The city’s new blueprint will not solve its major problems, but it will bring new hi-rises and business districts.

A new urban master plan for Tel Aviv-Jaffa was approved last night by the city’s local planning council by a 16-10 vote.

Brushing aside last-minute concerns raised by a number of city council members, Mayor Ron Huldai called on members of his coalition to pass the plan without further delay. Since his initial failed attempt to fast-track approval of the plan in 2010, Huldai has been watching the council’s deliberations with increasing impatience.

The plan itself is an impressive and professional document, but limited in scope. While it does create a framework for expanding the city’s housing stock over the next decade or so, it stops short of establishing a strong affordable housing program to help keep young people from being pushed out of the city by gentrification. And it has nothing to say about public housing or issues related to social justice, despite last summer’s social protests.

The plan will not solve Tel Aviv’s traffic problems either. It offers nothing beyond an existing light rail/subway plan, which has been stuck for over a decade, and foresees the continued dominance of private cars in the city in the future.

Nor does it propose steps to reduce the city’s carbon emissions. While most modern master plans use emissions reduction as a means to obtain broader goals of urban sustainability and quality of life, the words “climate change” do not even appear in Tel Aviv’s plan.

What the plan does do is to lay out, for the first time, what developers can build in the city, where, and how high. It allows for extensive construction of hi-rises and office buildings over the next couple of decades, which will ensure the city a solid tax base in the future.

However, it was promoted with a worrying lack of transparency. Throughout the process of putting together and discussing the plan, city hall refused to publish important parts of the plan. In fact, many of its core documents were only released for the first time last week. However, when city council members tried to hold a debate last night on the contents of these critical documents, their attempts were steamrolled by Huldai.

While the plan was still a work in progress, city hall made few attempts to make the public aware of its contents. However, literally minutes after it was approved, the municipality’s PR department issued self-congratulatory press releases to all the major financial media outlets, and even posted videos about the plan on Facebook.

The media, for its part, swallowed the city’s narrative whole, regurgitating its talking points uncritically, largely without seeking reactions from city council members or critics of the plan. (None of the newspapers took note, for example, of the strange fact that the master plan was formulated based on parameters laid out in a new proposed planning law – and not according to the existing law – as the municipality’s legal advisor admitted last night for the first time.)

Can Tel Aviv live with its new master plan? Clearly, the version that was approved last night is vastly superior to its initial iterations. The improvements came primarily as a result of persistent efforts by a handful of city council members and the activism of neighborhood groups, including a group of planning professionals living in the southern part of the city.

Surprisingly, many important last-minute changes came as a result of a series of public participation sessions held by the municipality’s planning teams last month. Unlike previous such sessions, the latest round of public meetings were conducted in an atmosphere of constructive dialogue and debate, and yielded a surprising number of insights, which the planners eventually integrated into the plan.

The limited opening provided by the city (the sessions themselves were conducted as a  concession to community groups, which had earlier demanded greater public involvement in the plan) for genuine dialogue with the public provided a glimpse of how city planning processes could look if they were taken more seriously by the municipality. They also illustrated how the public, when given the chance, is capable of contributing valuable input and local knowledge as a complement to the efforts of professional planners, whose approach is generally top-down.

The master plan will now go to the district planning committee, where it is expected to undergo further changes. By law, it will then be deposited for formal objections by the public for a period of 60 days, before eventually being approved by the Interior Minister.

Cover image: Rendering of a large real estate project approved by Tel Aviv’s local planning council last week (via Ynet).

Community groups win a number of key 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. 

Insensitive planning and a lack of transparency have generated significant opposition to plans for bike lanes in Tel Aviv.

A rendering of Bloch Street in central Tel Aviv, after its upcoming renovation (image courtesy of Tel Aviv Municipality).

After years of pressure from advocacy groups, the Tel Aviv Municipality has finally adopted an aggressively pro-bicycle agenda. Bike lanes are being paved, a bike-share system is being launched, and the city’s PR machine is working hard to sell the new strategy. Yet, the insensitivity and obtuseness which with the new policy is being implemented have already provoked a limited backlash, which, if left unchecked, threatens to endanger the entire project.

Tel Aviv is experiencing a surge of interest in urban cycling. As the number of people choosing to get around the city by bicycle has grown in recent years, so has the municipality’s budget for building new bike lanes.  According to a new 5-year plan, close to 40 km of new bike lanes will be paved over the next few years, many of them along central streets.

Meanwhile, the city’s bike lanes themselves have gradually evolved from pitiful logos spray painted onto sidewalks to color-coded sidewalk paths, to the elegant street-level, separated lanes built along main streets in the eastern part of the city in recent years.

All of this has engendered a new breed of activists, mostly car owners, who complain that city hall’s newfound enthusiasm for bicycles will lead to the unilateral elimination of dozens of already-scarce parking spots. While still in its infancy, the backlash has already taken on a number of different forms: internet activism, angry exchanges at city council meetings, even a lawsuit.

Tel Aviv is not alone in facing such a backlash. Similar scenarios have played out recently in several other cities around the world.

In New York, where the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pursuing an ambitious program of urban sustainability, an energetic new transportation commissioner has installed some 400 kilometers of new bike lanes over the last four years, eliminating hundreds of parking spots in the process. While considered by many to be a success – the project has led to a sharp increase in bicycle use while reducing traffic accidents – it has also drawn some very vocal criticism, mainly from a privileged minority of car owners.

In response, the city’s mayor and transportation commissioner have pledged to redouble their efforts to build a consensus around bike lanes, through better communication with the public, greater attentiveness to civic leaders and a more inclusive planning process. So far, the strategy appears to be working.

