ashamed of not knowing better, and whose temporary exhibitions I'm often sorry I don't to get see (the "not getting to" is one of the main problems, see below). I'm certainly not qualified to judge the professional-curatorial aspects of the recent renovation. I'm perfectly willing to accept the consensus view that the organization of the displays is now more logical and user-friendly than it was before. In point of fact I have little basis for comparison, since my visits to the Museum, from the early 1990s up until the time the renovations started, were sporadic and, from the late 1990s on, conducted in a young-family context. I never expected to see more than a little bit of the art and archaeology stuff at a time, and was often restricted to the Youth Wing sandbox and the dim tunnel of the Shrine of the Book, which my kids, like everybody else's, related to as a kind of amusement-park funhouse.

What I find hard to grasp is that so considerable a sum of money was spent on refurbishing the Museum without addressing its inner-sprawl problem in a more meaningful way. The issue of the Museum's location -- sprawl in "macrocosm" -- is theoretically going to be addressed by urbanization plans for the surrounding area, which I discuss briefly below. But what about the grounds of the Museum "campus" itself -- sprawl in "microcosm?"

Kiryat HaLe'om

The drawbacks of the Museum’s setting are no news to anyone. Its various structures are dispersed within a self-contained compound -- generally referred to as a "campus" -- in the city’s Givat Ram-Kiryat HaLe’om (“National Precinct”) area; the campus itself is surrounded by a sea of parking and separated from its nearest neighbors -- the Knesset, the Bloomfield Science Museum and the Hebrew University -- by a forbidding network of multi-lane roads. This setting has obvious implications for the Israel Museum’s ability to function as a public/urban amenity. You can't catch an exciting new exhibition in the course of a downtown shopping trip; you can't stop at the Museum after a stressful day at the office to decompress while contemplating a favorite painting.  It's not situated at a comfortable walking distance from anyone's place of employment. Were it more conveniently located, even a harried parent might have a shot at the occasional lunchtime gallery talk. But the Museum’s location precludes any chance at spontaneity: it's like a grand personage whom one can see only by appointment. You have to plan in advance and make an effortif you want to go to the Israel Museum.

Of course, the renovation was not meant to address the Museum’s location. Nobody thought of moving it to a part of town where it might be part of an interesting mix of uses, or be easily reached by people pursuing their everyday activities. No one wants to acknowledge that putting a major cultural institution on an isolated hilltop was a dumb idea. One could argue that moving the Museum would be impracticable at this point; yet one can’t help lamenting the single-use mindset that keeps us from arranging things effectively. The prevailing view in these parts seems to be that major museums need to be segregated in a specific of town, as with the planned removal of Jerusalem’s Natural History Museum from its longtime home in the German Colony -- near the shopping and eatery hub of Emek Refaim -- to  Kiryat HaLe’om. We also seem to think that a national museum has to be located in a national “precinct,” in deference to the Washingtonian model (and in contrast to, for instance, the Parisian model). There are indeed hopes of transforming Kiryat HaLe’om into something more than it now is. Anything would be an improvement -- even the current plans for  a local equivalent of Washington D.C.'s National Mall will surely produce something friendlier and more attractive than what currently exists. But will this be enough to bring the Israel Museum into the "city" -- to turn it into a destination for short, spontaneous visits as well as extended, pre-planned ones? That seems unlikely.

The original, American, National Mall is not generally thought of as a successful urban space. A lively debate is still going on about how to improve it; at the same time, no one appears to think the area can be turned into an exemplar of Jane Jacobs-style mixed-used urbanism. The best that seems to be hoped for is that specific portions of the Mall will be fixed up to make them more hospitable. So how optimistic can one be regarding Jerusalem's Kiryat HaLe'om? About a year ago I shared my concerns about how removing all government offices from Jerusalem's "historic downtown" would affect that part of the city -- turning it into a tourist-oriented Disneyland whose traditional, human-scale architecture houses pubs and cafes but little else of substance. The flip side of that is Kiryat HaLe'om -- a government-institution and national-monument enclave whose hypertrophic buildings are separated by lots of what Nathan Lewis would call Green Space. The public request for proposals that was issued in 2010 for the transformation of Jerusalem's Kiryat HaLe'om into a "central place in the life of the city" appears, on the surface, to encompass and link quite a few disparate elements ("culture, sports, leisure and recreation, tourist attractions, and events of a ceremonial, official, social and political character"). But does this really amount to a healthy mix of uses? Where's the (affordable) housing? Where's the (affordable, non-elitist) shopping?

I'm no urban fortune-teller; my crystal ball doesn't give me an entirely clear view of how the Municipality's visions of a lively pedestrian-oriented urban boulevard on Derech Ruppin will play out with Kiryat HaLe'om's existing and future iconic, monumental structures. But the plan for a new Museum of Natural History building, to be situated near the Bloomfield Science Museum, gives us more than a hint. In a Haaretz article, architect Gabi Schwartz, one of the winners of the Museum's planning competition, essentially ridicules the Jerusalem Municipality's hopes for urban vibrancy in Kiryat HaLe'om, remarking that the area is altogether chaotic and that the buildings in the vicinity do not "relate" to each other: "We felt that the battle here had already pretty much been lost, and we decided it was more important to preserve the site's green character."Haaretz reporter Noam Dvir goes on to note that the proposed building "presents no meaningful frontage to the surrounding streets, but rather retreats inward and entrenches itself underground. The main entrance from the Museum Boulevard is relatively obscure and situated in the shadow of one of the galleries."

That so major a project could have been awarded to an architect who publicly mocks the Municipality's hopes for urbanizing the area, speaks volumes about the future of Kiryat HaLe’om. The aforementioned Haaretz article notes that the planning competition's second- and third-place winners made more of an effort to relate to the urban fabric, meaning that the anti-urban choice must have been a deliberate one. One can't help but see parallels with the Israel Museum: a renewal plan by James Ingo Freed that (whatever its drawbacks) apparently encompassed a number of pro-urban and pro-human features was proposed in the late 1990s, only to be rejected following an outcry by Israel's architecture community -- which felt that it "dishonored" Alfred Mansfeld's original sprawling, user-hostile design. The renewal plan that was ultimately adopted -- the work of Efrat-Kowaski Architects and James Carpenter Design Associates -- both accommodates/reinforces the Museum's non-urban setting at the macro level and, at the micro level, perpetuates and sanctifies the campus' interior disunities and inhumanenesses.


The Israel Museum renewal

The renovation does seem to have pleased nearly all those charged with reviewing it in the media (with the exception of Esther Zandberg who fearlessly declares the emperor to be naked). The New York Times liked it, the Jerusalem Post liked it, Haaretz liked it. It is noted with satisfaction in these and other venues that you can now get to the collection wings via a climate-controlled passageway rather than facing the elements above ground. But is this really a cause for celebration? What are we ultimately left with? I'll summarize (to some degree merely echoing Zandberg, though with some added observations):
  • There is a new “entrance compound” at the “front” of the Museum which does not welcome the visitor or signal to him in an orderly, unambiguous way that he has arrived at a major cultural venue; what one sees on one's approach are a couple of banal, boxy structures (resembling oversized utility cabinets) of unclear identity. The slightly larger box is the Museum shop or "retail pavilion", while the smaller one is the actual entrance pavilion, marked by a sign so unobtrusive that many visitors who arrive by bus surely turn toward the store before noticing their error. Visitors who arrive by car (presumably the vast majority) reach the store before they reach the entrance. Given the outcry provoked by the supposedly "mall-like" character of the earlier renewal plan's entrance area, it's hard to understand how so prominent a placement could have been accorded to the retail pavilion in the later plan. The Freed plan was also excoriated for the "grotesque," pseudo-Biblical character of its entrance pavilion, which apparently featured gilded cupolas and was dubbed "the Alter." Are the current entrance structures, which aimed for "modesty," preferable? I guess one person's utility closet is another's "modesty." Or is it?
  • The same old sun-baked surface parking lot is there -- hardly a beloved feature of the Museum in its pre-renewal state. Museum Director James Snyder found that it would be "not pleasant" to enter the Museum from an underground garage. I suppose he finds the above-ground parking lot pleasant.
  • The Museum proper is still linked to the entrance area by passageways that more compact and human-friendly design would have rendered unnecessary. Mansfeld's original tiered open-air path -- the Carter Promenade --  is as shadeless and unforgiving of human physical frailty as I remember it, while the below-grade "Route of Passage" is an over-long, under-activated, sterile space whose most engaging feature is the little green golf-cart that plies its way to and fro, awaiting people with certifiable mobility challenges to transport from one end of the passage to the next. Car dependency, anyone? There's not much on display in the passage, though it's hard to imagine this being due to a paucity of displayable items. I guess the stark greyness of the tunnel is meant to render the headache induced by Olafur Eliasson's psychadelic "rainbow" at the end of it all the more intense.
  • Weirder still is the claustrophobia-inducing corridor that runs parallel to the Route of Passage -- essentially, a partitioning of the available space. Much high-flown language has been devoted to James Carpenter's "reinterpretation" of "the sensuality of narrow alleys and sunken oases by creating a defined arrangement of spatial experiences animated by phenomenal light." Apparently this rather traumatizing little alleyway was created so that the Route of Passage could be "fed natural light through prismatic glass and waterfalls."
    If this space is an example of good design, I can hardly imagine what might be considered to be bad design. Since when do architects go out of their way to create spaces that are unutilizable by humans and/or frightening to them? 
  • Campus grounds that are exceptionally -- almost spitefully -- inhospitable . Here we reach the crux of the matter:


    Grounds for outrage: 

    I don't expect instant perfection or magic bullets. I'm willing to accept that the Israel Museum will remain an isolated, car-oriented compound for some time to come. What really bothers me -- what prompted this critical post -- is the failure of the Museum's $100 million renewal project to turn the actual grounds of the Museum "campus" into a site that would serve its users -- local residents, foreign tourists, regular and infrequent visitors, individuals and families -- in a humane and dignified way. If the surrounding area has little potential for mixed-use urbanism in the foreseeable future, the Museum campus itself could have been made to provide a greater mix of uses to its visitors.

    By "mix of uses" I don't mean that a full-fledged shopping center ought to have been erected at the site or, for that matter, a housing complex. On the other hand, a small convenience store where tourists who, say, run out of diapers for their babies might pick up an overpriced package of Huggies, wouldn’t be a bad idea. The unthinkability of adding such a minor amenity – one that would acknowledge the facility's geographic isolation and the human needs of its visitors – to the venerable Israel Museum campus, is itself a big problem. But what really bothers me is that the renovation did not try in any way to make a virtue of necessity -- to leverage the “campus” concept itself in the form of attractive, welcoming grounds where Museum visitors might relax, picnic, take breaks during their tour of the Museum, and generally enjoy a more leisurely experience of the place -- given the effort they have to make to get there and the lack of any other resources in the surrounding area.

    The renovation's deficiency in this regard  is most clearly exemplified by a near-total absence of shade -- whether in the form of trees or of man-made canopies -- on the campus' extensive grounds. The very word "campus" conjures up leafy images, but the term that might best describe the Israel Museum campus on a summer's day is "sun-scorched:"

    Shadeless path at the Israel Museum -- note the
    "ornamental" stunted-bonzai olive trees that line the path

    Well-hydrated "shrine"

    Seating without shade

    There is no excuse for this. The campus' various water features -- the dreary little pool at the entrance with the abstract sculpture inside it, looking like some kind of deconstructed Facebook symbol; the gurgling man-made stream that runs along the tiered open-air passageway between the Museum proper and the entrance area; the jets that continuously spray the Shrine of the Book and the "moat" surrounding the Shrine -- all of these things seem to mock the human visitor with their hints at coolness and refreshment. Perhaps the architectural statement made by the white dome of the Shrine and the contrasting black wall -- the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness imagery -- is thought to be enhanced by the glare; to this visitor, at least, the uncomfortable conditions in which one is meant to view the architecture are simply insulting. Children in particular are fascinated by the water jets and will stand gazing at them under the harsh sun for long periods until dragged away kicking and screaming.

    Why can't one view the truly impressive and fascinating scale model of Second-Temple era Jerusalem in comfort? Must the model be displayed in the open air? Surely some kind of transparent dome could be erected that would cover it in natural-light conditions? Even if the open-air display has some justification, I can't understand why those who come to see it must be exposed to the elements. There are a couple of small canopies, but they are at an awkward distance from the model (which is itself gated off with a kind of buffer area). In actuality, everyone comes right up to the barrier despite the lack of shade, because they want to see the details:



    Then there's the Museum's famed Billy Rose Art Garden. Like "campus," the word "garden" tends to elicit an expectation of greenery. But what is this "garden" but a series of sun-baked gravel expanses, like an almost-empty parking lot. Apparently there was a lot of space to fill up on the sprawling "campus" and not a lot of money for landscaping, so they made a kind of sensory desert punctuated by the occasional nature band-aid that -- as usual -- offers no shade:


    Basically, if there happens to be a shady spot you can't sit there because there's no bench and they've made sure to put some ground cover around the tree that would be uncomfortable for a person to rest upon:


    Whereas if there happens to be a bench, you can be sure there is no shade:

    Of course, one would hope that an "art" garden would have some actual art in it.

    Why, in short, could I not find, on my recent visit, a comfortable spot where my little daughter and I could eat the sandwiches we'd brought with us? It's hard not to feel offended by the sight of a museum restaurant's shaded outdoor dining area while one is engaged in a fruitless search for shelter. I personally witnessed a guard shooing away a visitor who, attempting to drink his mineral water in relative comfort, took refuge from the sun in a crevice of this apple core sculpture near one of the Museum's canopied eateries ...


