Naama MEISHAR, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology , Israel
Using oral history and archival materials of the 20th century, this case study portrays the harmfull transformation of an urban, everyday socionature at Tel Aviv-Jaffa’s southern beach. In the 1970s and 80s, land reclamation buried a one-kilometer of rocky beach adjacent to Ajami, a pre-1948 Palestinian neighborhood of Jaffa, under a giant mound of construction waste. This paper explores everyday life in a littoral socionature of a marginalized neighborhood. It further traces the urban flows of materials, capital, planning ideas and populations that have caused an environmental transformation that destroyed this unique site.
The oral history section sheds light on the diverse and intense everyday exchanges between humans – mainly marginalized Palestinian residents – and nonhumans along the Ajami rocky beach during the 1950s and 60s. However, since 1969, Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality executed a Policy of marine dumping on this very site. This policy reflects a political, economic and ecological concern for the terrestrial environment, typical to the dominant Zionist ideology of land colonization. It also indicates an obliviousness regarding the littoral environment and its importance to everyday life and well-being of a local community.
In the late 1980s, a scientific-oriented environmental campaign put an end to the municipality’s dumping and land reclamation, and hastened the planning and construction of a seaside park on the reclaimed land: a new urban amenity fueling and being fueled by accelerated population and capital flows in a gentrification process that swept the area. The paper traces the different actors' perceptions throughout the three phases of this urban political change.
Mots clés : Waterfront Public Space |Everyday Life|Urban Political Ecology|Marine Dumping|Tel Aviv-Jaffa
A104364NM