New TA development project in the works

Tel Aviv authorities preparing plan for new northern neighborhood.

By RON FRIEDMAN
building311 (photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)
building311
(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)
The Tel Aviv municipal planning division is set to submit the most ambitious development plan of the last half century for approval by the district planning and construction committee.
After 10 years in the works, the city will early next month present a plan that aims to turn the last remaining major swath of land within the city’s borders into a brand new coastal neighborhood featuring tens of thousands of apartments.
The land in question, a 3,000-dunam (300-hectare) area stretching from the Reading power plant to the municipal border with Herzliya, currently holds a handful of dispersed buildings among empty sand dunes; but if the plan is approved, in a matter of years it will be a pulsing urban landscape.
What’s special about the plan – currently known only as Urban Master Plan 3700 – is that, unlike the other new neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, this one is not meant to be a quiet suburb or bedroom community. Instead, it is meant to be a direct extension of the “city that never sleeps,” and its planners have done everything to make sure that it will have a good blend of housing, commerce, entertainment, tourism, culture and recreation.
With the focal point of the new neighborhood being the beach, the plan’s designers did their best to provide the future residents with coastal living while ensuring the ecological integrity of the shoreline. Aiming for the neighborhood to be a showcase of environmentally friendly urban planning, the designers allocated huge amounts of the land for public use in the forms of parks, wide boulevards and public institutions.
“A successful city must provide a good mixture of residential areas, employment opportunities, entertainment, commerce and leisure. Our goal was to create an environment that will enable a high quality of living within a sustainable setting,” said the plan’s architect, Ofer Kolker.
Kolker told The Jerusalem Post that what he and his partners at city hall had in mind was a modern and green version of the existing neighborhoods at the heart of Tel Aviv.
After being presented to the district planning and construction committee, it will be the turn of the public to weigh in on the plan (which is detailed more extensively in today’s issue of the Post’s Metro local supplement). The planners said that they anticipate objections from environmentalists who would like to see the last open space in the city remain untouched, but that they hoped that an open and transparent planning process would enable all stakeholders to have their say and that in the end the city as a whole would benefit.