    Not everyone can find what they need in a museum cafeteria; not everyone's kids will sit still at a restaurant table; it can be a great hardship to have to stand on a long line with young children in a cafeteria; people have health issues, money issues, kashrut issues, etc. -- you can't expect every museum visitor to patronize a museum restaurant. A compound as isolated and self-contained as the Israel Museum can and ought to provide shade and comfortable seating -- at no extra cost! -- to those who make the effort to get there.

    I can understand wanting visitors to patronize the Museum restaurants and souvenir shops; I can't understand the use of mall psychology to force them to do so. The feeling one gets is that the Museum management wants to herd you through the collections, the restaurants and the stores without letting you linger on the grounds -- just as in a shopping mall where there is nowhere to sit except in the food court! 

    Perhaps the sprawl mentality of the Museum's original planners has evolved into mall mentality, where every space must be exploited to serve a commercial purpose. That would seem to be a logical progression. Is it unfair to slap a "suburban sprawl developer" label on Alfred Mansfeld? The claim is that he was inspired by the traditional Arab village -- that his white Modernist cubes were meant to hug the hill like village dwellings and to offer inspiring views of the surrounding landscape. It all sounds very high-minded  -- a cultural institution planned, in Zandberg's words, "on the principle of organic growth in the spirit of structuralist and cybernetic linguistic theories, which penetrated the architecture of the 1950s and 1960s. It is considered internationally a unique architectural experiment." But all I see is sprawl -- what many think of today as a failed experiment. A cultural institution that in its original state required visitors -- including disabled and elderly visitors -- to "climb a steep path under a strong summer sun or during chilly winter weather to get to the exhibition halls," and whose modular structures evolved into an unnavigable maze: did we really need it? Should we still be venerating it? Was all the effort and money spent on retaining the original idea worth it?
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    Snout houses, mothers and others

    February 11, 2014, 12:47 am
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    A couple of weeks ago I attended a conference at the Jerusalem Municipality on sexual harassment in the public realm, within the framework of the Municipality's Committee on the Status of Women.The conference touched on broader issues of gender and urban planning, though in a brief, compressed way. Most of the conference attendees appeared to be young, single university students for whom sexual harassment might well be a burning issue. One woman -- who stood out from the crowd by being obviously married and a mother -- got up toward the end of the conference with her young infant strapped to her in a sling and complained about playground safety. Her comments were well-received in terms of applause, but the actual discussion was very rushed. 

    I wonder what kind of turnout a more general conference on women and planning would get in Jerusalem? It's certainly a topic that has received a fair amount of attention elsewhere in the world. Sexual harassment is, by nature, a "sexy" topic and it may be relatively easy to generate interest and activism around it. By contrast, topics such as "trip-chaining" and mixed-use development as a factor in "gender mainstreaming" might not be capable of mobilizing the female masses -- especially when those masses are too exhausted after putting their kids to bed to go to a conference. (The aforementioned gathering at the Municipality took place after my usual bedtime.) I've heard mothers in my neighborhood say they have too many children to ever consider giving up their cars, no matter what kind of bus service might be available to them. I know there are women who find everyday life in a car-oriented neighborhood very frustrating, but it never reaches the point of talking openly about the specific architectural features and planning policies that make their lives difficult.

    Subsequent to the conference, I threw together a primitive (really primitive) slideshow on my pet peeve -- the front-loading garage or "snout house" that creates a conspicuously hostile environment for women (and children) in their home neighborhoods (as opposed to the center-city environments that were the sexual harassment conference's focus). The text is in Hebrew but the images speak for themselves. To briefly summarize: streets lined with front-loading garages are streets where women who come home after dark by bus feel threatened as they walk from the bus stop to their apartment, due to the prevailing sense of isolation and lack of "eyes on the street; where children are forced to stop every few meters as they walk down the street to make sure no cars are barreling out of the building garages; where you can't see the sidewalk in front of your house from any of your windows because the garage is blocking it, and so can't keep an eye out for your kids, for the school bus, etc.; where the sense of what the public realm should be has become so degraded that empty, sterile walls start cropping up everywhere, even surrounding children's playgrounds and shopping strips. 

    Snout house ordinances have been passed in all sorts of cities and towns abroad -- most famously in Portland, Oregon. Recently the Canadian capital of Ottawa also decided to "take the emphasis off the garage and put it on the house." Let's hope that the capital of Israel one day follows suit.




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    The Next Generation

    March 11, 2014, 3:08 pm
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    I've put up a post on the Times of Israel about a topic that is unrelated to this blog. It discusses the inappropriate way (at least, as I perceive it) in which the epidural is being marketed as the default option for obstetric analgesia at Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek Medical Center. 

    The post is primarily a reaction to an article in a promotional brochure that came with one of the Friday papers, in honor of the dedication of Shaare Zedek's new "Next Generation" building.

    Another article in the brochure talks about the building itself, how it was financed, the facilities contained within it. The facilities and services themselves are all very impressive (when they're not pushing the epidural ...). According to the article, the building was planned to incorporate numerous "green" elements:


    "We are very sensitive to environmental issues. Shaare Zedek is situated in an urban environment and it was important to us to be well integrated within it [...] Wherever possible we chose green construction."

    Here is a photo of the SZMC complex in Jerusalem's Bayit VeGan neighborhood,  with the new Next Generation building on the right. I scanned this image from the back cover of the promotional brochure -- the hospital's marketers seem to think it's impressive:




    I guess, for them, this constitutes being embedded in an urban context.

    By way of comparison, here's the "old-generation" Shaare Zedek building on Jaffa Road:


    courtesy of Wikimedia Commons -- I, Sir Kiss


    And just for fun -- here are links to a couple of paintings of the old Shaare Zedek building, by the well-known Jerusalem painter Rivkah Goldberg. The paintings were executed in 1995, during a period when the building was unoccupied (before it became the Israel Broadcasting Authority's headquarters). A front view is here; a back view is here. Sad that even the back view of an old abandoned hospital building, overrun with weeds and rickety old furniture, is more compelling than the front view of its brand-new, state-of-the-art, and "green" successor.

    Rifkah Goldberg is my idea of an urban painter. New Urbanists talk about the "outdoor room" -- Goldberg paints it. Often quite literally, with furniture. Check out especially the Jerusalem Chairs and the Jerusalem Neighborhoods and Yards section of her site.
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    Taking responsibility for Holyland

    May 13, 2014, 1:07 pm
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    I argue at the Times of Israel that we all need to take responsibility:

    http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-other-holyland-story/ -- featured op-ed 
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    Summertime, libraries, Brooklyn, Jerusalem

    August 25, 2011, 4:21 am
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    It's mid-August. The kids' summer camps have long since ended. Every day is an exercise in parental ingenuity: how to keep the children occupied in a positive way. How to keep eyes off screens, grubby little fingers off keyboards.

    Outdoor excursions are important in summer, at least to our family. But reading is also an activity that -- in the mind of yours truly, a former librarian -- is strongly associated with summer vacations. August, as I remember it from childhood, is public-library prime-time.

    Granted, the Brooklyn of my formative years was a public-library-goer's utopia. Perhaps I was spoiled -- though I do recall a certain famous NYC fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s ("Ford to City: Drop D--d") in which public library hours were curtailed. But that didn't leave much of an impression.

    Israel has never developed the kind of public-library culture that exists in the US. The municipal library systems here vary greatly in caliber from locality to locality, and there are no professional organizations with sufficient clout to set and enforce standards. I'm not sure why the Israeli public-library sphere has evolved so little over the years. Books certainly are expensive here -- like everything else; how Israelis have managed to obtain reading material all these decades in the absence of quality public libraries, I cannot imagine. (But then I have trouble understanding how they can afford expensive new cars, trips abroad, etc., on their Israeli salaries.)

    It's worth pointing out that a neighborhood branch of a municipal public library system doesn't have to be anything grandiose. Some of my fondest Brooklyn-childhood memories are of a modest storefront library that was located around the corner from our home on East 58 St. I was sorry when it later moved a few blocks away to a new, larger building at a busy commercial intersection. The storefront library had perfectly complemented the sleepy little strip of shops around the corner from us on Ave. T: the old-style luncheonette with the swivel stools; the cool, dim grocery with its fascinating stacks of canned goods -- themselves like bookshelves in a way; the perfumey drugstore with its aisles of greeting-cards; the Chinese laundry with the honest-to-goodness Chinese family living in its back room.

    The little library nestled among these stores might not have served the adults of the neighborhood very well, but from a child's perspective, it was "right-sized."

    Nostalgia aside, it is worth noting that, even before a proper, dedicated library building was built to serve this part of southeast Brooklyn, the municipal library system recognized the need to provide services to the local taxpaying population. In the absence of a building, the municipality rented a store and set up a library in it, with regular opening hours. Not too difficult, right?

    The Jerusalem municipality was capable, in the past, of coming up with solutions of this kind, in order to serve residents in newer neighborhoods where library buildings had yet to be built. If I'm not mistaken, both central and eastern Pisgat Ze'ev had public library branches operating on the premises of local schools, within a reasonable time frame after these areas became populated. Nothing fancy, for sure. But serviceable. Normal, convenient opening hours. Someplace to take your kids for an hour or two on a hot summer afternoon. Someplace to read a magazine, get some books.

    Something happened during the Lupolianski mayoral administration. Suddenly, it became okay to disenfranchise taxpaying Jerusalemites -- to penalize them for deciding to live in the city's newer neighborhoods. Suddenly, the lack of a library building became a good excuse for simply neglecting to provide library services. Send the bookmobile in there 2-3 times a week for an hour. That'll do.

    Below is the site where a public library is slated for construction, in the neighborhood of Jerusalem where I live -- Har Homa:



    Plans for this site also include kindergarten buildings and a small synagogue (the neighborhood is in a perpetual state of crisis regarding both kindergarten and shul space).

    The photo above was taken about half a year ago. The work has not advanced appreciably since then.

    In lieu of a real library, our neighborhood's children have been served for nearly a decade now by this rather forbidding specimen of a mobile library:



    For years I and my family snubbed the bookmobile. I had a "Mom-mobile" at my disposal and Baka wasn't too far away; we could get there on a weekly basis in summer, and perhaps once every six weeks during the school year. Not ideal -- certainly not walkable -- but it seemed pleasanter and more civilized to patronize a real (albeit modest) library every few weeks than to climb into that unventilated and unappealing little truck -- like a furnace in summer, and (so my kids claimed) reeking of cigarette smoke.

    Then, a couple of summers ago, the arrival of a new baby made the trip to the Baka library less practicable. I went through the mobile library's irritating subscription process (writing out half a dozen deposit checks for a hundred shekels each, so my 3 older kids could each take out two books at a time). Of course I hardly expected the Jerusalem mobile library's circulation system to be integrated with that of the city's public library system as a whole -- seeing that the neighborhood branches themselves are not integrated as a Westerner would expect them to be: instead of having a library card that serves you at all municipal branches, you have to take out a subscription at each and every branch that you want to patronize, going through the annoying deposit-check process every single time.

    So we subscribed, my kids used the mobile library a few times that summer ... then stopped once school started up again.

    The mobile library comes to Har Homa only 3 times a week, for an hour or, at best, an hour and a half at a time -- somewhere between 3:30 and 5:30 pm. What this means is that a child who goes to school outside of the neighborhood (a large proportion of Har Homa's children fall into that category) and comes home at around 4:00 pm, has little chance of making it to the mobile library, after unpacking his/her day for Ima and grabbing a bite to eat. What is more, many organized after-school activities, such as martial arts or music lessons, conflict with these miserly mobile-library hours.

    As things worked out, my kids were unable to make use of the Jerusalem mobile library during its operating hours in Har Homa.

    What is needed, clearly, is a local library that offers services during the normal range of hours for a Jerusalem branch -- from 2:00 pm to 7:00 pm, 4 or 5 afternoons a week. Whether that library is operated out of a storefront rented by the municipality, or in a caravan planted in one of the schoolyards -- that's for the iriya to decide.

    Har Homa, for those not aware of the local demographic situation, is overwhelmingly a neighborhood of families with young children. Basically, an entire generation of children has been growing up here without library services worthy of the name. Nine years is an awfully long time for the "new neighborhood" excuse to be employed. And library service is hardly the only sphere in which that excuse is being employed.

    Not that things are altogether rosy in Baka. To get to my summer 2011 library saga: I decided to try the mobile library again this year. Not out of any enthusiasm, but because I found out that the Baka library would be closing for two whole weeks during August.

    Based on previous years' experience I had been expecting the library to close for one week, when the community center that houses it shuts down for "concentrated" staff vacations. One August day a few years ago I arrived in Baka with my kids expecting to pass a couple of pleasant hours in the library, only to find, along with other families that had come for the same purpose, that the library was closed for the week -- nobody had bothered to post notices beforehand. When I inquired afterward why the library had shut down for a week during the month when it was probably most needed, the librarian told me that it is unsafe to keep the library open while the community center itself is closed.

    That, unfortunately, sounds like a typical Jerusalem Municipality solution -- rather than getting a security guard to stand at the entrance to the community center so the library can stay open during peak season, they just cancel services for the duration (ditto for several other Jerusalem public libraries housed within community centers).

    A public library branch, even a small and poorly-equipped one, represents a considerable investment of public resources. Isn't it a horrible waste of resources for a library to shut down for even one week -- let alone two -- during the summer vacation?

    In despair, I decided to try again with the mobile library. However, I had misplaced the sheet I once had detailing the bookmobile hours. I spent quite a while online trying to find the information, ultimately reaching this page which lists bookmobile hours for other neighborhoods, but makes no mention of Har Homa. The mobile library does not appear on the list of Jerusalem public libraries provided at the municipality website.

