Real-Estate Valuation and the Organization of the City

A Thesis Submitted to the University of Manchester for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities

2019

Uri Ansenberg

Alliance Manchester Business School Division of People, Management and Organisation Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Table of Contents ...... 1 List of Figures ...... 4 Abstract ...... 5 Declaration ...... 6 Copyright Statement ...... 7 Acknowledgements ...... 8 Chapter 0: Preface ...... 8

0.1. Setting Out to Study the City ...... 9 0.2. Why We Study the City? ...... 12 0.3. an Outline of the Thesis ...... 19

Chapter 1: Organisation Studies and The City – The Is and The Ought ...... 20

1.0. Overview ...... 20 1.1. OS and The Current State of The City – An Analysis in Light of the 'New Urban-Crisis'. 22 1.2. Organisation-Studies and The City– A Short Literature Review ...... 27 1.3. The Prevalent OS Urban Narratives: The Economic, The Institutional, and The Critical 30 1.4. The First Few Steps Towards a New OS-Urban Account ...... 37

Chapter 2: A New Urban Account: The Story So Far - from Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy ...... 39

2.0. Overview ...... 39 2.1. Barbara Czarniawska, Action-Nets and the Organization of the City ...... 40 2.2. Kornberger and Clegg - Strategy as a New Form of Urban Governance ...... 46 2.3. Moving Forward from Strategy and Action-Nets- Refining Our Research Plan ...... 52 2.4. How to Approach the City as a Multiple?...... 55

Chapter 3: How Do We Make Accounts – Actor-Network Theory as a Methodology for Our Research ...... 59

3.0. Overview ...... 59 3.1. Plan 3388b – An ANT view of a Tel-Aviv Construction Plan: The REV Appraiser as a Social Scientist ...... 60

(a) How Real-Estate is Made Valuable (a Thick Ethnographic Description):…………. .... 60 (b)How Our Urban Account is Made:……… ...... 64

3.2. Actor-Network Theory - From Case Study to Methodological Application...... 65

(a) Turning Our Initial Approach into a Systematic Toolkit...... 65

3.3. How to Use Actor-Network Theory for the Sake of our own Urban Investigation? ...... 68

Chapter 4: Entering the Field – How Did We Come to Follow Real-Estate Values ...... 72

4.0. Overview ...... 72 4.1. How to Study the City Ethnographically? ...... 73

Table of Contents

(a) Two Possible Points of Entry: ...... 73 (b) My Past Engagements with Real-Estate Values ...... 74 (c) Discovering Real-Estate Values in the Tel-Aviv Local Planning Committee………. .... 76 (d) Touring Along the Conservation Plan and Discovering REV ...... 80

4.2. Discussion: What Does the Follow-Up of Real-Estate Values Mean for our Research? .. 86

Chapter 5: Real-Estate Values in the Field: On the Trail of the 'Branding-Dispute' ...... 88

5.0. Overview ...... 88 5.1. The Tel-Aviv Conservation Plan – an Introduction: ...... 88 5.2. The Branding-Dispute ...... 92 5.3. Early Attempts to Prove the Branding Factor ...... 97 5.4. The Kapelner Report – a Statistical Attempt to Substantiate Branding ...... 101 5.5. Linking the Rising Value to the Conservation List ...... 105 5.5. The Legal Issue ...... 108 5.6. Conclusion ...... 109

Chapter 6: The OS-Documents Nexus – or: Why Should We Study Real-Estate Valuation Files? ...... 111

6.0. Overview ...... 111 6.1. The Active Role of Files in Urban Organization – Testing the Waters ...... 112 6.2. Documents in OS ...... 121 6.3. Identifying the REV-Documents ...... 124

Chapter 7: Opening the Real-Estate Valuation Files Black-box ...... 129

7.0. Overview ...... 129 7.1. The Various Real-Estate Valuation Files ...... 129 7.2. On the Trail of a Betterment Tax File: The Structure of REV Documents ...... 131 7.3. The Structure of the Betterment Tax File ...... 133 7.4. A Relational Analysis of the Betterment-Tax Files ...... 140 7.5. REV-Documents in Controversies ...... 142

(a) Measuring the Value in its Old Condition ...... 142 (b) Meters Without Value?...... 145 (c) How to Relate a Specific Betterment Claim to a Specific Plan?...... 146 (d) Creating Value Out of Nothing………...... 147 (e) How Many Additional Meters does a Plan Reward?...... 148 (f) How Many Similar Cases are Needed to Form a Convincing Evaluation?...... 149 (g) What is Similar………...... 149 (h Reification of the Market through Practice………...... 150 (i) The Number of Appraisers as the Number of Valuations?...... 150 (J) Delphi Research ...... 151 (K) Additional Construction Costs ...... 153

7.6. Conclusion ...... 153

Chapter 8: What Real-Estate Values Do – Standard-21 and the Organization of the city 155

8.0. Overview ...... 155 8.1. Introduction ...... 155

Table of Contents

(a) The Standard-21 files………...... 155 (b) Reviewing a Few Reconstruction Processes – Setting the Scene for the Exploration of REVs' Urban Praxis…………………………………………………………………….158

8.2. Following Standard-21 in Action ...... 163

(a) How Valuation Files Participate in the Financial Organization of the Urban-Sphere.. 163 (b) How the Standard-21 Files Shape the Relations Between the Professional and the Political Domains……………..……………………………………………………….. 166 (c) How the Standard-21 Files are Responsible for the Qualitative Aspects of Construction ...... 170

8.3. Reflections ...... 175

(a) When the Standard-21 is Pushed to its Limit - The Atarim Square Plan………… ..... 176 (b) Ezra and Bitsaron – The Council Fights Back………...... 178

8.4. Conclusion ...... 179

Chapter 9: In Guise of Conclusions: Reflections and Predictions ...... 181

9.0. Overview ...... 181 9.1. Introduction – a Summary of the Thesis...... 181 9.2. Real-estate Values and the Organization of the City – a Post-Script Reality ...... 182

(a)First Observation – the Failure to Show that REVs are Representations?...... 182 (b) Second and Third Observations – the Assembly Process of the REV-Document and the Participation of the REV Document in the Assembly of the City ...... 190

9.3. Reflections ...... 192

References: ...... 199

Word Count: 80,473

List of Figures

Figure 1. An Advertisement for the University of Manchester ……………………….…..7 Figure 2. A Visualization of Plan 3388b………………………………………….……..61 Figure 3. An Empty Plot of Land, Upon Which the Construction Envisioned and Planned in Plan 3388b Were to be Realised ……………………….…………………………….62 Figure 4. The Transformation of a Flat One-Dimensional Empty Plot of Land Into a Rugged Multi-Dimensional Terrain…...……………………..…………………….....…63 Figure 5. The Local Planning Committee Gathering……………………………….….77 Figure 6. L street……………………………………………………………………...79 Figure 7. Visualization of the Future L Street………………………………………….80 Figure 8. The Cardboard in Front of "the Hole"…………………………………… 84 Figure 9: "The Hole"…..……………………………………………………………...85 Figure 10. An Eclectic Building in Central Tel-Aviv………………………..………….92 Figure 11. A Bauhaus Building in Central Tel-Aviv…………………………………….93 Figure 12. A Detailed Sketch of a Plan…….………………………………..…………117 Figure 13. The Old and the New Plan's Notifications………………….……………..118 Figure 14. A Suggested Construction Plan for Atarim Square ……….………….……..121 Figure 15. An alternative visualization of the Atarim Square Plan……………………...122 Figure 16. Real-Estate Valuation Files…………….………………………………...... 130 Figure 17. A Delphi Research-Oriented Graph………………….……………...…….154 Figure 18. The Ayalon Highway in its Current Condition.……………………………..158 Figure 19: A Visualization of the Post Constructed Park…………………………..…...158 Figure 20. A visualization of the Post Constructed Park……………………………….161 Figure 21. A Visualization of the Post-Renovated La-Guardia

Road…………...... ……...... 162 Figure 22. Atarim square in its Current Condition...…………...…………………....….163 Figure 23. Atarim Square in its Current Condition……..…………………………..…..164 Figure 24. A Visualization of the Post-Constructed Square………...…………………..164 Figure 25. A Visualization of the Post-Constructed Square...…………………………..165 Figure 26. The Bank headquarters…………………………………………………...... 182

