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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2017
This article portrays and theorizes a new utterance of landscape architecture within Israeli Jewish-Arab urbanity, which aims to represent the prolonged and multifaceted Palestinian urban loss since 1948 in the design of a major city park. The analysis of design discourses at Jaffa Slope Park examines differing Israeli and Palestinian landscape sign systems. Dominant and breaching landscape architecture utterances in the constructed landscape of the park will be interpreted and theorized in the context of the discursive landscape sign systems, together with the local post-1948 history of urban institutional ruination and planning. The park's design involves both the intensive use and destabilization of a traditional Zionist/Israeli landscape mold that aims at greening ’Ereẓ Yisra'el and at concealing ruined pre-1948 Palestinian locales under green shields. Through a close reading of the park's landscape, the paper explores ethical, political, and allegorical utterances of landscape architecture, immersed in both Israeli and Palestinian landscape semiotics, yet undermining these sign systems at the same time.
I am grateful to landscape architect Alisa Braudo for generously sharing her constructive insights and extensive planning materials. This paper elaborates on a fragment of my PhD dissertation conducted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for which I am thankful to my instructors Professor Hannan Hever and Professor Hubert Law-Yone. My thanks go to Marilyn Reizbaum for her close reading and encouragement, and to the supportive senior and fellow members of the Jews and Cities group, especially Eli Lederhendler and Scott Ury who read the paper closely. I thank Mandel Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center in the Humanities and Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University, where I started developing some of these ideas as a doctoral fellow in the Jews and Cities group, and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University, where I completed this paper as a postdoctoral fellow. Thanks to Yeela Gundar for her meticulous graphic design of the cartographic data. Finally, I thank the anonymous readers and AJS Review editors for encouraging me to sharpen and clarify my ideas.
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35. “Midron Yafo,” January 25, 1981 (memorandum from Adam Mazor to the City Engineer), Tel Aviv–Jaffa City Engineer Department Archive, brown file of Urban Master Plan 2236–1 (documents in Israeli archives are in Hebrew). A state coasts’ master plan (no. 13) from the 2000s dismissed this scheme and designated the reclaimed land to a public park only.
36. Athamny, “Ledovev ’et ha-kirot,” 74–75.
37. On this cultural shift, see Nitzan-Shiftan, Alona, “Seizing Locality in Jerusalem”, in The End of Tradition, ed. AlSayyad, Nezar (New York: Routledge, 2003), 236Google Scholar.
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40. Four hundred eighty-nine objections to urban master plan 2360 were handed to the Tel Aviv District Planning Committee. Many of them claimed that the plan does not prioritize or nurture the Arab community. See “Minutes of the Tel Aviv District Planning Committee,” October 12, 1988, Tel Aviv–Jaffa City Engineer Department Archive, brown file of urban master plan 2236–8.
41. Wallerstein, Sebastian and Silverman, Emily with Meishar, Naama, eds. Meẓukat ha-diyur be-kerev ha-’ukhlusiyah ha-falestinit be-Yafo: Sof ʻidan ha-dayarut ha-mugenet be-nikhse reshut ha-pituʼaḥ [Housing distress within the Palestinian community in Jaffa: The end of protected tenancy in Jaffa] (Jerusalem: Bimkom, 2009), 33–35 Google Scholar.
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64. “Netiʻat ha-park ha-leʼumi me-ʻever la-Yarkon,” 5 May 1952 (memorandum by Seʻadiya Shoshani, the head of the Planting and Gardening Department in Tel Aviv–Jaffa Municipality), viewed on Tel Aviv–Jaffa municipality's website: http://park.co.il/he/%D7%90%D7%9C%D7%91%D7%95%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9D/ (accessed July 18, 2016). This memorandum announces a planting ceremony on May 13, 1952 “near the Shaykh-Muwannis village with presence of the prime minister” (translation by the author).
65. “Nakba Map,” http://zochrot.org/en/article/54772 (accessed July 10, 2016).
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70. Tel Aviv–Jaffa Municipality at el., Summary of Public Meetings, 15.
71. Some of these species and the aesthetics of agricultural landscapes penetrated urban landscape architecture projects other than parks. See Alon-Mozes, “Landscape and Agriculture,” 166–80.
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74. Tel Aviv–Jaffa Municipality et al., Summary of Public Meetings, 15 (translation by the author).
75. Interview with the park's landscape architect, Alisa Braudo, Ramat Gan, February 24, 2008.
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79. Ibid., 50–51.
80. Ibid., 38–39, 43–45. See also his argument that “essence is interest … egoisms struggling with each other,” Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 4.
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85. Poeisis is the Greek term for a creative activity, “the actual work of making,” through which an art work is founded; see Corner, James, “Representation and Landscape”, in Theory in Landscape Architecture: A Reader, ed. Swaffield, Simon (1992; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 145Google Scholar.
86. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 222–23 (emphasis is original).
87. There is another landscape architecture expression that reverberates with Palestinian ruins in two of the park's squares, which are paved with broken colored tiles collected from the waste mound on the site. For an interpretation of this type of paving as an essentializing, noncritical design gesture, see Meishar, Naama, “In Search of Meta-Landscape Architecture: Jaffa Slope Park's Design and the Ethical Experience”, Journal of Landscape Architecture 14 (2012): 40–45 Google Scholar; for an interpretation of the paving as a multidirectional memory design gesture see Mann, “Apartment to Remember.”
88. Interview with Alisa Braudo, Ramat Gan, March 30, 2008.
89. Ruderal species grow in areas that have been disturbed by humans, such as on the margins of roads or fields.
90. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 6–7, 46–47; Critchley, Ethics of Deconstruction, 127, 128–29.
91. The prefix “meta-” draws on self-questioning as well as on a transgression beyond the known or the same. See Meishar, “Meta-Landscape Architecture,” 40–45.
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93. Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, 92, 120, 127.
94. Corner, James, “Critical Thinking and Landscape Architecture”, Landscape Journal 10, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 161–62Google Scholar (emphasis added). As was mentioned in the exposition, the disciplinary discourse of political practice is limited due to reasons I will not be able to sort out here. Strangely, Corner confined critical action to the practice of landscape architects and dismissed scholars’ agency of critique of landscape architecture, see ibid., 160.
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100. This upper point of the slope, with the wreckage lying atop, was left untouched during the park's construction.
101. Hever, “Political poem,” 235 (translation by the author).
