Jerusalem’s Newest Tourist Attraction: Open-Air Escalators in Har Homa

לגרסה העברית

For several years now, Jerusalem’s Har Homa neighborhood has been the test site for an innovative form of underground garbage dumpster. Recently, however, the Municipality announced that Har Homa will be the venue for a somewhat more glamorous initiative: a system of open-air escalators. If all goes according to plan, the escalators will function as a public transportation mode, help residents cope with the neighborhood’s difficult topography, and attract tourists.

Har Homa’s residents – like those of other hilly Jerusalem neighborhoods – are all too aware of the mobility problems occasioned by steep inclines. Although a healthy adult with time to spare might, with only a little huffing and puffing, be able to climb the hundreds of outdoor stairs by which streets are typically connected in these neighborhoods, such is not the case for senior citizens, people with disabilities, mothers with young children in tow, and those faced with time constraints (such as parents who need to get their children to school or kindergarten before proceeding to their workplaces).



One of Har Homa's many "extreme" staircases

Up to now, Har Homa residents have dealt with this problem by using their private cars to get to and from most, or all, local destinations. In accordance with current planning rules, all neighborhood buildings were designed with hefty amounts of off-street parking. As a result, local households have found it convenient to own two cars, and sometimes more. The availability of these vehicles has made it possible for Har Homa residents to get to neighborhood supermarkets, groceries, health clinics, kindergartens, schools, synagogues, beauty parlors, pizza parlors, candy stores, the community center, and all other local destinations without having to climb endless stairs, or take heartbreakingly circuitous detours on foot in order to avoid the stairs.

Unfortunately, the minimum parking requirements, while ostensibly solving problems of local mobility and access, have created their own issues: horrendous traffic in the areas surrounding the neighborhood’s educational institutions and shopping centers, a Wild-West attitude toward parking, air pollution, excessively wide roads, unsafe and unpleasant conditions for pedestrians, and exceptionally unattractive architecture due to the need to house vast numbers of automobiles. All of things are inconsistent with current municipal policy, which seeks to promote walkability and public transit use, and to reduce car dependency to the extent possible.

Enter the Municipality's newest initiative, to be implemented in the coming months: the installation of a state-of-the-art open-air escalator system to supplement Har Homa’s network of outdoor staircases – and, in some instances, to replace those staircases.



Medellin escalator, courtesy of DaniBlanchette, Flickr

Outdoor escalators are operated in quite a few cities around the world, Barcelona and Hong Kong among them. Over the past few years, particular interest has been generated by the impressive system installed in Comuna 13, one of Medellín, Colombia's poorest neighborhoods, whose topography greatly resembles that of Jerusalem’s Har Homa. Unlike Har Homa residents, however, the denizens of Medellín’s most notorious slum have no private cars available to them, and until recently were forced to use stairs equal in number to those of a 28-story building in order to reach the city’s employment and commercial centers. The escalator system, like the cable car system that also serves as a mode of public transit in Medellín, is a social-justice project aimed at improving local residents’ living conditions, connecting them to the city and to jobs, and setting real social change in motion. The success of these initiatives earned Medellín the title of Innovative City of the Year for 2013 (beating out Tel Aviv, which placed second).

One may ask: why is the status of a third-world city such as Medellín relevant to our discussion of a Jerusalem neighborhood, most of whose residents fall somewhere along the middle-class spectrum and own private automobiles that give them mobility both within the neighborhood and outside it?

We posed this question to Deputy Mayor Ruth Sela, holder of the Jerusalem Municipality’s planning and environment portfolios, during a joint interview with her fellow deputy mayor, Gabi Ganon.

Sela: “We need to stop viewing the private car as the default solution to every transport situation, and as a symbol of status and luxury. The private car is simply destroying our built environment, and our health along with it. The present municipal leadership is an enlightened one that wants to advance sustainability and promote public health, and the car dependency that currently prevails in Jerusalem’s peripheral neighborhoods is inconsistent with that approach.

