The trash has gone – the trash mountain remains: a new look at the international design competition for the rehabilitation of the Hiriya landfill in Israel

Abstract

Hiriya landfill, in central Israel, served Tel Aviv for 50 years and became a byword for neglect and ugliness until it was recently transformed from an environmental hazard, into a beautiful park. This article explores the idea and experience of waste, as concept and matter, and its representations in the 2004 international design competition for Hiriya’s rehabilitation. Addressing the global issue of rehabilitating wasted sites, the competition encouraged landscape architects to address a polluted past and outline new cultural and ethical meanings in the reclaimed public space. Drawing from unexplored textual and visual sources, and combining landscape architecture with cultural studies on waste, we reveal that few of the 14 proposals touched upon the complexity of waste, with its cultural, ethical and social attributes. The winning entry by Peter Latz turned the mound into a striking monument to trash, but minimised the visitors’ idea and experience of the waste itself.

Keywords:

• Hiriya
• landfill
• landscape architecture
• competition
• culture and waste
• nature park
• landscape rehabilitation

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Naomi Angel for her insight, wisdom and useful guidance. Special thanks to Niall Kirkwood, Martin Weyl and Yoram Samuel for their outstanding generosity in sharing their knowledge and thoughts. We are grateful to Anneliese Latz, Lesley Marks, Idit Alhasid, Ora Limor, Yonatan Orr-Stav and Michal Shapira for their comments and suggestions on this paper. Many thanks as well to Riva Waldman-Hassin and Amos Rabin (Dan Region Association of Towns), Hagit Naveh Ashur and Shlomit Doten-Gissin (the Ariel Sharon Park), Arie Gonen and Tal Alon-Mozes for sharing sources and insights; and to all the landscape architects for their willingness to share their competition material and after-thoughts. Finally, the authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their incisive and enlightening comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Interviews with design partners

Naomi Angel, Former Tel Aviv District Planner in the Planning Administration, 14 December 2020, 29 December 2020, 5 January 2021.

Martin Weyl, Chairman of the Beracha Foundation, former director of the Israel Museum, 28 January 2020.

Interviews with judges

Tamar Darel-Fossfeld: 2 February 2021

Baruch Baruch: 8 February 2021

Suzanne Landau: 16 February 2021

Neil Kirkwood: 11 March 2021

Interviews with contestants

Vardit Tsurnamal: 9 February 2021

Itamar Raayoni: 12 April 2021

Matanya Sack: 13 April 2021

Aliza Braudo: 18 April 2021

Bruce Levin: 22 April 2021

Ulf Glanzer: 1 June 2021

Asif Berman: 2 June 2021

Notes

1 About the construction of the landfill in the early 1950s, see Limor-Sagiv and Lissovsky (2022).

2 The article’s focus is on the competition. Implementation of the winning proposal took over a decade and was the result of a rare cooperation between several governmental authorities. This is beyond the scope of this article but it is fully explored in another (forthcoming).

3 On previous studies on the competition, see: Alon-Mozes (2009, 2012), in which she examines the tension between the local and the global in the competition proposals and discusses the emergence of environmental thinking in Israel as exemplified in the Hiriya affair; see Lawson (2015), in which he analyses three large landfills which underwent rehabilitation and were turned into ambitious parks: Fresh Kills in NYC, Keele Valley in Toronto and Hiriya in Tel Aviv. In a personal essay titled ‘Hiriya: On stench and beauty’ (2010) (Hebrew), Martin Weyl describes the events surrounding the turn of Hiriya.

4 We confirm that all interviewees have agreed for extracts to be published and for their identities to be known.

5 See Corner (1999); Kirkwood (2003); Berger (2006); Meyer (2007).

6 For information on the Hiriya exhibition, see Weyl (2004).

7 Landscape architect Shlomo Aronson sought to establish a bird park whose structure would consist of pipes that pumped out the methane gas trapped in the landfill. Architects Ulrik Plesner and David Guggenheim, and urban planner Mordechai Kaplan, proposed turning the no-man’s-land surrounding the trash mountain into a nature park.

8 The exhibition brought together the Dan Region Towns Association, the Beracha Fund, environmental organisations, heads of local authorities and government ministers. Meanwhile, the Tel Aviv District Planning Committee, headed by Naomi Angel, sought to merge the undeveloped areas of Hiriya with a view to turning them into a metropolitan park, and to create infrastructure for runoff and flooding. This would be coupled with efforts, which had begun in early 1998, to rehabilitate the Ayalon River that flows to the foot of the trash mound.

9 Niall Kirkwood FASLA Chairman of the Department of Landscape Architecture, Graduate School of Design at Harvard University has studied the issue of waste management for many years, and has been involved in landfill rehabilitation projects around the world. Thus, he has continued the research and work of well-known landscape architect George Hargreaves. Kirkwood was among the first in the world to introduce the engineering-infrastructural element to the academic field of landscape architecture, thereby linking landfill infrastructure and ecology with design and culture (interview with Niall Kirkwood, 11 March, 2021). See Kirkwood (2003); Czerniak, Hargreaves, and Beardsley (2007).

10 See for example: Thomas Hirschhorn, Zbel Manifesto, Wang Zhiyuan, Tim Noble and Sue Webster.

11 See details of the Northeast Coastal Park in Barcelona, Spain, designed by Abalos & Herreros, which combines municipal waste-management facilities with a public park and beach (Reed, 2005, pp. 144–147).

12 According to Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1985), ‘habitus’ is the set of perceptions, behaviors, tastes and preferences of individuals in society who accept the structures of the social group to which they belong.

13 Norbert Elias’s work on the development of dining etiquette in medieval Europe (Elias, 1994) may help to explain the cultural transformation of Israeli society. Many Israelis still remember the days when Hiriya was an active landfill; however, today we find it incomprehensible that Israeli society treated with equanimity the gradual growth of the stinking mound of trash, with flocks of birds hovering above it, at the entrance to Tel Aviv.

14 Post-industrial sites also called brownfields, wastelands, drosscapes or manufactured sites are the centre of several recent studies (see, for example, Corner, 1999; Kirkwood, 2003; Berger, 2006; Meyer, 2007).

15 On the human outcomes of climate change and the Anthropocene era, with a focus on its exacerbation of the vulnerability of ecosystems and poor people, see also Nixon (2011).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) [grant 953/18].

Notes on contributors

Galia Limor-Sagiv

Galia Limor-Sagiv is a historian of landscape, environment, and waste and a PhD student at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. Her research deals with the history of the landscape of Hiriya, Israel’s largest landfill for 50 year that is currently being turned into a nature park. Her interests include man-made landscapes, infrastructure studies, and the impact of brownfields on humans and nature. Limor-Sagiv’s other publications are on the establishment of the Hiriya landfill in the 1950s and the coalition that fought to save the historic sycamores trees in Jaffa.

Nurit Lissovsky

Nurit Lissovsky is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. She is the editor of Arcadia: The Gardens of Lipa Yahalom and Dan Zur (2012); Gideon Sarig: Gardens for People (2017; with T. Alon-Mozes); Ruth Enis: Gardens of Her Own (2019; with T. Alon-Mozes); and Perspectives on the Work of Zvi Dekel (2021). Her research on the sacred landscape, on landscape architecture in Israel and on landscape design in national parks was published in Landscape Journal, Planning Perspectives, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, Ugarit-Forschungen, Palestine Exploration Quarterly and others. Her current research (ISF grant 2751/21) explores the American-Israel transnational knowledge flows and the making of Israel’s modern landscape.