Urban Arcadias: Émigré Experts, Spatial Knowledge, and the Rise of Zionist-Israeli Planning, 1933-1953

This study provides a first history of the emergence of urban and national planning in Jewish Palestine/Israel (1933-1953), placing it in the wider context of the international planning movement and the flow of knowledge, ideas and expertise within it. I do so by critically excavating the individual work of three German-émigré planners during the British Mandate period, all of whom later became senior state planners in early statehood: Eliezer Leonid Brutzkus (1907-1987), Ariel Anselm Kahane (1907-1986), and Artur Glikson (1911-1966). Their planning work, which has mostly escaped the scholars’ radar, embodies a unique encounter between German cultural sensibilities and professional traditions, British colonial practices and the Zionist ideology. Operating at a time of global turmoil, each produced a distinct imagination for national “Urban Arcadias”, grounded in the local settler enterprise, yet enthusiastically participating in the universal quest for a new social order.Essentially a work of planning history, this project also combines the perspectives of social history, history of the built-environment disciplines and Middle East studies. It takes as its point of departure underexplored aspects of planning, a distinct policy expertise that originated in fin-de-siècle industrial Europe and which evolved in the first half of the twentieth-century from a voluntarist, urban field to an influential public policy expertise concerned with large-scale planning. It highlights crucial, yet largely neglected, questions regarding spatial policy, including national and regional land use, town-country relations, settlement structure, demography and economy, and their encounter with emergent ideas on state interventionism and technocracy. Following an introductory chapter, which considers historiographical and theoretical aspects, a separate chapter is devoted to the work of each of the three planners during the British Mandate period. It progresses chronologically from Brutzkus’ introduction of functional-economic planning in the late 1930’s, to Kahane’s formalistic-aesthetic techno-utopian proposals for postwar reconstruction, and then moving on to Glikson’s environmentalist approach, which matured in his postwar exchange with the urban critic Lewis Mumford. The final chapter discusses how their cumulative insight was brought to bear, and compete on, post-1948 national planning, as co-founders of the first Israeli national planning team. Particular emphasis is placed on the planners’ varying conceptions of the local Palestinian population as they were either incorporated into, or removed from, their various plans. The Afterword suggests signposts for future research in connection with the postwar New Towns movement worldwide. This research provides new insights regarding the rise of planning at a formative period of institutionalization. It illuminates both the diverse disciplinary knowledge that informed its rise and the cutting-edge work by transnational planners operating in the cultural and geographical margins of the West. As well, it pushes the boundaries of the field of planning history, demonstrating the historiographical potential in addressing this distinct set of questions to the built environment fields and beyond, as revealed through this specific case study. Thus, the findings call for a revision of one of the founding myths of Israeli nation-building by countering the conventional “architectural modernist” narrative of early statehood planning, associated with the Bauhaus-graduate Arieh Sharon—the head of the first national planning team—and the aesthetic traditions and social utopianism that he espoused. Instead, I reveal how a cross-range of planning ideas, obscured by the overarching architectural narrative, were in fact the crucial locus of influence. Further, this unknown groundwork of planners and planning knowledge during the Mandate period, and especially the agency of Brutzkus, both explored here for the first time, call for a rereading of the transition from the pre-Independence Zionist rural pioneering ethos to the post-Independence ‘urban turn.