“After all, we’ve turned Jaffa Road into the country’s longest and most attractive pedestrian mall. You can’t go anywhere near the center of town nowadays with a private car, and over the coming years this trend will only intensify. Pretty soon there will be almost nowhere in Jerusalem to take a car to, or park one in – except the peripheral ‘residential’ neighborhoods! So it makes sense to implement our policy in these neighborhoods as well. Rather than each family owning multiple vehicles just so they can get to destinations within the neighborhood, we’re going to enable them to get to those destinations on foot, and to give up at least one family car.”

But, despite what you’ve said about Jerusalem’s core areas becoming increasingly car-hostile, the residents of Har Homa still need to use their cars to get to jobs and shopping centers outside the neighborhood, in the absence of any viable alternative.

Sela: “Of course we can’t hope to advance the escalator project and promote ‘car divestment’ without drastically improving public transit service to the neighborhood. The frequency of the bus lines that serve Har Homa will be increased to every 10 minutes rather than every 20 (or more) – constituting true ‘rapid bus service.’ We’ll also be annulling the parking minimums for residential construction, so it will be a lot harder to own more than one family car.”

Cancelling the parking minimums will surely be an unpopular move. People might start asking whether the Municipality isn’t intervening inappropriately in residents’ lives. If Jerusalemites have grown accustomed to using their cars for every out-of-home excursion, and if they enjoy the feeling of status and power that it gives them, why ruin it for them?

Sela: “Look, as a public official I have to think, and also act, with my constituents’ long-term interests in view – even if that entails decisions that are unpopular in the short run. The prevailing lifestyle in Har Homa and in Jerusalem’s other peripheral neighborhoods is simply unsustainable and unhealthy. The impoverished residents of Medellín’s worst slum are now benefiting from a neighborhood infrastructure that facilitates walking; they will neither want nor need private cars even once their economic status improves. They’re going to stay trim and fit, while the relatively affluent residents of Har Homa will be quivering gelatinous masses. You know, rumors have got round to us in the Municipality that Har Homa residents like to tie their garbage bags to their car antennas and drive with them to the garbage dumpsters located just a few meters from each building. It’s this kind of behavior that I, as a public official, feel obligated to address.”

That does still have overtones of ‘Big Brother’.

Sela: Hey, Mayor Bloomberg of New York City looks out for his public in just the same way – he takes things even farther. Go into a New York restaurant and open the menu – you’ll find that every item has a calorie estimate next to it. Bloomberg’s even trying to prohibit the sale of sweetened beverages in the city, as a public health measure.”

That particular effort hasn't succeeded. It was thought to be too intrusive – and that’s just what people are liable to think about your attempt to separate Jerusalemites from their cars.

Sela: “The escalator project – and the sustainability considerations that lie behind it – are issues of urban and transport planning that fall within the purview of a municipal authority. Not only that, but the question of the automobile’s place in the urban environment is absolutely one that municipalities should be facing up to and answering.”

At this point in the interview signs of impatience could be discerned in the facial expressions and body language of Deputy Mayor Gabi Ganon, who up to now had maintained a polite silence.

Ganon: “With all due respect to my colleague and to her concern for sustainability and public health, I have to take issue with the idea that environmental and health concerns are what ultimately set the escalator project in motion.

“The current municipal leadership is a proudly capitalist one, and it’s not reasonable for the Municipality to undertake projects of this magnitude just to make residents happy and ensure their physical fitness. We’re not a welfare state anymore.

“An initiative has to be potentially profitable – otherwise, how can we fund it? How would we raise the funds for an infrastructural project as complex as the Har Homa escalators?”

Indeed, we were planning to ask just that question. How will the Municipality be paying for the construction and operation of the escalators?

Ganon: “This is the good part. The Municipality won’t be spending a penny of its own money. And it won’t have to go schnorring, either. Two worthy and committed Jews, one Israeli and one from the Diaspora – with the means and the desire to benefit both the city and themselves – will be investing in the project and, in time, will receive an impressive return on their investment.”

How will they get a ‘return’ on a project whose main purpose is to advance the public good, not to generate income? Will users have to pay a toll?

Ganon [chuckling]: “No, no, no toll. It’s an interesting idea, but probably not practicable. No, there are other ways to make money off a project.

