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Israel's Second Generation New

Towns
Leonard Downie, Jr.
Story in .rtf

Tel Aviv, Israel

January, 1972
For many tourists and resident foreigners, Jerusalem is the place to be in Israel. Among the
countless emotional touchstones and historical reminders in and around its ancient walled
"old city" are important shrines of three major religions: the excavated western ("wailing")
wall of the Hebrews' second temple; the Moslems' golden-domed Mosque of Omar over the
rook on which Mohammed is said to have ascended into Heaven; and the various places
where Jesus was tried, forced to carry the cross, crucified and buried. Inside the traditional
"Jewish quarter" of the old city and on the hills of eastern Jerusalem that overlook it - all of
which was captured by the Israelis from Jordan during the 1967 war - historic old buildings
are being remodeled and modern highrises are being constructed, mostly to provide
luxurious hotels and "second home" apartments for wealthy foreigners, many of them
Americans. The rest of Jerusalem also continues to grow vigorously (and, some fear, too
rapidly) as the capital of Israel and world center of Jewish culture, with new government
offices, museums, archives, university buildings and suburban residential communities.
 East Jerusalem: Walled
old city and domed
Mosque of Omar are in
center background near
horizon; hills on which
new luxury hotels and
apartments are to be built
are on the right.

But for an overwhelming number of urban Israelis, whose emotional attachment to

Jerusalem is undeniable, Tel Aviv and Haifa on the Mediterranean coast are the places in
which to live. Despite the polluted haze of industrial smoke that often hangs over Haifa's
harbor, and the noisy traffic, Miami Beach-like seaside hotels and monotonous suburbs of
Tel Aviv, Israel's two largest communities still offer much of what has always made urban
living desirable in the favored cities of the world.

In Tel Aviv, there are the countless crowded sidewalk cafes on Dizengoff Street, the public
promenades and beaches along the Mediterranean Sea, the bookstores, varied shops and
open air food stands and European bakeries of Allenby Street, the sprawling Carmel food
market and Oriental bazaars in the maze of narrow old lanes in the Yemenite quarter, the
great variety of restaurants, theaters and nighttime activities throughout the central area,
and the tree-lined streets and parks for strollers almost everywhere in the city. Most major
avenues and centers of activity are surrounded by places where people live. As a result,
even in the suburbs, shops of every kind are located just downstairs or down the street from
one's apartment, green places where the children can go are nearby, and the sidewalks are
alive day and night with people.

In Haifa, a smaller, quieter city, the reknowned flora of the upper class neighborhoods on
the ridges of Mount Carmel trails down its sides and fills even the central business,
shopping and residential districts just above the harbor. Streets of shops and homes wind
around each other on the green hillsides, connected vertically by picturesque stairways and
walks that are bordered by narrow rows of shops and trees on some levels, and that open
into wide vistas on others. Haifa is often compared to San Francisco; it has a similarly
spectacular setting overlooking a bay and a pleasant, active center on a pedestrian scale.
 Lively downtown Tel
Aviv at night.
(E. Pikovsky Ltd. photo)

Israeli government planners are now trying to recreate the attractive characteristics of cities
like Tel Aviv and Haifa in the new towns being built in the country's interior. From two
decades of trial-and-error building for the great numbers of arriving immigrants have
evolved functionally integrated neighborhoods of housing, stores, offices and government
services that, in miniature, are not so very unlike established areas in the large cities. In
fact, the best of these new town neighborhoods are more conveniently arranged for
pedestrians and more imaginative in design than their big city counterparts. But they are
still only small, isolated parts of otherwise confused and sterile developments that continue
to suffer from their beginnings as loose, inefficient "garden city" collections of barracks-
like housing segregated from sparse commercial and government centers by overly
generous, barren open spaces. Much of the commercial diversity, cultural activities and
social excitement of satisfying city life is still missing. To try to solve this problem the
government has begun building a few more projects in which the planners have applied
from the very beginning on a town-wide (rather than neighborhood) scale what they
believed they had learned about building truly urban places on a manageable human scale.
These more recent projects can be considered a "second generation" of new towns in Israel.

"We can't really build a town yet," insisted Baruch Venger, a Ministry of Housing
employee who helped launch the new town of Karmiel, and is now its mayor. Karmiel,
located thirty miles by car northeast of Haifa in hilly central Galilee, is the newest, most
experimental and most closely watched of the second generation new towns. It is now
beginning the struggle to transform itself from a growing collection of carefully pieced
together physical parts into a real community breathing life of its own.

"We can build houses for people," Venger told me, as he explained the experiments in
architecture and building construction that are taking generally pleasing shapes at Karmiel.
"But the problem," he added, "is how to build a new society."

How indeed can a government or any other single force create in one stroke not just the
hardware of a city, no matter how attractive that may be, but also the satisfying, self-
perpetuating exuberance of life that makes cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa desirable places in
which to dwell? This, of course, is the basic problem confronting builders of "new towns"
all over the world today. Few, however, have faced it so frankly with as much
understanding so soon as has Israel. From the very beginning, it has been forced to build
wholly independent new communities scattered throughout the country. Because of their
physical isolation these communities must become socially self-sustaining entities to
survive, rather than dependent satellites of existing large cities. As a result, Israel has
become a pioneer in experimenting with the effects of land use, architecture, traffic
patterns, acclimation and other social factors.

Israel's second generation of new towns merit close study for this reason, even though they
lag behind contemporary projects in the United States and, especially, Europe in the
progress being made in controlling pollution, disposing of wastes, burying and servicing
utility lines, utilizing telecommunications and the like. Israel, burdened once again by the
task of housing an immense number of new immigrants (currently from the Soviet Union)
and still preoccupied financially with defense, does not yet have the time or money for
these technological experiments. Despite the possibly dire future consequences, it still must
build fast. Its greatest need, in addition to a sheer numerical increase in housing units, is the
creation of socially workable new communities that will bring together immigrants and
"veteran" Israelis, and attract more people away from Tel Aviv and Haifa to help better
balance the country's population distribution.

Although there are thirty new towns in various stages of development in Israel, three
projects stand out from the others as particularly belonging to a new generation in planning
and execution: Ashdod, the new seaport on the Mediterranean south of Tel Aviv; Arad, a
new resting place for tourists in the Wilderness of Judah overlooking the Dead Sea and the
home of workers exploiting the mineral and chemical wealth of both the Dead Sea and the
Negev Desert; and Karmiel, put down arbitrarily in the middle of the Galilee hills to
concentrate more Jews in a region heavily populated with Israeli Arabs, and to provide not
too far from the coast, in a scenic setting with an agreeable climate, a new magnet to draw
population and industry away from the crowded areas.