    Okay, I could just have picked up the phone to the main branch at Beit Ha'Am and asked. But as it happened, the bookmobile was there one afternoon while I and a couple of my kids were walking down the street. So we climbed on in. My kids chose a few books for themselves; but when we tried to check them out, the librarian was unable to locate any record of our subscription. It's all hard-copy, you see. The index card had been lost.

    I didn't have any checks on me and couldn't re-subscribe. So we left the books behind and went home. A few days later, we subscribed at the Gilo library branch (which has its own building, so it doesn't close during August). I hadn't thought of it as an option before, as I had understood the English children's book collection there to be quite minimal compared with Baka's and it's important to me that my kids read in both of their languages ... but in the end it was fine. My oldest found a Hardy Boys book that he had never read before, the staff displayed a heroic degree of understanding when my toddler threw a tantrum over a sippy cup that didn't belong to her, and we were able to combine the library visit with a trip to the Gilo pool next door. My only gripe: having to haul a stroller up a flight of stairs to get to the library, which was built in the days before anyone thought of access. A person who gets around in a wheelchair could not make use of the facility (and I gather that this is the case at other Jerusalem branches as well).
    ↧

    Jerusalem Playground Reviews -- Agenda and Parameters

    November 4, 2011, 10:46 pm
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    Agenda
    Two main objectives motivate my effort to review Jerusalem playgrounds:

    1) To provide parents and others with information about parks and playgrounds in Jerusalem -- information that might be hard to come by in the course of their day-to-day activities.

    * With regard to local residents, the idea is to offer a glimpse of play areas throughout the city. People naturally tend to stick with what they know, with what is closest to home. But sometimes the answer to a need lies a bit farther afield. And sometimes a perfectly worthwhile solution is closer to home than one might think.

    * With regard to tourists, I thought it might be a good idea to offer information about more "heimish" or local-color playgrounds -- places that can be used as bases for exploring different neighborhoods on foot.

    2) Grandiose as it might seem, I hope to exert an influence on those involved in planning Jerusalem parks and playgrounds. Probably the main reason that I have come to explore playgrounds outside of my home neighborhood over last dozen years or so is the erosion (as I see it) of traditional standards of playground design. A failure to provide for shade (not just in immediate terms, but in the long term as well); a lack of concern for how parks/playgrounds interact with the neighborhood as a whole (isolated locations, distance from shopping, services, etc.); a disregard of visibility issues (e.g., hiding play areas behind high walls); an inappropriate separation of shrubbery and trees from playground users ... these and other issues have frustrated me over the years as I have transported my children to play areas around Jerusalem in search of shade, contact with nature, and stimulating encounters with urban life.

    Review Parameters

    Parameters include:

    Location (street and neighborhood)
    Shade -- IMHO, the single most important factor in determining a playground's usability during daytime hours, and one that the Jerusalem Municipality has consistently ignored in the design of its newer playgrounds.
    Play equipment -- In general, Jerusalem playgrounds are rather poorly equipped by Western standards. There is little creativity and much repetitiveness. In my home neighborhood, playgrounds within a block or two of each other have virtually the same slide/tunnel structures, spring toys, etc. Even the playgrounds which I have reviewed most enthusiastically are not those with the fanciest equipment -- but I'm not sure that's such a terrible thing. One point that I try to underscore throughout these reviews is the importance of a playground's location, overall layout, multiple-use status, and interaction with the surrounding environment. Children don't need the most expensive toys available on the market -- they need environments that are stimulating.
    Age suitability
    Snack factor -- Although I, like many other mothers, try to bring healthy snacks or even meals (depending on the time of day) along on park outings, there are certain summer mainstays, such as ice creams and ices, that are often inconvenient to pack and schlep. Sometimes you forget stuff. Sometimes you just want to fly out the door and not pack anything. A small grocery or kiosk near the park can be a lifesaver. It can also bring more human traffic to the park, and make it a more sociable place.
    Schmooze factor -- Both children and their adult escorts benefit from human interaction. Sometimes it can be pleasant to have a park/playground to yourself, but usually you want to see people.
    Multiple uses within the park -- A playground with just one item of play equipment, or a number of items that are suited to a specific age range, will obviously be of limited use. Likewise, a space that contains some play equipment but offers no access to nature and no areas to explore, will not be too attractive to children or adults. Multiple uses give parks the ability to be different things to different users, or different things to the same user on different occasions.
    Beyond the park -- Items of interest to parents and children that are within an easy walking distance from the park. Parks and playgrounds that are isolated from commercial and other land uses are less valuable than they might otherwise be -- however fancy the equipment in them.
    ↧

    Gan Gidon (Gideon Park), Baka -- Jerusalem Playground Review #3

    November 6, 2011, 12:25 pm
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    Location: Efraim and Gidon (Gideon) Streets, Baka.

    Parking: It is still reasonably easy to find on-street parking along Efraim, Gidon and other nearby streets. The shady spots lining the park itself, which until a year or two ago were snaggable at all hours, now tend to be taken up by 8-8:15 am.


    Shade: This park is pretty shady, which is one of the reasons I use it regularly. Although not all of the play equipment is in shade at all times, much of it is shaded at any given time. Notably, the swings are in shade during the early afternoon hours -- a problematic time slot for Jerusalem playground-goers who don't want the sun beating down on their heads.


    I have taken children here at the unthinkable hour of 1:00 pm on a summer's day, just to use the swings ... And although the slide/climbing structure is in full sun for much of the day, it actually provides shade for the sand pit in which it stands (along with some surrounding trees). The open green space is shaded to some degree at any given hour.

    Even the Mom-Mobile (can you guess which one it is?) enjoys the shade.


    Playground equipment and features:

    -- Large climbing structurewith sections suitable for both toddlers/preschoolers:



    and older children:



    -- Swings (one toddler swing and one older-child swing). The swings are in shade from the late morning into the afternoon.

    -- Sandbox. Sandboxes are a dying breed in Jerusalem; you find them only in older playgrounds -- and when such playgrounds are renovated, the sandboxes are generally removed. I guess it's a labor-intensive affair to keep them free of animal droppings, though some appear to stay cleaner than others. The Gan Gidon sandbox unfortunately tends to be dirty and smelly; on one recent Friday morning I simply had to keep my daughter out of it due to its kitty-litter ambience. Usually, though, the situation is tolerable, and in my experience the sandbox in this park is extensively used.

    Sandboxes in general are not for the fainthearted mom; even when they look clean I always suspect the worst -- but I steel myself and let my kids play in them because I feel that they provide a valuable kind of sensory stimulation that other playground features/equipment don't offer. They certainly keep my little one occupied for relatively long periods of time.

    I just call in the biohazard squad to decontaminate her afterwards.


    -- Seesaw
    -- Merry-go-round-- Spring toy-- Basketball and soccer court


    -- Open green space (smallish), with large rocks for climbing.



    -- Picnic tables



    -- The shady, tree- and shrubbery-bordered length of sidewalk along the Efraim St. side of the park is really part of the park itself, and is a good area for bicycling/scootering/bimba-ing.



    Age range: toddler/preschool, school-age

    Snack factor: A kiosk at the park entrance on Efraim St. sells the usual ice creams/ices, salty snacks, and drinks. The kiosk recently changed hands and now calls itself "Efraim Bar." Previously it was called "Yummy BaPark"(יאמי בפארק) -- a name that never failed to raise a smile on my lips. Beyond this, myriad eateries, groceries/minimarkets and greengrocers are available a block or two away on either Derech Beit Lechem (Bethlehem Rd.) or Emek Refaim St.

    The back of the kiosk has been "decorated." While I accept that graffiti can be an authentic mode of artistic expression, I'm not too fond of the pink, green and black color scheme here...



    Schmooze factor: Gan Gidon attracts a particularly varied population of veteran Israelis, immigrants, short- and long-term visitors. On fine mornings I often see metaplot (family-based childcare providers) wheeling their young charges into the park in kibbutz-style wagons. I have also struck up conversations with the elegant, slender wives of American journalists stationed in Jerusalem, fresh from their cosmopolitan morning swims at the Y, slumming it with their lone toddlers in the less-than-hygienic sand pit. There are lots of French-speaking immigrants in Baka these days, so you hear that language along with the occasional Russian and ubiquitous English (Hebrew too, sometimes). Altogether Gan Gidon is a sociable little park, situated halfway between two fashionable thoroughfares; a true "third place."

    Multiple uses within the park: This compact park/playground manages, within its narrow confines, to encompass quite a few different uses that complement each other and enhance the site's value as a family-oriented public space.
    -- Play equipment suited to both young and older children
    -- A sand pit that constitutes a separate attraction, distinct from the play equipment
    -- A basketball and soccer court
    -- A lawn that is reasonably shady even in mid-afternoon
    -- Picnic tables
    -- Shrubbery areas suitable for young children to explore and muck around in
    -- Adjacent kiosk (with seating) that fuels additional human interaction.

    Bottom line: You can occupy kids here for decent amounts of time, because there are several distinct play areas/activity options. If only the sandbox were cleaner!

    Beyond the park: a walk along Gidon (Gideon) St., Baka

    Gidon St. provides the urbanista mom with a conveniently direct route between the two chic commercial hubs of Derech Beit Lechem (Bethlehem Rd.) and Emek Refaim St. But Gidon St. is more than just a connecting line. If you take Gan Gidon (Gideon Park) as your starting point, a walk along Gidon St. in either direction offers a kind of classic urban Jerusalem experience, in the form of residential architecture and landscaping that run the gamut in terms of style, period, and socioeconomic context.

    The intersection of Gidon and Efraim features an attractive seating area:



    Children like to walk around the stone benches surrounding these old olive trees, and (depending on age) to climb the trees themselves.



    The lovely flower garden adjacent to the seating area perpetuates the memory of Eli Altretz [sp.?], a painter and sculptor who was murdered by an Arab terrorist in 1990.



    Turning eastward up Gidon in the direction of Derech Beit Lechem, one finds interesting old houses ...



    ... newer residential buildings, and hybrids of the two:



    I'm no expert on Jerusalem architecture (that's an education I hope to acquire when I no longer find myself spending large chunks of time in playgrounds), but when I look at the building pictured above I think, Middle East on the bottom, Bauhaus on top.

    Another building that incorporates the old into the new:



    Too bad the arched windows in the photo below (the same old-new hybrid building as the one pictured above) are mostly hidden by a high, forbidding wall.



    Here, one new project offers the passerby a garage-scape to look at ...



    ... while on the opposite side of the street you can glimpse a beautiful garden through a chain-link fence:



    As you approach Derech Beit Lechem, Gidon Street becomes closed to vehicular traffic and narrows to a footpath:



    New but tasteful:



    The trendiness that is Derech Beit Lechem:





    Corner of Derech Beit Lechem and Esther HaMalka St. (one block down from the Derech Beit Lechem-Gidon St. intersection). The yellow awning (if I remember correctly) belongs to Siman Kriah (a.k.a. "Bookmark"), a store that sells used English-language books:



    Returning to the Gidon-Efraim intersection:

    A sign exhorts us, in one official and one non-official language, to care for Jerusalem's appearance:



    Yet just across the intersection, one finds legalized street spam (a.k.a. litter on a stick), courtesy of the Jerusalem Municipality:



    The section of Gidon St. that extends from the Efraim St. intersection to Derech HaRakevet is a study in contrasts.

    The even-numbered side of the street is the more upscale side, featuring attractive and well-maintained stone buildings. The odd-numbered side consists of shikun buildings (Israeli mass housing of the 1950s and 1960s). Some of the buildings have been refurbished, while others retain their old-style facing:



    The location being what it is, even these less upscale buildings have their signs of gentrification, such as sleek and shiny designer doors to individual apartments -- which contrast starkly with internal courtyards that have yet to be gentrified:



    The end of Gidon St. is picturesque:





    From here you enter Derech HaRakevet, where a new park, featuring attractive greenery, walkways, bicycle and running paths, has tastefully incorporated the old Jerusalem railroad track ...



    ... proving that the Jerusalem Municipality can plan something right when it wants to. Park HaMesila is a pleasant urban space to cross on the way from Baka to Emek Refaim, and an equally pleasant destination in and of itself, for humans and their canine friends alike.



    The new trees have some growing to do before they can give any real shade. During chol hamoed Sukkot, DH and I stood/sat mainly in the sun for half an hour while our three school-aged boys cycled happily up and down Derech HaRakevet:



    The building with the arched windows in the background was hidden from view until recently, when the area around it was cleared for a new parking lot. From an urbanist point of view, perhaps this is a net gain.

    The vibrant commercial hub of Emek Refaim is just a block down.
    ↧

    Centers

    December 6, 2011, 4:54 am
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    A rather close family member of mine works for the Jerusalem light rail, and the light rail project is, naturally, a recurring topic of conversation in our household. Based on this, one might assume that I was an "early adopter" of that shiny and elegant new mode of local transit.

    But I wasn't. Unfortunately, the light rail in its current configuration doesn't happen to come my way.

    My three older children have been on the trains. As part of a staff event to which family members were invited, they actually got to ride along a stretch of the route about a year ago, many months before the light rail became operational. They even have cute tee-shirts to prove it.
    I was probably home with a sick toddler. I don't really remember. Do I feel deprived? Not especially. That is, I'd be perfectly happy to go for a spin on those sleek and silent new trains -- just as I'd be happy to pamper myself for a day at a spa. But "going for a spin on the trains" would mean, for me, traveling downtown just for that purpose, and in my everyday life there's no realistic occasion for a trip downtown. A trip downtown would have to be prompted by more practical considerations than a desire to experience the light rail -- and the "revitalized" city center -- in all their glory.

    Where downtown Jerusalem is concerned, I guess you could say I'm a bit detached.

    On an abstract level, I can certainly understand all of the attention that is being lavished these days on the city center. The area was depressed for quite a while, and it's gratifying to see something happening there.

    What I find disorienting, though, is the chicness and sleekness of it all. It doesn't seem like part of my world.