In Tel Aviv, however, the city’s leadership has reacted to the umbrage of local car owners with its typical dismissive, my-way-or-the-highway attitude. “The streets of Tel Aviv do not belong to the residents,” a senior official in charge of transportation at the municipality recently told a local newspaper. “No one owns the streets or the parking spots, and the municipality does not have to conduct negotiations with the residents.”

Mayor Ron Huldai reacted with similar disdain when residents of Bloch Street showed up at a recent city council meeting to contest the decision to cancel several dozen parking spaces in order to make way for a new bike lane. As the mayor calmly ignored the residents’ protests, the council chairwoman made it clear that they would not be allowed to air their concerns, and threatened to have them forcibly removed from the meeting.

This kind of response is unlikely to defuse opposition.  On the contrary, it is pretty much guaranteed to further antagonize the project’s opponents, especially as the municipality’s flagship bike sharing project begins to flood the city with hundreds of additional cyclists this spring – potentially creating more friction between pedestrians, cars and bikes on city streets and sidewalks.

Looked at differently, however, perhaps the bike lanes versus parking discourse reflects a false dichotomy. Listen closely to the arguments of opponents and it becomes clear that what really irks them, even more than the loss of a few parking spots, is that no one bothered to include them in the decision-making process. On the other side, the pro-bicycle crowd has conveniently ignored the lack of transparency to which it would normally object.

If this is the case, then perhaps the best way to defuse the anti-bike backlash before it spreads is for the municipality to engage in an open, honest dialogue with the public. This might begin by presenting the city’s 5-year plan for bike lanes – formulated without public participation and never approved by the city council – to the public, while clearly communicating the reasoning behind it and its benefits, and creating space for public input.

Municipal officials might also make an effort to engage with disgruntled citizens who stand to lose their parking spots. In the case of Bloch Street, a meeting has been scheduled between residents and senior officials at the municipality. Next time around, perhaps it would be wise to meet with affected residents at an earlier stage of the planning process.

Moreover, while bicycles are certainly part of the solution, bike lanes alone will not solve the city’s chronic transportation problems. City officials would probably have an easier time persuading skeptical car-owners of the benefits of bike lanes if the latter actually believed that the municipality was engaged in a real effort to create immediate, near-term public transportation solutions.

In addition to bike lanes, these might include improvements to the bus system, along with more and better-enforced dedicated bus lanes, several lines of BRT (bus rapid transit) and the creation of a metropolitan transportation authority. According to various reports, some of these moves have already been set in motion, yet they are being promoted without any real effort to inform or involve the public.

Tel Aviv residents have repeatedly expressed their demand to be included in the planning of their streets and neighborhoods. Thus, presenting such a package to the public at this point would probably be the single most popular move the city’s leadership could make, even if it meant taking away parking spots and/or traffic lanes.

The transition from a car-dependent city to one which prioritizes public transportation, bicycles and pedestrians is not a cosmetic change but an inherently transformative process. As such, if the municipality is serious about making it happen, it must do away with its preference for closed-door decision-making and adopt a new spirit of openness and collaboration.

Originally published at +972 on 24 April 2011.

A comprehensive plan for Tel Aviv’s future is flat, unimaginative and out of touch with the city’s spirit and people.

Halfway through his third term in power, Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai is promoting his most ambitious project yet: a comprehensive master plan, meant to guide the city’s explosive development over the coming decades.

The magnitude of the plan is difficult to overstate; the mayor himself has described it as a “constitution” for the city. Yet, try Googling the master plan and you’ll find almost nothing. Amazingly, despite the enormous impact it is expected to have on the city, the plan has yet to be released to the public in full.

While some information about the contents of the plan is buried deep inside the municipality’s website, the city’s well-oiled PR machine has made no serious effort to bring it to the attention of the general public. (Quite the opposite, in fact: during a recent overhaul of the municipal website, several documents actually disappeared.)

During a series of public hearings, ostensibly designed to solicit feedback on the plan’s proposals, residents were given a partial and selective picture of the plan. As a result, municipal officials were able to limit discussions to narrow, predetermined parameters, while excluding the plan’s more controversial elements.

This pattern has continued as discussions on the master plan have moved to the city council. In meeting after meeting, council members have complained of receiving insufficient information about the plan. The result has been a series of unfocused and contentious discussions – yet the mayor has resisted council members’ calls for greater openness.

Meanwhile, the municipal spokesman’s office has apparently imposed a media blackout, telling journalists that no comments or interviews on the master plan will be forthcoming until after it is formally approved by the city council (at which point it will presumably be too late for the public to influence the plan in any case).

With no access for journalists, media coverage of the plan has been almost nonexistent, and with few details to go on, civic groups have had a difficult time influencing the planning process. The public, for its part, remains only minimally aware of the plan’s existence. This has proven a winning strategy for controlling the terms of the debate, though hardly a democratic one.

An analysis of portions of the plan that have been released, as well as materials distributed to city council members, reveals that the lack of transparency may be obscuring an unambitious and depressingly mediocre plan – one that stops short of offering real solutions for Tel Aviv’s urban problems, while failing to propose a compelling vision for the city’s future.

One of the plan’s most glaring shortcomings is its failure to propose a viable solution to the city’s transportation problems. Despite a rhetorical commitment to creating sustainable transportation systems, the plan hinges entirely on the realization of long-delayed plans for a light rail/subway system – a project which is only expected to begin to come to fruition a full decade from now, if not even later.

This is especially disappointing considering the emerging consensus (among residents, activists, government bodies and even municipal officials) that a parallel investment in nearer-term solutions, such as improved bus lanes and bus rapid transit (BRT), would offer more immediate results.