Each of the three towns, although still in the early stages of its projected development,
already possesses an identity of its own, a particular sense of place that is missing in most
of the monotonous first generation new towns. Each also has a much better reputation
among the Israelis than did the earlier projects, most of which are still derided as
"immigrant towns." A mechanic living in a suburb of Tel Aviv, for instance, has been north
to see Karmiel and would move there if he found the right job. A young woman working in
the aircraft industry in Tel Aviv has heard from her friends that Arad is a "together" place
to which young Israeli families are moving and staying. A survey of Ashdod residents
showed that an unusually high percentage - three of every four families, including
immigrants and veteran Israelis - plan to make that fast-growing city their permanent home.
 ISRAEL: the three "second generation" new
towns: Karmiel in cintral Galilee in the north;
Ashdod, the new seaport just south of Tel Aviv;
and Arad, in the Negev near the Dead Sea.

By no means are all three projects the same. Each was started at a different time, and each
for a very different purpose. Each also embodies, with varying degrees of success, its own
peculiar combination of the Israeli planners' most recently refined notions of new town
building. Beginning at Ashdod, which was the first of the three to be started, one can follow
the progress in social organization, land use, building design and construction methods
from there to Arad and, finally, to Karmiel, where, at the moment, the achievements and
shortcomings of a quarter century of new town building in Israel can best be seen and
analyzed.

Except for Beersheva, an older "new town" being developed at a long existing trading
center and crossroad, no other project has as much reason for being where it is, and, as a
result, is growing as fast, as Ashdod. This igantic undertaking includes not only a new
town, but also the $120 million development of a new port, located on the best suitable
deep water site in the middle of Israel's Mediterranean coast, south of Tel Aviv and north of
the seaside resort town of Ashkelon. A port at Ashdod was needed because Haifa, the
country's leading port since the days of British rule, is in an inconvenient northern corner of
the nation, and was being used to capacity anyway. A much smaller harbor at old Jaffa near
Tel Aviv could not handle large cargoes efficiently because of unfavorable shoreline
conditions, and it was closed when Ashdod's harbor opened. The new Ashdod port is
convenient to the big Tel Aviv and Jerusalem markets for imports, and much closer to the
southern regions of Israel, from which "Jaffa" citrus fruits and desert minerals are exported.
Nothing but empty sand dunes, bordered by citrus groves further inland, existed on the site
for Ashdod in the late 1950s when construction began on a thirty-foot high, two-mile long
curved breakwater, along with the necessary piers, wharves, docks and storage buildings
for the new port. The breakwater is a notable engineering achievement involving on-the-
beach casting of underwater support piers weighing up to forty tons each. It is today a kind
of functional sculpture - a sweeping arc reaching out into the sea. It can be seen from
almost any point on the higher land immediately to the south, where the city itself is being
built. Ashdod's port already handles nearly three million tons of cargo each year, compared
to the nearly four million tons that move through Haifa annually. It will become Israel's
largest port in a very few years.

As a result, the city of Ashdod is a booming economic success. It already has achieved a
self-feeding growth momentum unique among Israeli new towns. Its population has grown
to nearly 50,000 in a single decade, and is expected eventually to reach 350,000, which
would make it by far the biggest planned new town in the nation. Its chief attraction is the
job market of its expanding port and the industries that make use of the raw materials
unloaded there. These jobs and their good pay, as well as all the ancillary business
opportunities of a boom town, also have attracted a large number of native Israelis (Sabras)
and older European immigrants to join the African and Middle Eastern newcomers who
furnished most of the labor during the port's first years of growth.

ASHDOD, in 1963 -
Construction on the new
port and town on what had
been empty sand dunes.
The beginning of its great
arcing breakwater can be
seen in the lower right.
(The smaller, L-shaped
breakwater in center is for
construction purposes
only.)
(Israeli government photo)

These factors have had a great influence on the progress of Ashdod as a planned
community. The government has had to expend little effort to attract employers,
commercial activity, or the variety of residents needed to create the bustle of city life that
has often been in short supply in new town projects in the hinterland. And although the
government has built more housing in Ashdod, because of its size, than anywhere else in
the country, private developers also have found a lucrative market there and are building
entire neighborhoods themselves. They are aiming in particular for Ashdod's unusual new
town market of higher income Israelis and American and European immigrant families. A
sign outside one recently completed residential tower standing on concrete stilts on a hill
overlooking the sea advertised "exclusive, American-style apartments" with central radio
and television antenna hookups, central heating (still a relative luxury in Israel) and private
parking. On other hillside locations near the beach are growing neighborhoods of detached
single-family houses, some of them also built in expensive, roomy, American styles on
large lots.

Three faces of Ashdod:

Top - expensive,
American-style single-
family home on large lot
near the beach;

Middle - rows of rather

monotonous but well-
constructed apartment
boxes

Bottom - abundance of
greenery surrounding a
pedestrian walk and
playground between
apartment buildings.
Ashdod's very dynamism, however, and the growing role of private developers there, do
create some problems. Although the city is being built according to a rather rigid overall
land use plan (which places heavy industry to the north of the docks, for instance, so that
winds from the sea blow industrial smoke and odors away from the rest of the city to the
south), it is immediately obvious that widely differing amounts of care are being taken in
the layout and construction of various residential blocks. The single-family homes and
luxury apartment houses are being crafted attractively and solidly for higher income
families. But in some other areas of town on lower ground, block after monotonous block is
filled with apartment boxes that look like "immigrant" town "public housing," although,
ironically, much of it has been built by private developers. No experiments in placing
veteran Israelis alongside immigrants of various backgrounds, or putting upper and lower
income families together, are being tried in Ashdod. Its primary concern is growth. Yet,
even its duller areas benefit from the lush vegetation everywhere, the parks leading to the
public beach that will border the entire city along the sea, the unusually lively commercial
center of each quarter, and Ashdod's overall prosperity. Government surveys show that the
only dissatisfied residents there are those who believe their jobs and pay are not as good as
the next fellow's.

The "American style" apartments and suburban single-family homes for the middle class
are the most telling clue to Ashdod's place in the progress of new town building in Israel.
Its overall land use plan is generally like that of the projects considered to be "new towns"
that are now being built primarily for middle class families in the United States, and
particularly like the plan for Columbia, Maryland. Like Columbia, Ashdod essentially is
being built in several "villages" grouped roughly in a circle around a "downtown" city
center. Like the villages of Columbia, each "quarter" of Ashdod also has its own subcenter
of shopping, offices, government services and clinics, restaurants, cinema and the like.
Large boulevards carry the mainstream of auto traffic around the outside of the city and
through it on a few major axes, with limited access loops reaching into each village, in a
pattern almost exactly like that for Columbia. This road network is supplemented inside
each village in both Ashdod and Columbia with pedestrian ways that lead from homes and
apartments to schools, some stores, parks and recreation areas.

Both Columbia and Ashdod are essentially compromises between suburb and city. Each has
built-up areas of city-like density with walks and congregating places for pedestrians, but
these focal points are essentially "shopping centers" around which the residential satellites
revolve. The most efficient way to get to and from the centers, especially from the more
distant residential areas, is by automobile along the efficiently planned avenues. These
roadways, and not the pedestrian paths of the villages, are the real arteries of both new
towns, even though far fewer Ashdod residents, like Israelis generally, own cars than do the
middle class families of Columbia, Maryland.