“Look, the concept of ‘the public good’ has passed its expiration date – it belongs to the socialist era. Today’s philanthropists have learned this very well. They’ve reached the conclusion – and this is very consistent with Jewish tradition, by the way – that the highest form of charity is enabling others to earn a living, not just to throw money at them. And this is where the escalators fit in. The environmental and health benefits will essentially be by-products. The escalators’ real function is to be a tourist attraction, like the ones in Hong Kong, which upgraded a topographically problematic area and turned it into a vibrant, sought-after commercial quarter! The same thing will happen in Har Homa. You’ve got wonderful views of Bethlehem there – Christian tourists will come in droves, once the proper investment has been made. We might even put in a cable car system to run between Har Homa and Bethlehem, like the one we’re planning to operate between the Old City and the Khan Theater. Kevin Bermeister, the escalator’s main financer (along with Erel Margalit), will buy one of the neighborhood’s residential towers and turn it into a swanky hotel, Erel will open a few non-kosher restaurants, and everybody will profit. It’s a slam dunk!”

What -- drab, monotonous Har Homa, with its endless vistas of ground-level garages, is going to become a tourist destination?



Hong Kong (covered) escalators --
 courtesy of Maucaine via Wikipedia

Ganon: “Why not? They predicted at first that the Hong Kong escalators would be a total failure, but the novelty attracted people and led to the opening of innumerable businesses, shops and restaurants, situated mainly at the escalator system’s entry and exit points. A form of ‘transit-oriented development,’ if you will. Regarding Har Homa, we’ll soften the regulations so that the garages of the residential buildings can be converted into commercial spaces. There’ll be boutiques, cafés and pubs at the ground level of the buildings.”

Sounds like science fiction. But to what degree is this really agreeable to the residents themselves? Maybe they don’t want a pub at the ground level of every building? After all, it’s a neighborhood consisting mainly of young families, most of them religiously observant to some degree or other.

Ganon: “Look, a pub on the ground floor is a negligible price to pay compared with all the money that’s going to be flowing into the neighborhood -- money that will make it possible to provide Har Homa with all of the municipal services that are currently lacking there – a library, a well-baby clinic equal to the patient load, shade structures in the playgrounds, kindergarten buildings and synagogues in accordance with demand, development and maintenance of green spaces. The Municipality will finally agree to take responsibility for all those areas that have been left in Construction Ministry limbo. All the problems that the folks in Har Homa are constantly whining about will finally be resolved!”

Wait a minute – shouldn’t the neighborhood be getting all these services anyway, in return for the arnona [municipal property tax] that the residents pay?

Ganon: Don’t make me laugh. Did you really think residents are entitled to something in return for their arnona? Arnona barely covers garbage pick-up, after you take into account all the other really important things the Municipality has to finance with its limited resources. New sports and entertainment arenas that overrun their original budgets by a hundred million shekels, for instance. And let's not forget cool events like the Formula 1 road show planned for next month. With stuff like that going on, is it any wonder there's no money left for neighborhood libraries? The peripheral neighborhoods need to stop asking what the city can do for them, and start asking what they can do for the city -- then maybe they'll get somewhere."

But does Jerusalem really need yet another tourist destination? Aren’t the Old City and the revitalized downtown enough?

Ganon: “Decentralization and breaking up monopolies -- that's the name of the game. Why shouldn’t other neighborhoods enter the tourism market? Healthy competition between neighborhoods will ensure optimal delivery of tourism experiences to all those who visit the city – that is, to all customers purchasing the Jerusalem ‘product.’ Basically, I want to do in the urban arena what my brother did in the cellular one – open things up to competition. Besides, we’ve come to realize that the Old City and downtown Jerusalem simply won’t be able to handle the load once we reach ten million and more tourists per year. These areas have no carrying capacity. You throw two falafel wrappers on the ground and the city’s filthy.

“We need neighborhoods like Har Homa to take up the slack.”

********

*Note: The above is, of course, a satirical piece; the author hopes that no one will attribute the "interview" statements to any actual Jerusalem deputy mayors, past or present. The "interview" merely aims to take to their logical conclusion certain ideas that have gained currency in recent years, and to provoke thought.

