White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa (The MIT Press)

The history of Tel Aviv, presented for a moment as an architectural history, can be seen as a part of a wider process in which the physical shaping of Tel Aviv and its political and cultural construction are intertwined, and plays a decisive role in the construction of the case, the alibi, and the apologetics of the Jewish settlement across the country. -- __White City, Black City__ In 2004, the city of Tel Aviv was declared by UNESCO a World Heritage Site, an exemplar of modernism in architecture and town planning. Today, the Hebrew city of Tel Aviv gleams white against the desert sky, its Bauhaus-inspired architecture betraying few traces of what came before it: the Arab city of Jaffa. In __White City, Black City__, the Israeli architect and author Sharon Rotbard offers two intertwining narratives, that of colonized and colonizer. It is also a story of a decades-long campaign of architectural and cultural historical revision that cast Tel Aviv as a modernist "white city" emerging fully formed from the dunes while ignoring its real foundation -- the obliteration of Jaffa. Rotbard shows that Tel Aviv was not, as a famous poem has it, built "from sea foam and clouds" but born in Jaffa and shaped according to its relation to Jaffa. His account is not only about architecture but also about war, destruction, Zionist agendas, erasure, and the erasure of the erasure. Rotbard tells how Tel Aviv has seen Jaffa as an inverted reflection of itself -- not shining and white but nocturnal, criminal, dirty: a "black city." Jaffa lost its language, its history, and its architecture; Tel Aviv constructed its creation myth. __White City, Black City__ -- hailed upon its publication in Israel as "path-breaking," "brilliant," and "a masterpiece" -- promises to become the central text on Tel Aviv. Praise for the Israeli edition of White City, Black City "A path-breaking and brilliant analysis." -- Eyal Weizman, author of __Hollow Land__ "A challenging book that deserves to be read and argued." -- Tom Segev, __Haaretz__ "This is a unique and bold story about architecture that boldly challenges Israeli's national identity politics and the official narrative that was used to construct Tel Aviv's identity, culture, and rhetoric. The narrative goes something like this: the white city of Tel Aviv was founded in 1909 to the immediate North of the walled port city of Jaffa under an urban plan developed by Sir Patrick Geddes, which reflected the most advanced and modern organic planning principles. The buildings of Tel Aviv were designed by Bauhaus architects who were trained in Europe before immigrating to Israel. They created an outstanding architectural ensemble of the modern movement in a new cultural context. Tel Aviv became Israel's foremost economic and metropolitan nucleus and has always been considered one of the outstanding examples of innovative town-planning ideas of the first part of the 20th century. This book shows how Tel Aviv's tale of a modernist 'white city' that 'emerged from the dunes' and gained international recognition when it was designated a UNESCO world heritage site in 2003 hides behind its skyline the story of a city whose history has been buried. White City, Black City offers a new narrative, in which Tel Aviv is born in Jaffa and is shaped according to its conflict with Jaffa, thus influencing the fate of Palestine, Israel and the Middle East. This new urban parable is not only about architecture, building and writing, but also at its heart about war, destruction, erasure, and the erasure of the erasure. As Joana Gonen wrote in Time Out, "White City, Black City" is not a book about architecture. It is a political text written in clear language, under the cover of a book on architecture ... one of the most radical texts published in Hebrew in recent years."-- Provided by publisher