In Columbia, as in the older new towns of Israel, an attempt was made to spot a few
convenience stores, an elementary school and recreational facilities in each smaller
grouping of residential units that together form the circle around each village center. In
Columbia, each village is broken down into several of these smaller neighborhoods, and
each is supposed to be an almost autonomous unit on a pedestrian scale with a
psychological unity of its own. Some planners now point out, however, that although
children in these neighborhoods may congregate in the schools and on the playgrounds, the
adults in the neighborhoods of both Columbia and the first generation of Israeli new towns
still gravitate toward the village or town center, where the action is, if it is to be found at
all. Even the middle class adults who are getting away from crowded city life in pastoral
green suburbia in the United States go as often as they can to the nearest big shopping mall
to mingle with other people and enjoy whatever color and variety are there.

Comparison of Ashdod and Columbia

Master Plans.

What became clear to Israeli planners, as has been obvious for some time in the United
States, is that the only "unifying" factor of suburban or "new town" neighborhoods is
similarity in economic and social strata. Families tend to group themselves as residents of a
neighborhood of $30,000 split-level houses in Columbia, or as a group of "veteran" Israeli
or European immigrant families in the better neighborhoods of an Israeli new town. The
growing determination of the Israeli government to integrate older residents and
immigrants of all backgrounds and income groups was simply not being fostered, as many
planners had hoped, by dividing new towns into decisively separated residential
neighborhoods, each of which was supposed to grow into an integrated, homey unit. The
physical division only prevented the entire town from ever becoming a cohesive
community.

As a result, its residents were unable to find the satisfactions of urban living in either the
limited facilities of their own neighborhood or the too distant town center. The commerce
of the town center and the stores of the neighborhoods needlessly duplicated each other.
Depending on the peculiar circumstances of each town, either the neighborhood storefronts
stood empty as residents somehow made their way to the better stocked, more varied
center, or the town center remained under-used because it was too inconvenient for car-less
families to reach frequently.

In Ashdod, one can see the first tentative move away from this dilemma in Israeli new
towns, which is one basic difference between it and Columbia, Maryland, and other
American new town projects. The larger residential quarters of Ashdod (of which there will
eventually be sixteen, each containing about 20,000 people - compared to the 15,000
population of each of Columbia's planned seven villages) replaced smaller neighborhoods
(each of which contain only a few hundred families in Columbia) as the primary planning
units. This gives each family a larger universe within pedestrian access of his front door.
Each quarter can thus support much more than a few stores, a school and a playground or
two. In fact, the center of each of the first two completed quarters in Ashdod is larger,
livelier and more varied than many of the entire town centers of first generation new towns
in Israel. Because each center also has apartments mixed well with the scores of stores and
offices, it constitutes a more natural, around-the-clock urban place than even the
"downtown" of Columbia, which in reality is a few office buildings and a large covered
shopping mall surrounded by parking lots and major auto arteries that cut it off from the
places where people live.

Within the limited confines of the two-block square center of the first quarter of Ashdod,
one is almost back on the streets of Tel Aviv. It is not a boxy shopping mall inside, but
rather a criss-crossing of pedestrian streets and small plazas that go up and down, under
cover and out in the open, in and around irregularly placed and shaped buildings containing
apartments, stores, offices, cafes. There are department store, appliance and sporting goods
shops, foodstores, bakeries, dry cleaners, real estate offices, and even a "unisex boutique."
People are coming and going in every direction, or simply sitting outside enjoying the
winter Mediterranean sun in the numerous sidewalk cafes. Shopping housewives mingle
with workers on their lunch hour. Even the gaudy signs on some shops, many of which
would be banned as nonconforming in Columbia, Maryland, add to the color of life there.
Center of residential
quarter in Ashdod:

TOP: The view from

across the quarter's major
auto street.

Bottom: The center's

largest mall area.
 Inside the commercial
center, looking both ways
along a wide pedestrian
street, off which others run
in and around stores,
offices and apartments.
Note in center of both
photos three-story
apartment segment.

The people are undeniably working class men and women, the real builders of any port or
industrial city. Here and there, one hears French spoken by the numerous North African
Jewish immigrants. Something more is being built for them in Ashod than the old European
or American factory town, or the "immigrant towns" elsewhere in Israel. In Ashdod, they
have lively gathering places, somewhat better housing, the beach along the sea and
attractive parks - like the one that begins immediately across the main street from the
commercial center of the first quarter, with a flagstone terrace overlooking the sea, and
continues down a long slope of grass, pine and palm trees and tropical plants to the beach.

But for the executives

working in Ashdod, the
new town is still far from
being their idea of a
cosmopolitan place. Many
of them are commuters
who go to Tel Aviv for
entertainment, the arts, and
other aspects of big city
life. Their homes are either
in Tel Aviv or in the
suburban neighborhoods
of large houses in Ashkelon, the summer beach resort less than a half hour drive south of
Ashdod.

Because Ashdod has no single "downtown" at present, necessary governmental functions

have been parceled out in temporary locations in the various centers of the residential
quarters. As a result, the city lacks overall cohesiveness in that disturbing way that Israel's
older new towns and most meandering American suburbs do.

A big city downtown is supposed to be built eventually in Ashdod. An ambitious design

selected in a national competition would place government buildings, public halls, hotels,
stores and apartments around plazas in tiers that would step down to a seaside cultural
center and park. The architect's model is impressive, but construction cannot begin for
years, until many more residential quarters around the downtown site are completed. Even
then, realization of so large an undertaking depends on the interest that can be generated
among prospective private tenants and investors. One wonders if there will be sufficient
interest if too many of Ashdod's higher wage earners are already accustomed to spending
their non-working hours in Tel Aviv and Ashkelon. Perhaps there will be, but only because
of Ashdod's overall rapid growth and unusual economic potential as a large port.

How, then, can suitably lively, and expensive, centers be created for much slower growing,
less dynamic new towns? This problem has long vexed new town builders in Europe and
the United States too. In eight-year-old Foster City, California, near San Francisco, for
example, the residential areas are more than half finished and occupied, yet there still is
nothing but dirt covering the huge plot designated by an old sign as the "future town
center." For years, the residents of Columbia, Maryland, which is clearly the most advanced
American new towm project, had to drive to either Baltimore or Washington, D.C., each
about thirty miles away, to find a department store, first-run movie or the speciality shops
that middle class shoppers dote on. Only last summer did the first section of Columbia's
new covered shopping mall open. It turned out to be quite different from what had been
began as a more varied "downtown" of stores, offices and hotels in a setting on the shore of
a lake that would have fit in well with what had been evolving as the "personality" of
Columbia. Only three office buildings, all used by Columbia's developer, have been built
on that site. Merchandisers were more interested in development of a "regional" covered
mall center that they believed suburbanites would want, with a surrounding sea of parking
for shoppers driving from greater distances beyond Columbia itself. The existing center is
certainly used, and welcomed for what it contains, by Columbia residents. But it is out of
touch with their homes by foot and no more a part of Columbia psychologically than if it
were any one of several similar malls in the Washington or Baltimore areas.