The downtown trophy wife

Is it sensible to take a center-city area that up to now has been characterized by a mix of uses, and to designate it solely for "culture and tourism?"

Relatedly: should historic buildings be, on principle, emptied of workaday uses and dedicated exclusively to "culture and tourism" uses (e.g., boutique hotels)?

Such is the approach that the Jerusalem Municipality is currently taking toward Jaffa Road and environs -- the area that most locals simply think of as "downtown" but which is increasingly being referred to as the "historic city."

I think that this approach needs to be subjected to public scrutiny. I, for one, see two major problems with it:

1) The segregation of uses that it imposes will make downtown Jerusalem a much less attractive destination for regular Jerusalemites and Israelis, essentially rendering it a tourist trap whose artificiality will be perceived by the more discerning tourists;

2) By removing historic buildings from circulation as facilities where normal, everyday activities take place, and by devoting them to tourist-oriented uses, the planning echelon will be dividing Jerusalemites and Israelis from their own architectural heritage, thereby impoverishing them culturally.

As noted in my last post, which discussed the recently-approved plan for a high-rise office park at Jerusalem's western entrance, Deputy Mayor Kobi Kahlon has stated that "anyone who doesn’t have to enter the city shouldn’t do so. Leave the historic city to culture and tourism.” Downtown Jerusalem, according to Kahlon, is simply too fragile to "take the load" of the governmental/clerical functions currently housed within it ("You toss out two pieces of paper there and the city is filthy"), and is altogether suited to the expression of "much greater meanings."  The idea is that certain activities are just too mundane for the traditional architecture of downtown Jerusalem, and should be transferred to the envisioned skyscraper complex at the city's entrance -- "Rova Mevo Ha'Ir."
 

Generali Building, via Wikipedia (Magister)

In keeping with this idea, government offices now located in Jerusalem's "historic city" are slated to be moved to Rova Mevo Ha'Ir. Furthermore, according to Haaretz, "the Planning and Building Committee is also discussing a plan to turn the old ministries' offices, some of which are located in historic buildings, into boutique hotels."

One building that has been mentioned as a prime candidate for such a re-purposing is the "Generali" Building at the corner of Jaffa Road and Shlomzion HaMalka St., built in the 1930s to house the offices of the Italian insurance agency Assicurazioni Generali. The Generali Building is currently home to a number of Israeli government offices, including the Interior Ministry's Jerusalem District administration.

I haven't had anything to do in the Generali Building in years and don't know to what extent Israeli citizens are inconvenienced by having to conduct their business in that particular location. Deputy Mayor Kahlon claims that the presence of government functions in buildings such as this one "cause[s] terrible traffic downtown, as well as parking shortages". I find this assertion rather curious, inasmuch as Jaffa Road has been closed for some time to vehicular traffic other than the light rail -- the idea being that people should get to that part of town via public transit and forego the use of their private automobiles. If you're riding the light rail, why do you need parking? How can there be traffic jams in a part of town where cars are no longer allowed?

I don't pretend to know whether public-sector efficiency is best served by concentrating government offices in one specially-designed compound -- i.e., Rova Mevo Ha'Ir. It does strike me, though, that when ordinary citizens come downtown to run errands at government facilities, downtown can only benefit-- since a citizen who enters the area for one purpose will likely remain there for others. Logically, it would seem that when downtown Jerusalem is emptied of its government offices, regular Jerusalemites and Israelis will have less occasion to go there. Are we quite certain that this is what we want?

I personally don't have much reason to go downtown, as most of my needs can be met in the Talpiot Industrial Area -- the badly-neglected "secondary" CBD that, in my view, actually functions as primary CBD for a sizeable chunk of Jerusalem's population.. However, this past summer I enjoyed a brief but instructive city-center idyll that brought home for me just what is wrong with the Kahlon plan for this part of town.

Mushtasfa Jerusalem (District Health Office building),
 via Wikipedia (Ranbar)

Pictured at left is a historic building at 86 Jaffa Road -- one that, presumably, the Municipality would want emptied of its governmental functions and turned into a boutique hotel. This Ottoman-era edifice was constructed in 1882 as a residence and later turned into a hospital; since the British Mandate period it has housed the Jerusalem district health office.