    Skyscraper complexes encompassing office and commercial space, luxury penthouses for the wealthy and ground-level plazas for the masses are being approved for downtown Jerusalem by the Municipality. The Binyanei HaUma/city entrance area is slated to become Jerusalem's answer to Paris' La Défense business district (a comparison that deserves its own blog post, and then some). Suddenly nobody is satisfied with poor old downtown Jerusalem and its "country-bumpkin" atmosphere; everybody wants to see it transformed and modernized.

    Suddenly the words "density" and "mixed development" are on everyone's lips.

    I guess as a New Urbanist wannabe, I should be thrilled that downtown Jerusalem is being densified and reinvigorated. And I suppose I am -- but at a distance.

    From my vantage point in southern Jerusalem -- the vantage point of someone whose everyday activities revolve around the needs of children elementary school aged and younger -- "downtown" is the Talpiot Industrial Area. In the time it would take me just to travel to the city center, I can pop over to Talpiot, run my errands, and be home in time for whatever I need to be home in time for.

    Central Jerusalem is a place I never get to. Talpiot is my city center.

    A city can have more than one center. It's allowed. Very likely, the fact that a city can support more than one center is a sign of its vitality.

    Yair Assaf-Shapira, an architect and urban planner who blogs (in Hebrew) at planning Jerusalem , wrote a while back that the Jerusalem Municipality's "exceptional" approvals of commercial activity in the city's "periphery" or "margins" (i.e., Talpiot) pose a threat to business downtown. He has similar things to say about the Pisgat Ze'ev mall.

    Assaf-Shapira's position appears to reflect current received wisdom in the Municipality, namely, that "priority should be given to the city center over the secondary centers that developed over the years and attracted commercial activity from the CBD ["central business district"], thereby contributing to its deterioration [...] Developing high-tech [תעשייה מתקדמת] should be preferred in [Talpiot] to developing commercial activity that harms the city center."

    With all due respect to the local planning community and its concern for downtown Jerusalem (a concern driven by an awkward mix of hipster urbanism and old-time lefty nostalgia for the pre-1967 era, when Jerusalem's pesky peripheral neighborhoods had yet to be built), I have to think that this interventionist approach is incredibly wrong-headed. Restricting commercial uses in areas that serve the city's far-flung suburbs, and forcing people to travel way out of their way to the city center ... not cool. Why on earth shouldn't residents of Pisgat Ze'ev and Neve Yaakov in northern Jerusalem, or of Gilo, Har Homa, and Armon HaNatziv in southern Jerusalem, have good commercial facilities closer to home than Jaffa Road? What's preferable -- that people spend an hour in public transit, possibly switching buses and trains several times (with strollers and children in tow), to get to shopping facilities in the city center, or that they walk (or ride public transit for just 2 or 3 stops, or drive for 2.5 minutes) to local shopping?

    I think Jerusalem's planning cadre has become too "center-centric" in its urban thinking. The idea that the city needs only one center, and that that center should be lavishly developed while peripheral commercial areas are neglected and/or subjected to restrictions on the kinds of commercial activity that can be conducted within them, reflects ignorance of how working Jerusalemites -- middle-class families based in neighborhoods that aren't terribly close to Jaffa Road -- really live.

    On the other hand, I have to say I'm glad that my little south-Jerusalem commercial hub in Talpiot hasn't been declared a "priority" area, which would doubtless smooth its rough edges and harm its funky character. Although the Jerusalem Development Authority website does mention some kind of plan to "redesign" the TIA -- to downplay its light-industry component and introduce elements of "accessible housing" [מגורים זמינים] and "employment" (i.e., office buildings for high-tech), this doesn't strike me as the same kind of large-scale sanitization and elite-ization effort that is underway downtown. And for this I am grateful. Everything I like about the Talpiot Industrial Area reflects the fact that planners have pretty much left the place alone.

    When I think about Talpiot, the term loveably chaotic spontaneously pops into my head. Actually, the word spontaneous also pops into my head when I think about Talpiot. Other words and expressions that, for me, are associated with this part of town include: anarchic, hodge-podge, chock-a-block, haphazard, tumultuous, heterogeneous ... you get the point.

    I love it that nobody thinks the Talpiot Industrial Area needs a glamorous new transit solution entailing a decade of road work (shudder), or that skyscrapers should be built there to increase its "density" (already dense enough, thank you), or that the area needs to become a "magnet for high-tech" (yawn).

    I love it that you can do the following in Talpiot: purchase high-end housewares and low-end footwear; get your car fixed; bowl; do one-stop back-to-school shopping at a bargain outlet; sip a cappuchino at a cafe table; triumphantly snag a free parking spot after circling around weird little service roads for half an hour; "sneak" around the back of a building to get to a factory outlet for ladies' hats and grab some gourmet peasant bread while you're at it; pile a shopping cart with several weeks' worth of groceries; go to a shiur; check out tile and fixture samples for your latest home renovation project; get a driver's license; get married.

    Where else but the Talpiot Industrial area can you enjoy fine pastries at an outdoor cafe table, situated on a gritty industrial walkway overlooking factories and auto repair shops? HaLechem shel Tomer:



    I often think that Jane Jacobs would have approved of the Talpiot Industrial Area -- not necessarily its lack of a residential element, but certainly its vitality and the spontaneity and naturalness with which the area developed its diverse mix of commercial uses. By contrast, I don't think she would too impressed by the grandiose plans currently in place for Jerusalem's entrance area. She liked development from the bottom up, not top-down "strategic planning."

    TLC for the TIA

    All this being said, there are areas where Talpiot could stand a little tender loving care. Not overbearing strategy, but some minor tweaking -- preferably driven by those who use the area -- merchants and shoppers.

    Here's my wish list:

    -- A little bit of regulation to ensure appropriate pedestrian access to shopping areas. Talpiot is home to two malls (Hadar and Achim Yisrael) that are pedestrian-friendly, meaning that they have regular street-front entrances -- and to two other malls (Rav Chen and Lev Talpiot) that are entirely pedestrian-hostile (you basically take your life into your hands trying to get into them on foot). There ought to be municipal ordinances regulating this issue.

    -- Get some kind of substantial green public space in there. We're talking about a major commercial hub -- surely the level of human traffic in the area justifies the creation of a modest park. There's currently nowhere in the TAI where you can take a break from shopping to just sit and get some fresh air, or bring your kids to decompress between errands. What's more, there is no existing venue that can accomodate the kind of public events (e.g.,concerts, speeches, fairs) that one would normally expect to find in a bustling urban commercial district.

    There are still some parcels in the TIA that are undeveloped/in development, and which the Municipality apparently has earmarked for "higher-tech" industries [תעשיות מתקדמות יותר] than those currently served by the area (though, thankfully, not in an aggressively "strategic" way). IMHO, anyone who wants to build an office tower in the TIA should be required to incorporate some kind of open green space into the plans -- a small park, or a plaza with a funky fountain. It's by no means far-fetched to expect Talpiot-area developers to provide the public with some amenities. That's what's happening, after all, with the upscale high-rise projects under development in downtown Jerusalem.

    -- Relatedly: There are a few strips of neglected green/shady space along Pierre Koenig -- between the Hatenufa and Tzeret intersections (i.e., between the old Triumph building and the Carmel/Beitili building), and across from the Hadar Mall:



    These strips could, perhaps, be upgraded into small promenades or pocket parks    . Why not make something of the little bit of nature that already exists in the TIA? Instead of allowing people to jam their cars between the trees along the Hatenufa-Tzeret strip ...



    ... why not fence the strip off from the adjacent parking lot and cultivate it a bit, install a bench or two and a couple of small animal-shaped climbing structures? These green strips always look to me like wasted opportunities.

    -- Put some sane limits on outdoor advertising in the area:



    The intersection of Pierre Koenig-Poalei Tzedek does not have to be a billboard-fest. Hasn't it occurred to anyone that drivers rounding the traffic circle there don't need any more visual distractions than they already have?



    Also, what's with those tall advertising "stalks" lining the street in front of the Hadar Mall? When the mall first went up a decade or so ago I thought they were temporary installations meant to inform the public about what stores they could find inside. Nobody needs them now -- we all know what's in there. They create a tacky, carnival-like atmosphere along the street:



    Replace the advertising stalks and those stunted potted trees with some shrubbery and some real trees that give shade! The building set-back is pretty large; one would expect more greenery in front of it. Sounds like a good formula to me -- replace billboards with trees!

    The items on my wish-list are point-specific things that, I think, could be accomplished without turning the Talpiot Industrial Area into a "strategic project," or doing away with the grit, grunge and spontaneity that make the place loveable and fun to spend time in. All that's needed is recognition on the Municipality's part that the area is a legitimate urban commercial center, one that attracts a large and diverse local population, and is therefore entitled to appropriate municipal services.
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    Pini's Room

    January 4, 2012, 1:40 am
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    The Jerusalem Biblical Zoo is an obvious destination for Israeli families during school vacations, even for those who live outside Jerusalem; for Jerusalemites, all the more so. We're lucky to live just a few minutes' drive from the Zoo, and we spend a lot of time there throughout the year; our family subscription, pricey though it is, is one of our more worthwhile annual expenditures. When we enter the Zoo gates it's like walking into an extension of our backyard -- albeit a better-tended extension.

    Yet however often we go there, we seem to discover the Zoo afresh every single time -- sort of like finding something new each year in the same Torah portions we read last year ... This Hanukkah we got to see a little corner of the Zoo that we had never had an opportunity to visit before -- one that isn't on most people's Zoo itinerary. In fact it doesn't have regular opening hours; getting into it is kind of hit or miss, unless you happen to speak in advance with the individual who's in charge of it, and for whom it was named.

    The place I'm referring to is Pini's Room -- Cheder Pini -- "Pini" being Pinchas Amitai, the well-known zoologist, expert on all things that crawl, swarm or buzz, and prolific author of books with titles like Scorpions! and Life Beneath the Rocks.

    Prof. Amitai (I guess I'm too American to feel comfortable with Pini or Pinye, as he is widely known) has produced numerous works on Israeli wildlife, including a youth-oriented guide to the local insect world that makes a great Hanukkah or birthday present for the child so inclined. But in Jerusalem he is more than just a famous author; he is a colorful figure on the city scene, legendary for his hospitality toward the many children who come knocking on the door of his Bayit VeGan home in quest of "walking sticks." (For a cute Haaretz profile of the Professor and his walking sticks, click here). Prof. Amitai not only supplies his young callers with the spindly creatures, but also provides detailed explanations about how to care for these and other animals. Endlessly patient and eager to transmit his love of the natural world to children, he treats his visitors to tours of his home and garden, introducing them to the exotic creatures that populate the myriad jars, boxes and aquariums scattered throughout.

    My boys have visited Prof. Amitai once at his home -- a memorable occasion and one which they are clamoring to repeat. (DS#1 blogged about it here -- in Hebrew.) But somehow it never seems to work out on those hectic weekday afternoons. A visit to Cheder Pini at the Zoo during Hanukkah seemed like a good interim compromise -- we were going to the Zoo anyway and I could occupy the toddler in the adjacent play area. A phone call to the Professor confirmed that he would be there sometime during the course of Friday morning ... so off we went.

    Cheder Pini, located near the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo's petting zoo and playground, is really a microcosm of Prof. Amitai's home collection. It was donated by him and he maintains it himself, often picking leaves of various kinds to feed the room's many little occupants as he walks from his home to the Zoo -- a very long walk.

    As I noted above, Cheder Pini is open only intermittently, that is, when Prof. Amitai happens to be there. However, while he is there he is a most attentive host. On this particular occasion my boys spotted him, unassumingly attired in his "Zoo Volunteer" shirt, as he entered the playground area on his way to the Room (we had been waiting for him for a while). We followed him in after he unlocked the door, and he made sure that we left the door open so that others could come in as well, which they did.

    As my two year old wasn't too keen on hanging out in a not-large room full of cages and aquariums that were too high for her to comfortably peer into, I only stayed in the room long enough to snap a few photos (the boys remained for quite a while afterward). Unfortunately our "real" camera recently died, leaving me with only a phone camera for the time being. The limitations of that latter device, coupled with the difficulty of managing the little one, made for some pretty awful pictures. I'm posting below a few of the more presentable ones:

    The Professor and his avid students:


    Well-camouflaged grasshoppers:

    DS#1 with some choice walking-stick specimens (which he got to take home):


    A poisonous centipede:


    The fearless Professor picking up the poisonous centipede:


    Every mother's dream:


    A sampling of Prof. Amitai's books on display:

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    Density without walkability in Jerusalem -- a problem of the past, or an ongoing one?

    January 17, 2012, 10:53 pm
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     Unholyland, via Wikipedia (Adiel Lo)
     Michael Lewyn, an American law professor who writes extensively about urban issues, blogged recently at Planetizen about -- of all places -- the scandalous Holyland project, where he happened to stay during a vacation week in Jerusalem.

    Refreshingly, Lewyn bypasses the issue of how those giant-towers-perched-on-a-cliff look to the rest of the city -- the visual affront that most Jerusalemites are all too aware of. Instead, he directly addresses a more pervasive and insidious issue, one that is not on most local residents' radar screen: the striking lack of walkability in newer Jerusalem neighborhoods planned for maximum density.

    Lewyn is clearly surprised to find that a "pretty dense neighborhood in a pretty dense city [...] may be more confusing to navigate, and separate uses more aggressively, than some sprawling suburbs." He notes the Holyland area's problematic topography, which would have made a grid layout hard to implement; but he also points out that San Francisco, among other places, manages to be walkable despite its hills.