An alternative approach - building an attractive, expensive center first, fitting it in with

surrounding residential neighborhoods - was tried in Reston, Virginia, south of
Washington, D.C. Exceptionally well-designed apartment buildings and combinations of
shops and apartments were carefully placed around man-made Lake Anne at the bottom of
a bowl of low hills. Lake Anne Center immediately won national praise for its architectural
and natural beauty. However, the center's great initial cost helped bankrupt Reston's
original developer, Robert Simon, and forced the scuttling of much of his more daring plans
when his financial backer, Gulf Oil Corporation, took over the project.
What Israeli planners wanted was a town center that would grow proportionately with the
project itself, and not a heart to be put in after the body had grown almost to maturity. They
also wanted to spread the expense out over the time it took to build the entire project, rather
than putting up a huge sum at either the very beginning or very end of development. To try
to accomplish this, they turned to a concept that, once again, seemingly mirrors the way
"unplanned" cities have always grown naturally: the linear center.

Instead of being a point in the middle of a circular community deeign, the linear center
becomes the spine of the city, growing longer as the residential neighborhoods alongside it
grow. As each stage of residential development is completed, so too is a parallel section of
the city center with all the services needed for a population that size. Until the project has
grown very large and outlying neighborhoods are built, the center is never very far, even by
foot, from most of the homes in the neighborhoods alongside it. Less duplication of
commercial facilities, except for daily needs, would then take place in the residential areas
themselves. Yet life in them still benefits from the nearby urban activity of the center, and
its economic activity is stimulated, in turn, by its easy accessibility to most residents. The
diverse functions of the city - housing, commerce, education, recreation, government and
other activities - are more closely intertwined with one another.

Evolution of Linear Center

Concept

Top - Plan, in principle, of

new towns like Ashdod,
Israel, and Columbia,
Maryland

Middle - Plan for Arad,

Israel

Bottom - Plan for Karmiel,

 Israel.

In Columbia, Maryland, and Ashdod, Israel, and most other past new town projects in the
U.S., England, Europe and Israel, a circular group of residential villages or quarters, each
with its own commercial center, is grouped around a "downtown" city center, which
usually is not built, however, until most of the surrounding city is completed.

In Arad, Israel, each section of the linear city center that bisects the new town is built along
with the adjacent residential quarters. Each quarter does not need its own center, as a result,
and at each stage of development, there is sufficient "downtown" for the number of
residents.
In Karmiel, Israel, the linear center is considerably enlarged to become the true "spine" of
the city. Each section of the center also is to be built along with the corresponding
residential quarter. Only outlying neighborhoods (built on hillsides here) will have their
own subcenters.

The great avenues of the world's large cities have always been, after all, linear activity
centers for the residential areas around them. The function they serve in carrying pedestrian
and auto traffic through their areas can easily be duplicated by a new town linear center. In
addition, new towns have an opportunity to keep cars on separate axes, away from
pedestrians, who can be given their own grand avenue through the middle of the center, and
easy access to it from their homes by passageways above or below the automobile traffic
arteries. The builders of one American new town, Park Forest South, Illinois, near Chicago,
believe that it also would be easier and more economical for public transportation to be
built along a linear center (See LD-1; The Midwest: An Unlikely Laboratory for New
Towns). A single such line could reach as many people and functions as several built on
radii from the edges to the point center of a circular new town. This is one of several other
reasons that they have planned a linear center for their project.

Park Forest South is just beginning to build. The linear center concept has been tried
elsewhere only in limited ways in a few new town projects in Scotland and the Soviet
Union. Israeli planners, therefore, were the first to make it the predominate physical and
psychological theme of a new town and, at the same time, eliminate decisively separated
individual neighborhoods and quarters with competing subcenters of their own.

As it happened, the first Israeli project planned with a linear center, Arad, used the concept
as much for climatic reasons as any other. The hard lessons of Beersheva, originally
planned as a spacious low-density suburban "garden city" that did not wear well in the wind
and sun of the Negev desert, dictated that Arad be more suitably designed for its even more
remote location on a high, exposed desert plateau on the edge of the Negev, where the
Wilderness of Judah begins alongside the Dead Sea.

As illogical as Arad's location may seem at first, there were definite reasons for its
selection. Although the barren wilderness around Arad supports almost no natural
vegetation, it does contain hidden treasures: phosphate for fertilizers, natural white cement
and marble for building materials, and a wealth of minerals in the stagnant water of the
Dead Sea. These are all processed at nearby factories in the desert. A new petro-chemical
plant also was put in the area, far from the country's large population centers, which it
might otherwise further contaminate. The plateau site picked for Arad is convenient enough
to these enterprises, and, at the same time, relatively accessible to the rest of the nation by
highways over the gradually ascending hills leading to the new town from the west.

On the other side of Arad, the plateau falls away sharply to the east in a series of steep hills
reaching the flat shoreline of the Dead Sea, 3300 feet below Arad and 1300 feet below sea
level. From a vantage point just a few miles east of Arad's center, one can look out over the
spectacularly rugged hills to the eerily still green-blue Dead Sea and mountains of Jordan
beyond it. It is at this spot that Arad's resort area for tourists is being built (two hotels and
restaurants are there already), adding more jobs and revenue to the town's economy.
Recently improved roads wind from there down to the Dead Sea shore and "beaches" and
further to the site of ancient Sodom to the South. A new road north also takes tourists to the
recently excavated mountaintop palace-fortress of Massada, built by Herod as a retreat and
later besieged and captured by Roman legions from the last zealot Jewish holdouts of a
revolt against Rome 1900 years ago.

ARAD: Its desolate site on

barren desert hills as
construction began in the
early 1960s. Buildings are
temporary structures used
to house planners and
workers; the beginnings of
the street layout for the
town are visible, in center.
(Israeli gov't. photo)

In some respects, Arad's climate is as agreeable as it could be in the desert. Its summer
temperatures are about the same as Beersheva's, averaging 80 to 90 degrees, and its lofty
location benefits from cooling breezes. But it is exposed to steady sun radiation and
occasionally vicious high winds carrying cutting dust and sand from the desert. Drinking
water is nowhere in the area.

The planning team for Arad was charged with designing a city protected from the dangers
and unpleasant aspects of the climate and yet "open" enough to and in harmony with the
severe natural beauty and vistas of the area.

ARAD – a tight-knit new town turned inward from the desert wind and heat to face a linear city center.
Map shows
Arad almost
alone in
Negev
Desert. The
hotel resort
area is on a
high point
overlooking
the Dead
Sea, and near
the road to
the first-
century
mountaintop
ruins at
Massada.