I had to bring my 3 year old daughter to this building several times this past summer, for a series of anti-rabies innoculations (after she was scratched by a stray cat). Never having needed the services of the district health office before, and having no prior knowledge of the facility's whereabouts, I was very pleasantly surprised to find myself ushering my daughter into this distinguished old structure, the formality of whose arched stone gate is set off by a soothing little front yard and welcoming, geranium-filled porch:

Rather than having to sit in an institutional waiting room for the prescribed 20 minutes post-innoculation, my daughter and I (and the other kids I brought along on the various vaccine visits) were able to enjoy our mid-morning snack out here on the district health office porch, joined by the occasional employee on coffee break. When we were through, we stayed downtown, running different errands each time. On one occasion we picked up inexpensive crafts supplies at a discount store; on another -- paperbacks at a second-hand bookshop. I got to familiarize myself with some clothing stores I had never seen before. We bought slushes and iced coffees, burekasim and cookies. We discovered a newly-renovated playground in the downtown area that constitutes a worthwhile destination in and of itself.

Had we not needed the services of the local rabies prevention unit, we would not have patronized any of the aforementioned downtown businesses. We simply wouldn't have been downtown.

Our forays to the city center were both enjoyable and productive. We didn't go there for the specific purpose of experiencing "culture." We got a healthy dose of "culture" just by taking care of some decidely mundane business at the scenic venue of the Jerusalem district health office. And we were able, afterward, to run a variety of errands on foot, within a radius of just a few city-center blocks. Culture and commerce, pleasure and efficiency -- the blessings of mixed-use development.

Unfortunately, current urban thinking in the Jerusalem Municipality appears to have stalled at the "separation of uses" stage. Much lip-service is being paid to the idea of mixed-use development, but the plans being actively adanced call for a fairly rigid compartmentalization of uses.

Whether 86 Jaffa Road in particular has a boutique future in store for it is not the point. The point is that Kobi Kahlon thinks "we have to empty [Jerusalem's historic downtown] of all the officialdom [פקידות] and other uses. This city has far greater meanings."

I'm sure that when Kahlon talks about Jerusalem's "greater meanings" his intentions are reverential -- and that is the problem. It's one thing to appreciate the city's history and to want to  preserve its unique character in those areas where "character" has a tangible presence in architectural form. However, putting specific parts of the city on a pedestal and dictating the kinds of uses that can take place in them, is quite another matter. It's almost like the objectification to which men sometimes subject women -- an idealization that ultimately devalues.  Rather than having someone alive and dynamic to relate you, you end up with a porcelain doll, a trophy wife, a puppet.

In the case of downtown Jerusalem, what we could end up with, if we're not careful, is a sterile museum in which tourists lap up lattes and empty their pockets to purveyors of kitschy Judaica while street mimes and jugglers leap and frolick in a frenzied effort to conceal the emptiness at the core of downtown -- a place where no actual work goes on, where no real life is lived, where nothing productive happens. 

We already have an "Old City" that is devoted to religion, tourism and religious tourism. Do we really want to start calling that part of town the "Old Old City?" Must Jaffa Road now become a "New Old City" -- a static Disneyland of handsome traditional architecture housing nothing but cafes and boutiques?

I don't want to be unfair to Kobi Kahlon. I have no problem with his desire to add office space in the city entrance area or even, necessarily, with the transfer of government agencies to that part of town -- provided that such transfers are clearly in the public interest. What bothers me is the assumption that governmental and commercial/corporate affairs are best managed out of dedicated skyscraper complexes, while historic downtowns and traditional architecture should play a merely ornamental role in the life of a city. In the present post I have looked at the latter half of this false dichotomy. In my next post I hope to discuss the former in greater depth.

Jerusalem's Rova Mevo Ha'Ir: copying the wrong Parisian model

A couple of decades ago, give or take half a decade, I spent an academic year in Paris on an American study abroad program. After 10 months of thumbing my little red Plan de Paris par arrondissement (= old-school GPS) to a pulp, I found myself facing a summer short on cash -- but unwilling to retreat to the States before I could legitimately claim to have spent an entire calendar year in Europe.