Regarding the city’s other major problem – the spiraling cost of housing – municipal officials are not saying if the plan will pursue anything more aggressive than the bare-bones policy on affordable housing that the municipality has already adopted.

Climate change, another critical challenge, is not even mentioned in the plan. As both Israel’s most carbon-intensive city and its center of creativity and innovation, a strategy to position Tel Aviv on the vanguard of national efforts to move to a low-carbon economy would seem like a no-brainer. Strangely, although the city says it is working on a separate plan for reducing emissions, that plan will apparently not be integrated into the master plan.

One thing, however, that is clear is that the plan will transform the city’s skyline beyond recognition. While low skylines will be preserved in the center of town and in parts of Jaffa, areas east of the city center would be transformed into a forest of skyscrapers. In a victory for real estate interests over long-standing opposition by residents, the plan would also allow for extensive high-rise construction in the south of the city, creating multiple corridors of office and residential towers, which would hover awkwardly above existing low-rise neighborhoods.

In comparison to long-term plans for other cities around the world, Tel Aviv’s new master plan aims low. For example, San Jose’s “Green Vision,” a 15-year plan adopted in 2007, includes ambitious, quantifiable goals such as adding 25,000 new green jobs to the local economy, planting 100,000 trees, powering the city with 100% renewable energy and using recycling and waste-to-energy technologies to eliminate 100% of the city’s solid waste.

In cities around the world, the trend is clear: urban master plans are no longer simply tools for handing out buildings rights to developers, but road maps to urban sustainability. That Tel Aviv’s leadership has yet to grasp this fact speaks to a profound failure of imagination.

The best way to shake up the stagnant logic of the new master plan is to expose it to the public. The new master plan would benefit greatly from an open public debate, something which has been sorely lacking thus far. Rather than shutting out the city’s people and NGO community, many of whom have long expressed an eagerness to be partners in shaping the city’s future, the municipality would do well to tap into their creativity.

In order for this to happen, the municipality needs to release the new master plan to the public, immediately and in its entirety. Following full publication of the plan, the municipality should create a website dedicated to explaining the plan’s proposals to the public (an accepted practice around the world), while creating space for residents, NGOs and community groups to help shape the plan. At the same time, the municipality must engage with the media and raise the level of awareness about the plan among the general public.

Tel Aviv is a city of openness and creativity, and its planning and municipal governance should reflect that spirit. The last thing Tel Aviv needs is another formalistic document, cooked up by worn out technocrats and approved over the heads of the public. What is truly needed is a master plan that authentically reflects the collective wisdom of the city’s people and civic organizations, formulated in an open and democratic process. Only then can such a plan legitimately be called Tel Aviv’s “constitution.”

Originally published at +972 Blog on Jan. 23, 2011.

What the city’s new urban master plan means, and why no one seems to know for sure what’s in it.

New skyline: one possible future for the city center, east of Ibn Gvirol. New tall buildings in brown, currently planned in purple, existing in blue.

The Tel Aviv Municipality is promoting a new urban master plan, officially named תא/5000, which will guide the city’s growth and development through the year 2025. In formulating the plan, Tel Aviv joins Israel’s other three major cities, all of which are in the process of replacing old, obsolete master plans.

The new plan will be a statutory document, with the force of law. As such, it should clear up much of the present ambiguity regarding what is and isn’t permissible to build, and where, in Tel Aviv. The plan is based on the city’s previously-formulated strategic plan, as well as input from an extensive public participation process.

However, the city’s activists and NGO community are up in arms about the way the plan is being promoted.

What’s in the plan?

First, the numbers. According to the plan, Tel Aviv’s population will increase  to 450,000 people in 2025, up from 393,000 people today.

But the plan’s major emphasis is on creating new office space, with the stated aim of preserving Tel Aviv’s status as the country’s business and financial capital. In order to accomplish this, the plan adds an amount of office space equaling 17 of New York’s ill-fated Twin Towers to the city, ultimately more than doubling the city’s current volume of office space.

Critics have argued that so much new office space, without a corresponding increase in housing stock, is liable to drive housing prices, already on the rise, even higher, which would further compound current problems with gentrification and a lack of affordable housing in the city. And if Tel Aviv’s planned mass transit system fails to materialize over the next decade or so (and according to many, this is a likely scenario), housing prices may climb higher still, when some half a million people employed in the city are forced to move closer to the center to avoid endless traffic jams.

The “planning principles” guiding the plan are relatively progressive and in line with trends in contemporary planning. They include things like: promoting “multimodal and sustainable transportation,” mixed land uses, quality public space, a mix of housing solutions, regulations concerning where hi-rises will and will not be permitted and environmental regulations.

While these are solid principles on which to build a city’s master plan, the municipality has not yet seen fit to explain the specific policy steps that it intends to take based on these principles. So, for example, while the principles include creating “quality public space,” no one can be sure if this means that the municipality will actually begin to pay more attention to urban design, or if we should simply expect more of the same. And while the plan’s principles emphasize sustainable transportation, the new plan contains some controversial new highways, especially in the south of the city.

“Green buildings” are also mentioned in the plan’s principles, but does this mean that 104,000 new housing units and 9.6 million square meters of new office space will be LEED-certified, or at least built according to green building principles? None of this is explained in detail in the documents that the municipality has released, and it seems the municipality prefers to keep its commitments vague in these areas, at least for now. There are, by the way, apparently a host of policy documents attached to the plan which deal with these issues, but they of course have not been released to the public.

As far as transportation goes, the plan predictably rehashes longstanding plans for a metropolitan mass transit system. While ambitious and impressive, these plans have been stuck for years, and negotiations between the state and the consortium that won the tender for project recently collapsed. Even if the problems are miraculously solved, the system’s first lines are not expected to start running for at least another decade. Thus, the plan contains no meaningful transportation solutions for the foreseeable future.