An architect's
model and an
artist's view
of Arad's
third
residential
quarter (#3
on map
below).

Note the
well-
sheltered
main
pedestrian
"street" that
runs down
the middle of
the quarter to
the adjoining
section of the
linear town
center. This
quarter is
now under

Top - First
residential
quarter of
Arad (#1 in
map at top)

Middle - is
shown in
detailed plan

Bottom - in
photo.

Note: stores,
schools,
clinics, open
spaces,
malls,
pedestrian
walks – all
inside
protective
border of
large
apartment
buildings.
Auto access
is limited to
parking cul-
de-sacs.
The planners responded with a plan for a densely concentrated community that encloses
within a wall of protective buildings and low hills on its perimeter interior plazas,
promenades and carefully tended greenery. Water is piped in from the west. A unique city
"landscape" is being resourcefully crafted out of flagstone walks and malls, decorative
stones rather than grass in the median strips of boulevards, and aggregate stone facing
manufactured in the tan colors of the desert for the fronts of the buildings. Arad is
becoming a picturesque man-made oasis in a region where the only other signs of life are
the black tents of a few hardy Bedouins on the more gentle hills to the west and the fleeting
glimpses of shy mountain goats on the bluffs of the eastern edge of the plateau.
 Median strip in Arad: "landscaping" that does
not need water

The majority (30,000) of Arad's projected 50,000 residents are to live in a densely built-up
central area placed in a slight depression in the plateau like a clenched fist held in a cupped
hand. This rounded central area will contain six symmetrical residential quarters, three
lined up on each side of a linear center of commercial and public facilities and gathering
places that bisects the town from south to north. Taller apartment buildings on the
periphery of the residential quarters, some of which almost touch each other, protect the
interior spaces, the town center and the wide boulevards from excessive wind and sun.
Pedestrian ways are shaded here and there by building overhangs. Apartments have private
courtyards, patios or balconies enclosed by roofs and walls. Low, more open kinds of
housing are built in the shadows of larger buildings.

Auto traffic is kept outside the residential quarters on large streets running between them
and alongside the linear center. One can drive from one end of the central area to the other
in a few minutes and on the main thoroughfare pass through all of Arad in five minutes. Yet
it is also possible to drive into every part of each quarter on dead-end service lanes and park
within 100 yards of any residence or store.

The "main streets" of the quarters and the town center are the pedestrian avenues. In each
quarter, they pass by apartments, schools, nurseries, clinics, synagogues and small stores
for daily needs before crossing a single auto street to reach the town center, which opens up
into broader plazas inside groups of larger stores, banks, a post office, a cultural center,
cinemas, the town administration and other facilities, many of which are already in place.
Although each residential quarter will have its own name, unique "floor plan" and
necessary daily services, they will tend to blend into one another, and the town center, to
form a cohesive whole. Thus, the central area's density serves both as protection from the
desert's less friendly elements, and also as a means to make what always will remain a
fairly small city a nevertheless relatively urban place, more urban already, in fact, than
several larger "first generation" Israeli new towns. The compactness of the center, and the
staging of the construction of the linear commercial and governmental spine to coincide
with the development of the adjacent residential quarters also makes these facilities more
economical, even though their physical quality is a marked improvement over that of many
other new towns in Israel.

"A certain density is needed to absorb initial costs of the infrastructure (public buildings
and spaces, roads and utilities) and, later, to maintain it," explained Shmuel Horwitz, a
Ministry of Housing new town planner. Streets, walks and pipelines are relatively short in
Arad, and yet sufficient to serve 50,000 people. In the United States, pointed out Horwitz,
who studied urban planning there, suburban and even "new town" developments for similar
size populations are spread out over so many hundreds of acres that very high infrastructure
costs must be passed along to residents in high home prices and local taxes for
maintenance, with the result that only the middle class can buy into them.

There also is a definite market in Israel for suburban-style living, and Arad's design
provides for that too. Outlying neighborhoods planned for a total of 20,000 people are to be
nestled into protective hillsides surrounding the central area. One of these neighborhoods,
with an open view of the center of town and the plateau beyond it, is already being filled
with privately built, higher priced single-family homes in individualized styles. These areas
are to have more complete subcenters of their own in the future.

Arad's undeniable urbanity in so remote a location, its growing architectural and aesthetic
appeal, and its adaptation to the surrounding desert all provide striking contrasts between it
and a notable American new town project being built in a similarly isolated, rugged desert
setting. The American development, Lake Havasu City, Arizona, is being promoted as a
"prototype" for future new towns of its kind(See LD-3, Two New Town Mirages). It is
being built by private contractors with a "master plan" and public facilities provided by its
founder, Robert McCulloch, a Los Angeles real estate investor and manufacturer of chain
saws, boat motors and small aircraft. McCulloch is moving his factories to the new town,
which is located on the shore of man-made Lake Havasu on the Colorado River along the
California-Arizona border in what also is otherwise empty desert far from any big city.
Like Arad, Lake Havasu City is being built as a self-sufficient settlement on an economic
foundation of specialized industry (in this case, McCulloch's) and tourism (Lake Havasu is
being used for water sports and a backdrop for the London Bridge, which was rebuilt there
after being carted in pieces from England).

Despite these similarities, the two projects could not be more different in their respective
methods of execution. Rather than being a closely planned experiment in land use,
architectural design and social intercourse in a remote desert setting, Lake Havasu City is
basically a real estate sales promotion with a layout no different than if it were being built
in the San Fernando Valley outside Los Angeles. Although the temperature is hotter than in
Arad, Lake Havasu City is growing as a loose connection of single-family homes, house
trailers, small apartment buildings and cinder block stores scattered widely across the
barren rock and dust; everything is exposed to the unrelenting sun. Nothing is located
within safe or convenient walking distance of anything else, and there is no public
transportation. Except for the focal point lakeside recreation areas, the project has no unity
of design or overall physical sense of community. Except for its tourist hotels and well-
watered golf courses, its landscape remains desolate and uninviting.

Lake Havasu City is not really making progress in coping with its environment or
experimenting with any new forms of urban structure. Arad, on the other hand, located in
almost exactly the same kind of setting (and without the advantage of a usable lake) is
blossoming into a climatically sound, potentially attractive urban place.

Part of Arad's promise is due to its social planning. Its first inhabitants were not the usual
confused immigrant families talked into settling in an unknown new town project
immediately upon arriving in Israel. Instead, they were all Israeli-born families or
immigrants who had already been living in the country for some time. They were specially
selected by the government for their needed special skills, economic stability and
willingness to become pioneer settlers at Arad (in exchange for certain housing and tax
subsidies). Among them were all of Arad's government planners, who were required to live
there.

As a result, the population of Arad during its formative years has been unusually young,
adventuresome, highly skilled, and economically secure group of people, who soon created
an enviable esprit de corps. Only now are some new immigrants and lower income families
being placed among the oldtimers there. The town's progress to date has shown that not
only are many of its physical planning ideas probably suitable for duplication elsewhere,
even where climate is not so singular a factor, but also that a more self-sufficient body of
early settlers is important, especially in so difficult a location.