Abstract

The city, as an object of organisational study, has received scant attention within the discipline of Organisational Studies in particular, and in the business school in general. While the management and organisational literature dealing with urban matters is abundant, the city itself, as opposed to phenomena taking place within it, has rarely been the focus of true scholarly attention, from an organisational point-of-view. This research aims to address this very issue, by first identifying the strands of organisational thought about the city and problematizing the prevalent narratives underlying most urban OS scholarship, thus stressing the need to generate a novel urban account. By conducting an Actor-Network Theory oriented ethnographic study in and around the Tel-Aviv council, all the while rethinking the theoretical premises which inform our fieldwork, an attempt is made to advance our understanding of the city with a view to resolve this lacuna. Opening the Real-Estate Value (REV) black-box by following the praxis of professional valuation and the ways it assembles the city landscape, and by focusing on REVs material manifestation via Real-Estate Valuation documents, we were able to register a novel account of urban-organization that succeeds in portraying a complex and multifarious city. This novel account allows us, in conclusion, to gain new insights into heterogeneous urban phenomenon and their interrelation to the various different Actor- Networks which make up the city. We showcase the utility of our approach by examining gentrification, without pre-assuming its nature, via a follow-up of the ways REVs and their manufacturing connects diverse sets of actors into what is commonly understood as a symptom of either an economic, political, or cultural reality. This breaking down of misapprehensions regarding the assembly of an unbounded organisation such as the city is not only useful for broadening our organisational understanding of the city, but has far-reaching implications on the field of OS as a whole, as it allows one to study different registers of formality without succumbing to pre- assumed structural limits and myths.

Declaration

No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning.

Copyright Statement i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes. ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made. iii. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trademarks and other intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions. iv. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property University IP Policy (see http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=24420), in any relevant Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s regulations (see http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/about/regulations/) and in The University’s policy on Presentation of Theses.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements I would like to first express my sincere gratitude to my supervisors Prof. Damian O'Doherty, Prof. John Hassard and, Dr. Dean Pierides, for their continued support, encouragement, mentorship, and friendship. The combination of rigorous critique and long conference nights, sometimes in medieval castles, have given this work its back-bone and helped me overcome all the trials and tribulations along the way. I would also like to thank the PGR staff at Manchester Business School and the many colleagues at PMO for their help and support. I would also like to thank the University of Manchester Presidential Award Scholarship for generously funding my studies.

Secondly, I would like to thank my informants, colleagues and friends in the Tel- Aviv Council, around the city, and beyond. They have opened their hearts, minds, and documents with kindness and patience. I am grateful for the Israeli Public Service's continued openness, which welcomed an external researcher like me and were always intrigued to hear of my on-going research and answer my sometimes-naïve questions.

To my friends and fellow students, Rita Davidson and Isabelle Velasquez, thank you for being there. Your support and companionship through the rainy Manchester years will not be forgotten.

To Oz Gore, my friend and mentor, in whose steps I followed. Thanks to you, I was able to start this journey in the first place. I still remember our first conversation, after I got accepted to the PhD program, your prophetic advice followed me since then.

To Gill Abarbanel, who has accompanied my work since its inception, almost 24/7. I could not have done it without your assistance. Now it is your time to start a PhD journey, and I hope to be able to do as much for you as you have for me.

To my partner, Alon Kadmon – I love you. It was thanks to you that I found my direction in the field. Without your continued support I could not have been here.

Finally, I want to thank my family for their backing and care. Especially to my mother, who has been the academic inspiration in my family and has believed in me even when I failed my 10th grade exams, and my father – who wrote 27,000 Real-Estate Valuation files in his fruitful career, and helped me see the magic in the mundane. This work is dedicated to you.

Chapter 0: Preface

"For the past thousand years the city has so often been mapped, itemized, measured, inscribed, transcribed and triangulated, that you’d expect to be able to trust the maps without going into the street in the little white van to start all over again. After all, the Parisian jungle is not the Amazon! But according to our land surveyors the difference between a tropical jungle and a concrete one is not that big. One gets lost in both: in the former due to a lack of landmarks and in the latter due to an excess of signs, nails, posts and marks that one has to learn to distinguish" (Latour & Hermant, 1998, p. 14).

0.1. Setting Out to Study the City

Figure 1. An advertisement for the university of Manchester As I write these words, a new building is constructed outside my window. It is part of the one billion GBP, ten-year University of Manchester campus masterplan. The construction site is surrounded by a metal fence upon which various posters are attached. Some posters are Health and Safety instructions, some are visualizations of the upcoming building and some, as seen in the above image, serve as sophisticated advertisements for the city of Manchester as a whole, and for the university in particular. The above campaign highlights the relations between the university and the city as it connects the momentous history of the place with the institution located within it. Being the "Original Modern city" associated with such things as Socialism, The Industrial Revolution, the splitting of the atom, voting rights for women, Graphene, computer

Chapter 0: Preface

science, the football league, the railway, and Vimto, Manchester is placed prominently on the stage of world history. The text in the black hexagons showcases the seemingly intertwining history of the university and the city, as it portrays the university's role during the assembling of these events. Alan Turing, for example, developed the first artificial intelligence "during his time at the university", while Beatrice Shilling "was one of the first women to be accepted onto an Electrical Engineering degree… [and later] develop[ed] the RAE restrictor which increased the capability of Hurricane and Spitfire planes in WWII". The affiliation of so many issues, grouped together under the moniker of 'modern', with one specific site is not unusual. It is seemingly natural for us to think about the city as a stage, or rather a context, in which various different events take place. It is also common to relate the activity of key institutions, such as the university, with the events that took place in the city. Shifting my gaze away from the office window to the Alliance Manchester Business School hallway, I realized that this image of the city as a (mute) stage does not only reflect the common-sense view of the city but also the way in which the city is viewed inside my academic discipline of Organization Studies (OS). This realization, to which I arrived shortly after I started to explore the field of urban organization, is located at the centre of our research. Broadly, it can be stated that the purpose of our investigation is to get past this view of the city as a platform for other organizational phenomena, and study urban organization through its own means, or, to put it differently, instead of studying how the urban participates in the organization of other things, study the organization of the urban itself. Substantive parts of the upcoming dissertation are dedicated to the establishment of the above claim that most OS investigation of urban organization are actually investigations of organizations in the city. But first, I shall quickly summarize the focal points of our research so as to set the framework of what is about to come. Generally, when reviewing the OS-urban literature, one finds that most accounts are based upon one of three pre-established, external, narratives of urban organization. These three narratives are (1) the economic – according to which the city is organized in-line with economic forces such as those of supply and demand, (2) the institutional – which sees the city as a socially embedded structure that should be understood from a much more culturally-oriented perspective, with a system of myths and conventions behind its organization, and (3) the critical perspective – that understands the city as a product of political forces such as interclass struggle or sectarian interests which ultimately lead to the continued oppression of the masses. These three narratives, that are simply adopted into

Chapter 0: Preface

the large majority of OS-urban accounts as pre-existing assumptions with regards to urban organization, are problematic due to (1) their fundamental fallacies (such as paradigmatic blindness, pre-assumed categories, and unassailable assumptions – all of which will be fully explored later on), (2) the fact that we want to study urban organization in its own right and not rely upon ready-made and external explanations of urban organization, and (3) as we believe that the very reliance on narratives, which, following Morgan (Morgan, 2006) we see as metaphorical images, serves to obfuscate as much as it helps tell stories. Therefore, the purpose of our research is to rise above these three narratives and develop a new urban account. We started our journey by reviewing important OS scholars who did try to study urban-organization on its own means, Czarniawska, Kornberger and Clegg. Despite the great insights regarding urban organization that we gained while studying about Czarniawska's understanding of the city as organized by nets of actions to which she calls Action-Nets and Kornberger and Clegg's notion of Strategy, which they identify as the prevalent urban management paradigm that replaced Urban-Planning, we realized that if we want to develop a new urban account we must approach the matter differently. Therefore, following Latour, we came to the conclusion that a new urban account needs to adopt the complexity and multiplicity of the city, and not, as most other OS urban investigations do, try to overcome these 'features' and to portray the city in a simple and unified way. From Latour we also took the idea that to generate a new urban account our task is not to replace the existing narratives with a new, more accurate one, but rather, just like any other social scientist, we must be able to register the city differently. In other words, our task is to make a different image of the city that will tell a new story about it. New actors such as the non-humans, and description of the assembly process of the urban Actor-Networks1 should be included in this new image. Trying to transfer our new research strategy into a concrete investigation we (re)discovered Real-Estate Values (REV) at the beginning of our fieldwork and decided that by following them, as they are located everywhere around the city and are related to almost everything, we might be able to generate our new urban account. Recognizing two possible points of departure: the Tel-Aviv conservation plan and the Tel-Aviv local planning committee, we started by following a conservation plan valuation dispute but

1 In Actor-Network Theory, the empirical world is said to be made out of networks which act as actors, and vice versa. An actor-network is seen as both the basic ontological unit and as a way of accounting for the experienced world, in a way that does away with hierarchies, external dichotomies and pre-assumed categories. We will expound this notion in detail in chapter three.

