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Globalization, Architecture, and Town Planning in a Colonial City: The Case of Jaffa and Tel Aviv
MARK LEVINE1
University of California, Irvine
| This article explores the manner in which late nineteenth- and late twentieth-century ideologies and spatial practices associated with modernity-as-globalization unfolded in the cities of Jaffa and Tel Aviv. While often overshadowed by Tel Aviv, its younger and larger neighbor to the north, which since its founding in 1909 was conceived of as the "most modern city in the Middle East," Jaffa was in fact the pre-1948 economic and cultural capital of Arab Palestine. As such, by the late 1940s it was home to upwards of seventy thousand Palestinian Arab inhabitants, thirty thousand Jews, and a complex set of economic, social, and cultural relations within and between both communities. |
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The constant interactions between Jews and Palestinian Arabs often muddied the nationally determined boundaries between the two towns, and through this, the two nations. Because of this, the Tel Aviv municipal and Zionist leadership needed (from the start) to use every method at their disposal for creating and enforcing separation between Jews and Palestinian Arabs. This included the most modern(ist) architectural and town-planning discourses available in Europe (which themselves evolved in good measure in colonial settings). |
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Crucial to these discourses was a narrative of progress and modernity versus tradition and stagnation that reflected the dual society paradigm central to the enactment of Zionist ideology and politics. Such paradigms, and the ideologies that support them, are fundamental components of globalization, whether in the era of high imperialism when Jaffa and Tel Aviv's conflict began, or today. Just as important, they helped sustain a discursive erasure of the territory and history of Jaffa and its Palestinian Arab residents that made possible the literal erasure of ninety percent of the pre-1948 population during the war. |
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Situating Palestine in Global History | |
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Palestine in the First Era of True Globalization, 1880–1914: Globalization, Urbanism, and the Force of Colonial Modernity | |
| At its most basic level, globalization can be summarized (however problematically) as a self-consciously increasing density of economic and cultural contact between—and in theory at least, integration of—distinct societies around the world through expanding networks and flows of commodities, money, cultural symbols, and people. Five eras of globalization can be delineated, from the incorporation of the Americas into existing Euro-African-Asian trade networks after 1492 through today.2 Of these, the eras of high imperialism (roughly 1870 through World War I) and post–Cold War globalization have witnessed the strongest intensity of flows and network formation, if not always integration, on a global scale. |
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These processes played out in important ways in the space of Jaffa–Tel Aviv, a particularly powerful site for the unfolding of modernity—and through it, globalization—in Palestine. Specifically, the Jaffa–Tel Aviv region was a primary generator for the rest of the country of the boundaries established by a mutually constitutive fourfold matrix of discourses composed of modernity, colonialism, capitalism, and nationalism, and the numerous binaries they create and sustain. Together they constituted an extremely potent force that, when deployed by the leaders of Tel Aviv and the larger Zionist movement, made possible the "overthrowing" of the existing geography of the region in favor of one that supported the national and economic goals of the Zionist movement. Such overturning of existing spatial, economic, and cultural geographies is a hallmark of globalization during the "long century" that began in the late nineteenth century and continues through today. |
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