A Lack of Transparency

To this day, the plan has not been presented to the public in full. Although an exhaustive and even unprecedented public participation process was undertaken ahead of the plan’s formulation , the sessions were mostly designed to solicit input from residents, with very little revealed about the specifics of the plan. From the documents describing the public participation process (which have been released in full), it appears that a large percentage of the participants were not particularly satisfied with any of the alternatives that were presented to them. Several documents have also been posted online regarding the information that serves as the basis for the plan, and some of the different alternatives presented in the plan. (The information contained in this post was culled mainly from these documents, as well as materials presented to city council members recently.)

However, most of the information that has been made public is selective and even incomplete. The scale and nature of the information posted online does not even approach the sophisticated websites that cities such as New York and New Orleans have built as part of their master planning processes.

Adding to the confusion, the municipal spokesman’s office has refused to comment on the plan or grant interviews with its planners before it is approved by the city council (in other words, while the public is still able to exert influence). Perhaps for this reason, media coverage of the master planning process has been sparse, and many are not even aware of its significance or even existence.

Presumably, after the city council approves the plan, an effort will be made to make the public aware of its contents, but by that point any opportunity for the public to have a meaningful influence on the plan, including expressing its objections to specifics, will have passed.

The overall effect of this process is that, while the city can claim, rightly, that it has created space for public input regarding the plan, it has also managed to tightly control the terms of that discussion by reserving the right to release only that information which serves its purposes.

In a scathing letter sent recently to a member of the city council, the Society for the Preservation of Nature in Israel’s (SPNI) Tel Aviv center criticizes the way the plan was presented to the city council. The 4-page letter pointed to a long line of procedural failures, inconsistencies and ambiguities, among them the fact that complete maps were not presented to city councilors, a lack of clarity regarding procedures for public participation, a failure to adequately engage with urban nature and sustainability issues and so on.

The SPNI also criticized the plan for its overemphasis on massively increasing office and residential density, without a corresponding increase in green spaces and public institutions or adequate public transportation solutions. In conclusion, the letter called on city council members to heed the public’s objections to specific projects (mainly in the south of the city), and to plan the city for the benefit of its current and future inhabitants.

An Alternative Plan

Meanwhile, a group of urban planners and architects from south Tel Aviv has been working on a plan of its own, which is meant to serve as an alternative to the municipality’s master plan and a basis for changes to it. The alternative plan, which was recently presented to municipal planners and residents, focuses on south Tel Aviv and Jaffa.

The alternative plan asserts the uniqueness of south Tel Aviv and Jaffa, and demands that these areas be planned with an eye toward preserving that uniqueness. Instead of filling up the area with massive buildings, the group suggests new construction that fits into the existing architectural fabric. Whereas the municipality’s plan calls for using roads in the south of the city as arteries for thru-traffic, the group proposes developing the area’s historical road grid and a network of urban streets and boulevards, while preserving the area’s ecological and architectural patrimony.

The alternative plan also suggests extending Tel Aviv’s historical preservation plan to Jaffa and south Tel Aviv, parts of which predate the “White City.” The alternative plan also puts a heavy emphasis on developing the area for its residents, preserving the existing human mosaic (especially in mixed Jewish-Arab Jaffa), creating affordable housing and a balanced housing mix and leveraging local assets into urban regeneration, without gentrification.

To what extent the municipality is willing to adopt any of these principles remains an open question.

What Happens Now?

Last week, the city council held the first of several hearings on the new master plan. The meeting focused on the northern and eastern quarters of the city. No special effort was made to make the public aware of the meeting, and in fact only a few dozen residents showed up to observe.

The members of the city council had quite a lot to say about the plan, most of it critical. In response, the mayor agreed to hold more frequent meetings, twice monthly, and encouraged  city council members to approach the planning team with their comments. Mayor Huldai also backtracked from his original plan to attain the council’s approval for the plan by the end of 2010.

To conclude, someone once wrote: Bureaucracies use boredom the way a skunk uses smell… Being part of democracy ought to feel exciting, and invigorating: we should view every part of it that’s boring with deep mistrust.

In the way that it has promoted this plan, the municipality has exhibited a deep distrust of its own residents, and a tendency to mask the democratic process with procedural jargon and a lack of clarity.

The city’s master plan is a huge opportunity, both for re-imaging the city and for including the residents of the city in the process in a way that builds identification with the city itself. Thus far, the leadership at the municipality has not shown that it understands this. One hopes that, after what happened this month in the city council, the city’s leadership will change its approach – and that the public will recognize that is also has a part to play in making that happen.

A stalled light rail, a new bus system and a controversial master plan. Plus a French invasion, heat and humidity.

Is this Tel Aviv’s new skyline? The buildings in purple would be built according to the new master plan.

The Light Rail is Dead

It’s official: the light rail, at least in its current incarnation, has finally expired, after being on life support for the last couple of years. Last week, the state announced that it was cancelling its contracts with MTS, the consortium that was supposed to build and operate the first line of the system. Now the legal battle between the state and MTS begins, but that doesn’t interest anyone.

The real question is: what will become of the light rail? The good news is that the Finance Minister has declared that the project will endure, with or without MTS. Instead, the state will carry out the work itself (through an army of contractors and subcontractors, of course).

How long will this take? Professionals working on the project claim it will take perhaps 7 years of work to get the first line up and running, but most people who are not connected to the project estimate at least another decade. And that’s just for the first line.

Jerusalem’s light rail, by the way, is scheduled to start running next April – a small miracle, considering the project’s mismanagement and frequent (and often ridiculous) setbacks.