Chapter 0: Preface

quickly learned that from this dispute, known as the Branding-Dispute, we can only learn that it is impossible to confirm the claim (that was at the heart of this valuation controversy) that REVs are representations of external factors such as the forces of supply and demand. Finding this discovery to be insightful we nevertheless realized that in order to be able to say something positive about REV and as a result about the city we most find some concrete object that will allow us to follow REV around our field. Inspired by Latour's treatment of legal files, we understood that files play a similar role in our field, and that the REV documents can serve us in our investigation. Out of this understanding came two chapters in which we followed the assembly process of the REV document (via a follow up of betterment tax files) and the participation of the REV-document in the assembly process of the city (via a follow up of economic valuation files). These contain the central empirical findings of our research, in which the reader can find our new urban account that, following ANT's avoidance of abstraction, will not be summarized here but will have to be read in full in the actual chapters.

0.2. Why We Study the City?

In the European Group of Organisation Studies (EGOS) conference of 2018 in Tallinn, I presented an early draft of this work in a panel titled "Smart and Liveable Cities: Organizing Urban Governance and Leadership" (Pogner, Miscione, & Wahlin, 2018). The panel's call for papers started with a declaration that: "Contemporary narratives and discourses about managing, governing and developing cities could be divided into two competing streams. The first one (Smart Cities) is very prominent in mass media, tech companies and tech communities; whereas the second one (Liveable Cities) is mostly enacted on social media platforms, in cultural branding initiatives, social movements, grassroots initiatives, and (virtual) communities. Both streams struggle for getting a voice in the discourses as well as in mediascapes." (Ibid) The call for papers continued with a summary of the authors understanding of the city: "Cities can be analysed as eco-systems that are emerging and developing in the context of global economy with new forms of organizing." (Ibid) and ended with a specific invitation for writers to send abstracts that are: "investigating the interrelation of the expected and the unexpected on the urban scale by looking at the sometimes surprising outcomes of the interplays of change and stability, innovation and technology, spaces and spacing, planning and creativity, organization and spontaneity." (Ibid) After being lucky enough to be the first person in the stream to present my paper, I spent three full days listening to my colleagues while they presented their own urban-

Chapter 0: Preface

organizational research. The impressive variety of topics included papers about such matters as: urban protest movements, the science behind urban strategic planning, myths and the management of cities, what makes cities sustainable, power relations within cities as evidenced from the study of one specific mega-project, the construction of the sharing city from a discursive point of view, the study of urban resilience and adaptation policies, the effect of the construction of innovation centres within cities on the urban management, the construction of democratic governance within smart cities, urban strategizing process, and the development of touristic mountain biking routes around the city2. Spending three days in front of all presentations while reading the full papers in advance of the conference, I was able to identify that the large majority of papers (and presentations) started with two repeating sections in which the authors (directly or indirectly) explained: (1) what are cities? (2) why should we study them? Despite the great variety of papers that were based on very different methodologies, from the use of statistics to long-term ethnography, and stemming from different theoretical frameworks -economic theory, ANT, institutional theory, and Marxism, to name but a few - it seemed that most of the answers to the questions were very similar, or, to be more precise it seemed that the answers to the second questions were similar while the answers to the first question were confused and partial in a similar way. Trying to operationalise the definition of the city, the writers either stated directly or implied indirectly that the city is (1) its administration, (2) an entity that is being managed by a municipality, as the one thing that unites all cities is the fact that they have a governing body, (3) an action-net3, (4) a network, (5) an economic entity, (6) an entity that can become 'smart' or (6) an object of capitalist accumulation. Explaining why one should study the city, most of the papers quoted the same official UN statistics, according to which the urban population is, in the first time in human history, around 50% of the total population of the world and is expected to rise to 66% by 2050, and are therefore expected to face serious challenges, risking their resident's lives, safety and livelihood. This looming crisis, they argued, demanded a major rethink in the way we study, understand, manage, and organise cities. While the answer to the first question – what is the city - served as a precursor to my colleagues' studies, it became the focus of my work, as I was not satisfied with any of the

2 As I am reporting on these papers from the point of view of an ethnographer, and since they were presented in a working group and are therefore unpublished drafts, I will not directly reference, cite nor quote from them and any identifiable detail that might be given is changed. 3 See chapter two.

Chapter 0: Preface

half-working definitions offered above. As for the 'why', my research also involves a long discussion about the latest urban challenges as they are understood from the perspective of what is known as the New Urban Crisis (Florida, 2017), a term coined by one of the most influential contemporary urban theorists, Richard Florida, and denotes the expanding socio-economic gaps, the inaccessibility of home-ownership to the younger generations, and so forth. But, similarly, it does not serve as a satisfactory incentive, and my answers emerged out of my experience in the urban field and as a result of my ethnographic engagement with the Tel-Aviv council. My decision to conduct ethnography is directly related to its growing adoption within OS, as is evidenced from the existence of "specialist conferences and standing working groups at management and organisation symposia" (D. O’Doherty & Neyland, 2019, p. 450), the numerus OS ethnographies that have lately been published (See, for example, Czarniawska, 2012; O'Doherty & Neyland, 2019; O’Doherty, 2017; Ybema, Yanow, Wels, & Kamsteeg, 2009), and special issues of OS journals devoted to ethnography (Czarniawska, O’Doherty, & Neyland, 2019). I decided to join in on this emerging ethnographic trend due to the fact that "it provides the basis for paradigmatic innovation in academic research communities; questions and unsettles taken-for-granted assumptions shared across paradigms; and pushes back against the secrets and lies in which modern corporations are so often mired " (D. O’Doherty & Neyland, 2019, p. 450) and as such it seems to perfectly fit our initial state of confusion, especially in the light of the fact that "ethnography is uniquely placed to provide insights into complexity, paradox and ambiguity in organisation which often poses problems to those seeking quick and pragmatic diagnosis and solutions to managerial problems accustomed to box diagram mappings, simple cause–effect relations and linear processes" (Ibid, 453). In addition, the fact that growing ethnographic resources are being invested is the study of areas previously "left to science, engineering or technology studies" (Ibid) fits our ambition as we want to explore the urban field, which was traditionally left to specific experts such as economists, urban planners, geographers etc. In addition to the great advantage that our research can draw from the use of the ethnographic methodology, the fact that ethnography is as-of-yet not institutionalized within the business school, as is evidenced from the fact that (1) there are hardly any training for this research method for business scholars (Ibid), and that (2) the understanding of ethnography's advantages within the discipline are still quite narrow. Most scholars, it seems, still view ethnography's main advantage as stemming from the researcher being able to hold, on the one hand, the point of view of 'the outsider', while

Chapter 0: Preface

being a "fish in the water" (Ibid) on the other hand, and is therefore in a privileged structural position which allows her to see what the subjects cannot. Wishing to dismantle this somewhat paternalistic view of the epistemic superiority of the ethnographer, we choose instead to focus on the more recently highlighted strengths of this methodology, such as the fact that it allows one to see agency in a new and complicated way that recognises the role of non-humans in the puzzle (Latour, 1996a), and is able to portray reality from a non- dichotomic perspective (Latour, 1991). I believe that it is important to develop an OS- oriented ethnography not only for the benefit of our research purpose but also for the sake of advancing OS research. Our adoption of ethnography is directly related to our adoption of Latour's scholarship specifically, and to the broad ANT library in general. Many ANT-oriented ethnographies (Callon, 1986; Czarniawska, 2000a, 2002; Faraias & Bender, 2010; Latour, 1987, 2002; Latour & Hermant, 1998; Law & Hassard, 1999; Mol, 2002; Shamir, 2013; Yaneva, 2009) are directly related to our research goal, through what they teach us about organizations, the city, and the complexities of our contemporary world. Furthermore, I came to see that our adoption of ANT ethnographical sensibilities allows us to digress from the urban image that the three urban narratives create, as ANT, when adopted as an methodological stand, is invested in the attempts to capture the complexity and the multiplicity of reality as integral to it and thus as something that must take a central part in our accounts and as something that the researcher need not overcome4. In addition, ANT's view of agency as being granted via our description and not as located out there, and thus its ability to grant agency to various non-human objects is central in our attempt to change the ways in which we understand the urban5. My actual research is based upon 15 months of fieldwork that was conducted in and around the Tel-Aviv council. Launching my ethnography in July 2016, I was not sure where should my departure point be. As access is not a simple matter, I took the best opportunity that I found and joined the Tel-Aviv vice-mayor's office (with whom I had previous connection due to my past political activity) and took the active role of helping her prepare for the local planning committee gatherings. In each gathering, around ten construction plans were discussed and, as each plan entailed dozens of highly technical pages, not to mention the meeting that I had to conduct with local residents, council officials, developers, lawyers, and architects so as to understand the plan that will be

