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ABSTRACT
The article explores mid-twentieth century professional transnationalism by highlighting the crucial role of lesser-known planners – ‘ordinary modernists’ – in disseminating, negotiating, and ultimately shaping the modern built environment. It focuses on the work of Ariel Kahane (1907–1986), a mostly unknown German-Jewish senior planning officer under both the British Mandate and on the Israeli ‘New Towns’ team of early statehood. It examines Kahane’s critique of British imperial planning’s betrayal of the emancipatory values of large-scale planning, and shows how, while drawing on planning innovations from the British metropole, he produced his own, self-contradictory, planning vision. Kahane’s planning ideas advanced notions of Jewish exclusiveness, an orientation expressed ever more explicitly after 1948, when he became a high-ranking planning officer in Israel. His work as a senior state planner illuminates aspects of continuity across the divide of 1948, which is typically viewed as a moment of rupture with respect to Israeli state planning and the formation of ethno-spatial structures.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the generous financial support of the ‘Gerda Henkel Stiftung’ and ‘The Historical Archives of the Hebrew University Cataloging project (1918–1948),’ administered by The Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Center, The Hebrew University, and the Marbach Literaturarchiv. This article is based on a paper presented at the workshop on ‘1948 in Palestine and Israel: New Approaches and Interpretations,’ held at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, October 4–6, 2018. I would like to thank professor Alon Confino for his invitation, as well as Tamar Novick, Adi Livny, and Eli Osheroff for their instructive comments on earlier drafts. Special thanks to Professor Josiah and Dolly Kahane, as well as Ines Sonder and Joachim Trezib for generously sharing their collections, and to Ron Makleff and Neil Wilkof for their editorial assistance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Shira Wilkof specializes in the transnational history of modern urbanism and spatial expertise. She is currently preparing a book manuscript on mid-twentieth-century professional transnationalism, using the case of Zionist-Israeli planning as a distinct encounter between Central European spatial modernism, British imperial practices, and the Zionist settler society.
Notes
1 The only exception is Joachim Nicolas Trezib, Die Theorie, 110–25; Trezib, Trezib, “Transnationale Wege Der Raumplanung.”
2 Warhaftig, They Laid the Foundation.
3 E.g. Neumann, Arieh Sharon; Nitzan-Shiftan, “Contested Zionism.”
4 Hein, “The Exchange of Planning Ideas,” 4.
5 Ibid.
6 For example, Mercure-Jolette, “Hans Blumenfeld”; Vellinga, “The End of Cities”; Edelman and Allor, “Ladislas Segoe and the Emergence of the Professional Planning Consultant.”
7 Nicolai, Architektur und Exil.
8 Wolfe, “Purchase by Other Means”; Porter and Yiftachel, “Urbanizing Settler-Colonial Studies.”
9 Sela-Sheffy, “High Status Immigration Group,” 79.
10 Tamar Oestreich (Ariel Kahane’s niece), telephone interview by author, October 18, 2015.
11 Eintrag zu Anselm Kahane, Matrikel Bd. VIII (1923–1928), S. 351, achte Zeile (über die Doppelseite), Universitätsarchiv der Technischen Universität Berlin.
12 Campbell, The German Werkbund, 145.
13 Lee, “Negotiating Modernities,” 40–51.
14 Poelzig to Kahane, December 4, 1935, Professor Josiah and Dolly Kahane Collection (thereafter JDK); Jansen, December 9, JDK.
15 For example, Yacobi, Israel and Africa; Feniger and Kallus, “Building a ‘New Middle East.’”
16 The contours of this cultural retention are well described in Sela-Sheffy, “High Status Immigration Group.”
17 Kahane, Erlebte Raumplanung.
18 Kahane, “Planning in Palestine,” VI, 1, JDK.
19 Ibid, 2.
20 Gillon, “Planning for Living.”
21 Kahane, “Planning in Palestine,” III, 2.
22 Trezib, “Transnationale Wege.”
23 Kahane, “Clarification of Basic Problems in Town Planning,” 15; Kahane, “Outline for the Constitution of a Department of Housing and Planning,” August 1942, 1, The Central Archive of the Hebrew University, Kahane Collection (thereafter HU KAHANE) 13/4.
24 Kahane, “Planning in Palestine,” VI, 1.
25 Ibid., III, 3.
26 Kahane, “Outline for the Constitution,” 6.
27 Kahane, “Planning in Palestine,” I, 1.
28 Razin, “District Plans in Israel,” 1250–2.
29 Ben-Asher Gitler, “ Marrying Modern Progress with Treasured Antiquity.”
30 Home, Of Planting and Planning, 215–26.
31 “Planning in Palestine”, III, 2.
32 Fruchtman, “Statutory Planning as a Form of Control;” Crookston, “Echoes of Empire”; Khamaisi, “Israeli Use of the British Mandate Planning Legacy.”
33 King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World-Economy, 44–5.
34 The son of the Chief Engineer in India, Kendall pursued a career as a colonial planner. He had practiced in Malaysia, Jordan, Gibraltar, Zanzibar and Uganda. Home, Of Planting and Planning, 202; Lapidot, “The Regional Schemes of the Mandate Period,” 54.