    It is bracing to see a visitor to the city hone in on so glaring a problem, precisely in a part of town that most Jerusalemites think of as exclusive. Although a failure to address topography or to strive for walkability has always been pretty much par for the course in the city's more middle-class "ring" neighborhoods, it's sad to be reminded that the elite Holyland project -- a neighborhood that, while not exactly in the city center, hardly qualifies as "peripheral" by Jerusalem standards -- did not elicit a higher degree of planning competence.

    It's tempting to regard Holyland as a dinosaur, the last relic of an era when Jerusalem's planning cadre could conceive of no greater neighborhood amenity than a quasi-private exit ramp directly onto the Menachem Begin Boulevard (highway)that connects north and south Jerusalem. It's also tempting to regard Holyland as merely the product of a corrupt political system. It's tempting, but one should resist the temptation and recognize that such a project could never have been erected had there been anything like a local public norm for either aesthetics or walkability. There were no such norms during the 1990s, when Holyland was planned, and I submit that even today, with a more "enlightened" and "transparent" municipal administration in place, there is no level of urbanist awareness that would ensure the walkability of new developments in Jerusalem -- except, perhaps, in certain choice areas.

    "Density" has become a big catchword in Israel, and "high-rise construction" is being touted as the way to achieve it. Just last week a major Israeli newspaper's finance supplement devoted a lengthy article to the issue of high-rise construction ("פחד גבהים", "Fear of Heights,"Makor Rishon -- Kalkala, issue 753, 13 January 2012 -- apparently unavailable online). Though pointing out that high-rise residential construction has yet to become popular in Israel, the author, Gavriel Wolfson, presents it as unequivocably desirable. One "expert" whom he quotes, Dr. Rina Degani, asserts that if it were up to her, she would "cease issuing authorizations for low-rise construction;" another "expert," Yisrael David (Israel's representative to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat) dishes up the quasi-green argument that "there is more room around tall buildings for public spaces such as gardens, parks and children's playgrounds." Both of these statements reflect a discouraging lack of sophistication in the embrace of urbanist concepts.

    The idea that residential towers are the sole key to efficient land use in land-poor Israel has been challenged from multiple angles by Ami Ran in an article in Architecture of Israel Quarterly (click here for a rather primitive English translation; the original Hebrew is here). Ran points out, among other things, that the old low-rise Kerem HaTeimanim neighborhood is three times denser than Tel Aviv's "modernist White City" area, and that Tel Aviv's overall density (7000 per square km) is less than half that of "satellite towns" Bat Yam and Givatayim. While he feels that high-rise is the right way to go for commercial uses, he is skeptical about residential towers: "Although it is numerically possible to place a greater amount of residential units on a certain plot, it will ultimately be at the expense of the environment. The larger spaces needed between the high buildings break up the continuum of the city with its variety of urban activities." This latter point essentially refutes Yisrael David's specious "tower in the park" argument in the Makor Rishon article. "More room around tall buildings for public spaces" -- many would counter that this translates into isolated towers that do not integrate into any viable urban fabric, and that the "public spaces" surrounding them tend to be sterile and/or not family-friendly (you can't very well keep an eye on your kids from the 27th floor).

    The election, in 2008, of a young and dynamic Nir Barkat as Jerusalem's mayor is generally though to have heralded a new era in local urbanism. Sustainability activist Naomi Tsur, an outspoken critic of Israeli suburban sprawl, holds the municipal planning and environment portfolios and serves as deputy mayor. There is much talk about densifying the city, but any actual concern for walkability seems to begin and end with the transformation of downtown Jerusalem into a large, rather sanitized and elitist, pedestrian mall. The existing mainly-residential neighborhoods are slated for "densification," but little attention is being paid (again, excepting a few select neighborhoods) to what the new projects expected to produce this densification actually look like and how they will be contributing to the urban fabric.

    The tower-in-the-park idea doesn't seem to be as popular around here as that of the quasi-gated community. I say quasi-gated because the projects to which I'm referring are not actually gated, but they turn their backs to the street and detach themselves from their host neighborhoods in a manner reminiscent of gated communities.

    An early example of the quasi-gated community in Jerusalem is the Ganei Katamon project from the early-mid 1990s, in which a cluster of 4-storey apartment buildings surrounds a large inner courtyard. The courtyard is really open to anyone -- there is no "security" to keep people out -- and could thus arguably be considered a neighborhood asset; but most passersby, intimidated by the project's surrounding walls, would probably never think to enter it. From outside the project, greenery spilling over the formidable stone walls softens the visual impact, but doesn't counteract an overall effect of removing human life and vitality from the street. Note the cavernous garage entrance:



    A more recent project, one still partly under construction, is Ganei Zion in the gentrifying Katamonim neighborhood (bordering the more upscale San Simon area). This project consists of four 6-8 storey buildings and a residential tower surrounding a "private park." The outside of the project presents a fortress-like view to the surrounding neighborhood of modest low-rise buildings:



    It's possible that a project this unattractive at street-level could no longer fly in the Katamonim, due to opposition by vocal residents and to the existence of a master plan for the neighborhood that, while indeed recommending densification (primarily by adding floors to existing buildings), also stipulates certain design features relating to building facades and wall heights, apparently aimed at preventing any more Ganei Zions. Whether this master plan is actually being implemented, and street-hostile projects thereby prevented, I couldn't say. It's worth noting, though, that the local activism and the master plan reflect the Katamonim neighborhood's privileged status: it is relatively central, it is close to more upscale neighborhoods, and it already houses a critical mass of "gentrifyers."

    Residents of Ganei Katamon and Ganei Zion can enjoy a walkable lifestyle thanks to the overall human-scaled character of the neighborhoods in which they are situated, and their proximity to commercial hubs. However, should a critical mass of street-hostile projects eventually be reached in places like Katamon and the German Colony, the street environment and, at least to some degree, the walkability of these areas might well be compromised.

    The situation worsens considerably when we look at projects currently in the planning/construction stages in more peripheral areas that are less walkable overall -- i.e., that are characterized internally by a separation of uses and/or are distant from the city center or any secondary commercial hub:

    Ahuzat Yaniv or Yaniv Estate, a new project under construction by the Haim Zaken firm on an isolated parcel near the eastern entrance to Gilo, is yet another quasi-gated complex that has nothing to do with anything currently in its vicinity (there isn't much), and has little potential to be integrated into any kind of human-scaled urban fabric in the future. A cluster of 8-story apartment buildings surrounding an internal park, it is acually open on one side; but it's not at all clear that that open side will eventually be part of a built-up streetscape featuring additional residential and/or commercial buildings. In any case, the project, to judge from the simulation gallery provided by the developer, will have, on its three other sides, that same walled-in look that characterizes Ganei Katamon and Ganei Zion.

    (It's worth noting that Gilo's master plan is by no means as detailed as that of the Katamonim, and gives little impression of being informed by a walkability ethos. A class issue?)

    Another project that is in the early stages of construction, this one on the outskirts of the Arnona neighborhood: Chalomot Ramat Rachel, by the Shikun Ubinui company. Planned to border a wadi (a dry riverbed or valley), the project features ... (surprise!) a private open green area on the wadi side, complete with benches, play equipment, and unobstructed "breathtaking view". The other side of the project -- what one might expect to become the street-fronting side, if the surrounding area ever develops enough to create an actual street -- is completely taken up by a garage that juts far, far out in front of the building proper, as well as an open parking area on top of said garage. The project's promotional video focuses, naturally, on the "back-side" of the project, the part facing the wadi; the hideous garage-as-building-facade is barely shown; you can glimpse it between 1:45-1:48 of the video.

    So, what we currently have in the way of urban infill/densification here in Jerusalem may well be increasing the city's number of human inhabitants per square kilometer, but it is doubtful whether any other worthwhile urban goal is being advanced.

    Before I conclude, a few more words about walkability in the topographic context alluded to by Lewyn in his blog post:

    It's worth noting that Holyland Park residents, cushioned by their direct access to Begin Boulevard and representing, as a group, a certain kind of lifestyle choice, probably don't notice that their neighborhood suffers from a "walkability deficit." The hilly terrain very likely doesn't bother them; they have their much-vaunted view of the city (Holyland Park is one of the few places in Jerusalem where a view of the city doesn't include ... Holyland Park), and, one presumes, are perfectly happy to get around by car.

    The topography issue that Lewyn brings up in a somewhat offhand way is actually much more meaningful for Jerusalem's peripheral neighborhoods, which house a large proportion of the city's young working families. While the average resident of Holyland Park probably doesn't have to worry about getting a toddler to kindergarten in the morning, and therefore faces no logistical problems involving strollers and inclines, the average resident of Pisgat Ze'ev or Har Homa has to take relative altitude into account when deciding on a daycare framework for his/her child -- or be prepared to transport the child by car over heartbreakingly short distances.

    Consider the following photo from Har Homa (planned during the late 1990s, around the same time as Holyland Park):




    The view in the above photo is from from Sol Liptzin Street down to Rav Yitzhak Nissim, the street that runs directly parallel to it -- i.e., just one street over. Both of these streets are extremely long and circular, that is, they loop around the steep hill on which the neighborhood is built, and connect only via long, long staircases such as this one. Clearly, you can't pull a stroller up such a staircase (well, I have done it, but don't recommend it). Anyone whose mobility is suboptimal -- i.e., not just people who use wheelchairs, but relatively healthy elderly citizens who get around other parts of the city with little trouble -- would be out of luck here.

    Clearly, no attempt was made by planners to solve any of the problems posed by the new neighborhood's hilly terrain; rather, it was assumed that residents would get around by car. After all, the developers who built the place were required to allocate 1.5 covered parking spaces per residential unit, making the neighborhood into something like a gigantic automobile storage facility:




    Har Homa was indeed planned for maximum human density: there are no single-family homes there, just apartment buildings with little or no space between them. Unfortunately, the neighborhood was also planned for maximum car density, as reflected in a fully-autocentric streetscape of front-facing garages. I wrote about the Jerusalem snout house phenomenon here and here; I will not belabor the issue at present, except to point out that when you expect everyone to get around by car, you don't make an effort in the direction of walkability, but simply build with the car in mind. And when the neighborhood is planned around the car, making for an unpleasant visual environment (in addition to a difficult natural topography), you don't want to walk around too much anyway.

    Jerusalem doesn't need more talk about densification, or any more construction projects that deliver densification in the absence of more meaningful urban values, first and foremost walkability. What Jerusalem does need is widespread public awareness of what makes a street environment pleasant, and a neighborhood walkable -- and architectural/planning norms that reflect such an awareness. Difficult issues need to be confronted, such as the desirability of minimum parking requirements, how best to address problems posed by topography, and whether enclosed, "quasi-gated" projects are good for city neighborhoods. Public norms need to emerge that make designing for walkability a no-brain proposition. Then it won't be necessary to chase down corrupt politicians after problematic developments have already been constructed.
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    Gan HaAgvaniya (Tomato Park), Old Katamon -- a Jerusalem Playground Review

    February 24, 2012, 12:00 am
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    Name: This much-loved park has an irresistible name. Who wouldn't want to go to a park named after a tomato?  Although the place had been known to me for many years, I learned its name only when my oldest son started attending Chorev Elementary School, which stands across the street from the park and supplies a large proportion of its clientele. Apparently the name refers to the park's shape, which is thought to be tomato-like, with a slightly indented shrubbery area at its "crown":

    On maps of Old Katamon that I have looked at, the tomato comparison seems a bit far-fetched.

    Actually the park has another, official name, inscribed on two separate plaques:





    John V. Lindsay, Mayor of New York City from 1966-1973 -- a.k.a. Mayor Linseed of Gotham City ...

    I did a little digging online about Harvey Rothenberg, the park donor identified on the plaque in the above photo. A successful New York City businessman and active Zionist who helped found the Jerusalem Fund, he was also a good friend of John V. Lindsay and served on Lindsay's mayoral staff for a salary of $1 per year -- somewhat reminiscent of our current shekel-a-year Jerusalem mayor. Rothenberg reminisces about his interactions with such luminaries as Golda Meir, the Shah of Iran, and Teddy Kollek, here. For a fascinating article about John V. Lindsay and his conception of New York City as an "adventure playground," click here.

    It may seem unfair that a "popular" playground name should trump the name intended for it by its donor; there may be something instructive in this, something to do with the primacy of physical features in the minds of children. I don't feel capable of bucking the trend and talking about "John V. Lindsay Park" in everyday conversation, but I do think it's worthwhile to trace the donor history of parks and to honor the philanthropists who help make Jerusalem a better place. So, I hope, where relevant, to keep including donor information as a feature of my Jerusalem Playground Reviews.

    Location: Kovshei Katamon Street, at the Kaf-Tet BeNovember Street intersection (across from Chorev Elementary School), Old Katamon.

    Transit/Parking: Bus line 24 (Kovshei Katamon St.); plentiful on-street parking on Kovshei Katamon during most daytime hours, except for school drop-off and pick-up times.

    Shade: Gan HaAgvaniya has abundant shade. I can't vouch for the central play area during all daytime hours, but a large sandbox near the park entrance (which includes a couple of spring toys and tic-tac-toe installation) is shady throughout the day:


    The park's large open area is bounded by a margin of shrubbery and lovely mature trees:

    Benches are scattered along the park perimeter to take advantage of the shade.


    Playground equipment and features:

    Large climbing/slide structure, suitable for toddlers and young children, up to about ages 6-8:





    Merry-go-round

    Running barrel

    Small see-saw

    Spring toys

    "Standing" see-saw




    Large, relatively clean and shady sand box with tic-tac-toe installation and spring toys:


    Cat statue (good for climbing, throwing sand at):


    (Plenty of real felines, too ...)