4 For further details, see chapter three 5 Ibid.

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presented in the upcoming meeting, I had a lot of work. The most fruitful moments of these early ethnographic days were the actual gatherings of the committee, full to the brim with ethnographic insights. The debates around the plans themselves, conducted in a highly technical manner, the numerous different participants, the setting of the room, the buffet (that was an important site for me in which I was able to communicate intimately with many committee members and partake in their more private talks) and the technical language to which I had to adapt, all proved to be fertile grounds for my research. A few month into the fieldwork I started to expand my horizons and, being more familiar among the council employees, I get permission to participate in the city Engineer Forum - the highest municipal professional planning gathering, second only to the political local planning committee, in which representatives of all sub-departments discuss each and every urban plan. As fascinating as the local planning committee, my participation in this forum opened many doors and helped me gain the confidence of various council officials from the different regional planning departments, the strategic department, the real-estate valuation department, the property department, and so forth. Eventually I either actively participated in meetings or just had a few meaningful conversations with representatives of almost all section of the council planning bodies. In addition, I met and followed local residents of areas related to plans that I took a closer look into. I had many meetings in which I talked to the residents, joined them in their activity (such as protesting against the council, going to court, talking with fellow residents, meeting developers, etc.). In addition, I met many developers, real-estate appraisers, architects, lawyers, and other professionals – some for long and structured interviews and some for unofficial conversations. Doing all that, I had to make hard decisions with regards to my research. I decided to focus my efforts on two different plans and try to study them as much as I can. The first was the Tel-Aviv Conservation Plan, based on a list of a thousand buildings that were deemed important and thus had to comply with special regulations. Perhaps a seemingly simple plan, it nevertheless transformed the city and even resulted in a huge lawsuit of around three billion NIS. Following this plan, I talked to all relevant council officials, read hundreds of protocols, books, and reports, joined planning and legal meetings, talked to residents, real-estate appraisers, architects, lawyers and so forth. I toured the city and even went to a few remote places such as the northern city of Acre to better understand the context of the plan. The other plan I followed was a regeneration plan of one semi- suburban area. The council decided to demolish it and re-built it, while the vice-mayor did not know what to think about the matter, especially due to the fact that many residents

Chapter 0: Preface

who opposed the plan contacted her. She asked me to study the plan and its circumstances, and indeed I spent around 10 months of being highly involved in this project, in all aspects – from residents to council professionals and politicians. After choosing on which plans to focus, the second crucial decision that I had to take revolved around my actual point of departure, or, to put it differently – which phenomena or practice must I begin my study with, if I wish to reach new understandings of the city. As each ethnographic moment was full of enticing matters that involved numerous human and non-human actors, that could have easily filled the remainder of my fieldwork, I had to decide how to handle this complex reality. Looking for a perspective that will allow me to portray the city in a novel way, I made a decision to follow Real-Estate Values (REV), which consistently came up in my fieldwork early on. I will extensively elaborate on the empirical and theoretical reasons behind this decision in chapter four. I will nevertheless shortly describe now how I arrived at my decision to focus on REV. After getting over the initial fieldwork confusion and excitement, it became clear how one could not 'simply' describe the complex urban reality of Tel-Aviv. In line with the ANT sensibilities that I developed, which taught me that reality is dependent upon the tools being used to inscribe it, I began the process of developing my own set of tools that will allow me to reach some meaningful insights into the field I was in. A reflective moment that took place just after one of the committee meetings pushed me towards this understanding. Being asked by a colleague about my observations from the meeting, I suddenly felt that there are hundreds of different stories I can weave from this smallest of gatherings, as any ethnographer coming from the field will relate. To name but a few listed in my fieldnotes of that day, I could tell of:

- The meeting's protocol and its 'official' happenings, as they are recorded for posterity. - The individual actors, such as the committee members, or any one of the technical staff members, from the legal advisor all the way to the cleaner. - The ways in which PowerPoint presentations were used during the meeting, and the images these portrayed. - Choose some specific actant, such as parking, and follow its role during the entire gathering. - The explosive relations between the audience and the committee members. - The different discourses being used by the different actors.

Chapter 0: Preface

- The intricate carb-based politics around the buffet table, the power-dynamics regulating access to it, and the importance of the choice of coffee.

Eventually, as I wrote down in my notebook what could have easily surpassed a hundred possible stories, I came to the conclusion that I must not continue with these naïve attempts to capture (in my notebook, in my recording device, and with my camera) everything that happens inside these meetings. Therefore, I decided that I must (1) relax, let the happenings play out in front of my eyes without trying to obsessively capture them. As my mission was to understand the complex entanglements that were taking place in the urban arena and not to capture each and every movement, it was much more important to develop my intuitions, sharpen my ethnographic sensibilities and meaningfully integrate into my field, i.e. perform the aptly-named practice of participant-observation. Alongside, I needed to (2) develop some strategy out of my integration in the field that will be the most suitable for our research purpose. As part of that attitude, I become increasingly aware of the fact that REV, which for operational reasons, we will for now define as numbers that are attached to properties and denote their 'value', accompanied me to every corner and were related to almost every urban happening. As will be repeatedly shown, REV appeared in every plan, and almost every any other urban matter from the construction of hospitals, schools, and shopping malls, through the demographic makeup of the city, to the political campaigns of municipals parties. I could even argue that REV is a mediator between all urban actors and as such it allows the city to happen. As part of our attempt to generate a new urban account, it is the story of the REV that will be told in this dissertation and that will help us better understand the organization of our cities. Finally, (3) I had to make some ethical decisions. Conducting an ethnography in and around the Tel-Aviv council entailed a constant ethical questioning of almost all my steps. For example, I was often exposed to very sensitive information. It was either inner- organizational politics or some broader political matter that was related to the wider public. Should I document the rumours that I heard about the motivations behind the acts of some senior committee member? Should I consider it as part of the 'planning'? What about some secret relationships between two individuals? Should I join a meeting to which I was not officially invited? Should I explain my role to each and every person in the field? There were no ready-made answers to such questions and I was not able to use some ethical guidebook in each and every step. I had to develop my intuitions about the happenings in the field while constantly reflecting on what was happening and sharing my experiences with my supervisors. Eventually, I adopted some general rules that accompanied me during

Chapter 0: Preface

the entire investigation: (1) I will do as much as I can to protect the identity of individuals – and will not keep (even for myself) any identifying information, (2) I will not do anything that a person in my position who actually works for the council will not do, hence I was not looking for information that was not available to me and I focused only on the work that was assigned to me by the vice mayor ,(3) whenever I had doubts I wrote a note about it and discussed it with my supervisors. In a sense, learning how to ethically conduct myself was one of the most important lessons that I learned during the entire research.

