South African Know-How and Israeli Facts of Life: the Planning of Afridar

Planning Perspectives ISSN: 0266-5433 (Print) 1466-4518 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rppe20 South African ‘know-how’ and Israeli ‘facts of life’: the planning of Afridar, Ashkelon, 1949–1956 Ayala Levin To cite this article: Ayala Levin (2017): South African ‘know-how’ and Israeli ‘facts of life’: the planning of Afridar, Ashkelon, 1949–1956, Planning Perspectives, DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2017.1389657 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2017.1389657 © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 25 Oct 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 499 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rppe20 PLANNING PERSPECTIVES, 2017 https://doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2017.1389657 South African ‘know-how’ and Israeli ‘facts of life’: the planning of Afridar, Ashkelon, 1949–1956 Ayala Levin Department of Art History, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA ABSTRACT KEYWORDS In 1949, in the newly founded state of Israel, South African architects Norman Garden suburb; Hanson and Roy Kantorowich planned the city of Ashkelon and, within it, the neighbourhood unit; south- exclusive neighbourhood unit Afridar. Managed by the South African Jewish south transnational planning; Appeal, which initiated and funded the project, Afridar presented a radical model town; native township; apartheid exception to Israel’s centralized planning approach during that period. An early example of a semi-private settlement initiative for an ethnic and class- based enclave reserved for ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Jewish immigrants, it functioned as a ‘model town’ for the immigrant population from the Middle East and North Africa, which was housed by the government in the rest of the city of Ashkelon. Afridar’s enclave reproduced planning practices from South Africa, which had been coloured by race since the 1920s. Despite its exclusive image, it was modelled after progressive experiments in the design of Native Townships. Their main objective of such experiments was to improve the standards of housing of racially discriminated populations yet, in practice, they served as a tool to implement apartheid policies. This paper interrogates this ambivalence of social aspirations and complicity with state segregation practices through examining the translation of apartheid’s planning practices to the Israeli context, and the negotiations and conflicts this translation entailed. Why not use South African know-how and patterns of thought in creating new cities, instead of building monotonous, repetitive and unattractive towns such as Lydda, Ramleh or the former Migdal.1 Philip Gillon (1956) Apartheid’ should not be the essential feature of Israeli Planning.2‘ Roy Kantorowich (1956) On arrival in the city of Ashkelon on the southern coast of Israel, 14.5 kilometres north of the bor- der with Gaza, the traveller who proceeds to the neighbourhood of Afridar is greeted by an unusual architectural ensemble in the Israeli urban landscape: a grouping of low-rise porticoed buildings, reminiscent of both an Italian piazza and a late nineteenth century colonial farmstead (Figure 1). These structures are embellished with rustic stone, on the one hand, and modern precast concrete, on the other. This is Afridar’s civic and commercial centre, situated at the edge of a green CONTACT Ayala Levin [email protected] 1Philip Gillon, “Why Ashkelon?” The Zionist Record, February 10, 1956, 2, South Africa Rochlin Archives of the South Africa Jewish Board of Deputies (thereafter SARA) ARCH 503.1/2B. 2Kantorowich to Glikson, June 3, 1956, SARA ARCH 503.1/3/3. © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. 2 A. LEVIN Figure 1. Dov Karmi and Jack Barnett, Afridar Civic and Commercial Centre, view of the portico and clock tower, 1954. Courtesy of Dov and Ram Karmi Archive. suburban neighbourhood. The neighbourhood’s detached and semi-detached houses are punctu- ated by window boxes and roofed with tiles. This eclectic ensemble was commissioned and con- structed in the early 1950s, as a ‘model town’ and the intended nucleus of the city of Ashkelon (Figure 2). An inscription in Afrikaans, English, and Hebrew, dating from 1961, reminds the visitor of the origins of this suburban enclave as a gift to the young state from the South African Jewish Appeal (Figures 3 and 4). Planned in the early 1950s by prominent South African architects Roy Kantorowich and Norman Hanson together with the younger Jack Barnett, the neighbourhood Figure 2. Jack Barnett, Afridar Civic and Commercial Centre, perspective drawing, c. 1950. Courtesy of Adam Barnett. PLANNING PERSPECTIVES 3 Figure 3. Inscription in Afrikaans, Afridar Civic and Commercial Centre, contemporary view, photograph taken by the author. stood out in contrast to the predominant cheap