Calls for BRT in TLV

With the light rail project delayed until who knows when, new ideas are emerging about how to keep traffic moving in the interim. The most interesting by far is something called Mahir Ba’ir (Fast in the City), a plan for two new Bus Rapid Transit lines being promoted by City for All, a movement on the Tel Aviv city council. While the campaign in favor of the plan is gaining momentum, the municipality has been strangely detached, offering no substantive reaction to the proposal.

The Mahir Ba’ir campaign, by the way, also proposes doing away with the almost universally loathed New Central Bus Station, and scattering its bus routes across various other bus terminals around the city.

At the same time, a coalition of environmental organizations is calling for a network of exclusive bus lanes to be built immediately on all main roads in metropolitan Tel Aviv.

Bus Reorganizing Launched

Meanwhile, the city’s bus system is being reorganized. Today the first of five phases was launched, with minor changes being made here and there, and two very short dedicated bus lanes coming into existence (one of them on part of King George Street).

Surprisingly, the Transportation Ministry has launched a clear and informative website to accompany the reorganization, as well as another new website with information about all public bus routes in the country (previously, this information was scattered among the websites of the various bus companies).

However, while the bus reorganization’s website has comprehensive and easily accessible information about the present phase of the process, there is absolutely no information regarding the changes planned for the next four phases of the process, nor the dates on which the public can expect these future changes to occur. Apparently, the planners of the bus reorganization would prefer to keep us in the dark for now.

New Master Plan

A controversial new master plan for the city is making its way through the city council this summer. The plan, meant to guide the city’s growth and development through the year 2025, displays an unhealthy preoccupation with the construction of new skyscrapers and pandering to the interests of the real estate industry. Apparently, it also has plenty to say about issues such as green building, affordable housing and upgrading public space, but these parts of the plan have not been released to the public.

After attempting to ram the plan through the city council at lightning speed, the mayor was forced to backtrack and allow for a bit more discussion of the plan in the city council than he had previously planned. Three meetings have been scheduled for the next two weeks, in which the planning for the north, east and center of the city will be presented to the city council.

Discussions on the south of the city and Jaffa will presumably be scheduled for October, after the Jewish holidays, although these dates have not yet been announced. After that, the pan-urban aspects of the plan will be presented to the city council.

Interestingly, the municipality has made no special efforts to publicize these important meetings. As a result, very few residents of the city are even aware of the fact that such an important document is currently under debate.

The Society for the Preservation of Nature in Israel has been harshly critical of the hasty and amateurish way that the plan has been promoted, while a group of architects and urban planners from the south of the city are attempting to convince the plan’s architects to be more mindful of the needs of the actual people living in the city.

Intolerable Heat and the French Invasion

Meanwhile, as happens every August, the city has become unbearably hot and humid, and the areas next to the beach have been almost completely taken over by Jewish tourists from France. Haaretz recently wrote an amusing article about the phenomenon.

Due to the heat, the country’s electricity consumption is threatening to overwhelm peak production, and the electric company has warned of possible power outages. Everyone agrees that no one remembers it being this hot in previous years.

In response to growing public pressure, the Tel Aviv Municipality has agreed to release key documents.

The Tel Aviv Municipality has agreed to release key documents containing details on municipal policy and decision-making. The moves came in response to growing public pressure and charges of a lack of transparency at the municipality’s highest levels.

The newly-released documents contain information about the workings of several dozen municipal committees, including one which has been described as the city’s supreme decision-making body, as well as the particulars of the city’s yearly budget.

A recent Metro article exposed claims that a secretive and little-known institution at the municipality has effectively supplanted the city council as the body that runs the city. According to a number of sources, the institution, known as the “Management Committee” (va’adat hanhala), operates behind closed doors and with a total lack of transparency.

The Management Committee is the most powerful of several dozen committees. Composed mainly of city council members, these committees are charged with hammering out policy on issues such as the city’s school system, environmental protection and transportation. Like the Management Committee, most committees do not publish records of their discussions, making it difficult for the public and nongovernmental organizations to keep track of their work.

Adding to the controversy, motions raised in the city council for debate are almost always transferred to the various committees for discussion, where their fate is often unclear. Critics charge that most of the committees are essentially meaningless, with many of them meeting only rarely, while real decision-making power rests with the Management Committee.

In response to the report, the Tel Aviv Municipality issued a surprising statement claiming that “any citizen may review the minutes of [Management Committee] meetings.” The statement added that “Management Committee meetings do not take place in the dark.”

That statement took Tamar Neugarten of Council Watch by surprise. A project of the Tel Aviv Green Forum (under the auspices of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel), Council Watch (mishmar hamoatza) monitors environmental decision-making on the city council. In recent months it has been involved in a public campaign to open up municipal committees, including the Management Committee, to public scrutiny.

According to Neugarten, transcripts of Management Committee meetings had never before been presented as available to the public. “We weren’t sure if they were serious or not,” she told Metro recently.

Eager to hold the municipality to its word, Council Watch quickly submitted a formal request to view the transcripts of the Management Committee’s meetings. At the same time, a letter was sent to City Council Chairwoman Yael Dayan, requesting that transcripts of all committee discussions be posted on the municipality’s website. The letter noted that this was already standard practice in other cities, including Jerusalem and Modi’in.

Council Watch eventually gained access to the Management Committee transcripts, two months later, following what Neugarten describes as an exhausting bureaucratic runaround. It was apparently the first time a public interest group had been allowed to analyze the documents, which were sitting in storage in the municipal archive.

Around the same time, an amendment to the city council’s procedural guidelines was brought for a vote on the city council. Proposed by council members Yoav Goldring and Tamar Zandberg, the amendment stated that transcripts of all municipal committee discussions would be made “available to the public.” Previously, the guidelines stated that they would only be available to city council members.