If, however, as could be argued, Arad's unique location minimizes the widespread
applicability of its planning concepts, there is also now underway another project, in a
friendlier climate in the northern part of Israel, where these same concepts are being tested,
some to even greater extremes. The site for this laboratory for Israel's urban future is in an
area that has often been important in the country's past, the rocky gray and green hills of
central Galilee. Through a riverless valley there, just south of the mountains that lead into
Lebanon, travelers have passed for centuries on the road from the Mediterranean coast to
the Sea of Galilee. Alongside that road, in an ideal bowl of low hills almost exactly halfway
between Haifa on the coast and Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, is where Karmiel, Israel's
newest new town, is being built.

It is to serve no special purpose, such as the development of a port as at Ashdod, or

establishment of a vital desert outpost as at Arad. Karmiel is only supposed to become a
new city where none was before, to support itself with whatever kind of industry it attracts,
and, the planners hope, to evolve into the kind of attractive community that will lure
Israelis away from the congested coastal area not far away. Without the special advantages
of Ashdod's port or Arad's industry and tourism, these simple goals could be large orders.
Karmiel is not to be an urban marketing center for a large agricultural area, as most first
generation new towns were built to be, primarily because most of the good farmland around
Karmiel is owned by Arabs who trade in their own good-sized villages there. The Arabs of
Galilee constitute the highest concentration of non-Jewish citizens anywhere within Israel's
pre-1967 borders. Karmiel will be, in fact, central Galilee's first predominantly Jewish
community. The government controls 60 percent of the land in the area, much of it being
unplowable rocky terrain, and Karmiel's site is the best situated parcel of that land on which
to build a city. Its weather is relatively mild summer and winter. Rainfall is plentiful and
there is sufficient underground spring water for a city's needs. From almost every point on
the site, there are pleasant views of surrounding hills and an expansive sky.

As at Arad, the planners designed every aspect of Karmiel in meticulous detail - not just the
general land layout, road system and provisions for water, sewage and utilities (the basics
of "master plans" for most American new town projects) - but also the three-dimensional
architectural design of each residential area and its adjoining section of the linear town
center. The development then was carefully staged so that adjoining or complementary
residential areas, town center facilities, industrial plants, parks, roads and utilities could all
be developed together and completed before the next group was begun. As a result, at any
one time during its construction, the finished part of Karmiel is a cohesive whole, with all
facilities needed by a town of its size at that moment, and with no large empty sites of
"future" this or that.

Karmiel's linear center is to bisect the entire community in a mile long arc to be built from
the northeast corner near the bus station, industrial plants and entrance to the town from the
main highway, to the southwest, where residential neighborhoods are to climb the low hills.
Cutting across the community from the northwest to the southeast will be an irregular green
band of park and open space, weaving in and around residential areas and opening into a
large public square where it intersects with the linear town center. At that square will be
built the town hall, a youth center, museum and other buildings, with a swimming pool
(already built), sports stadium and other facilities just southeast of the square in a
continuation of the park that would be directly connected with the rest of it by a broad
passage under the public square.
Paths that take pedestrians
past abundant greenery…

and around corners and

down narrow stairs in
Karmiel's first residential
area.
As in Arad, auto streets would be confined to outside and between residential areas, with
the city's principal boulevard running parallel to the town center. In Karmiel, this boulevard
is an already begun divided highway on a ridge overlooking the town center, providing
incoming motorists with an impressive view of the growing heart of the city, and residents
on the malls and pedestrian ways of the center with a view of the bustle of traffic. This
latter was done very purposefully.

Horwitz expressed the current feeling among some planners that residents want and enjoy
the sight and sound of automobile traffic. This relieves the "overly serene" sterility of car-
less places. Although people will see more auto traffic from pedestrian walks in Karmiel,
they will be better protected from its danger than in earlier Israeli new towns by several
pedestrian bridges over the main auto roads.

View from above of main

pedestrian thoroughfare of
Karmiel's first residential
area.
(Israeli gov't. photo)

Karmiel's first residential quarter and adjoining section of the linear town center are already
completed in much the way they were envisioned in the original plans. The residential area
is a long, narrow, intricately designed pattern of apartment buildings placed around groups
of attached, single-family "carpet houses" with walled-in yards on the gentle slope of a hill.
A main pedestrian street runs along the entire quarter parallel to the adjacent town center,
with many smaller walks branching off it and running down the hill between buildings and
rows of houses. Some buildings, open malls, playgrounds and planted areas have been
dropped in irregularly so that most walks off the main one turn here and there or go up and
down stairs in the seemingly random way that narrow streets form interesting mazes in
older cities. In a relatively small space, a larger world of "streets" has been created for
pedestrians in Karmiel, and been made interesting by the different kinds of buildings and
facilities and already flourishing trees and plants everywhere. It is almost a microcosm of
one of the attractive hillside neighborhoods of Haifa.

KARMIEL CITY PLAN

 The project is to be built in the stages roughl
to the numbers in the residential areas and ac
sections of the linear town center, industrial a
spaces. Large public square of government b
cultural activities is to be built where the wes
parkland and north-south town center interse

Town center as seen from main road on ridge above it. Note
clock tower, attractive stone mall.

Pedestrian "main street" of first residential ar

 Karmiel's first residential areas and adjacent linear center in middle.

Attractive stone facing and improved construction of new Wide pedestrian steps along-side "carpet" ho
apartment buildings on hillsides.
In order for this pedestrian network to mean anything to the people living along it, Horwitz
pointed out, there must be reasons to travel it. In Karmiel, all the necessities of daily living
are located somewhere or other along the pedestrian ways: schools, day nurseries, small
shops, clinics, synagogue and playgrounds of the residential quarter, and the other stores,
offices, cinema, community recreation and government offices of the town center a bit
further along. There are benches along the walks and lights to keep them alive at night.
They are not afterthoughts put in for a few nature-loving citizens as an out-of-the-way
alternative to the auto roadways; they are the main streets, back alleys and garden paths of
Karmiel, the future nerve system of the city.

About 5,000 people live in Karmiel today - half new immigrants and half Israeli born or
immigrants who have been in the country at least five years. "We think a one-to-one ratio is
best," explained Mayor Baruch Venger. "We planned it so that newcomers and veterans
(including the town's planners) live together in the same buildings. The layout of the town
also brings the different kinds of people together. In Karmiel, there are people from 20
different countries who grew up speaking 25 different languages."

Instead of reserving the largest and best located homes for Israeli oldtimers while fitting
immigrants into what is left over, Karmiel planners and officials, according to Venger, offer
large homes to larger families and small ones to smaller families, regardless of their length
of residence in Israel. Newcomers as well as other Israelis are eligible to buy new homes;
yet they may occupy the same homes at low government-subsidized rentals if that is all
they can afford. As a result, it is harder to pick out the new immigrants by the places in
which they live in Karmiel. It is a less stratified community than are many other Israeli new
towns built earlier.