0.3. an Outline of the Thesis

The upcoming work is structured as follows: Chapter one introduces the contemporary city and its complexities, reviewing the current treatment that the city receives within the OS literature. Arriving at the conclusion that most OS urban literature is dependent upon one of three pre-existing urban narratives – the economic, the institutional and the critical, we lengthy describe them, analyse their shortcomings, and finally arrive at the conclusion that we need to develop a new urban narrative. Chapter two is a review of the OS researchers who, coming to a similar conclusion, attempted to resolve this deficiency: Czarniawska, Clegg and Korenberger. Describing the work of these scholars, we will then try to learn from their shortcoming, and, using Latour, try and develop a strategy to overcome them. Chapter three is dedicated to a reflective review of ANT and the reasons that led us to adopt it into our methodology. Chapter four is an introduction to REV and an explanation of the way they emerged out of the field to be our central matter of concern. Chapter five is the first empirical chapter in attempt to identify REV, by following the Tel-Aviv Conservation Plan, where we learn to debunk the common image of REV as representation of underlying reality and hint at the possibility that REVs have agency and that they might be actively participating in the organization of the city. Chapter six turns back into the literature to review our methodology in light of Latour's treatment of the legal file. We learn that in order for us to find a positive understanding of REV and follow it in action, we must focus its material form – the REV- Document. Chapter seven is a long and detailed analysis of the REVs, as they appear in the field in the form of the document, in an attempt to find out how the REV is assembled.

This chapter follows the conclusion from chapters five and six that the REV-document might be active participants in urban-organization and therefore should be studied carefully to allow for a better understanding of the city. This examination of the REV should take part on both sides on its network, from within and from without, and therefore chapter seven is dedicated to a review of the REV assembling process while chapter eight is dedicated to a review of how REV's participates in the assembling process of the city. In each chapter we closely follow one type of REV document: in chapter seven it is the betterment tax file and in chapter eight it is the economic viability document. Chapter nine is a reflective chapter that discusses the relations between our follow-up of the REV and our research purpose – developing a new urban account.

Chapter 1: Organisation Studies and The City – The Is and The Ought

1.0. Overview

This thesis grew out of an incompatibility between the dramatic shifts taking place within cities and the inadequate attention it receives as an object of organisational inquiry within the academic discipline dedicated to the research of organisations – i.e. Organisation Studies (OS). Cities are perhaps one of the most central of contemporary organisations and it is as an ‘organisation’ that this thesis will seek to understand and develop the city as an object of inquiry. Based on ethnographic work in and around the Tel-Aviv council, we challenge organisation studies to organisationally study the organisation of the city, a provocation the discipline may not yet be ready to hear. We do not mean to imply that there is any lack in OS research pertaining to the cities, on the contrary, yet there is a shortage of novel urban OS accounts where the city receives its due attention as an organisation par excellence. There is a great wealth of writing about urban matters from organisational perspectives. However, instead of studying how the city is organised, the vast majority of these papers use one of three fundamental narratives, henceforth termed as the economic, the institutional and the critical6 narratives of the city. In almost all urban OS literature, one of these three narratives

6 We will expand upon these terms later in the chapter.

Chapter 1: Organisation Studies and The City – The Is and The Ought

appear as a pre-established, pre-ordered underlaying explanation to how the city is organised. That being the case, the 'organisationalness' of the city, or, to put it differently, the characteristics of the city as an organisation, are not examined but rather, are assumed. The result is a large body of literature that is not trying to explore how the urban is organised but, instead, studies organisations taking place within the city, while the city serves as a mere backdrop. Early on in my fieldwork I have come to the realisation that this state-of-affairs fails to adequately grasp the lived reality of urban-organisation, as the three dominant urban narratives suffer from paradigmatic blindness, pre-assumed categories, and unassailable assumptions and therefore conflict with the empirical reality that we were exposed to during our urban investigation. To put it differently, the city I encountered did not conform to any of the assumed realities I came to expect from the literature which prepared me for my field work. This state of confusion, stemming not only from an over-reliance on the three above-mentioned narratives, but as I came to realise – from the very use of narratives as explanatory tools, came to be the driving force behind my ethnographic inquiries. Trying to fill this gap in the literature, our research views the city as an organisation waiting to be systematically mapped and therefore aims to study how it is organised. That being the case, we will depart from the three pre-assumed urban narratives (the economic, the institutional and the critical) in an attempt to develop our own new urban account. This endeavour will be informed by Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which we found to be the best fitting methodology and framework for non-narrativized account making. To delineate the above in greater length, the upcoming chapter will be sub-divided into four sections:

(1) In order to first establish the need for a more thorough investigation of the city from an OS perspective, we will suspend our critique to introduce the 'new urban crisis' (Florida, 2017), denoting the commonly understood challenges facing the contemporary city as it deals with such challenges as the expanding economic gaps, the lack of affordable housing, the rise of the gig economy, the global heating crisis, and so forth. We will discuss how the study of these shifts vis a vis the city organisation is reflected in current research, and the implications this lack of proper treatment has on our theoretical and methodological grounding. In addition, we will discuss, on the one hand, the benefits that can stem from an OS investigation

Chapter 1: Organisation Studies and The City – The Is and The Ought

of cities to the study of cities themselves and, on the other hand, to OS scholarship as a whole. (2) Having established the need for an OS treatment of the city organisation, this section will start with a short literary review of the current urban OS scholarship, present our analysis of the main trends within it, and establish our main point of critique of its current state - namely – that the large majority of our reviewed literature is not invested in the study of urban-organisation but rather in the study of organisations that take place within the urban, which serves as a mere stage upon which other organisational phenomena take place. (3) In this section we introduce the three urban narratives we identified in current OS representations of the city: the economic, the institutional and the critical. We will discuss their shortcomings, mainly the fact that the three narratives are based upon paradigmatic blindness, pre-assumed categories, and unassailable assumptions, and elaborate on the need to develop a new non-representational urban account if we are to make sense of urban organisation. (4) To conclude, we will present our final research purpose – to develop a novel urban account. We will explain how it emerged out of our three urban narrative's shortcomings, and will lay the foundations for the upcoming discussion.

1.1. OS and The Current State of The City – An Analysis in Light of the 'New Urban-Crisis'.

What have become of our cities and why we, as OS scholars, should study them?

"The makeshift tent-city of the 2011 Tel-Aviv protest required organisation. Together with the ten thousand odd semi-residents who spent their summer in the affluent main avenues of the city, we quickly found ourselves performing mock urbanity. Waste removal, supply logistics, infrastructure maintenance (temporary as it may be), security, planning and construction, diplomacy and factional rivalry became the lot of the residents-protestors. It was just a matter of survival; the settlement grew so fast that to avoid disasters we had no other choice but to take care of every aspect of our lives. Thus, while seemingly trying to resist (what we understood as) the corrupt system, we were in fact immersed in endeavours to create our own governing bodies…. Seeing up close how complicated the organisation of our tent-city was, it became evident to me that we ourselves adopted many of the behaviours against which we came to protest in the first place."

Chapter 1: Organisation Studies and The City – The Is and The Ought

Ohad, who orchestrated a tent area back in 2011 and is now a council employee7

Eight years after the protest ended, the repercussions from one of the most intense summers in recent Tel-Aviv memory still resonate, as all known registers of Israeli public protest were re-defined during those few hot and profound months. The 2011 social justice protests were sparked by a few young activists at the beginning of July, but quickly grew into a nationwide protest movement. Numerically, the peak of the events occurred during the first Saturday evening of September 2011, in which more than 465 thousand people took to the streets and participated in one of the eighteen demonstrations that were held during that night. 300 thousand people participated in the long march from the centre of the summer's happenings - Rothschild avenues in middle Tel-Aviv – to the remote 'Kikar HaMedina' (The Nation Square), in what is now known as the biggest demonstration in the history of Israel. Large parts of the crowd were acting militantly, releasing great energies that accumulated into one fundamental demand – complete and irreversible social and political revolution. Posters comparing the (then and now) Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak and the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad did not leave much room for imagination. At the end of the night, thousands of demonstrators blocked one of Tel-Aviv's main streets. When the police came with large forces, I was only a few meters away from where one of the demonstrators was brutally crushed under the legs of a police horse. The raging crowd stoned the horse and the policeman that was riding it with garbage and empty glass bottles. Never did the Israeli middle class rile up as bitterly as it did that summer. The protest movement shaped the public conversation for two full months while thousands of tents were occupying the main streets of cities all around the country. Living in the Tel- Aviv tent-city during most of that summer, I can testify that the feelings were magical - I have repeatedly witnessed how people were developing their political consciousness for the first time and were starting to believe that change is possible, as exemplified by the rallying call of "It is Time to Wake Up!!!" – which became synonymous with the 2011 protest and its leaders, for years to come. It might come as a surprise to the casual reader that in a country that has been in various wars since its establishment in 1948, the 2011 social protest, such a fundamental protest in Israel’s history, was not about the occupation of the Palestinian territories or any