    Shrubbery areas that are accessible to children for mucking around and exploring:


    Lots of climbablerocks and stepping-stones:



    A circular path, part asphalt and part cobblestone, suitable for scootering, tricycling, etc.:


    Age range:  Play equipment suitable for toddlers and younger children up to ages 6-8; for older children the park offers sufficient space to kick a ball around, dig for scorpions (if they're into that sort of thing), ride a scooter, or just hang out.

    Snack factor: Unfortunately, there is no kiosk or grocery in the immediate vicinity (i.e., accessible without having to cross a street, or at least visible just across a street). However, there is a grocery around the corner on HaLamed-Heh Street, a fairly short walk away, as well as a bakery/cafe. A few blocks away, on HaPalmach St., there is a larger selection of stores and eateries (see the Beyond the park section below).

    Schmooze factor: I use this park mainly in the afternoons, when I pick my kids up from the school across the street. The after-school hours are quite busy and fun here, with older Chorev kids stopping to play or cutting through the park on their way home ...

    (somebody brought their hamster to school today)
     .. mothers picking up their younger schoolchildren and bringing preschool siblings and babies along for an outing ...


    ... or perhaps a picnic:



    On school days you sometimes see classes of 30+ children from Chorev Elementary School charging into the park -- time off for good behavior ... On Friday mornings (a school morning, but also the start of the Israeli Friday-Shabbat weekend) the park is a popular spot for fathers with toddlers, giving their wives a break. On regular weekday mornings (Sunday through Thursday) the park usually gets some traffic -- the occasional mother-child or babysitter-child dyad, dog walkers, etc. However, Gan HaAgvaniya doesn't seem to especially attract metaplot (family-based childcare providers) with larger numbers of children in tow, perhaps because there is another, bigger park a couple of blocks down that also has swings, or possibly due to a problem with seating in the park's main play area, which I discuss below.

    Seating:My one criticism of the park. Yes, there are plenty of benches along the tree-lined perimeter, and they provide delightfully shady seating on a hot summer's day. There is also a bench near the sandbox, and a funky seating area at the park's entrance:

    
    In memory of Eliezer Karsani
    
    The problem is that there are no benches near the park's central play area, where most of the equipment is located. 

    The play area was renovated a couple of years ago. Formerly, it consisted of a small but sturdy and attractive wooden climbing/slide structure, a metal "car" installation with benches and steering wheels, and a spring toy or two. The equipment was situated within a sandbox, which itself was surrounded by a circular stone bench where mothers and other adults could sit and keep a close eye on the children playing there. When the play area was renovated (and I never could figure out why, as the previous set of equipment was perfectly adequate), the stone bench was removed and replaced with ... nothing that anyone, adult or child, could comfortably sit on.

    Instead, the renovated play area was partly demarcated by a "decorative"but useless stonewall that is too high for a normal-sized adult woman to sit on in a dignified way:


    You have to jump pretty high to get up on this thing, and then your legs dangle ...


    If you look carefully, you can see that the wall is actually slanted in the wrong direction for anyone who might actually want to sit on it while facing the play area ... There are some benches not too far away, but the wall serves as a barrier between them and the play area, meaning that a mother/caregiver who wants to keep a close eye on children using the play equipment (and step in quickly to intervene where necessary) would not feel comfortable using the benches.

    There is a problem in Jerusalem these days with excessive wall-building. I don't mean in a political sense (that's far beyond my purview), but in an urbanist sense. I point this out regarding another, brand-new playground that is effectively ruined by its surrounding wall, and regarding the city's newer residential construction. Just because it's made of Jerusalem stone doesn't mean it belongs there! There's more to urban design than putting up walls! 

    Multiple uses within the park: Gan HaAgvaniya is definitely a mixed-use kind of place. It boasts:

    Several different play areas that are distinct yet visible and easily accessible to each other (a plus for caregivers watching several children of varying ages);

    Well-developed, multiple shrubbery areas where kids can interact with the natural world;

    A circular path for scootering, etc.;

    Some open lawn space:


    Rocks and stones for climbing;
    
    There is an adjacent empty lot (in Old Katamon! -- surely constituting some of the most valuable real estate on the planet) where more adventurous children can explore:


    The park's immediate proximity to a school and a bus stop, and its relative proximity to some shopping areas, make it a pass-through place. Although it is bounded along much of the "tomato" perimeter by residential buildings, with a buffer of shrubbery and mature trees, this boundary is actually quite permeable. All the locals seem to know where the park border's unofficial "transit points" are, and utilize them as shortcuts.

    Gan HaAgvaniya fits my mantra: a good park should be different things to different people, and different things to the same people on different occasions.

    Beyond the park: Kovshei Katamon and HaLamed-Heh streets

    Although I have reviewed three other playgrounds so far in the enchanted Old Katamon-German-Colony-Baka triangle, it is Gan HaAgvaniya and its surrounding streets that conjure up memories of my bitza past with a Proustian palpability. This is subjective, I know. I'm sure other Katamon refugees have their own involuntary-memory triggers.

    As you leave Gan HaAgvaniya and head up Kovshei Katamon in the direction of HaLamed-Heh, you see some pretty typical Katamon architecture:


    The above building is not an especially fancy one, just a normal stone-faced residential structure that exemplifies what life was like in Jerusalem before the current nightmare of minimum parking requirements. Note that there is indeed some parking space at ground level, under the building proper and directly in front of it. Note also, however, that the area in front of the building is left open, meaning that the structure's overall human scale remains intact. Yes, there's a car parked there, but there's also a bit of shrubbery; you can see the balconies and windows of the lower floors; if you pass by at night you have a reassuring sense of human activity in the area. This is in contrast to the snout houses that have become all the rage in Jerusalem over the last two decades -- buildings with large, enclosed garages that protrude from the building facades and create a sense of desolation at street level. A few of these devils appear a little farther up, when we turn the corner onto HaLamed-Heh Street. I will point them out to you, don't worry.

    Another undistinguished, but human-scaled and therefore attractive apartment building:


    The Kovshei-Katamon--HaLamed-Heh intersection:


    The corner building is Yakar, the well-known synagogue and epicenter of my bitza memories. To point up the connection with Gan HaAgvaniya, I used to duck out from Yakar to the park on Yom Kippur for a catnap between mussaf and mincha -- the ten minutes or so that were left after the endlessly drawn-out (but beautifully harmonized!) davening. Now, I do like trees and shrubbery but I think they've gone a bit overboard. I'd like to see more building here.

    Turning left onto HaLamed-Heh, one finds an interesting mixed-use street marked by attractive older architecture and, unfortunately, some terrible recent construction.

    One lovely old building serves as a residence ...


    ... while its next-door neighbor houses a bank:


    Kos Shel Bracha wine shop (I'll try to get another picture of the place sometime when it's open).



    Below: the only store selling religious Jewish books on this side of town. Since they have a local monopoly, why do the proprietors of Havruta feel it's necessary to advertise themselves all over Jerusalem on those ugly municipal ad installations?


    But it is a great store (though not very stroller-accessible), with a good children's section (including English books) and attractive Judaica:


    Ah, here we come to it. The original Jerusalem snout houses, circa mid-1990s -- the start of a plague. The cavernous garage entrances, like giant yawns in the middle of an otherwise pleasant and human-scaled street:




    The interesting and rather hopeful thing that characterizes this snout-house setup on HaLamed-Heh St. is that the garages alternate with commercial spaces: a minimarket and a branch of the Lechem Shel Tomer bakery/restaurant chain:

    On the menu: "orange" soup, kumquat confiture (marmalade?), "outstanding" hamantaschen ...

    Whether the minimarket and bakery/cafe occupy spaces that were originally planned for commercial use, or converted from garage spaces, I don't know. The minimarket guy hadn't been there long enough to tell me ... But the sight of this garage/commercial mix does give one hope that many of Jerusalem's snouthouses will someday be retrofitted for shops and restaurants, offices, small groundfloor apartments ... thereby creating viable streetscapes, rather than depressing garage-scapes.

    Farther down the street there's another cafe and a greengrocer ... but the little one was getting impatient in her stroller. Also, she was filthy, having removed her shoes and socks (this in mid-February) for a more "feet-on" sandbox experience at Gan HaAgvaniya:


    Bath time!

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    Outdoor advertising: Jerusalem should follow Tel Aviv's lead ... and copy Paris

    April 1, 2012, 5:29 am
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    For about four years now I've been cringing at sights like the following:




    It's true that after a while you can get used to things that once drove you nuts. I guess some of the shock value of these Jerusalem Municipality advertising installations has worn off by now; but I still think they are ugly, strident, vulgar, and altogether inconsistent with the subtlety and refinement that I associate with Jerusalem. I also think that they have, for the most part, been inappropriately placed. Moreover, they are not very effective at their appointed task -- delivering commercial and cultural information -- for reasons that I will set forth later in this post.

    I used to have a theory about how these ad installations got authorized to begin with. The fact that they first appeared under the mayoral administration of ultra-Orthodox Uri Lupoliansky made me think it was an encroachment of the pashkevil aesthetic into parts of Jerusalem where that aesthetic didn't belong. Now, Lupoliansky did get a lot of flak from the ultra-Orthodox community for trying to clear the streets of unauthorized posters in haredi strongholds like Mea Shearim -- but it was also during his term as mayor that these formal ad installations began to appear throughout Jerusalem, including in the non-haredi parts of town. The two phenomena -- the Mea Shearim cleanup and the citywide oudoor advertising free-for-all -- were apparently two sides of the same coin, the latter being an "authorized" communication channel that supposedly kept the former in check.

    Whether the introduction of municipal ad installations had the desired effect of keeping unauthorized posters off the walls of Mea Shearim, I don't really know -- but I tend to doubt it. Whatever the outcome on that side of town, I had never noticed a problem with bandit billboards on, for instance, Emek Refaim St. (in the lively and heterogeneous German Colony), and so I consider the placement of ad installations there to constitute an introduction of visual pollution where there had been none before:
    
    
    Stately entrance to old Templer cemetery, Emek Refaim St. -- an appropriate site for commercial advertising?
     Basically, at the time of their initial appearance I regarded these Jerusalem advertising boards as manifestations of a warped aesthetic sense, combined with a drive to inject money into the city coffers by any means, fair or foul. And I wanted the installations gone.

    Well, I still want them gone; but in the meantime my attitude toward outdoor publicity/advertising has gained a bit of nuance. I've come to recognize that different cities, and different parts of the same city, can take different approaches to advertising. At one end of the spectrum, New York's Times Square can hardly be imagined without its giant billboards. By contrast, Los Angeles has banned digital billboards and multistorey signs. And at the opposite end of the spectrum, Sao Paulo, Brazil, via its Clean City Law, has rid itself altogether of billboards, posters and bus ads.

    And then there's Paris with its Morris columns:

    Jeune femme traversant le boulevard -- Jean  Béraud (via Wikimedia Commons) 

    A more up-to-date version:

    via Wikipedia
    In 2006 considerable public controversy was generated by a Paris Municipality decision to "unclutter" the public space by reducing the number of its iconic poster columns, which since the 19th century have been considered a major and inexpensive medium for publicizing cultural events in the city. What is worth noting is that the Parisian pillars have been historically dedicated to the purpose of supporting the arts -- not of enriching the municipality, as appears to be the case with today's Jerusalem ad installations.

    It's also worth noting that the Morris columns of Paris, with their "crown" detail, etc., are designed with an obvious concern for aesthetics. Not only that, but the very concept of a three-dimensional pillar display, rather than a flat "screen-like" expanse, has something distinctly human, tactile and fun about it. This was brought home to me recently as I took a good look at an object that had been lying around my house since my oldest son was a toddler -- a cardboard stand-up street scene that could serve as a child's primer on the New Urbanism:

    The street scene (apparently a European import) features an advertising pillar (far left), and you can see how, under the right conditions, outdoor advertising might contribute just the right degree of liveliness to a street environment, without being overwhelming or vulgar. In this image, if you look closely, you can make out two children playing peek-a-boo around the column. Now picture a real-life street scene, in which well-dressed Parisians glide around a cylinder of this kind in an elegant pas-de-deux as they scan it for news. It almost looks like a form of two-way communication.

    Although I spent time in Paris as a student many moons ago, I somehow never thought to connect those Morris columns with the Jerusalem ad installations that have sprouted like poisonous mushrooms around the city over the last four years. They are so different visually that I simply couldn't place them in the same universe, although technically they both fall into the categories of street furniture and outdoor advertising media.

    The pashkevil connection aside, what I find so objectionable about the Jerusalem ad installations is the sheer lack of humanity evident both in their design and in their deployment.

    The Parisian pillars are not intended for view by drivers, but by pedestrians (their invention pre-dates the auto, after all). Even when they are placed at intersections (as in one of the above photos), they clearly are meant to catch the eye of the human being crossing the street, not the driver waiting for the light. And (at least based on a scan of images -- and there are lots of them -- via Google) they are by no means placed exclusively at intersections.

    By contrast, the Jerusalem installations are pretty consistently situated at intersections, including many that get very little foot traffic:
    
    Hebron Rd.-Shmuel Meir Blvd.
    
     Several things are worth noting about the above photo, but at present I will focus on the fact that this is an intersection at the city's periphery that hardly anyone crosses on foot -- meaning that the advertising here is intended exclusively for drivers waiting for the light to change. Yet, except for the most boldly-printed headlines, no driver, sitting across the road from the installation, can possibly read what is written on those posters. This is typical; I have noticed it at many intersections around the city. The ad installations are supposed to be doing double duty by targeting drivers and pedestrians alike.  Yet they fail miserably with regard to drivers, as they do not take human visual capabilities into account! Those responsible for the installations' design and placement seem to have thought they were going to be communicating with windshields, not with people.

    (Given this inefficacy, it's really too bad that the lovely pastoral view of an olive grove had to be sacrificed to the municipal advertising imperative.)

