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.

With the world’s attention focused on climate change talks in Copenhagen, where world leaders may or may not reach an agreement by the end of the week, a parallel gathering in Istanbul is exploring practical solutions to the climate challenge. At theEcocity World Summit, the answer to climate change and other environmental, social and even economic problems lies in how we design, build and live in our cities.

“Cities are important as solutions to the climate change challenge,” said Janet Larsen of the Earth Policy Institute. Larsen, who just flew in from Copenhagen, described the negotiations at COP 15 as “a process where every country comes to the table trying to concede as little as possible. We will not solve the problem this way,” she added.

In contrast, city designers (whether they be professional planners, policy-makers or citizen activists) are already addressing the challenge, she said, by changing the way cities function. As examples, she noted a plan to make new homes in EU countriescarbon neutral by 2020, and the Complete Streets movement in the US.

Representing the United States, Parris Glendening of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute exhorted attendees not to “imitate or duplicate what we have done in the US over the past fifty years,” which he described as half a century of subsidized sprawl.

Suggesting that gas prices in the US would spike once again once the minute the worldwide recession ends, Glendening described American suburban communities as place where “residents could literally not survive without their cars.” However, by designing for greater density and walkability in urban forms, Glendening estimated that up to a third of the world’s carbon emissions could potentially be eliminated.

Several of the Turkish speakers noted the enormous challenges facing Istanbul, including internal migration trends that add some half a million new residents to the city every year. And despite ambitious plans, laid out enthusiastically by Dr. Veysel Eroglu, Turkey’s Minister of Environment and Forestry, many of the local speakers expressed their frustrations about the pace of change in the country, pointing out, for example, that green building certification has only been attained thus far by five buildings in Turkey.

Originally published at TreeHugger.com. Photo by Jesse Fox.

This editorial calling for action from world leaders on climate change is being published today by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages.

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.

This film was shown to delegates at the opening ceremony.

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.

But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June’s UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: “We can go into extra time but we can’t afford a replay.”

At the deal’s heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.

Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.

Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world’s biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.

Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of “exported emissions” so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than “old Europe”, must not suffer more than their richer partners.

The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.

But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.

Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.

Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”.

It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.

The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.

Via The Guardian. For more on how the global climate change editorial came about, click here. To follow the Guardian’s coverage of the Copenhagen climate change summit’s opening day, click here.