Fenster, Tovi and Oren Shlomo (eds), ערי המחר - תכנון, צדק וקיימות היום/ Are ha-mahar: tikhnun, tsedek ve-kayamut ha-yom. Tel Aviv, Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 2014, 280 pages, $35.90, paperback. ISBN 1882331755.

Cities of Tomorrow: Planning, Justice and Sustainability Today is an important and most welcome addition to the limited texts available in Hebrew in the field of urban planning. The volume comprises a selection of 15 chapters with an introduction by Tovi Fenster and a brief epilogue by Tamar Berger. The chapters are written by a wide range of leading Israeli researchers, activists and urban scholars from a variety of different backgrounds and institutions. The central question underpinning  the different contributions is:  how to plan the cities of tomorrow and to what extent and under what circumstances could they become more just and sustainable?

The volume is divided into two main sections addressing this question. The first section discusses the themes of ‘Justice and sustainability: the principles of planning the cities of tomorrow’ from a theoretical perspective.  In the second section, the book moves to a more practical focus on ‘Planning the cities of tomorrow: towards justice and sustainability’. The different chapters grant a wide spectrum of possible answers and solutions to how we can reach a just and sustainable urban future today and  facilitate a better tomorrow. The book critically engages with these issues with particular attention to the Israeli context. The contributions vary from a more critical approach relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to questions of environmentalism, sustainability, gray space, queer space and gender, among other themes.

In each of the chapters the authors are asked to reflect on their interpretation of the “just and sustainable cities of tomorrow” and on how such cities could be best achieved. The result is a set of rather different contributions, and this, in my view, is one of the main strengths and weaknesses of the book. While each individual contribution offers a nuanced contextual account and provides the reader with a flavoured overview of the topic, the diversity of the volume as a whole  makes it for a challenging read, if faced all at once. A select itinerary through individual chapters is more rewarding. Due to the richness and diversity of the contributions, I have chosen to give a brief overview of each chapter to expose their importance as individual pieces.

The book opens with a seminal contribution by the distinguished urbanist Peter Marcuse. The opening chapter by Marcuse is an important achievement in its own right, as it grants access to a glimpse of this influential urban thinker’s writings to an Israeli audience. His opening essay critically examines the question of sustainably in the context of planning tomorrow’s cities. Moreover, Marcuse argues that sustainably holds a political threat, concealing the existence of different clashes of values and interests by groups and individuals who are excluded from the debate. “Sustainably should not be a goal in its own right but rather a way to balance out the needs of different populations in the city to avoid spatial and social divisions” (pages 25-26). The entire chapter comes across as an illuminating theoretical blueprint that critically forges our thinking about sustainably, justice and planning. In his concluding remarks Marcuse places the responsibility on “us”, the urban dwellers, to reach a balanced and just urban future. As a whole, the piece serves as an excellent introduction to the other contributions in the book.

The second chapter by Issi Rosen-Zvi critically addresses the question of environmental justice in the city of tomorrow from a theoretical point of view. Based on philosophical theories from Aristotle to Rawls (among others) Rosen-Zvi suggests reducing the definition of ‘Environmental Justice’ to its original scope and thus incorporating mainly health hazards. He claims that the weakest urban residents are usually exposed to more health injustices and calls for reconfiguring the urban sphere. Environmental justice is therefore brought to the center of the debate about tomorrow’s cities. Eran Feitelson moves to a more practical evaluation of reducing hazards in the urban environment. He argues that a theoretical discussion is important but not sufficient to capture a full understanding of the questions at stake. Feitelson gives an example from a research project in a Jerusalem neighborhood revealing that some urban areas are better suited to certain hazards land uses. Next, Lia Ettinger argues that the current neo-liberal economy leads to the tragedy of the commons. Ettinger advocates for a new civil contract based on community values and local talent negating the current exploitive and unsustainable mode of production.

Hana Hamdan-Saliba focuses on the lack of urban justice and accountability of the Palestinian minority rights in the Northern port city of Haifa. She stresses that the current imbalance needs readjusting to grant the Palestinian minority a fuller right to the city. The first section concludes with an ethnographic description by Chen Misgav and Tovi Fensters of the Southern Tel Aviv Park encampment during the summer of 2011, when Israel was swept by unprecedented political protest and mass rallies. The unique conditions of the collective encampment bring to the fore some of the most venerable voices sharing new hope and despair about marginalized communities’ future right to the city.

The second part of the book opens with several contributions on how to achieve a just and sustainable city from a more practical perspective. In the opening chapter Hubert Lu-Yon suggests there is an urgent need for a radical change of the current theoretical, practical and institutional planning frameworks. Lu-Yon proposes an alternative planning epistemology beyond what he frames as the current “neo-planning” mode leading to an unjust and unsustainable urban future. In the next section, Shlomo Hasson foresees an urban future with a substantial mobilization of local urban partnerships. He envisages this as a consequence of globalization, the decline of the welfare state and the rise of neo-liberal state policies. Hasson recommends that urban authorities learn how to work with the new partnerships, rather than resist them; this cooperation, he argues, can lead towards a more sustainable and just political urban future.