    My favorite, of course, is when the ad installations are positioned near traffic circles. Apparently, drivers are expected to crane their necks to make out what's written on the posters while they're driving around the circles:
    
    Traffic circle at entrance to Har Homa. You can't make out anything on those ad boards while you're whizzing past ...
    
    Yet I would argue that even when the installations are placed in spots with heavy pedestrian traffic, they are not particularly effective. It's true that on a busy street like Emek Refaim, people will definitely stop to look at them. But you have to step back awkwardly in order to focus on the text of the posters ...  


    ... risking collision with other people at a teeming intersection, and then shield your eyes from the psychadelic glare. The installations, jam-packed with posters superimposed each on the other, in eye-blistering colors that clash both with each other and with the otherwise stately and graceful Jerusalem landscape, are simply not scaled for the human eye at street level.

    What is more, they take up an awful lot of visual "space." Unlike Morris columns, which attract attention but do not overwhelm, the Jerusalem ad installations are a form of visual hijacking. Look at how the view of a lovely Old Katamon house and its garden is obstructed by -- not one, but two -- installations:


    Here an ad board disrupts the tranquillity of a residential Baka street:


    The above intersection, Efraim and Gideon streets, is just a couple of blocks away from both Emek Refaim and Derech Beit Lechem -- two major commercial hubs that have certainly received their share of ad installations. Couldn't the Municipality have let this quiet little street slumber in peace? Or do they think the Day-glo colors contrast elegantly with Jerusalem stone?

    And, what about the local residents who have to look out their windows at the backs of these things, or the pedestrians who have to accept these grey and lifeless metal backsides as part of the streetscape:



    It's nice to know that Ariel, the Jerusalem muncipal company that is responsible for these eyesores, takes pride in the installations' aesthetic caliber.

    On its website Ariel doesn't bother to name either the company to which it has contracted the twice-weekly changing of the posters, or the "sponsor" that it "recruited"  several years ago to "replace 300 old and broken-down installations around the city, at a cost of millions of shekels, in exchange for advertising rights to the upper portion of the installations." [emphases mine -- Julie@walkablejlm]

    The term "recruited" struck me as intriguingly vague. Isn't this the kind of service that a municipality would normally  publish a tender for?

    I did some digging, and came up with the following:

    In 2008 the Jerusalem Municipality did issue a tender for the provision of outdoor advertising/street furniture services -- after a lengthy period in which such services had been provided by multiple companies on a short-term contract basis. Jerusalem was, at that time, following the lead of Tel Aviv, which had recently entered into an agreement with a multinational outdoor advertising company following a tender process. The idea was that various local and international companies would submit their bids, and that Jerusalem would end up with a professional, aesthetically-pleasing and unified municipal street furniture "style", provided by an organization with proven design expertise.

    However, the tender caused an uproar in the Israeli outdoor advertising industry, as its conditions seemed to automatically disqualify local competitors and leave the playing field open solely to large foreign companies -- necessitating intervention on the part of the Israel Anti-Trust Authority.

    I haven't, as yet, been able to trace the entire train of events that succeeded the tender's publication and the subsequent outcry; what is certain, however, is that a few months after the tender was published, it was cancelled. None of the foreign companies that might have been expected to submit bids, did so. Why? Well, apparently there was something irregular about the Jerusalem tender itself. Among other things, the time period stipulated for the provision of services -- 15 years -- was considered unusual in the industry, and made the tender an unattractive proposition for the relevant firms.

    What is one to make of all this?

    Was the original tender a farce? I wouldn't want to hurl accusations without having all the facts, but something doesn't add up.

    It's not clear to me who is currently responsible for designing, erecting and determining the placement of Jerusalem's ubiquitous ad installations, and whether they are also responsible for the graphical end of things. As far as I can tell, the company that appears to be in charge of designing and deploying the posters plastered on the installations is Diyuk Advertising & Distribution,  a company whose website proclaims the availability to prospective clients of 300 ad installations "throughout the city" -- "Eeeeeverybody can see you" [כו ו ו ולם רואים אותך] !

    Who is Diyuk Advertising & Distribution? Diyuk was founded in 2005 by Udi Moshe Cohen, "after a decade of experience in outdoor advertising and broadsides [מודעות רחוב]in the ultra-Orthodox and religious sector, as well as in the secular sector which has traditionally had less exposure to the broadside medium" [emphasis mine -- Julie@walkablejlm]

    Basically, Diyuk is a pashkevil company that got a good gig: bringing the Mea Shearim pashkevil look to all parts of the city. Although they don't list the Jerusalem Municipality as one of their clients, and are not mentioned on Ariel's website, what can one conclude from the "Shiltei Yerushalayim" page of their website, but that they are the de facto operators of the municipal ad installations? It's not clear to me whether Diyuk was actually responsible for deciding on the installations' infelicitious flat-screen format and idiotic placements, or whether Ariel should get credit for this. But they certainly appear to be responsible for the overall look.

    Compared with the Jerusalem Municipality, the Tel Aviv Municipality exhibits both decent taste in its choice of outdoor advertising format, and relative transparency.

    Tel Aviv, in 2010, contracted with JCDecaux, the company that currently handles Paris' Morris columns, to replace its old ad installations with columns in the Parisian style. Actually, a photo taken from the JCDecaux website shows a rather plain metallic cylinder, somewhat reminiscent of a cola can and decidely less attractive than its Parisian counterpart:


    But no matter. It's a whole lot better than what we've been used to in Jerusalem. And the Tel Aviv Municipality doesn't seem to feel the need to keep its contractor's name a secret. The municipality published a tender, which was duly won by a large and experienced international company in the street furniture/outdoor advertising industry. The fact that JCDecaux was the only contender doesn't bother me too much; at least the process was open and transparent, unlike the mysterious "recruitment" that took place in Jerusalem.

    This lack of transparency, and the sheer ugliness and inefficacy of the Jerusalem ad installations, may have been consistent with the Lupoliansky administration's unprofessionalism; I certainly didn't expect any expansion of the phenomenon under Mayor Barkat. Yet the installations have proliferated since he entered office.

    Should a local company that does shoddy work be preferred to a multinational that demonstrates professionalism? I don't think so -- certainly not where Jerusalem's visual environment is concerned. Of course, it would be great if a local company -- whether ultra-Orthodox, national-religious, secular, Christian, Muslim or Bahai -- acquired professional skills in the outdoor furniture/advertising sphere even remotely comparable to those of a company like JCDecaux. (Just compare Diyuk's website with that of JCDecaux, and decide which company you would rather have in charge of outdoor advertising in the Israeli capital -- the holy city of Jerusalem.)

    To sum up:

    If the Jerusalem Municipality wants to provide a platform for the effective transmission of information related to culture and the arts, it would do well to adopt -- as Tel Aviv has done -- the kind of column or pillar format that works so well in European cities, and to place these columns in shopping districts, near community centers, in public plazas and on sidewalks that are wide enough to accomodate them -- thereby targeting pedestrians in areas where there is heavy foot traffic. The flat ad installations currently in use, positioned at all sorts of intersections where they often block views of attractive architecture and greenery, are absurdly ineffective at conveying information to drivers, except in those instances where the entire space is devoted to a single large commercial ad. The attempt to target both pedestrians and drivers (and to communicate both cultural and commercial information) using the same format was ill-conceived, to put it mildly. And (again putting it mildly) the Jerusalem Municipality would do well to display rather more transparency regarding its choice of service provider in the area of street furniture/advertising.
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    A Memorial to Bad Urbanism on Derech Beit Lechem

    May 25, 2012, 12:41 am
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    Derech Beit Lechem, or Bethlehem Road, is a long street that runs through Jerusalem's Baka and Talpiot neighborhoods, parallel to the thunderous traffic artery of Derech Hevron. Derech Beit Lechem, though itself a busy thoroughfare in parts, would not normally be called "thunderous" (a car word) but rather "bustling" (a people word). When one talks about Derech Beit Lechem one tends to draw on a lexicon of chicness and boutiques, cafes and gentrification.

    This vocabulary mainly describes the section of Derech Beit Lechem that extends between Rivka Street (near "Tsomet HaBankim") and Yiftah Street. There is considerable urbanist consciousness in that part of town; Baka activists have garnered media attention by protesting planned changes in traffic patterns that would, in the words of architect and Baka resident David Guggenheim, "have destroyed the delicate urban fabric" of Derech Beit Lechem.

    There is, however, another Derech Beit Lechem -- one whose urban fabric is not so delicate: the Talpiot Industrial Area end of the street, between HaTenufa and Derech Baram. On this stretch of Derech Beit Lechem, one side of the street features old industrial buildings ...


    ... flanking a forlorn, vacant lot where the infamous Versailles wedding hall disaster occurred eleven years ago yesterday, on May 24, 2001. No one, apparently, wants to build something new here:

    Site where the Versailles wedding hall once stood, now offering a direct view of the ubiquitous Holyland project.
    
    The opposite side of the street, on this stretch of Derech Beit Lechem, houses some of Jerusalem's poorer residents, in a compound of decrepit shikun buildings (1950s-era mass housing for immigrants) currently slated for urban renewal:

    

    And it is on this side of the street, directly across from the now-desolate space where the Versailles disaster occurred, that a "memorial garden" has been created in honor of the disaster's victims:


    Is it just me, or does this "garden" seem wholly inappropriate, whether as a memorial to the casualties of a collapsed dance floor, or as a feature of a street where, after all, human beings continue to live and go about their business? Well, I guess if I thought it was just me, I wouldn't be writing this post, would I?

    Here's what I think is wrong with the Versailles memorial site:

    1) It has a distinctly military-cemetery feel, as though the designer (architect David Guggenheim -- the Baka activist mentioned above) thought the site was meant to commemorate a battle where heroic warriors fell, rather than a civil disaster. Those tall, straight-arrow cypress trees standing at attention under the brutal midday Mediterranean sun, surrounded by a stark grey concrete wall bearing the names of the fallen ... This military ambience is all wrong, given the civil nature of the incident.


    2) The site is unsuited to an area where, as I noted above, people live, play, work, and pursue everyday activities. Basically, a large chunk of public space was hijacked and turned into something that no one can use. This isn't a cemetery, it's a street. Would David Guggenheim want something like this on his end of Derech Beit Lechem?

    To be more specific about why the memorial is unsuited to an area where people live and "do stuff" (as opposed to a military cemetery or some kind of national battlefield park):

    -- The "garden" is shadeless, meaning that no one can spend time there during normal daytime hours. Wouldn't it have been more meaningful, a more fitting remembrance of the departed, to have planted some shade trees, and arranged them in an inviting way, with some benches under them, creating what we refer to in Hebrew as a pinat hemed -- a "cosy corner" that would have elicited gratitude from local residents and passersby, and, perhaps, have stimulated actual contemplation of the names of the disaster victims -- rather than concealing them?


    -- The overall layout is such that one can't be in the site; one is forced to
    walk around it. As I said: a hijacking of public space. One can speculate that Guggenheim intended something deep by this: perhaps the set-up of trees-mounted-on-a-platform, upon which we gaze as outside observers, was meant to evoke the moment just before the dance floor collapsed beneath the wedding revellers -- a moment that was captured for posterity on video, and viewed by many thousands of people.

    Whatever visual metaphor Guggenheim had in mind, it does not, in my view, justify the removal of a public space from public use. The local residents didn't cause the disaster. Why should they not have the use of their street in its entirety, and in aesthetically pleasing form?

    And if the site of the catastrophe itself -- directly across the street from where the memorial "garden" was installed -- has lain desolate for the past decade, wouldn't that have been the logical venue for a monument of some kind?

    -- Also, what's with the grey, blank wall on the outside of the memorial? 


    Not that it was necessary or desirable to have this grey starkness on the interior walls, either -- but how can one justify putting a blank wall directly across from what is, essentially, a nice, modest, pleasantly dense and human-scaled stretch of multifamily dwellings:


    The Versailles disaster, in which 23 people perished and 350 or more were injured due to "quick and dirty" construction methods and owner negligence, demonstrated one kind of price that society pays when the needs of actual human beings are treated with cavalier disregard by those responsible for our built environment.

    The Versailles disaster "memorial garden" demonstrates another cost that we incur, as a society, when those responsible for our built environment disregard the needs of actual human beings. No, no deaths are likely to be directly caused by an ugly and unusable memorial garden. But I would argue that negative urban features such as these have a cumulative effect. They make it seem okay to do inappropriate things with the street; to design and build inappropriately. They alienate us from the street, with devastating effects on our quality of life and long-term health. Twenty-three fatalities in one shot is indeed a terrible tragedy. But when, as a society, we adhere to a lifestyle in which the street is a place to be avoided, we suffer health consequences that, though more insidious, reach much farther.
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    Brander Park and Gardens, City Center -- a Jerusalem Playground Review

    July 16, 2012, 11:19 pm
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    I recently had the pleasure of visiting a renovated playground in the city center -- the "revitalized downtown Jerusalem" that I sometimes mock in a spirit of contrarianism. This wonderful new playground definitely creates an incentive (which I previously found lacking) to go downtown with the kids ...
    Name: Brander Park and Gardens
    There is a plaque identifying the park's donors as  Dr. Jerome and Mrs. Frances Brander of Atlantic City. On maps, however, the area seems to be called Meir Sherman Garden. When the conundrum has been resolved, Gd willing, I will update.

    Location: King George Street, downtown Jerusalem (adjacent to Independence Park).

    Transit:Egged lines 4, 4A, 7, 7A, 8, 8A, 9, 9A, 17, 17A, 19, 19A, 21, 21A, 31, 031, 32, 032, 38, 74, 75.
    Shade: There's plenty of shade in this park, making it quite usable at all hours of the day, even when the sun is at its harshest. In addition to the many trees scattered throughout, some of them quite old and venerable ...