The amendment passed unanimously, without debate. During the same meeting, however, the mayor made it clear that the public would still not be allowed to attend committee meetings.

For the members of Council Watch, it was a radical and welcome step toward transparency.

In response to an inquiry by Metro, the municipality pointed out that minutes from city council meetings, as well as the Planning and Construction Committee and Licensing Committee are already published on the municipality’s website. Regarding the transcripts of the Budget Committee and Management Committee discussions, the city promised that they would be posted online “soon.”

In the meantime, Council Watch has already begun examining the newly attained Management Committee documents, and is working on compiling summaries of the committee’s recent meetings and decisions, which will be published on its website.

An initial analysis, says Neugarten, confirmed some of Council Watch’s suspicions. “We found that there is a sizeable backlog of subjects up for discussion, and that they are discussing issues that are supposed to be dealt with by other committees.”

At the same time, she adds, the transcripts reveal Management Committee meetings to be serious and professional, with detailed presentations made by officials and outside experts, something which she says does not necessarily happen in city council meetings.

“These are serious and important discussions,” Neugarten concludes, “and I don’t think they need to hide them from the public.”

****

In another victory for transparency advocates, the Tel Aviv Municipality will begin publishing its yearly budget online and in an open format, beginning with the 2011 budget.

In late 2009, for the first time ever, a copy of the NIS 4.24 billion municipal budget was published online before coming up for discussion by the city council. However, certain members of the city council protested that the document was published in a closed format (the municipality chose to publish the budget in several hundred pages of pdf files) that did not allow for easy, computerized analysis. Such analysis was necessary, they argued, in order to expose distortions in the city’s budget allocations, such as alleged discrimination in education funding, before the city council vote.

City officials, however, refused to accede to the request, arguing that the municipality did not have the technical capacity to export the budget file in an open format. Not everyone was convinced, and in early 2010 Ir Likulanu (City for All), an opposition movement on the city council, and the Movement for Freedom of Information, a nongovernmental organization, took the municipality to court.

That strategy paid off. In early July, one day before the Tel Aviv District Court was scheduled to discuss the case, the city suddenly announced that it had solved the technical problem and that it would release next year’s budget in an open format, which would be available to the public on the municipality’s website.

The peculiar timing of the announcement led Ir Likulanu activists to theorize that the municipality had realized it was headed for an embarrassing defeat in court.

The municipality disputed this, saying in a statement: “The request to receive the budget file, specifically in an Excel file, was not possible technologically, and there was no legal obligation [to do so], yet despite this the mayor announced that the file would be released when that became possible. And indeed, when it became possible, the municipality consented to do so.”

Update: Following its success vis a vis the Tel Aviv Municipality, the budget transparency campaign has moved on to the national level. According to financial newspaper Calcalist (Hebrew link), Israel’s Treasury has already released the 2009-2010 state budget, in a detailed Excel file, and moves are underway to make it available to the public online.

This article was originally published in the Jerusalem Post’s Metro magazine, on August 6, 2010 (pdf, online version).

Key parts of the city’s decision-making process remain concealed from the public.

City hall in Tel Aviv. (photo by Jesse Fox)

Mya, a 30 year old writer, lives near King George Street in central Tel Aviv. “It’s a narrow street, and it’s always backed up,” she says. “I work from home, and it’s difficult to concentrate with all the cars honking and buses and delivery trucks idling outside.”

“I think the city has started building a subway,” she adds. “That might help things, but I’m not really sure when it’s actually supposed to start running.”

However, despite her annoyance with the situation, Mya has never bothered to contact the municipality about it. “It just seems like a total waste of my time,” she explains, adding with a sigh that her trash cans keep disappearing too.

Theoretically, the body responsible for dealing with urban issues like transportation and garbage disposal is the city council. Consisting of democratically elected representatives of various communities, the council’s role is to govern the city. Yet, in Tel Aviv, this is not necessarily the case.

“The way that the mayor has engineered matters, the city council has no role at all in determining what the city does and how it does it,” says Dr. Noah Efron, a member of the city council since late 2008.

In his year and a half serving on the council, says Dr. Efron, a professor of history and philosophy at Bar Ilan University, “not a single policy or ordinance proposed by a city council member has been brought up for debate, much less approved.”

Dr. Efron represents Ir Likulanu (City for All), an ideological political movement that has had an adversarial relationship with Mayor Huldai since winning five seats on the council in the last local elections.

But it isn’t only members of the municipal opposition that would like to see a more democratic process in the city council. Says Reuven Ladianski, a city councilor and member of Mayor Ron Huldai’s coalition, “The fact that so many motions raised in the city council are simply transferred to the various municipal committees without discussion undermines the city council, to the point where it becomes almost irrelevant.”

The general public, for its part, no longer bothers to attend council meetings. This was not always the case. Following the 2008 elections, which swept a number of fresh faces onto the council, a rowdy and energetic crowd regularly packed the isles. Since then, however, the enthusiasm seems to have worn off. In 2010, city council meetings draw an audience of barely a dozen or so spectators, mostly local bloggers, journalists and political activists.

With a low hum of chatter emanating from both the council and the audience, meetings are conducted in technical and legal language that spectators often find bewildering. Council members frequently slip out for cigarette breaks, and even the mayor himself often gets up and simply walks out of the room, mainly when members of the opposition get up to speak.

A meeting of the Tel Aviv city council. (photo by Jesse Fox)

“Our job is to translate everything that happens there into something that the residents of the city can understand,” says Tamar Neugarten of Council Watch (mishmar hamoatza), an organization that monitors city council meetings. “That means separating the important from the unimportant, reading the documents and breaking through the legalese.”

