The role of landscape planning in Israel’s national schemes: natural versus cultural scenery

ABSTRACT

From the early Zionist settlement of Palestine (late 19^th century), landscape planning in Palestine consisted of not only territorial planning but also of symbolic image and scenery planning, reflecting the role of the scenery for people’s identity, national pride, and source of income. This study analyses the different approaches to the concept of landscape in several of Israel’s national schemes and related legislations. In general, during the pre-state period, the image of the country was intended to represent both the connection to the nation’s biblical past and the modern era. Later, during the early state period, the natural landscape won prestige, and early parks were designed to appear natural, regretting the hectic development of the first decades of statehood. The emergence of the concept of the ‘cultural landscape’ (mainly since mid-1990s), changed preservation and development policies in accordance with global and local nationalistic tendencies.

KEYWORDS:

• Scenery planning
• nature
• cultural landscapes
• Israel

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Ottomans constructed the Hejaz railway, developed the city of Haifa, and established the city of Be’er Sheva. In contrast, they were responsible for the deforestation of the Mediterranean coastline (Norris, 2013).

2. For pre-statehood Zionist development of Palestine see Toren (1988, 2003).

3. During the early 1990s, Israel’s Society for the Protection of Nature established OLI—the open landscape institute—which focuses on developing policy tools and datasets to promote the protection of land resources and open landscapes in Israel.

4. The phrase ‘product of the country’ was the title of a generation-long propaganda campaign that encouraged people only to purchase produce manufactured in Israel. Interestingly, Aronson chose to publish his thoughts in the official journal of the Organisation of Israeli Teachers.

5. According to CIA World Factbook 2019, of 245 nation states, Israel is number 154^th in size but 30^th in density (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/208rank.html).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation [109/14].

Notes on contributors

Tal Alon-Mozes

Tal Alon-Mozes is a landscape architect and an associate professor at the faculty of Architecture and Town Planning of the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa. She has a M.L.A. degree from U.C. Berkeley and a Ph.D. from the Technion. For more than a decade she served as the chair of the landscape architecture program and established its graduate degree. Her scopes of interest include the landscapes of the past: histories of the designed landscapes of Israel, the landscapes of the present: green infrastructure for contemporary Israel and landscapes for the future: landscape architecture pedagogy. Among her published works are two edited books on Israel’s modern landscape architects and many papers that cover her diverse scopes of Interest.