    ... there is the welcome addition of a large artificial shade structure covering a selection of attractive, new-style "dynamic" play equipment.


    Obviously these shade structures cost money and one can't expect that every corner of a playground will be encompassed by them. Still, it's kind of a shame that this line of cool and varied swings is so entirely exposed to the sun -- I doubt one can use them comfortably after about 9:00 a.m.:


    All in all, though, this is a well-shaded playground/park, where at least half of the play equipment is sufficiently shaded for mid-day use, and where comfortable picnic spots can always be found:


    Play equipment and features:

    Play equipment seems to have its own fashion trends, which wax and wane. A few years ago every new playground in these parts featured a climbing/slide structure with tunnels and turrets, a kind of all-in-one facility around which the entire play area revolved -- like the department store on which a mall is "anchored."

    Over the last couple of years, however, things seem to have evolved. My first inkling of the changing times came on a family trip to Zichron Yaacov two summers ago, where we were enchanted by what seemed to us a wonderfully original playground full of strange kinetic-dynamic-futuristic play structures of a kind we had never seen before.

    Now these structures are popping up here in Jerusalem as well. The novelty hasn't worn off yet -- maybe it never will:










    As noted above, an entire section of the playground is devoted to the swing concept in a variety of ultramodern incarnations. The swings are attractive and fun -- for older children; none is suited to a toddler, unless she's in someone's lap ...



    There's a separate toddler play area with some nice features, including this sleek bouncy snake:


    The train structure is very attractive, but was in full sun and hot to the touch at around 10:30-11:00 a.m. when we were there:



    Other notable features and amenities:

    -- Bicycle racks

    -- There's a regular water fountain near the toddler play area, and a more "advanced" one off the older-child area -- the water is chilled, and the fountain has a bottle-filling installation:


    -- Rarity of all rarities in Jerusalem playgrounds: a restroom. My son tried to get in but couldn't figure out how. I have no idea whether it works, is cleaned/maintained, etc. Nor do I want to be the one who checks this out. Perhaps an intrepid reader will care to update me on this, for the benefit of the wider public ...


    -- Brander Park leads directly into the larger, open green space of Jerusalem's well-known Independence Park, an area suitable for picnics, ball-related activities, gatherings, etc. Independence Park has no play facilities per se and I never thought of it as a full-service attraction in and of itself for kids, but nowadays it makes a nice, relaxing side-trip when everyone has tired themselves out on Brander Park's exciting play equipment. Of particular interest is the man-made water feature -- small pools and streams, mainly in shade, that attract kids like flies and offer adults a cool and refreshing interlude amid the downtown bustle:






     
    But don't bring your bathing suit, or drink the water. It might embalm you:



    Age range: Toddler through adult:


    Snack factor: Many restaurants, cafes, bakeries and convenience stores a short walk away on Jaffa Rd. and along the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall; a kiosk selling ice creams/ices, snacks and cold drinks (as well as less child-oriented items such as lottery tickets and cigarettes) is located at the park's Meir Shaham St. entrance.

    Schmooze factor: This is not the kind of playground you go to in order to meet up with a regular crowd of neighborhood moms and childminders -- a valuable feature of certain other playgrounds that I have reviewed.. Brander Park is downtown, so it gets a more transient and varied clientele, and that is its strong point and brand differentiation. One sees locals of all stripes, tourists, plenty of dog-walkers, etc.

    Seating: Seating has been handled thoughtfully and generously throughout the park, whether in the form of wooden benches (a fair number in shady spots), a circular stone bench surrounding the main play area, or stone tree and shrubbery platforms that do double duty as seating:



    Multiple uses within the park: Brander Park certainly has much to offer within its borders, especially if those borders are extended to include Independence Park. It has several play areas (suited to different age groups) that are distinct and intimate yet flow gracefully into each other; lawns for kicking a ball around, picnicking, etc.; steps and platforms that beckon young children to climb on them; the babbling brook of Independence Park; areas of noisy togetherness and spots of repose. You won't be bored here.

    Beyond the park: Self-evident, considering the downtown location. In the immediate vicinity, on King George Street, are certain tourist-itenerary items such as Yeshurun Central Synagogue, the Great Synagogue and Heichal Shlomo.

    Prior to the renovation, I never considered this playground to be anything that I would travel out of my south Jerusalem comfort zone for. In general, I always regarded downtown as rather child-unfriendly and resented the lack of a worthwhile play area there. I never could bring myself to run errands in the city center with kids in tow. I've hardly been downtown at all these last few years, as most of my needs can be met closer to home (i.e., in Talpiot); in fact my unexpected recent forays there were occasioned by nothing less than the necessity of getting my three year old vaccinated against rabies at the Health Ministry facility at 86 Jaffa Rd. I dreaded the trip downtown with her, thinking that Brander Park, as I remembered it (a rickety old merry-go-round?), would not compensate her adequately for the innoculation experience. In the end I was pleasantly surprised on all counts: the rabies prevention unit is run efficiently and located in a beautiful old building that is worth visiting on its own merits; the little one was enthralled by the shop windows of Jaffa Rd. and the passing trains; and I discovered the Brander Park renovation.

    I'm not naive. I know the Jerusalem Municipality didn't have lowly residents like me in mind when it decided to renovate this playground, but rather the tourist population. Yet this is one instance where the locals truly enjoy a collateral benefit. "Mixed-use" has become a catchword of the downtown Jerusalem revitalization scene, but it appears to refer mainly to a mix of commercial, office and hotel/residential space in new high-rises slated for construction. Yet by creating a truly fun place for children in the city center, the planning echelon has done much to enhance downtown Jerusalem's mixed-use status -- without having to reach skyward.
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    Israel's Construction and Housing Ministry versus Yoav Q. Public

    August 16, 2012, 6:36 am
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    Yoav Lerman, whose runs the popular Od Blog Tel-Avivi (“Another Tel Aviv Blog”) and is one of Israel’s foremost New Urbanism activists, has been individually sanctioned by the Ministry of Construction and Housing – for no other reason, apparently, than that he has exercised his right to criticize the Ministry.

    Lerman, according to the short bio accompanying his blog, is a doctoral candidate in Tel Aviv University's Department of Geography and Human Environment, where he conducts research on "pedestrian movement in urban environments and the factors affecting it." He also directs "a research project funded by the Israeli National Road Safety Authority related to pedestrian safety." He serves on the board of Merhav -- the Movement for Israeli Urbanism, and has participated, as an expert panelist, in that organization's annual Israeli Mayors' Institute on City Renewal.
    Lerman wished to register for a conference sponsored by the Ministry of Construction and Housing, to launch the Ministry's new urban street design manual -- a topic of obvious relevance to his professional concerns. Considering both his credentials and his personal standing in the urbanist community (not many blogs have five-year anniversary events organized for them), it hardly seems possible that his registration request could have been rejected.

    Yet rejected it was, and in a manner shocking for its sheer crudity -- its gross violation of democratic norms.

    I offer below a translation of the letter that Lerman received from the Ministry's Deputy Chief Architect, and of a portion of the blog post in which Lerman relates the incident and his response to it. A few words of background:

    I have been following Od Blog Tel-Avivi for a while now, and so far as I can tell Lerman is situated well within the mainstream of New Urbanist thinking. He is generally critical of what he sees as a sprawl orientation on the part of Israel's Construction Ministry, an orientation that dictates the creation of car-dependent suburban communities and peripheral urban neighborhoods that lack services, amenities and shopping within walking distance of residents and that are unserved or underserved by public transit.

    In one blog post from May of this year, Lerman posited a direct link between a murder that took place in a Be'er-Sheva park and the Ministry's anti-urban policies. In this tragic incident, which was widely reported in the Israeli media, a young father of two was stabbed to death by youths in a park below his apartment building when he went down to complain about the noise they were making. Lerman attributes the prevalence of such delinquent gatherings to the incompetent way in which Israeli communities are designed: "[t]he Israeli planning echelon is creating suburb after suburb in which only four elements are present -- dwellings, parking spaces, parks and roads. There is no commercial activity, there are no cafes, no jobs and -- worst of all -- there is no reason why any adult would want to move around these places on foot." The lack of an adult presence on the streets voids "the suburbanized public space" of "informal adult surveillance" -- i.e., no "eyes on the street."  At the same time, the car-less teenagers who live in these places are forced, by default, to congregate either in garages or in "dark and deserted parks."

    Readers with an urbanist orientation will find nothing earth-shattering in this analysis; still, one could argue that Lerman overstated his case somewhat. He certainly chose a sensationalist title for his post: Murder by Planning [רצח על רקע תכנוני]. Now, Lerman is a witty and engaging writer, and one can understand how he might have found such a title irresistible; I think it can hardly help but appeal to anyone who already shares his views.  But readers unacquainted with such concepts as "mixed-use development" and "eyes on the street" might well have trouble agreeing that the Construction Ministry's zoning practices, however detrimental to urban health, were necessarily to blame for a cold-blooded stabbing; and it is perhaps only human nature that the various cogs in the Ministry machine would feel personally implicated here. Perhaps such gems of pithy vitriol are best reserved for instances in which the planning echelon bears obvious, unequivocal responsibility for fatalities, as in the Raquel Nelson affair.

    Whatever the case may be, there is no excuse for the way in which the Chief Architect's Division in the Construction and Housing Ministry responded to Lerman's conference registration request:

    Dear Mr. Lerman,

    The upcoming conference is open to only a limited number of participants and is intended for planning and implementation personnel, not for those involved in incitement; we are therefore obliged at this stage to turn down your request.
    Moreover, since the new urban planning guidelines were drawn up by the State, at the behest of one of its "superfluous entities," namely, the Ministry of Construction and Housing, and since they constitute a perfect formula for future murders within the public space, the basis for your interest in attending the conference is not exactly clear to us.
    Not only that, but since we have good reason to believe that our response will immediately be posted on the slanderous blog that serves as your customary vehicle of expression, we would greatly appreciate your taking the opportunity to publicly apologize for your earlier attacks.
    Sincerely,
    The Chief Architect's Division

    The disrespectful and vindictive tone in which this governmental entity chose to communicate with a law-abiding citizen speaks volumes about the state of democratic culture within the Construction and Housing Ministry. As Lerman points out:

    Some employees in the Construction Ministry's Chief Architect's Division appear to have taken personally my opinion that the Construction Ministry is a superfluous entity and feel that, on this account, they are somehow entitled to impose upon me individual sanctions unconnected to the matter at hand. In my innocence I had assumed that a citizen of the State of Israel has the right to criticize the government and its ministries if he sees fit to do so, in the hope of ensuring needed rectifications or at least of generating discussion on topics worthy of being addressed. This is an everyday occurence in Israel, a country where freedom of expression is the order of the day. I fail to understand why this freedom ends at the door of the Construction Ministry, and it seems that the Ministry, whose boss I am (as are you), could use a refresher course in demoracy. In all my years as a blogger I have never encountered so disgraceful a response from the government establishment, even from entities that have been subjected by me to prodigious amounts of criticism (the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality first and foremost). Fortunately, most of these entities have realized that the criticism, however harsh and uncompromising, is not personal, and is certainly not directed toward any specific cadre of functionaries, but comes, rather, from a place of wanting to improve things.

    Construction Ministry spokesperson Ariel Rosenberg, responding to Lerman's post on another site where the affair was publicized, reiterated that the conference had been intended for "planners and engineers -- the target audience that will actually be adopting and implementing the guidelines formulated in the new manual," and noted that all other parties who had sought admission to the scheduled conference had been placed on a waiting list. He went on to express strong disapproval of Lerman's mode of expression ("murder by planning" did not go over well), characterizing it as excessive and "bordering on libel." These statements, taken on their own, might seem reasonable enough -- one man's strong criticism being another man's libel -- but the concluding sentences of Rosenberg's response show his true colors -- that is, the Ministry's true colors -- in an embarrassing way:

     [J]ust as public servants must take care to interact with the public in an appropriate and professional manner, so must the public weigh its actions and words wisely when criticizing the actions of official bodies. Mr. Lerman, like journalists and others who are involved in the field or who take an interest in it, may attend the conference in order to learn about the positive activity underway -- space permitting, as noted above.
    The thinly-veiled threat (weigh your words when dealing with us, or suffer the consequences) does not reflect well on the Ministry. Nor does the complacent, patronizing attitude embodied in the spokesperson's words -- the presumption that anything coming out of the Ministry must be "positive," and that the Ministry is doing the larger public a favor when it allows it a glimpse of its inner sanctum.

    Given this attitude, what might one expect of the Ministry's vaunted "professional" activity -- its competence in shaping the environments that we all live in? No one is more eloquent on this topic than Yoav Lerman:
    If we take Construction and Housing Minister Ariel Attias' statements on the subject of housing as a reflection of his views, we find him to be utterly ignorant of the needs that housing shouild meet, excepting, perhaps, the simple provision of a roof over one's head.  The Housing Minister tends to express himself in terms of volume -- "We've authorized a gazillion and a half apartments,""We've put two trillion housing units on the market." But he pays no attention to the details, particularly to location, transit, dwelling sizes and features, or access to opportunities. The Housing Ministry thus continues to market apartments that no one wants, rather than moving in directions that the market is demanding, and that current economic development makes possible.
    And to conclude, I demand an apology from the Chief Architect's Division in the Ministry of Construction and Housing [...] An apology for imposing individual sanctions, for not being able to accept criticism, and, in particular, for the poor quality of the Israeli public space. Any employee of the Chief Architect's Division (or of the Ministry itself, or anyone else) who wishes to do so is welcome to publish a response post on this blog, and to explain why the Ministry of Construction and Housing is necessary and what successes may be laid to its credit, and why the Israeli public is willing to pay more to live in areas that were planned, for the most part, during the British Mandate period, than to live in those that the Ministry was involved in planning.
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