7 From fieldnotes: 17.11.2016.

Chapter 1: Organisation Studies and The City – The Is and The Ought

other war and peace related issues, but was related to a seemingly much more mundane theme – the 'housing-crisis' i.e., the constant rise of real-estate values (Schipper, 2015). Since 2011, the 'housing crisis' is one of the most prominent political problems within the Israeli public sphere. In sharp contrast to the pre-2011 condition, the government's ability to successfully lessen the housing-costs became one of its biggest challenges according to which its performances are measured8. In addition, constant initiatives to promote rent- regulations, public housing, new publicly led financial schemes, and so forth were promoted by activists, NGOs and politicians from all across the political spectrum. To illustrate how this emerging 'crisis' was witnessed on the ground, I shall employ my notes from several planning committees to which I was exposed during my ethnographic investigation. Observing the happenings within the committees, I quickly became aware of the fact that a crisis-oriented vocabulary became central to all planning processes that took place in the post-2011 era9. This new vocabulary appeared in discussions about such matters as affordable-housing, long-term rents, the construction of small apartments for young people and even the development of shared living spaces. This shift in tone was not powerful enough to transform the privately-funded construction system that characterizes all urban planning in Israel. However, the day-to-day planning activity and its basic epistemology are completely different from the pre-2011 condition. Tel-Aviv, Israel's main economic hub and the centre of Gush-Dan (sometimes known as The Greater Tel-Aviv area) in which 25% of the country's citizens are living10, is at the epicentre of a continual price surge. This sharp increase in real-estate values, that started at the late 2000s, was transforming the city into one of the most expensive places in the world11, is commonly associated with the creation two separated social classes, divided by unbridgeable economic gaps, of property-owners and leaseholders. Being blamed for the exodus of large populations away from the 'unaffordable' city, the housing- crisis, mostly presented through the eyes of young professionals (the social group with the best PR), was pushing urban management towards the conclusion that the city cannot

8 Since 2011 two different national plans to fight the rising housing costs were initiated: Lapid’s 2013 Zero-VAT plan and Kahlon’s 2016 Tenant Housing plan, both of which played a major role in election campaigns and had a prominent place in public debate for years. 9 I base this comparison on 'pre-2011 discourse' from numerous protocols and recordings which I reviewed in my studies. 10 Israel has 8.5 million citizens as of 2019 while the government controls approximately 4 million Palestinians without citizenship. Greater Tel-Aviv is home to around 2 million people while the Tel-Aviv- Jaffa municipality is in charge of 400,000 residents. 11 According to a 2017 survey measuring the average cost of living in cities that was published in the Economist, Tel-Aviv is the 11th most expensive city in the world see (“Measuring the cost of living worldwide,” 2017)

Chapter 1: Organisation Studies and The City – The Is and The Ought

afford to lose its young and educated residents. Thus, as I have witnessed during my ethnographic work, large parts of the urban managerial focus started to be directed towards the development of mechanisms and policies that will prevent the departure of the 'creative-classes' (Florida, 2002)12. Tel-Aviv's urban-crisis is not an isolated phenomenon located only in the Middle- East, but, rather, is part of a global, comprehensive trend, that emerged all around the (developed) world in cities such as New-York, London, Madrid, Hong-Kong etc., and is associated with global protests such as the Occupy Movement that focused on the banks' responsibility for the 2008 global financial crisis which, according to the protesters, was highly related to the control of the banks over the housing markets (Gamson and Sifry, 2013). This 'new urban-crisis', a phrase coined by one of the most influential urban thinkers of our times, Richard Florida (Florida, 2017), is reflected in the fact that the world's leading cities, in which most white-collar positions can be found, are becoming grotesquely unequal and less and less affordable, especially for the younger generations, who are forced to either live in remote places and commute a few hours a day, live in very low standard accommodation with many flatmates or with their parents until old age, or be driven out of the big cities all together, or for members of the lower socio-economic classes which are being 'pushed' outside the city, even if they own some property in it, paradoxically enough13. This global housing crisis, that was acknowledged lately in a special report of the world-bank which stated: "inflated house prices and high rents in major cities are damaging the employment prospects for millions of young workers across the European Union" (Inchauste, Karver, Kim, & Jelil, 2018, p. 36), is not an isolated phenomenon but is part of great transformations that our cities are undergoing in the last few decades. These changes stem from the dramatic shift in the world's urban population, that according to a 2014 special UN report on urbanity (United-Nations, 2018) has passed the 50% mark of the total world population (contrary to 1950 in which only 30% of the world population were living in cities) while in the western world the numbers are even higher – 82% in north America and 73% in Europe (Ibid). This great movement towards the cities is deeply entwined with such urban shifts as: (1) the technological development often framed as 'smart-cities

12 According to the creative class theory (Florida, 2002) in order to flourish a city must invest in the most valuable human-resource – young, creative and educated people. As Israel's economic and cultural center, Tel-Aviv was already in full capacity of this resource, thus the organisational efforts of the council were not dedicated to attract more young and creative people but rather to make sure that these people will not be pushed outside the city due to the rising prices. 13 Chapter nine of this dissertation further explore this state of events.

Chapter 1: Organisation Studies and The City – The Is and The Ought

projects' that include self-driving cars, CCTV controlled urban environments, smart infrastructure, and the development of urban strategic management techniques (Kornberger & Clegg, 2011), all parts of the new ways to manage the growing urban population, (2) the great economic shifts towards privately led neo-liberal urban-regimes (Hackworth, 2006), that also include the shift towards the gig-economy in the form of companies such as Uber and Airbnb that have, undoubtedly, a lasting effect on our cities, (3) environmental challenges related to the great (air, water and land) pollution that the urban environment produces and the global heating crisis's effects such as droughts, floods, rising sea levels, heat waves, forced immigration, and so forth, and (4) social and cultural shifts related to the local and the global immigration into the cities and political changes such as the rise of women and LGBT rights movements. These urban transformations invite serious reconsideration of our notion of the city. Our old concepts of the modern city, that were established around the same period in which Dickens and Zola wrote their great urban novels, no longer provide us with meaningful conceptualizations of the city in its current organisational form. This calls for a new line of research whose focus is the management and organisation of the contemporary city, as it exists today, outside the pre-conceived notions of the urban. Knox's review of cities and OS is very useful in this regard (Knox, 2010). Asking what will happen if OS scholars start to "take 'the city' as a site of organisation" (Ibid, 185), Knox suggests that the city can become a "site for an ongoing re-evaluation of the way in which organisational theorists can engage with questions of social and cultural transformation" (Ibid). The opportunity to study the city as a "phenomenon of complex organisation" (Ibid) that "exceeds the limits of organisational settings and processes as they are conventionally understood" (Ibid, 186) makes the city a promising space for production of novel OS knowledge. This is due to the fact that the understanding of the city as a complex organisation14 can serve as a model for the growing population of OS scholars as they increasingly move away from the study of bounded organisations to the study of organisational-dynamics15 and from the study of formal organisation to the study of the "organisational character of modern society" (Ibid, 189).

14 According to Knox, the complexity of the city stems from it being made up of "distributed, processual spaces, subject to systems of planning, calculations and prediction that are provoked by the threat of breakdown, in the form of congestion, disorder and decay" (Knox, 187) 15 The study of organisational dynamics has set the tone of a plethora of recent scholarship and is becoming increasingly common as the focal point of various OS journals and publications, such as Organisation, Organisation Studies, and Human Relations, to name but a few. It is important to remember, however, that some scholars are moving in the opposite direction (Du Gay & Vikkelso, 2016). We hope that our work will demonstrate the disadvantages of such a move.