Council Watch, a project of the Society for the Protection of Nature’s Tel Aviv Green Forum, recently opened a new blog, where it posts summaries of city council meetings and analysis of municipal decisions, including those of the city’s urban planning committee.

“These are important public bodies,” Neugarten insists, “and they should be transparent, along with dozens of other municipal committees that are not open to the public. But the truth is that the mayor manages everything behind closed doors. In Tel Aviv, the real policy-making is done by the Management Committee.”

****

The Management Committee (va’adat hahanhala) is a body chaired by the mayor. Its members include deputy mayors, members of the coalition, and a handful of powerful senior officials. Although little is known about its workings, the committee is considered the real decision-making body in the municipality, sort of a shadow city council.

On its blog, Council Watch writes: “The Management Committee was set up based on the Municipalities Ordinance, which defines it this way: ‘The council may choose from among its members a permanent Management Committee to advise the mayor with regard to carrying out his duty, and serve as a committee in any matter that is not the authority of another committee, permanent or temporary.’”

In reality, claims Council Watch, the Management Committee has largely become the body that determines municipal policy de facto, effectively superseding the city council. However, unlike the city council, the Management Committee does not publish its discussions, and its meetings are closed to the public, opposition parties and the media.

“The Management Committee publishes nothing,” says Neugarten. “We do not know when it meets, what issues it discusses or who is invited to speak at its meetings.” In this way, she says, important decisions are made without transparency, and without the possibility to hold politicians accountable.

According to Dr. Yishai Blank, a law professor at Tel Aviv University, the tendency to hold important policy discussions in closed committees, instead of on the city council, reflects a will to weaken opposition parties, while deflecting public criticism.

“Municipal committees are supposed to be the local version of parliamentary committees, like those in the Knesset,” explains Dr. Blank. “Their job is to hold in-depth discussions and develop municipal bylaws, but also to make sure that the leadership carries out the will of the city council.”

The problem, he explains, is that city councils in Israel have chronically weak oppositions. “This is especially conspicuous in Tel Aviv, where for years there was no significant opposition in the city council, which allowed the mayor to function virtually unchecked.”

“Now that we are seeing the development of a new opposition,” he says, “it would be proper to invite members of the opposition to participate in Management Committee meetings as well, so that the body is reflective of the entire city council.”

****

A hint as to the character of Management Committee discussions was provided earlier this year, in an article by Yoav Zeitun on internet site Ynet. The committee was reportedly discussing a proposal to grant residential parking permits to young people who live in Tel Aviv, but whose cars are registered in other cities (under their parents’ names).

Huldai, according to the article, opposed the idea, and began to raise his voice, yelling sarcastic and vulgar remarks that embarrassed committee members. He was eventually convinced to support the idea, however, and later apologized to the committee, explaining that he simply got carried away with enthusiasm.

The secrecy surrounding the Management Committee may also be concealing a lackadaisical organizational culture, in which meetings are held at irregular intervals and pressing issues wait in line for months before being brought up for discussion.

The Management Committee has been criticized as a sort of municipal “black hole,” into which motions from the city council and municipal committees tend to disappear for an extended period of time. Says Tamar Neugarten: “We know from comments by city council members that the Management Committee has a huge backlog of issues up for discussion, due to the fact that it doesn’t meet often enough.”

This creates a situation in which important decisions languish for months while waiting for the Management Committee’s approval. This is apparently what happened to a motion submitted by Pe’er Visner of the Green Party, which proposed granting children free entrance to the city’s museums.The proposal, submitted in July of 2008, was finally approved this month, nine months later, by the Management Committee.

Reuven Ladianski of Latet Lichyot is a member of the Management Committee, which he describes as a forum that discusses both motions and recommendations that rise from the city council and the municipal committees, and policy proposals that come down from the mayor and senior officials.

He confirms that there is a backlog, adding that during his first year in office, the Management Committee convened only about once every two months. Lately, however, he says that the body has begun meeting more frequently, approximately once every two or three weeks. The change is apparently due to pressure from the media and city council members.

“It makes no sense that the body that effectively runs the city should meet only once every few months,” says Ladianski. He also believes that the workings of the Management Committee should be made more transparent, even suggesting that its decisions be brought before the city council for discussion.

“Aside from certain issues which might be considered especially sensitive,” he says, “I don’t see a reason why the Management Committee’s discussions should not be published.”

Adds Efron: “If city council members were truly able to represent the people that voted them into office, the city would look very different.  There would be real efforts to keep housing affordable and air breathable.  Schools in the south of the city would get more money and resources.  The agenda of the city would look radically different, and better, than it does today.”

In response to claims raised in this article, the Tel Aviv Municipality issued the following response: “First, it should be emphasized that Management Committee meetings do not take place in the dark, as is implied, but are work meetings that are conducted in accordance with the law, with their discussions recorded and decisions publicized in an orderly manner. Any citizen, including city council members and members of the opposition, may review the minutes of the meetings.”

“In addition, it should be noted that, contrary to claims, a majority of coalition members are of the opinion that discussions in the Management Committee are much more effective and efficient than plenary discussions in the city council, especially regarding issues that require a long and thorough discussion that allows for input from professionals. Moreover, every operative decision that is approved in the Management Committee is eventually brought up for approval by the city council.”

“It should be understood that with the scope of activity required in a city like Tel Aviv – Jaffa, most decisions reach the city council after having been processed and discussed at the professional level and in the relevant committees.”

Regarding the Management Committee’s backlog, the Tel Aviv Municipality told Metro: “Every motion that is transferred to the Management Committee will be brought up for discussion. In the case that a backlog is created, additional meetings are scheduled, as directed by the mayor. It should also be noted that many times discussions are postponed on the request of those who submitted the motion.”