pre-fabricated government construction of the time, and unsettled the almost exclusive preference for the modernist functionalist aesthetic in both housing and public buildings. Despite the South African planners’ ambition to create a ‘model town’ that would facilitate inte- gration rather than segregation, this article argues that their planning techniques and cultural biases radically undermined this goal, not least because of the interests of the Israeli government. Among radical international circles, and in recent boycott campaigns, it has become commonplace to denounce Israel as an apartheid state. Political geographer Oren Yiftachel has coined the term ‘creep- ing apartheid’ to describe the ethno-spatial politics of the Israeli regime both within and outside the Green Line.3 However, alongside these structural analogies, the two regimes whose birthdates coincided in 1948 – Israel’s declaration of statehood came in the same year as the rise to power of the National Party in South Africa – were also entangled in concrete historical ways, partly due to South Africa’s large Jewish population. As is well known, Israel notoriously maintained diplomatic 3Yiftachel, “Between Colonialism and Ethnocracy.” 4 A. LEVIN Figure 4. Inscription in English, Afridar Civic and Commercial Centre, contemporary view, photograph taken by the author. and commercial relations with South Africa during the apartheid regime: ones revolving mainly around nuclear cooperation.4 While that case of ‘knowledge transfer’ remains covert, this paper focuses on another earlier instance of direct transfer of expertise between the two countries at the pregnant moment of their consolidation – that is to say, knowledge transfer in the field of city planning. Although a unique phenomenon in the histories of Israel and South Africa, the planning history of Afridar offers a localized, microscopic view of the often-contradictory dynamics of the global circulation of segregationist practices.5 The transfer of ‘know-how’ evoked in the epigraph is characteristic of this period, when North- South importation of technical knowledge, including in the field of urban planning, was a normative component of decolonization and ‘development’. The opening of the development market, which up to this point had been controlled by the colonial powers, enabled new directions for the travel of knowledge and expertise beyond the North-South or core-periphery trajectory. Yet neither Israel, ‘a post-colonial colony’, to use intellectual historian Joseph Massad’s succinct definition, nor 4Polakow-Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance. 5Nightingale, Segregation, 10 and 14. PLANNING PERSPECTIVES 5 South Africa, a ‘colony of a special kind’, fit neatly into the North-South post-colonial divide.6 Orig- inating in settler-colonial societies, the planners of both states had already gained expertise in adapt- ing ‘Northern’ models to ‘Southern’ locales. The Jewish Appeal’s aid to Israel – framed in national terms as ‘South African know-how and patterns of thought’–can therefore be viewed as a case of South-South exchange, albeit of ‘a special kind’. This article argues that it is necessary to examine the exportation of urban planning techniques from South Africa to Israel within a framework that gives precedence to the unique local experiences that shaped these techniques in their ‘Southern’ settler-colonial context. While both the Israeli planners and their South Africa counterparts enjoyed similar access, although of varying degrees, to the post-war hegemonic centres of the discipline, that is, Britain and the USA, the planning concepts they shared were charged with particular social, economic, political, and ethnic or racial meanings. It is this tacit knowledge – a form of ‘embodied expertise’–that was translated from one context to another.7 One of these planning concepts was Clarence Perry’s neighbourhood unit, which by the mid-century had already gained considerable mileage in Abercrombie’s plan for London, where it functioned as the organizing planning unit, as well as in its application to non-western locales, such as Addis Ababa (1956) by Abercrombie himself, or by Albert Mayer and Otto Koenigsberger in India.8 As planning historians now emphasize, the exportation of urban models should be viewed simul- taneously as importation, underscoring the local agency involved in this exchange as urban models were modified and adapted to new contexts.9 It is also agreed that some of these models, predomi- nantly the garden city but also the neighbourhood unit, were useful in implementing racial and economic segregation both in the colonies and in their countries of origin, England and the USA, respectively.10 Taking place as it did between one peripheral node and another, the case of Afridar marks a new phase in this exchange, given that it was twice removed from the centre of knowledge production.

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