Luckily Georges, the heroically non-judgmental and patient program director, was able to arrange temporary work permits for such underfunded students who insisted on remaining abroad.

 Which was how I found myself, over a period of several weeks, shuttling from picturesque central Paris to the futuristic La Défense business district at the city's western outskirts, where I had landed a job heating up frozen croissants and serving "instant" espresso to those employed in the surrounding skyscrapers.

La Défense -- Stairway to Heaven by
Dmitri A. Mottle, via Wikimedia Commons

By "shuttling" I of course mean a Métro ride, but a space-shuttle association would not be far off the mark. Going to La Défense was like rocketing or beaming up to the moon or some kind of space station carved into a forbidding alien landscape that, by dint of hard labor, had been made marginally habitable for humans, but not attractive to them. Considering that I had spent most of a year tirelessly criss-crossing the streets of traditional Paris, it says something that I never spent a moment in La Défense beyond what the timeclock dictated. The fact that I was working -- though technically in Paris! -- in a fast-food joint  à l'américaine, serving up bad imitation French cuisine to Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who, in any other setting, would surely have turned up their noses at such travesties, said it all.

So my question is, why would Jerusalem want to do this to itself?

The Israeli (and international) media have lately been abuzz (in English: here, here and here) over an "ambitious" plan to transform Jerusalem's western entrance area -- referred to in Hebrew as Rova Mevo Ha'Ir -- into a sleek and ultramodern business district, complete with the skyscrapers that are thought necessary to project a municipal image of exuberant money-making. "The city as economic engine."

The plans for Rova Mevo Ha'Ir have actually been in the works for several years (Mayor Nir Barkat, who assumed office in 2009, was the project's primary initiator). When the plans were first publicized, a similarity to Paris' La Défense district was proudly proclaimed. Apparently,  the mere hint of a resemblance to something European was thought sufficient to place the project in a positive light.

La Défense is not normally considered a success from the perspective of urban vitality. One author and lecturer in the urban planning sphere, Alex Marshall, calls the complex "stunningly dead." Charles Siegel , writing recently at Planetizen, points out that there are better models for smart growth than the "stale modernist model of La Défense." In fact, when the Rova Mevo Ha'Ir plans were first publicized in 2009, and hailed as Jerusalem's answer to La Défense, Siegel commented, again at Planetizen, "Virtually everyone agrees that La Défense blighted Paris' skyline and is an anti-urban design. Just what Jerusalem needs to destroy its historical character."

Unfortunately, those charged with planning Rova Mevo Ha'Ir seem unable to differentiate between design elements likely to foster vibrancy and ones liable to create deadness. Much lipservice is paid to designing with the pedestrian in mind, but the plans themselves paint a different picture.

The slideshow prepared by Farhi Zafrir, the architectural firm that won the Rova Mevo Ha'Ir competition, is a frustrating mish-mash of declared aspirations to walkable urbanism and simulation images that give such aspirations the lie.

Not the least annoying feature of the slideshow is its dubious referencing of traditional city design -- its deployment of photos of bustling European streets featuring human-scaled low- and mid-rise architecture -- in order to "prove" the value of the monolithic skyscraper project that it is actually trying to sell.

Farhi Zafrir first make a ploy for audience sympathy by describing, in Slide 2, the current sorry state of the Jerusalem entrance area. That part of town is certainly a mess -- as the architects put it, "sparse and dispersed construction," "separate and isolated compounds," "a roadway rather than a street." The pictures speak for themselves. Yes, almost anything would be better.

In Slide 3 the architects treat the viewer to a warm and fuzzy photo selection featuring narrow, Nathan Lewis-type streets, European version, full of fine-grained architectural detail and hip young city dwellers doing their thing en masse. "Priority to pedestrians" is the slogan here.