The only American new town project presently committed to a similar mixing of widely
divergent income groups in each building and neighborhood is the Cedar-Riverside project,
being built on an urban renewal tract adjacent to the University of Minnesota campus in
downtown Minneapolis (See LD-1, The Midwest: An Unlikely Laboratory for New Towns).
It intends to place well-to-do families and those needing government housing subsidies in
the same high-rise buildings, with a public housing building almost next door. It also
intends to use lively pedestrian avenues and walks to further bring people together as they
walk each day to school, work and stores. Its means of separating pedestrians and autos
promises to be even more sophisticated than Karmiel's: in some places cars are to be kept
on streets and in parking lots several levels below elevated pedestrian areas. Unlike
Karmiel, however, Cedar-Riverside, as an experiment, is not forced to sink or swim entirely
on its own. It will benefit considerably from its university neighborhood location,
proximity to Minneapolis's commercial downtown and the unusual cultural activities
existing, and to be preserved, in the old neighborhood it is replacing.

The government builds everything in Karmiel: homes, stores, offices, government buildings
and, of course, the roads, recreation facilities and the rest of the town's "infrastructure." The
city government is loaned money by the federal government with which to buy the schools
and the city administrative buildings. All land remains under national government control.
Overall, about half of the housing in Karmiel is sold to residents, and half is rented. There
are several government subsidy plans to help young married couples, immigrants of all
kinds and other resettling families to buy their homes. In addition, families moving to
Karmiel are given tax reductions, and families with teenagers do not have to pay high
school tuition there, as they must in most other places in the country. These subsidies, as
well as Karmiel's location, scenic setting and community plan, are expected to bring to it
residents who might otherwise choose to live in Haifa or Tel Aviv.

"We also attract new people with our schools," Venger said. Israel is not immune to the
educational problems that many other countries are suffering these days. It often has
particular difficulty maintaining good school programs in the new towns, with their variety
of new immigrant children and classroom shortages. Usually, many teachers in new town
schools commute long distances from bigger cities or are temporary teachers, usually
immigrants themselves, who agreed to a short stint in a new town as part of their package
immigration agreement with the government.

Venger said he made certain, however, to hire "a good manager and interested teachers. We
expended great efforts to find good people," he added, "because good schools are important
to the kind of people we want living here. These are not bad children that we sometimes
have, just many different ones. Educating them requires dedicated, good people." To work
in Karmiel, at good salaries, teachers must also live there, an unusual requirement. "We
want our teachers to be part of the community and able to see their children after school
hours, too," Venger said. By living there, the teachers also increase the proportion of
college educated professional people among the town's residents.
Actually, Karmiel's widespread reputation as a physically attractive, experimental
community has brought to it more " academic" people than were originally expected or than
there are now professional jobs for. "Many of them have to work outside," Venger said,
"usually in Haifa. But that is not too far, really; most of them have cars and are used to
commuting, especially newcomers from America. We are realizing that some commuting
may always be necessary."

The vast majority of Karmiel's wage earners work right there in town, however, making
airplane parts, shirts, dresses, cosmetics, shoes, a variety of specialized metal and plastic
products, and the pre-cast wall sections for Karmiel's buildings. Among the laborers and
craftsmen working in these jobs are several members of Israel's first urban kibbutz, a group
of immigrants from the United States who formed Kibbutz Sha'an in Karmiel. Unlike
members of rural agricultural kibbutzim, the families in the small Kibbutz Sha'an do not all
live together. They are scattered in apartments throughout the town. They pool their
earnings, however, and pay out to each family what it needs, proportionate to the family
size. They also get together often for group meals and recreational and cultural activities.
Although most of the men are college educated, they are working in factories or at
individual crafts in Karmiel. Mayor Venger believes that Karmiel must be on the right track
if it can attract this kind of new resident - people actively experimenting in new urban
lifestyles.

"There is spirit here," Venger said. "When a tree is planted, everyone knows about it and
shares in it." Such boasting may belie Venger's role as a politician. Like all Israeli new
town mayors, Venger was originally appointed to the job by the national Ministry of
Housing, for whom he worked. More recently, he won re-relection when residents of
Karmiel voted locally for the first time. (Such prompt granting of self-government is
another Israeli new town innovation.)

"I guess they thought I was doing a good job," he said, more with earned pride than vanity,
as we talked in his temporary office in the town center, overlooking an attractive stone
plaza surrounded by the town's first stores and offices. He was, like many Israelis, matter-
of-factly, and a bit immodestly, proud about his involvement in a pioneering experiment.
Venger, Shmuel Horwitz of the town planning office in Tel Aviv and many other Ministry
of Housing planners are not what one expects of "civil servants," just as Karmiel is not
what one expects of a government-built project. After years of frustration, evangelistic
Israeli planners are proving that exacting planning and government control of such projects
can produce worthy innovation, quite the opposite of what Americans have come to
believe.

As in any true experiment, problems have arisen in Karmiel, though some of them stem
more from national economic conditions than flaws in Karmiel's own planning and
execution. Israel's economic slowdown of the mid-1960s and the expense of the 1967 war
forced an almost complete standstill in construction at Karmiel from 1966 to 1968. The
slowdown in the planners' careful staging of the project prevented it from acquiring as soon
as planned some of the urban services and attracting some of the merchants that were
expected to help fill out its town center. Only recently was a cinema built, for instance. The
lag in growth caused the government's commerce ministry to channel fewer job
opportunities to Karmiel, which, in turn, threatened to hold back further population growth
once construction was resumed. Karmiel's physical urbanity and attractiveness combined
with the other inducements to keep people coming and the project going, although the town
still faces a crucial period in the next few years as its planners and builders try to align
properly again the growth of its various components.

Venger also sees the need to expand quickly the town's human resources: recreation
facilities, cultural services, variety of goods offered in its stores, social organizations, and
the countless other aspects of an urban atmosphere by which one measures a community's
livability. "It's not merely one problem," he said, "but many little ones that can become one
big one."

There are nevertheless signs of the "spirit" that Venger spoke of so proudly. The part of the
town center that has been finished already contains attractive landmarks - a large outdoor
sculpture and a striking clock tower. Although the city administration occupies only
temporary offices on the second floor there, everyone directing visitors proudly refers to it
by the Hebrew phrase for city hall. In the residential areas, the buildings and planted areas
are much better maintained than even those in many upper income apartment suburbs of
Tel Aviv and Haifa.

"Terrace
houses" in
Upper
Nazareth -
two views.
(Israeli
gov't.
photos)
Many of the planning and architectural concepts being tested in Arad, Karmiel and, to a
lesser extent, Ashdod already are spreading elsewhere in Israel. The "carpet" pattern of
connected single-family houses with walled-in patios - and another version for steeper hills,
"terrace houses," in which the roof of one house serves as the patio for the home above it -
have been built, among other places, in the older new town of Upper Nazareth, where they
relieve the monotony of look-alike rectangular apartment buildings strung out on the
hillsides.