Update: According to Ha’aretz commentator Ze’ev Segal, Israel’s Justice Ministry is attempting to secure cabinet approval for the creation of a new unit that would enforce the concept of freedom of information vis a vis public authorities. Segal suggests that Israel follow the example of US President Obama, who on his second day in office, issued an “open government directive” ordering all government authorities to publish information online about their activities in an open and accessible way.

This article was originally published in the Jerusalem Post’s “Metro” magazine on April 30, 2010 (click here for a pdf of the print version, here for online version).

After over two years of study and deliberation – and rising rents – the city finally has a plan.

Good news this week for everyone who’s been feeling uneasy about the spiraling cost of housing in Tel Aviv – after over two years of study and deliberation, the Tel Aviv Municipality has approved a plan to create affordable housing units in the city.

While this does not necessarily mean that rents will fall any time soon, it does mean that a supply of below market value rental apartments will gradually come into existence within Tel Aviv’s municipal borders over the next several years. By approving the plan, Tel Aviv becomes the first Israeli city to come up with a coherent affordable housing strategy – although several other cities, notably Jerusalem, are working on plans of their own.

The plan was drawn up by a special commission, whose advisory team was led by Dr. Emily Silverman, an urban planner and a researcher at the Technion. Sounding less enthusiastic than one might expect, Dr. Silverman reacted to the decision this week on the Coalition for Affordable Housing in Israel’s Hebrew-language blog.

“It isn’t an excellent plan, and perhaps not even an especially good plan,” she writes. “And I say this as the person who headed the plan’s advisory team.”

She continues: “The mandate that was given to us was defined as the creation of a workable solution. Not perfect, not grandiose, not necessarily original or a breakthrough. Not a solution based on significant constitutional changes or one that would require financial support. Rather, a solution that could be put into place now, as a first step in Israel. With all of the limitations, shortcomings and opportunities that exist here today.”

Some details about the plan:

The program will benefit mainly young, working couples with children. According to the commission’s report, 70% of new affordable housing units will be allocated to young families making up to NIS 12,000/month (average wages in Israel, equivalent to around $3,200). Rents would be approximately NIS 2,800 per couple, or no more than 25% of a family’s monthly income.

The program will focus mainly on providing long-term rental apartments. On city-owned land zoned for housing, new buildings will be required to include up to 25% affordable rental units. The city will also offer scholarships to students who are willing to live in run-down southern neighborhoods, like Neve Sha’anan.

Regarding another of the commission’s recommendations – that developers be granted increased building rights in exchange for agreeing to build affordable rental units – the municipality will have to develop new legal tools before anything like this can be implemented.

Two pilot projects were also announced: one containing 100 apartments on a 4 dunam city-owned plot in the southern Shapira neighborhood, and another containing around 50 units near Kikar Hamedina in the northern part of the city.

Eligibility criteria for the program have not yet been determined, but will likely require at least 3 years previous residency in the city, and possibly also completion of compulsory army service.

The commission’s report also recommended setting up a forum to address the unique housing situation faced by the Arab community in Jaffa, as well as finding specific planning solutions for that community. That forum has already begun to meet, while a number of other organizations are working on a plan to set up a community development corporation (CDC) in Jaffa.

The plan offers no solutions for the city’s low-income residents, claiming they are the responsibility of the state’s housing agencies.

The commission which formulated the plan was set up in late 2007, after a sharp rise in rents across the city led to public pressure for the municipality to step in with some form of regulation. The issue featured prominently in the run-up to the November 2008 local elections. In May 2009, the city announced that the commission had officially finished its work.

The long delay between that announcement and the formal approval of the plan led many to suspect that the city was dragging its feet, or as Prof. Noah Efron of Ir Lekulanu (City for All), the largest municipal opposition party, told me last year: “Nobody within the municipality wants to advance it, so it’s simply not being advanced.”

The decision to approve the plan this week was made by a controversial municipal entity called va’adat hahanhala (“the executive committee”). One of the most powerful bodies in the municipality, the committee is staffed by the mayor and members of his coalition, along with senior municipality officials. City council members who are not part of the mayor’s coalition, as well as the press and the public, are not allowed access to the committee’s meetings.

Following its approval, the plan will be implemented by a municipal committee headed by city council member Arnon Giladi. The principles contained in the plan will also be integrated into Tel Aviv’s new Urban Master Plan, which is currently being formulated.

Coverage of the 2010 Eilat-Eilot Renewable Energy Conference.

Israel’s Solar Industry Trying to Regain its Edge TreeHugger.com, Feb. 17: Half a century ago, Israel was a world leader in renewable energy. Today, after years of dragging its feet, the industry is trying to regain its former glory.

Israel, Egypt Considering Joint Solar Energy Project in Sinai GreenProphet.com, Feb. 18: According to the plan, Israel would supply the technology, with Egypt supplying the land required for the project.

Spearheading an Energy Revolution TreeHugger.com, Feb. 21: How a remote and sparely populated region is positioning itself on the forefront of Israel’s resurgent green wave.

Solar-Powered Camels and More From Israel Renewable Energy Conference (slideshow) TreeHugger.com, Feb. 23

Will Solar Panels Cover Israel’s Last Open Spaces? GreenProphet.com, Feb. 23: A conflict may be brewing between an emerging renewable energy industry and environmentalists over land preservation in Israel. The heart of the controversy has to do with where to put the massive solar installations that are expected to be built in the arid Negev and Arava regions in the south of the country.

Can Israel’s Wind Power Sector Compete with Solar? GreenProphet.com, Feb. 28: In Israel, renewable energy has become almost synonymous with solar energy in its various forms. But what about that other renewable resource – the wind?