Urban renewal
The Movement for Israeli Urbanism wants to revive Israeli city centers for the public good.

Globes - Hagit Peleg-Rotem 26 Dec 05 20:14

“Theodore Herzl [the founding father of Zionism] sheds a tear every time he looks at the monuments to him all around Israel,” says Czamanski Ben Shahar & Co. Ltd. partner Tamir Ben Shahar, who specializes in planning and evaluating viability for commercial zones. “Streets named after Herzl in Haifa, Netanya, Rehovot, and other cities in Israel, which were once the main streets of their cities, have become abandoned and neglected.”
Ben-Shahar says that accumulated mistakes by decision-makers and authorities caused by lack of understanding what makes cities healthy have harmed downtown areas. “The usual practice is to blame power centers and commercial areas outside cities. Obviously, they accelerate the process of decline in city centers, but the way streets look when they are not maintained and improved plays a greater role in driving commerce away from cities,” he explains.

”City centers have been emptied around Israel. Netanya, for example, has moved its municipal engineering department to the business district in Ramat Poleg. In Jerusalem, they took the university and government complex out of the downtown area. Now they’re putting the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design back in the town center, but it’s not easy. In Haifa, they took the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology out of the Hadar neighborhood. They didn’t even leave parts of the university that were in the city. They made every possible mistake in order to remove the vitality from the city’s beating heart. Now, we’re trying to bring it back to life, but the price is much greater,” Ben-Shahar says.

Ben-Shahar is a board member in Merhav -- Movement for Israeli Urbanism, which a private group of architects, planners and academics founded two years ago. Merhav is part of the global new urbanism movement, whose goal is to put life back in the city, and give it back to its residents. The group hopes to change the ways that people think, and influence both planners and planning agencies and the public’s concept of ecology.

Hundreds of professionals from various disciplines took part in Merhav’s first conference in Beersheva last week. They came out of interest in the subject. Among other things, they learned how to move the process of municipal rehabilitation from utopian discussions to practical implementation. Examples presented at the conference included area rehabilitation in several US cities, and their consequences for local economic recovery.

”No prosperous city center can exist without commerce that functions at a very high economic level,” says Ben-Shahar. “Our criterion for success in the process is the movement of customers. The calculation is simple. When sales proceeds per meter increases as time progresses, housing rents rise accordingly, and real estate values increase, then the private sector has an incentive to invest.”

Ben-Shahar says that problem is adapting planning processes to the dynamic rate of events. “One of the most difficult problems in Israel is that property owners and tenants (retail chains and businesses) no longer believe in promises of urban improvement by the public sector. Economic processes, consumer habits, taste and needs change quickly, while planning and approval processes are too slow and awkward.

”There’s a huge gap between planning and implementation. Planning lags about 15 years behind economic processes. To draw up an Urban Building Plan for Jaffa Port takes eight years, and they still haven’t finished it. If someone wants to develop something, they want to do it now.

”The only city doing anything real in developing its downtown district is Jerusalem. In addition to the Jerusalem Economic Corp. (TASE: ECJM) (JEC), which deals with a range of topics, the Jerusalem municipality has founded Eden (the Central Jerusalem Development Company), a company whose only commitment is to the city center. Founded four years ago, Eden budget is set for the next 10 years. The way the municipality works with the company guarantees that all fees collected in the downtown district will be invested back there.”

As a test case, Ben-Shahar presents Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda open-air market, which has been undergoing this two-directional process for some years. On the one hand, turnover volumes have been dropping significantly, as a result of the security situation and competition from retail chains. On the other hand, renewal from within is taking place, attracting a new kind of public and business.

The market recently received a booster shot for its renewal process from Eden. Ben-Shahar says, “Markets in the heart of town are one of the nice things that we travel to see in Barcelona and Paris. Historic markets are being renewed all over the world, and news ones built, while in Israel, planners think that the area has to be cleaned up and the market taken out of the town center. The right thing to do is to preserve the market in the town center, and bolster its synergy with other activities.”

Ben-Shahar says that architects and transportation advisers, not economic, marketing, and advertising people (retail experts), are now planning the location of markets. The market is a collection of businesses in an area unit, but it is not managed, unlike shopping malls and large shopping centers. The market can be deliberately improved and planned through a centralized management that bears some of the responsibility.

