Neighborhood groups scored their most significant victory in recent memory today when the mayor agreed to a number of changes to the city’s new urban master plan.

A long-running battle over Tel Aviv’s proposed master plan reached a turning point today when Mayor Ron Huldai agreed to adopt a series of proposals put forward by neighborhood activists for the southern part of the city.

The mayor’s announcement this morning at a meeting of the local planning committee took pretty much everyone by surprise (including, apparently, the municipal planning department).

Huldai’s city hall had sought to develop one of the city’s last undeveloped areas, a broad swath of land in the southern part of the city, as a new central business district. When the first drafts of the new city master plan began to appear a couple of years ago, they showed the area, which is sandwiched between residential neighborhoods, filled with high-rise office buildings and bisected by a broad highway.

Local residents immediately voiced their rejection of the proposal. Once again, they argued, city hall was pursuing its own agenda while ignoring local needs. While the city’s plan for the area would bring in new tax revenue (office buildings pay significantly higher municipal taxes than residential apartments) and provide a new traffic corridor for commuters headed to the city center, they pointed out, it would also physically divide their neighborhoods, while neglecting to solve chronic urban problems such as an acute housing crunch and a lack of decent public transportation.

Soon after, a coalition of neighborhood activists and community-based organizations came together to create South Tel Aviv for People, a grassroots initiative formed to advocate for a more people-friendly planning vision for the city’s southern quarter. (Full disclosure: I live in this part of the city and am heavily involved in the initiative.)

Working with local communities, the group put together an alternative proposal for the area which envisioned it as a mixed-use district, with plenty of new apartment buildings, schools and parks built along pedestrian-friendly streets. The proposal made the case for setting aside a portion of the new apartments for affordable housing programs while building public transportation instead of highways and extending the city’s building preservation plan southward (currently, the city only grants protection to historical buildings in the center of town).

For the past two years, South Tel Aviv for People has advocated for this vision by issuing position papers, lobbying local politicians, holding public events and raising awareness of the issue through the media. Over time, the group has sharpened its criticism of city hall’s plans while formulating an increasingly coherent and persuasive alternative. Meanwhile, city hall has done its best to ignore the group and its ideas.

However, as the master planning process dragged on, these ideas began to gain traction with city council members, whose votes were needed to get the plan approved. This alarmed the municipal leadership, which had hoped to push the plan through the approval process without encountering any serious resistance (thanks, in part, to a total lack of transparency).

As a result, several hearings on the master plan were postponed or cancelled, while those that did take place often became bogged down in arguments and disorder.

Several months ago, after a particularly rancorous meeting, the group received an invitation to meet with senior planners at the municipality. Its representatives gave a presentation – which was duly ignored by the deputy head planner (the most senior person in the room), who gave his full attention to his Blackberry. Some officials attacked the group, while others tried to convince them that their reservations about the plan were misguided. Needless to say, nothing came of it.

The city councilors on the planning committee, however, were becoming more receptive to the group’s message, which made it harder for the mayor’s coalition to ram parts of the master plan through hearings.

Today’s hearing began with the usual rancor, as committee members (armed with a position paper formulated by South Tel Aviv for People) demanded answers to a number of open questions about the details of the master plan.

Then the mayor strolled in and, after a short private consultation with the head of his planning department, announced that he was reversing his position – effectively allowing the committee to adopt the community’s positions on a number of important elements of the plan.

According to the new changes, Shlavim Street (the backbone of the new district planned for south Tel Aviv) will become an urban street instead of a commuter highway, and the buildings built along it will be mostly mid-rise apartment buildings, instead of high-rise office buildings.

Additionally, the city’s new central bus station, a mammoth structure that spews pollution onto several southern neighborhoods, will be moved to a different location (presumably on the city’s outskirts). A large city-owned lot, currently occupied by parking lots and garages, will become a complex of schools for local kids and a prison located on the city’s southern border will be transferred elsewhere and office buildings built in its place.

Municipal planners also promised to publish the master plan in full within two weeks. Incredibly, city hall has thus far managed to resist calls to release these documents, which have been kept under wraps even as hearings on the master plan proceeded and votes on its proposals were held.

In another achievement for local civil society, a two-month public participation process on the master plan will be launched early next year.

There is still plenty of room for improvement. For example, the plan still contains nothing about affordable housing (an acute issue in a city where the cost of housing has skyrocketed over the past few years), public transportation or sustainability issues.

However, the decisions made today are a huge leap forward. By accepting the major tenets of the alternative plan that rose up from the grassroots, the municipal establishment has opened the door to further changes, while proving that regular citizens, through sustained activism, have the power to influence even the most stubborn politicians.

Cover image: South Tel Aviv for People logo.