Chapter 1: Organisation Studies and The City – The Is and The Ought

To illustrate how the study of urban organisation can contribute to broad OS scholarship, Knox put forward a few important thinkers who engaged, along the years, with the organisation of the city. The German sociologist Georg Simmel understood the organisation of the city to be a result of the urban/rural divide, and this is utilized by Knox to make us re-think the validity of seeing the contemporary city (and as a result also the contemporary organisation) as constituted through such divisions. From Castlles, Knox borrows the idea that "in the globalised space of flows… the dynamics of how cities work are no longer driven by local concerns and relations within the city, but as much by the interactions that take place between the high earning urban dwellers of city suburbs spread around the world" (Ibid, 188). She does so in an attempt to raise attention to the ability of urban-organisation studies to serve as a " bridge between theorists of globalisation and those analysing internal organisational dynamics so that we might think of ways that allow research to interrogate the patterns and ‘structures’ of organisation as they manifest at the level of the city" (Ibid, 189). Latour's analysis of Paris presents the ANT method of dealing with organisational complexity, which avoids the use of abstraction by following how the complexity is being produced in action via the description process of the city that, as Latour illustrates vividly in his textual and visual descriptions of Paris (Latour & Hermant, 1998), is responsible for the organisation of the urban. To conclude this section, (1) we have discussed how the city has been transformed in the last couple of decades, due to (a) the dramatic increase in urban population in relation to the worlds' rural population; (b) the increasing economic gaps and the emerging housing crisis; (c) the great economical changes that happened in and around our cities such as the rise of the gig economy, the need to cope with the global heating crisis's results, and so forth. Following the main part of this chapter we posit that (2) the study of city organisation is in lack of OS treatment, and would greatly gain from the discipline's attention and (3) how the unbounded nature of the city can help OS in its transformation from the study of bounded entities and formal organisation to the study of unbounded entities and non- formal or semi-formal organisations. Moving forward, we shall dedicate the next section to review how exactly current OS scholarship accounts for various organisational modifications that the city has undergone.

1.2. Organisation-Studies and The City– A Short Literature Review

What was already said about the city in and around OS? The city, as an object of inquiry, has gained prominence in recent years within the OS community. As we will see, the large number of papers dealing with a wide scope of urban

Chapter 1: Organisation Studies and The City – The Is and The Ought

related issues that were published lately in central OS journals such as Organisation Studies, Organisation Science, Organisation, and Human Relations serve to reflect this fashion. As the emerging body of urban OS literature is so broad, the scholars' attention was divided between various topics. Thus, the OS-urban oriented library includes researches that deal with a large variety of issues such as (1) strategic planning and strategic decision making within the public administration16 (2) the current development and the future organisational implications of Smart Cities17 (3) the implication that the 'shared-economy', mostly conceptualized through the understanding of companies such as Uber and Airbnb, has on the urban-fabric18 (4) the relations between different artistic forms and the organisation of the city19(5) the relations between gender and sexuality and the spatial manufacturing of the city20 (6) the studies of architecture-oriented practices as managerial forms21 (7) the climate and the ways in which cities are coping with or planning towards the coming crisis22 (8) the organisation of local communities inside and outside cities23 (9) the organisation of big urban events24 (10) the organisational and economic implication of different property regimes25 (11) how urban planning is managed and organised26 and (12) the social management and organisation of urban and non-urban space27. The fact that Management and Organisation Studies are taking an important part in the contemporary political and academic urban debate, as is evident, for example, through their account of currently popular topics such as the heating crisis and the shared economy (Fleming, 2017; Wissman-weber & Levy, 2018), demonstrates that OS are located at the forefront of urban related studies. OS’s ubiquity also demonstrates that organisational problems cannot, any longer, be ignored, and that the specific perspective that OS brings to the table, when the questions of management and organisation are raised,

16 See: Agranoff and McGuire, 2003; Vaara, Sorsa and Pälli, 2010; Boersma and Clegg, 2012; Johnston and Clegg, 2012; Hydle, 2015; Brandtner et al., 2017. 17 See: Pinsonneault and Kraemer, 2002; Hampton and Gupta, 2008; Garrett, Spreitzer and Bacevice, 2017; White Zuzul, 2018. 18 See: Imas and Weston, 2012; Fleming, 2017; Garrett, Spreitzer and Bacevice, 2017. 19 See: De Cock, 2010; Godart, 2014; Beyes, 2015; Case and Gaggiotti, 2016; Michels and Steyaert, 2017. 20 See: Ward and Winstanley, 2004; Wasserman and Frenkel, 2015. 21 See: Kornberger and Clegg, 2004; Kornberger, Kreiner and Clegg, 2011; Boutinot et al., 2017; Comi and Whyte, 2017. 22 See: Whitehead, 2013; Wissman-weber and Levy, 2018. 23 See: Marquis, Davis and Glynn, 2013; Fernández, 2016; Heinze, Soderstrom and Heinze, 2016; Venkataraman et al., 2016; Garrett, Spreitzer and Bacevice, 2017; Weeks, Ailon and Brannen, 2017; Cruz, Beck and Wezel, 2018; Do, C. B. Lyle and J. Walsh, 2018. 24 See: Pipan and Porsander, 1999; Pitsis et al., 2003; Simpson, Cunha and Clegg, 2015. 25 See: Weber, 2016; Bencherki and Bourgoin, 2017. 26 See: Czarniawska, 2012; Kornberger, 2012; Thanem, 2012. 27 See: Watkins, 2005; Dale, 2005; Clegg and Kornberger, 2006; Taylor and Spicer, 2007; Marrewijk and Yanow, 2010; Beyes and Steyaert, 2012; Costas, 2013; Munro and Jordan, 2013; O’Doherty, 2013; O’Doherty et al., 2013; Wasserman and Frenkel, 2015; Hydle, 2015.

Chapter 1: Organisation Studies and The City – The Is and The Ought

is more important in understanding how urbanity functions, then it ever was. However, as I will demonstrate shortly, it is important to notice that the vast majority of these urban related studies do not see the city as an organisation waiting to be systematically mapped, but, on the contrary, adopt the ready-made notion of how the urban is organised, in order to research secondary phenomena within the established boundaries and stabilized logic of what they understand to be the city. For example, when researching urban strategy Vaara et al. (Vaara, Sorsa, & Pälli, 2010) clearly state that the focus of their interest is not the city but "the role of texts in strategy processes in organisational and social struggles" (Ibid; 686) for which the city serves as the already familiar terrain and background. Indeed, there are good reasons why the city is located in the centre of the research: "While strategic plans may have powerful effects in all organisations, the public sector provides a particularly interesting setting for our analysis. This is because of the politically and ideologically charged nature of planning and reforms in state and municipal organisations… [that tends] to either replace bureaucratic values and practices with post-bureaucratic ones… or strengthen the role of managerialism… which has led to the overall promotion of neo-liberal ideology in public service." (Ibid) However, the above quote unmasks an underlying assumption that the basic organisation of the city and of the processes of which it is part, were already satisfactorily charted in existing literature. As we will shortly see, reviewing all other studies in our OS urban-related publications' list, it is evident that the large majority of the papers concentrate on organisational phenomena located within cities while relying on (some) already established notion of the city's organisational reality. The field dedicated to smart cities mostly focuses on such questions as "how the internet may influence the structure of community?" (Hampton and Gupta, 2008; 831), "how [a] sense of community is constructed by independent workers in coworking spaces?" (Garrett, Spreitzer and Bacevice, 2017; 822) and the exploration of " the role IT plays in organisational downsizing" (Pinsonneault & Kraemer, 2002). While in the study of climate one finds such queries as "how do organisations comprehend and make sense of the changes and risks associated with the Anthropocene?" (Wissman-weber and Levy, 2018; 493) and "which actors and discursive frames are engaged in the planning and decision-making processes?" (Ibid), the study of big urban events is also based on an already familiar conceptualization of the city while trying to cope with questions related to the study of project management, such as "how the future- perfect developed in the life of one large, complex project whose uniqueness meant that it was unable to be strategically planned in advance" (Pitsis et al., 2003; 574). Those researching urban (and non- urban) space deal with such issues as "the meanings of built spaces and the extent to which these

Chapter 1: Organisation Studies and The City – The Is and The Ought

meanings are central to an organisation’s identity" (Marrewijk and Yanow, 2010; 2) and "spatial elements that communicate the organisation’s brands and goals" (Ibid) while the study of gender asks questions such as "how storytelling can be used as a research method to establish how sexual identity can be discursively constituted?" (Ward and Winstanley, 2004; 220). Similar to the papers that are mentioned above, most other urban-oriented OS papers share this basic structure in which the city serves as an unproblematized context, or, rather, a stage, for many other phenomena that are taking place upon it. This being the case, the contemporary OS literature teaches us many new things with regards to organisational phenomena taking place within cities, while neglecting the actual organisation and management of the cities themselves. To put it differently – we are not learning how cities are organised, but only how they participate in the organisation of other things. The fact that such a significant body of OS literature comes pre-packaged with an underlying notion of how the urban field is organised, while not giving due attention to that 'stage' as it stands on its own means (Gore, Hammond, Bailey, Checkland, & Bailey, 2018) and not trying to illuminate questions such as: is it correct to consider the city as a singular, unified, well-defined and meaningful field? What kind of field is the city? and how is the urban organised? means that the answers to these questions, neglected by the OS-urban literature, were left to the mercy of a few other disciplines.