Ben-Shahar adds, “There are 1,400 such management companies worldwide, owned jointly by local authorities, property owners, and tenants. Their job is to create conditions for the commercial system in the area to function at maximal effectiveness, while the area is preserved and maintained at a high level. Businesses pay municipal property tax in any case, but when a management company enters the picture, it provides values that contribute to proper business management.

”The Mahane Yehuda market is a typical urban anchor. The market houses 450 businesses. 20,000-25,000 people a day pass through it on weekdays, and even more on just before weekends and holidays. The market is undergoing all kinds of processes and internal reawakening. Next to the usual market stores, whose product mix extends to 40% of food products, a fashion store belonging to two young designers, cafes, and a Yuppie restaurant owned by Eli Mizrahi, chairman of the Mahane Yehuda business committee, have opened in the market in recent years.”

Ben-Shahar says that Mizrahi holds a jazz and tapas evening every Sunday, which Ben-Shahar attributes to “Mizrahi’s enthusiastic retail-mindedness.” The success of such events supports Ben-Shahar’s claim that efforts to promote the market should be centralized. Eden, headed by general manager Assaf Whitman, initiated cooperation several months ago between the market’s merchants committee and economic consultants and planners. “Success of the process is creating a win-win situation for both sides,” Ben-Shahar says.

Getting the residents involved is one of the key principles of the new urbanism, in recognition that cooperation and understanding can solve conflicts, and avoid delays and difficulties. As Amitai Har Lev, executive director of Mekomot - the Environmental Mediation Institute Ltd. puts it, “In city planning, almost everything causes a conflict. Cooperation between the parties involved on the various issues is a process that creates trust and dissolves conflicts. It’s not ‘Me against you’, but ‘you and me together against the problem.’ This process requires transparency and accessibility of the parties involved to the sources of information.”

The method that Har Lev outlines is liable to create delays in some decision-making, but not as great as the delays created by objections on planning committees, which, in most cases, are the only way for people to participate in decision-making having a direct effect on their living space. The authorities are inclined not to disclose any information to the public, and when they do reveal their plans for public scrutiny, they do it in a patronizing way. A planned process of cooperation also gives the public the power to influence, within limitations that everyone knows and understands.

Har Lev adds, “Today, developers and planners are also coming to realize that cooperation pays -- a long way around that is shorter in the end. Involving the public at an early stage and constructing a system of consent can give a developer the advantage of not getting bogged down in objections.”

The second day of the Merhav conference was devoted to involving the public in planning processes. In Beersheva, Merhav has been conducting a focused process in three neighborhoods for the past four months. Merhav has set up a working group of planners and residents -- business owners and homeowners -- with the support of the municipality, which has promised practical support for plans devised by the group.

Irit & Dror Architects partner Dror Gershon, who, together with partner Irit Solzi, was among the initiators of the group, cites the northern Beersheva railway station as an example of the process’s importance. The municipality and management of the railway, in cooperation with Ben Gurion University of the Negev, proposed an elevated pedestrian bridge to connect the railway station to the university. “But the connection to the university cut the station off from the nearby neighborhood,” Gershon says. “One neighborhood is separated from the station by fenced-in student dormitories, and another is separated by the railway tracks from the continuous municipal space.”

Gershon says that the bridge makes this separation even more extreme. “Before, they used to walk in the street, and pass through the grocery store. Today, students step off the train, and enter the university, without dirtying their shoes in the city’s dust. There’s absolute separation. If the bridge is so good for the university, why not for the neighborhoods?” he asks.

According to Gershon, integrated development of access to the station, and of the station site itself, for the benefit of the passengers and residents, could add commercial space, business activity, and movement of people to the site, which would constitute active purchasing power. A confluence of interests could enrich the university’s sphere of activity by expanding its appeal to the non-student population, and serve the residents as an active shopping center, which one of the neighborhoods lacks.

The process developed by Merhav has won over private participants from the public, as well as municipal activists, private citizens, and local business owners. These parties are cooperating with planners and consultants, who are contributing from their time and professional capabilities. The municipality is following the process consistently. Gershon says, “At the beginning, it was necessary to overcome a crisis of confidence between the residents and authority. The municipality, however, made it clear to what it could commit itself in the long term. At the conference, we translated this into a program, vision, and targets, and we started putting it on maps.

”In the short term, the process is already producing results, because all the parties taking part in the work groups, or accompanying the process from outside, are becoming agents of change. Urban thinking of the municipal engineering and geographic department, for example, and professional thinking of architects and municipal planners, are changing and having an influence.”