35 E.g. Holliday, “Town Planning in Palestine,” 202.
36 Kahane, Curriculum Vitae, n. d., HU KAHANE 17/3.
37 Kendall, Jerusalem, The City Plan.
38 Josiah Kahane (Ariel Kahane’s son), in a conversation with the author, June 2015.
39 Razin, “District Plans in Israel,” 1250.
40 Kahane, “Twenty-Five Years,” 256.
41 Ibid., 255.
42 Ibid.
43 Hall, Urban and Regional Planning, 55–65.
44 For example, the case of Trinidad in Home, Of Planting and Planning, 215–26.
45 Kahane, “Report on the Preparation of Regional Town Planning Schemes in the Coastal Plain of Palestine,” December 28, 1944, HU KAHANE 13/4, 1, 3.
46 Kahane, “Outline for the Constitution of a Department of Housing and Planning,” August 1942, HU KAHANE 13/4.
47 E.g. Shamir, The Colonies of Law; Meiton, Electrical Palestine.
48 E.g. Marom, “Planning as a Principle,” esp. 1915–9.
49 Kahane, “Outline for the Constitution of a Department of Housing and Planning,” August 1942, HU KAHANE 13/4, 1.
50 For example, Kahane, “Clarification of Basic Problems in Town Planning”; Kahane, “Amendment to Jerusalem Regulations for Zone ‘B.’”
51 On Frenkel, see “From Bauhaus to Palestine.”
52 Freestone and Amati, Exhibitions and the Development of Modern Planning Culture.
53 JDK, Kahane, “Planning in Palestine,” Vorwort, 4.
54 El-Eini, Mandated Landscape, 48, 385–6.
55 Kahane, “Report on the Preparation,” December 28, 1944, HU KAHANE 13/4, 1, 2.
56 Wakeman, Practicing Utopia, 80.
57 van Roosmalen, “London 1944: Greater London Plan,” 258.
58 With its focus on regional ordering of an already built-up area, this plan should not be confused with previous attempts at regional planning, which focused on devising blueprints for mostly unbuilt lands. The most notable examples are the plans by Kauffmann (1926) and Abercrombie’s (1934) for the Haifa Bay commissioned by Zionist agencies.
59 For example, “An Exhibition of the Planning of Construction in the Country,” Ha’aretz, January 15, 2; Special Correspondent, “Organic Town Planning Exhibition,” The Palestine Post, January 8, 1945, 3; Ariel Kahane, Interview no. 4 by Mira Yehudai, transcript, May 18, 1981, 3 JDK.
60 Kahane, “Planning in Palestine,” IV, 2.
61 The 1945 British Village Statistics, in Abu-Sitta, “Atlas of Palestine, 1917–1966,” 35.
62 Ibid.
63 Kahane, “Planning in Palestine,” IV, 5.
64 Exhibition panel, “Communications”, JDK.
65 Ibid.
66 Exhibition panel, “Habitation”, JDK.
67 Eyal, The Disenchantment of the Orient, 33–61, 152–84.
68 Kahane, “Report on the Preparation,” December 28, 1944, 4, HU KAHANE 13/4.
69 Kahane, “Planning in Palestine,” IV, 1.
70 Ibid.
71 Kahane, “Report on the Preparation,” December 28, 1944, 4, HU KAHANE 13/4.
72 HaShimshoni, The Path which I Trod, 137
73 Ibid., 136–9; Yacobi and Misgav, “The Geo-Biographies of Spatial Knowledge.”
74 Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 382, 589.
75 Kedar and Yiftachel, “Land Regimes and Social Relations in Israel,” 138.
76 Kahane, “Memorandum regarding the Jewish Development of Western Galilee,” August 17, 1954, 2, HU KAHANE 13/9.
77 E.g. Yuval Ne’eman, “The Problem of Developing the Galilee,” n. d., HU KAHANE 13/9.
78 Kahane, “Twenty-Five Years,” 256.
79 Ibid.
80 See Kahane, Aufgaben der Biotechnik in der Städtebaulichen Planung, in “Planning in Palestine.”
81 Spiegel, New towns in Israel.
82 Kahane, “Oshrat: A Perspective,” 43.
83 Ibid., 38.
84 Sharon, Physical Planning in Israel. 48–9.
85 Reichman and Yehudai, A Survey, 63–83.
86 Kahane, “Oshrat: A Perspective,” 38.
87 Kahane, Memorandum regarding the Jewish Development of Western Galilee, August 17, 1954, 2, HU KAHANE 13/9, 1.
88 Ibid, 2.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid.
91 Kahane, “Oshrat: A Perspective,” 37.
92 Shafir, “From Overt to Veiled Segregation;” Manna, Nakba and Survival, 1948–1956.
93 For example, Levin, “South African ‘Know-How’ and Israeli ‘Facts of Life.’”
94 E.g. the work of Erez Tzfadia, Haim Yaacobi and Tovi Fenster.
95 Yiftachel, “Planning and Social Control,” 396.
96 Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices., 217.
97 Hein, “The Exchange of Planning Ideas,” 4.