Having been thus buttered up, the viewer is then meant to be duly impressed by slides 4-11, which show us how Farhi Zafrir are going to rescue us from the dreaded stroad situation that currently exists, by building an architecturally monotonous, dedicated business, government-office and hotel district (the Israeli planning echelon's idea of "mixed-use development").

via Jerusalem Municipality

Yes, there is an emphasis on transit-oriented development here -- the project's much-touted connectivity to the Jerusalem light rail and the (future) high-speed Tel Aviv -Jerusalem train. Yet it is disturbing that all this accessibility is meant, ultimately, to keep people out of Jerusalem's historic downtown -- to artificially, and in a sense even dictatorially, concentrate certain activities -- and the people engaged in them -- in this one particular area.

For instance, the idea of transferring government ministry offices from their current locations in historic downtown buildings to the sterile office park of Rova Mevo Ha'Ir, and of turning the historic buildings into boutique hotels, may seem, at first glance, to have a certain poetic justice -- relegate the dry government paper-shufflers to dull modernist edifices! Save the pretty buildings for hunky and babalicious vacationers who can appreciate them! -- but it flies in the face of everything the New Urbanists have been telling us about real mixed-use development and the vibrancy it produces.

Deputy Mayor Kobi Kahlon has been quoted as saying, "Anyone who doesn't have to enter the city shouldn't do so. Leave the historic city to culture and tourism."  That is one of the most disturbing statements I've heard/read in a long time. Kahlon feels that by diverting jobs and government offices to the Jerusalem entrance, the "historic city" will be spared traffic congestion and "parking shortages." Unfortunately, it may also become depleted of anything resembling real life, and turn into a giant museum. I'm reminded of Alan Davies' (The Urbanist) recent description of Venice: 

In a physical sense Venice is pedestrian nirvana, but in my opinion it’s also a one dimensional city. The throngs of people along the canals are almost all tourists. The businesses only provide lodgings, food and fodder for tourists.

Is that what we want Jerusalem's historic downtown to become?

 My special bugbear: the Farhi Zafrir slideshow references La Défense (slide 12), in a manner that can only reflect ignorance or disingenuousness on the part of the designers.

I can't seem to copy the slides into the blog, but here is a La Défense plaza photo very similar to that used by Farhi Zafrir in slide 12 of their presentation:

David Monniaux via Wikipedia

The above photo (that is, its counterpart in slide 12 of the architects' presentation) is grouped together with a couple of photos of traditional European public squares, including an open-air market scene that looks something like this:

Street market at the bottom of  rue Mouffetard -- David Monniaux, via Wikimedia Commons

Farhi Zafrir's aim is to entice the viewer with street scenes that most people would be happy to see in their own city, and which the viewer is meant to understand that the architects are going deliver via their proposed Jerusalem entrance project. Yet one can see at a glance that the La Défense scene (the one that most closely resembles Farhi Zafrir's Rova Mevo Ha'Ir simulation) has little in common with a traditional street market scene.

In the La Défense photo, people scuttle like insects across an exceptionally uninviting, oversized plaza, dwarfed by brutal-looking buildings that do not work together as any sort of defined streetscape or provide the sense of enclosure that human beings generally require if they are to feel comfortable in a given built environment.

In the traditional-Paris street market photo, you've got it all: lovely and varied architecture on a human scale, enclosure, "intimate anonymity."

I humbly submit that this grouping of a photo of the La Défense plaza together with photos of traditional European public squares is a cheap ploy intended to persuade the public that a relatively isolated, limited-use high-rise complex can offer the pleasing urban ambience of a more traditionally-designed quarter. In my view, this reflects questionable ethics on the part of Farhi Zafrir.

It is too bad that the local planning echelon, and the architectural firm that it chose to design Rova Mevo Ha'Ir, couldn't have mustered up a bit more ambition, and devised a plan that would have increased Jerusalem's office-space supply in a style that respected the city's architectural traditions -- as in the Le Plessis-Robinson model described so compellingly by Charles Siegel. As Siegel points out, neo-traditional development can be "dense enough for smart growth" and can deliver its density "in a more attractive and livable environment than the typical modernist development."

But very likely there are no templates for neo-traditional design in the software used by Farhi Zafrir -- so they settled for a stark modernist office park, hoping to pass it off as successful urbanism.