The pedestrian pathway systems and small parks along them are showing up in the better
planned suburbs outside Tel Aviv. Especially sophisticated pedestrian "street" systems are
being developed and kept well separated from auto traffic in the expensive apartment
developments rising on the hills of Jerusalem. These apartments are being designed and
grouped together so as to preserve scenic views (the Dead Sea can be seen from some of
the ridges), protect residents against Jerusalem's sometimes harsh climate from the
Wilderness of Judah desert, and fit in aesthetically with the surrounding landscape - just as
has been done in Arad and Karmiel.

Some of the new design concepts are also being used in new homes built by the
government for a community of Bedouins who had given up tents to live on the outskirts of
Beersheva. Specially designed for the desert climate, these homes are divided into "guest"
and "family" wings so the wife can enter and leave the house without going through the
guest area, in conformance with Bedouin custom.

The Arad and Karmiel projects also pioneered new methods for on-site mass production
manufacturing of building parts. A plant based on the French-developed "Ballancy" method
is producing prefabricated building walls and load-bearing partitions for construction at
Arad. Even pipes for plumbing are put into the interior walls in the plant before they are
taken a short distance across the town and assembled into housing units. Polystyrene
insulation is sprayed onto the inside of the exterior walls which are then covered on the
outside with a decorative aggregate of beige stone. In Karmiel, a variation of the Danish
"Modulbeton" method is used to produce both walls and floors for that new town's
buildings, leaving even less to be done on the building site itself. The attractive stone used
for the facing of the buildings there is taken right from the ground on which Karmiel is
being built. These methods have helped reduce some costs and construction time in new
town development, while still providing many jobs in the pre-fabrication plants.

It is necessary to remember, however, what is not being done in the second generation new
towns of Israel. In Karmiel, for instance, although the water supply and sewage pipe
systems were carefully designed and staged with the rest of the town's development, the
method for disposing of the sewage is relatively unsophisticated - putting it into "oxidation"
ponds to await natural chemical changes - which could cause future pollution problems if
impurities make their way into the soil and water table.

Industrialized
housing: an
interior
apartment
wall being
made,
complete with
built-in
plumbing
pipes and
fixtures, in
Arad factory
(left), and pre
cast exterior
wall being set
in place on
building site
(right).
(Israeli gov't.
photos)
In all the new towns, overhead utility wires, individual television antennas and rooftop
water heaters (which use energy from reflected sunlight to help heat the water, thus
conserving electricity) mar the otherwise impressive progress that has been made in
building design and landscaping. Another sight common to old and new towns is laundry
and bedding hanging out windows, over railings or on clothes lines on the outside porch
which every Israeli apartment has. Apparently laundry facilities have not been included in
most apartment complexes. Attempts to correct what some consider the eyesore this causes
include construction of a private outdoor space for each apartment that is hidden from
public view by a decorative outdoor partition.

Nowhere, even in Karmiel where there is to be one parking space per family, has the likely
eventuality of an Israeli motorcar explosion been planned for. And the absence of any rail
mass transit means increasing pollution of the air with bus and auto fumes. Sophisticated
sewage disposal plants, underground utilities, cable television, subways, even underground
parking are all "luxuries" that present day Israel cannot afford, even for its showcase new
towns. These heavy expenses are being borne in some projects in Europe and the United
States, however, and freedom from them may help explain why Israeli new town builders
have more leeway to experiment in other ways. Putting off those big expenditures,
however, likely will result in serious future problems for Israel.
Overhead
utility
wires,
television
antennas,
roof top
water
heaters and
laundry
mar views
of
apartment
buildings
in Upper
Nazareth
(top) and
Ashdod
(bottom)
new towns.
It is also obvious that the recent strides made in new town building in Israel most benefit
the newest immigrants (the Soviet Jews), and the select Israelis and more settled American
and European immigrants that the government lures to the new towns with financial
inducements. Tens of thousands of "Oriental" Jewish immigrants from North Africa and the
Middle East, meanwhile, still can find no better homes than the worst little boxes in the
near slums of the badly planned early new towns and the delapidated housing of formerly
Arab ghettos. The country's remaining Arabs, as a group, also are badly housed, despite a
few efforts like the project for Bedouins outside Beersheva. In Jerusalem, the luxury of the
reconstructed Jewish quarter within the walled old city and the high-rise developments on
the surrounding hills will contrast sharply with the crowded, decrepit homes of
impoverished Arabs in other nearby quarters of the old city.

In fairness, it must be noted that some Arab slums, such as those in the port area of Haifa,
have been torn down (although sometimes for new housing for Jewish immigrants rather
than the Arabs, who must then seek homes elsewhere on their own), and extensive work is
being done to correct problems in the immigrant-filled older new towns. Overall, in fact,
Israel has built a remarkable number of new homes, including many in the new towns, for
its lower income families, a claim that few governments or new town community builders
of other countries can make. Even the carefully selected populations of Arad and Karmiel
are to be 50 percent new immigrants and lower income families. They are not "country
club" new town suburbs like one finds in the United States, and somewhat in Europe, where
most homes can be afforded only by the middle class.
Israel also is proving that innovation, imagination, excitement and even beauty in spots can
be produced by government planning and building. Its financial commitment to housing
construction and new town development is amazing when compared to its overall budget
and the cost of defense. By contrast, the small amount spent by the United States
government for similar programs is indeed paltry.

But the most remarkable aspect of Israel's new town building program is its boldness in
experimentation. Everything that they had heard of being tried elsewhere, as well as ideas
of their own, has been attempted by the Israeli planners within the limits of their budget.
This strategy has produced whopping blunders, which in turn made "new town" a phrase
that still must earn more respect for many Israelis. But it has also produced remarkable
progress in a little over two decades in an economically evolving nation.

This readiness to experiment, and risk money in the process, is the primary lesson that
Israel's new town program provides for the United States. Americans still are not ready to
make enough of a commitment to so much innovation or such a high level of spending for
improvement in the housing of their lower classes. They suffer instead the wastes of half-
measures by the government in the housing field and the follies of real estate promoters
doing business as usual under a "new town" sign that frequently may constitute false
advertising. Israel gambles because it must, and it has something to show for it. When one
surveys the suburban sack of Santa Clara County, California, the pockets of the
Brownsville slum in New York City that look like they have been B-52 bombing targets, or
the kind of house that $20,000, $30,000 or even $40,000 buys the average middle class
family these days, can we not help but wonder that such dire necessity will not soon be
facing the United States.

©1971 Leonard Downie, Jr.

Leonard Downie, Jr. is an Alicia Patterson Fund Fellow on leave from The Washington
Post. This article may be published with credit to Mr. Downie, the Post and the Alicia
Patterson Fund.