Moving to a different view of tomorrow’s urban politics, Moriel Ram and Haim Yacobi describe the growing phenomena of irregular migration in today’s Israeli cities. They specifically focus on the case of Tel Aviv as a “Shelter City” for African asylum seekers and refugees illegally crossing the border from Egypt, and on the lack of assistance or official refugee policies by Israeli authorities. These factors, they argue, severely hinder the possibilities for a better future.

The chapter by Erez Tzfadia and Oren Yiftachel brings the current academic debate about “Gray Space” (see Yiftachel 2009) to the attention of the Hebrew reader. The main argument put forward is that a major part of the worldwide urban growth—and the ‘West’ is no exception—takes place in informal spaces laying literally "in the shadow" of the formal, planned city, and partially exists outside the gaze of state authorities and city planners. The urgent need for a more “balanced city of tomorrow” is further stressed by Tali Hatuka, who criticizes current urban planning practices for putting too much emphasis on restoration and participation. Hatuka believes that in order to challenge and break away from the present decaying urban condition, we should develop a utopian vision of a more balanced urban future.

The lack of such vision is observed in Daniel Gutwein’s study, which critically assesses the Israeli government’s neglect of the country’s periphery over the last decades. Gutwein gives facts and figures to support his argument on the ongoing privatization and restructuring process by both left and rightwing governments. He suggests that reaching a more sustainable and just tomorrow entitles an urgent shift by the government to start investing in the Northern and Southern periphery. Another type of urban periphery is investigated by Oren Shlomo, who critically engages with the contested urban environment of Palestinian East Jerusalem. Shlomo argues that the planning system is a major force behind the governmental apparatus controlling the local populations’ urban needs. He claims that over the last few decades a weakening of Palestinian urban sovereignty in Jerusalem has been taking place and this has been paralleled by the Israeli authorities’ growing control of the local residents’ social and spatial basic needs.

Ronit Davidovich-Marton and Lihi Ein Gedi Davidovich perceive the current Israeli National Master Plan “TAMA 35” as too rigid and inflexible to cope with the challenges faced by a diverse and dense Israeli urban reality. As an alternative future, they suggest a more flexible national planning framework able to cope with the multitude of challenges that Israel’s planning system is facing. In the last chapter, Carmela Yaakobi-Walke and Rebecca Sternberg discuss the unique Israeli urban phenomenon of small-scale urban agriculture plots (Meshek Ezer, in Hebrew).  Originally part of an early twentieth-  century German planning tradition, in the 1950s these plots were allocated by the government to support the local family economy. Although this represented a rather small-scale intervention from a wider city perspective, the use of these plots as a “spontaneous garden city”, the authors argue, promoted local entrepreneurship and diversity in tomorrow’s Israeli central cities.

As noted above, the book mainly engages with various examples through an Israeli empirical lens. At the same time, however, it also focuses on several aspects of contemporary urbanism and as such it is relevant to understand wider challenges and processes taking place in most cities worldwide. Especially timely is Peter Marcuse’s critical examination and questioning of what we mean when we use the term sustainably in the context of planning tomorrow’s cities. This is further picked up by the different contributions in the book.

I would like to conclude with a tribute to Professor Peter Hall, a founding father and giant of urban and regional planning, who recently passed away. I find it relevant to mention one of his most influential books bearing a similar title, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Hall, 2002). Peter Hall’s book grants a wide ranging positive reading of what we can learn from the past of the Euro-American city planning tradition. However, early on in his book he warns the reader that planning can quickly become a problem rather than a solution:

“In practice, the planning of cities emerges almost imperceptibly into the problems of cities, and those into the economics and sociology and politics of cities, and those into the entire-socio-economic-political–cultural life of the time” (Hall, 2002: 5).

In its remarkable diversity and detail, I believe that Tovi Fenster and Oren Shlomo’s volume manages to capture a certain moment in the wider critical understanding of the current and future challenges faced by planners in Israel and further afield. As such, it makes an important contribution (the first in Hebrew) to better understand what Peter Hall refers to as the complexity and multidisciplinary challenges at stake to plan a better tomorrow for our cities.

I strongly recommend the book to anyone concerned with the burning challenges of how we can improve and shape our contemporary urban present to build a better future. I am certainly looking forward to suggesting  several of its chapters  to my own students. 

References

Hall P (2002) Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Yiftachel O (2009) Critical theory and ‘gray space’. City 13 240-56.