Tel-Aviv, the First Century: Visions, Designs, Actualities

15 The 1925 Master Plan for Tel-Aviv by Patrick Geddes

Reflections on the city of Tel-Aviv are often framed by discussions of modernity, especially the Jewish experience of modernity.1 The origin of the city was the Jewish suburb of Ahuzat Bayit that was founded outside Jaffa in 1909, and changed its name to Tel-Aviv a year later. The city’s many buildings of the 1930s and 1940s in the styles of Le Corbusier, the Bauhaus, and other versions of European modernist architecture suggest that Tel-Aviv is the realization of architectural modernism’s dream of an ideal city erected on a clean slate. The stories of Tel-Aviv’s origin on sand dunes, vineyards, and orange groves seem to support this characterization. Superficially, Tel-Aviv’s urban fabric indeed indicates a modern city with few, if any, historical roots. Yet from its inception, the city was part of the Zionist project of resettling the land of the forefathers, an endeavor that sought to re-establish roots in the ancient homeland. The Tel-Aviv that took shape from the mid-1920s onward grew according to an urban master plan by the Scottish city designer Sir Patrick Geddes (1854–1932). In 1925 Geddes visited Palestine for the third time, on the occasion of the inauguration of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem . He had already visited the country in 1919 and 1920, upon being appointed official planner of the Hebrew University along with his sonin -law architect Sir Frank Mears (1880–1953) in 1919. After the celebrations on 1 April 1925, Geddes traveled to Tel-Aviv where he spent the next fifteen The 1925 Master Plan for Tel-Aviv by Patrick Geddes Volker M. Welter Politics and History are interwoven, but are not commensurate. —Lord Acton 300 Volker M. Welter two months working on the master plan for a large-scale extension of the first, modern Hebrew city. During its gradual implementation in the decades following 1925, his master plan underwent changes and adaptations , but the basic layout of large blocks created by north-south and east-west cross streets intersected by narrower access lanes was adhered to. Geddes appears to have succeeded where many other modern urban planners failed: his ideal city of the future became reality. Patrick Geddes’s 1925 master plan was both a contribution to TelAviv ’s modern appearance and to its foundations in history. This essay approaches Geddes’s Tel-Aviv by asking what ideas about the modern city the Scottish natural scientist—who had meandered from biology via sociology into town planning—had to offer that fascinated Zionists like Israel Zangwill (1864–1926), Montague David Eder (1865–1936), and Haim Weizmann (1874–1952). The attraction of Geddes rested on his two-pronged approach to the city. By the late 1910s, he had consolidated his ideas about cities and their planning into a synergistic concept of large-scale regional planning. Geddes called this conceptual model a valley region or valley section. The goal was to integrate urban and rural ways of life into a regional civilization or region-city.2 This was potentially of interest to the larger Zionist project. While the region-city was Geddes’s vision for the city of the future, it was nevertheless rooted in history, because it was the latest stage of a long historical development. To paraphrase the title of Geddes’s bestknown book, Cities in Evolution,3 cities evolved out of history and were not created with a single stroke or by, indeed, a revolution. With this evolutionary approach to cities and regional planning, Geddes could address the needs of the Zionist movement with regard to both the foundation of a modern Hebrew society in Palestine and the linking of this to Jewish history. The first part of the essay will look at Geddes’s early contacts with various Zionists in 1919 that led to a Scotsman becoming one of the first planners to work for the Zionists in Palestine. It will also set out Geddes’s regional vision for both a resettled Jewish Palestine and the city of TelAviv . The second part will focus on the main characteristics of the plan for Tel-Aviv. The third section will argue that Geddes embedded in the plan manifold links with the histories of both Jaffa and of cities in gen- 301 The 1925 Master Plan for Tel-Aviv by Patrick Geddess eral. Thus the plan questions whether Tel-Aviv really was a city without precedent, as many...