Tel Aviv is over

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An Italian television crew recently asked me to explain how Tel Aviv became one of the most attractive cities in the Mediterranean. We were in the Railway Park in the south of the city, a no-man’s-land whose existence hardly anyone was aware of until an act of architectural magic transformed it into an urban magnet. I scratched my head and tried to come up with an answer. My interlocutors were from Rome, the Eternal City, the world’s densest locale of architectural delights. Still, they looked around in astonishment as if they had never seen such a gem.

That’s apparently Tel Aviv‘s drawing power, I thought to myself. There’s nothing really beautiful or special to see. When I show foreign guests around the city, I discover that there’s not one monument to take pride in. If there is, you’ll be hard-pressed to find it. The monument to Yitzhak Rabin is hidden alongside a parking lot, the fountain on Dizengoff Square is perhaps charming but in a comic way, the towers of the Azrieli Center are geometric objects stuck in the heart of a noisy, polluted area. In short, nobody comes to Tel Aviv to see things. Maybe the opposite.

There’s nothing to see in Tel Aviv, but that nothing generates a feeling of lightness and freedom. This effect is not a Tel Aviv invention. It exists, albeit differently, in other cities; in Berlin, for example, a more important city than Tel Aviv.

What turned Berlin into a vibrant center of attraction at the turn of the 21st century? More than anything else, it was the empty space. Berlin was never a beautiful city like Paris, or cosmopolitan like London. True, at the start of the 20th century, it experienced an urban efflorescence and it has a few museums and three opera houses.

But at bottom, it remains a relatively new city without a deep historical tradition. It’s a rather artificial capital that the princes of Brandenburg built on the edges of the dark north. An “overgrown military camp” was historian A.J.P. Taylor’s verdict. During the past century the city accumulated plenty of past, but the past, by definition, has passed.

Berlin is a hole, even if in the positive sense, because with the right timing, its lack became an asset. At the beginning of the 1990s, following the dissolution of East Germany, the eastern part of the city contained thousands of ruined buildings, empty apartments and, no less, structures that had housed now-defunct state-owned enterprises. Whole regiments of buildings stood abandoned. The city was abundant with Freiraum – unused space.

Tel Aviv’s Givon Square.Meged Gozani

Those spaces filled up with squatters, anti-establishment invaders. Neglected bunkers became galleries, forlorn power plants were converted into nightclubs. But more importantly, it was the empty space that allowed housing costs to remain more modest than in any other West European metropolis. Starving artists and young people who found themselves shunted out of other places in sated Europe flocked to Berlin and created a vibrant urban scene.

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Tel Aviv, in contrast, enjoyed a different sort of nothing. In a country laden with layers of religious and historical meaning, it embodied by its sheer existence an absence of gravity and holiness. The simple white buildings, which had been intended for use as functional workers’ houses, generated a feeling of airiness. In the final decades of the 20th century, when Israel became even more religious and Jewish, Tel Aviv transcended that and took off thanks to its light cargo. The emptiness drew everyone who recoiled from the heavy load of tradition and national sentiment. From this point of view, the term “empty wagon” that’s hurled as a pejorative against secular people isn’t necessarily negative; emptiness is needed to allow movement.

Thus emptiness becomes attractive. Absence creates yearning. Tel Aviv became a hedonistic refugee camp of the threatened secular bourgeoisie, who gathered from all corners of the country on the shores of the Mediterranean. They aren’t looking for what the city has, but for what it doesn’t have, or has in very small numbers: Haredim, Orthodox, the poor.

Ossification

But cities that are built on nothing are playing a dangerous game. That happened in Berlin, which within a bit more than a decade morphed from an inexpensive, laid-back place into a real-estate bonanza. The punks were supplanted by hipsters, who in turn were dislodged by yuppie high-tech types. Fearsome investment houses acquired entire city blocks. Prices in workers’ neighborhoods like Neukolln and Kreuzberg doubled in just a few years. Everyone wants to live in the center of the young and vital center. But as soon as “everyone” arrived, the scene ossified.

And then, one day, Berlin’s new residents opened their eyes, looked around and asked themselves what the city actually has. And the answer, again, was nothing. But this time the nothing was priced dearly. Apartments in neglected neighborhoods are going at exorbitant prices thanks to the “young, vibrant scene” that’s promised to the buyers. But that scene is becoming less and less young and vibrant. That’s true in both Berlin and Tel Aviv, which in recent years has been buckling under its attractiveness. It has become too expensive for its nothingness.

The point is that a strategy of nothing is appropriate for a vital, dynamic city, but not one sated and choking on money. The Tel Aviv municipality can dig tunnels that will enable movement by millions of people daily, but all that will only underscore what’s not here. In Rome, after all, there’s the Pantheon and the Sistine Chapel, and Paris has the Place de la Concorde and the Luxembourg Gardens. Tel Aviv has Givon Square. From the workers’ city that was built, as the song says, “from the foam of a wave and a cloud,” what remains is mostly foam. Very expensive foam.