1.3. The Prevalent OS Urban Narratives: The Economic, The Institutional, and The Critical

What are the difficulties that emerge from the existing literature?

Relying on external approaches to provide explanations with regards to how the city is organised, our review of the urban OS literature discovered that three central narratives are used by most urban OS scholars as background knowledge of urban-organisation. The first narrative is based on neoclassical economic reasoning (Hesterly & Barney, 1999). This narrative absorbs most economics' theoretical assumptions into the city so as to portray it as a business-like entity. Equilibrium, for example, which is an important economic notion, is used to explain the fluctuations in the real-estate market and, also, more broadly and generally, the fluctuations in the city's image as they are reflected through its constant and eternal competition with other cities. Richard Florida is one of the most prominent and influential scholars to write about the city from this theoretical perspective. In The Rise Of The Creative Classes (Florida, 2002) Florida presented his theory, according to which those that desire a city to flourish must make all possible efforts in order to attract a new kind of

Chapter 1: Organisation Studies and The City – The Is and The Ought

resource - the 'creative classes', which is the social groups with the highest 'human capital' (Florida, 2002). Academic works that concentrate on new ways to organize the city according to Florida's analysis flourished in the last few years (Evans, 2009; Pearson & Pearson, 2017; Pratt, 2008; Thiel, 2017), while his analysis became so widely accepted and popular that it transformed the management processes of cities all around the world to such a degree that it was possible to associate its performative influence with the current urban crisis (Florida, 2017; Markusen, 2006). Michal Porter is another extremely influential scholar who based his analysis of the city on an assumption of an underlying economic reality (Porter, 1990). His theory, according to which each urban area's best organisational strategy is to focus on its competitive advantages and develop, or, rather, support, clusters of related business and industries, has gained a lot of ground within the organisational literature, especially in strategic management (Harfield & Hamilton, 1997)28. The second narrative, often seen as one of the most important streams of thought within OS (Alvesson & Spicer, 2018) is the neo-institutional approach to organisations. Based on a shift from the rational theory of choice towards a much more culturally sensible view (Czarniawska, 2008; 771), institutional theory "challenge[s] the hegemony of economic explanations of the social world by questioning the prevailing assumption that efficient production is both a necessary and proper organisational objective" (Suddaby, 2015; 93). Bringing to the front such issues as the relations of institutions with their environment, mutual relational influences of actors inside institutions, behavioural characteristics that cannot be understood by the self- interest of those who act in and around institutions, processes of isomorphism and legitimacy formation, and cognitive and cultural explanations to the dynamics found within and across organisations, this theoretical progression, that is trying to “bring society back into management and organisation studies” (Friedland and Alford, 1991; 241), has not skipped the urban landscape According to Lowndes (Lowndes, 2001) five different perspectives of the city as an institution can be traced in the neo-institutional literature: (1) the institutionalisation of urban governance (Wilson, 1998, for example) (2) the study of urban markets and inner

28 It is important to notice that the following urban-narratives – the institutional and the critical, arise out of a disagreement with the economic narrative regarding the role that institutions, culture, and politics vis- à-vis the role that rational economic-actors play in the organisation of the urban. While we agree with these critiques, we will shortly see that we also take issue with the institutional and the critical narratives. Before moving forward, however, it is important to notice that during the ethnographic stage of this research we were constantly exposed to a reality that conflicts with the image that was given to the city by the economic narrative. We will report and reflect on these observations later on, but for now, we just want to illuminate the fact that our criticism of the economic narrative is based upon the institutional and critical criticism as well as on our novel observations from the fieldwork.

Chapter 1: Organisation Studies and The City – The Is and The Ought

networks operating within the "increasingly hollow shell of the public sector" (Lowndes, 2001; 1961) (3) the institutionalisation of 'Weak Ties', i.e., the soft, sometime hidden, relationships between the different actors and institutions who take part in the urban-management field (see for example, Clarke, 1995) (4) the analysis of change (and continuity) within the constantly transforming urban management (see for example, Lownpes, 1999) and (5) local governments' democratization processes (see for example, Stoker, 2004). However, despite the richness of research at hand, it will shortly be quite evident that the conceptualization of the city as an institution, in contrast to its conceptualization as an economical unit, is vague and unclear. This confusion is reflected in the fact that neo- institutional literature is full of "tautological claims, a sense of pseudo-progress and frequent repetition of earlier insights" (Alvesson and Spicer, 2018; 7), or, to push the argument forward, the neo- institutional literature treats the fundamental characteristic of the field, i.e. the city, as a mere social construct. As will be reported in later chapters, this reification of specific phenomena that allows one to explain all contingent bifurcations of the happenings through the classical identification of patterns such as isomorphism, were in complete contrast with our ethnographic findings that were blind to the crude separation of the social from its environment. It is evident that the creation of sociological generalizations, according to which there is one clear social origin that explains all different findings traced empirically in the field, is very different from the inherently contingent 'reality' that we become aware of by our ANT-oriented ethnographical means29. However, the third narrative, upon which a broad understanding of the city is established, is based on another kind of criticism. The basic claim that serves as the hub of the criticism of institutional theory, made by those influenced by Critical Management Studies, focuses its criticism on the argument that institutional analysis neglects the political perspective of the city as it is manifested through such terms as "exploitation, ideology, class, worker, and hegemony [that] disappear from use in institutional studies (replaced by consensus, empowerment, networks, and compliance)" (Hirsch and Lounsbury, 2015; 96). Thus, in sharp contrast to the non-political shade of the neo- institutional theory, the critical approach to the city is based on:

"systematically investigating the relationship between capitalism and the urbanization process; understanding how that urbanization shapes and determines socio-spatial inequalities and politico- institutional arrangements; exposing the naturalization of inequalities and injustice that result from

29 Chapter three of this dissertation is dedicated for the exploration of our ANT/Latourian oriented ethnographic methodology.

Chapter 1: Organisation Studies and The City – The Is and The Ought

capitalist urbanization, deciphering the crisis tendencies, contradictions and lines of conflict that exist within contemporary cities; and finally the prospects for socially progressive and sustainable alternatives to contemporary capitalist urbanism" (Marcuse et al., 2014; 1905)

Being associated with 'neo-Marxist' writers such as Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Manuel Castells and Peter Marcuse (Brenner, 2009) and with a wide range of works analysing the city as a 'political arena' in which a constant battle between the different social classes is taking place (see: Beyes and Steyaert, 2012; Kornberger, 2012; Giovannoni and Quattrone, 2017; Nash, 2018) the critical approach to the city is certainly more robust and attentive to the 'political reality' of urban life then the institutional theory. However, despite its allure, the critical approach makes similar assumptions, with regards to the pre-existence of hidden social forces responsible for the organisation of the city, as do the institutional and the economic approaches. Thus, it does not provide us with an urban image which is attentive to the empirics, but, on the contrary, the political narrative is used as a pre-existing template to make sense of the city without actually exploring it. This commentary about the critical narrative captures our overall criticism of the three narratives at the background of most OS-urban literature – it is the assumption that it is at all possible to account for urban reality when pre-assuming the nature of the urban. We will return to this point later in this section. Claiming that "critique has run out of steam" (Latour, 2004) Latour's analysis of critical theory can help us frame the difficulties that this third narrative introduces as well as pave a path towards the creation of new urban images. Pointing at the fact that the critical approach, still a prominent tool in the social scholar's toolbox, which helped academics "emancipate the public from prematurely naturalized objectified facts" (Ibid, p. 227) has "outlived [its] usefulness and deteriorated to the point of now feeding the most gullible sort of critique" (Ibid; 229-30), Latour is trying to analyse what has happened to critical analysis and how it transformed from being an intellectual resource, used to undermine the power of the established knowledge, into the exact opposite – an anti-intellectual weapon used by the powerful in order to undermine the possibility of meaningfully criticizing reality. Latour's criticism is interestingly applicable to the critical underpinning of the 2011 Israeli social-protest, in addition to many comparable urban-oriented disputes sometimes referred to as the Occupy Movement (Gamson & Sifry, 2013). Demanding that the city will be handed back to its 'real' residents while protesting against the soaring real-estate prices that were pushing the non-rich to the outskirts, expanding the social gaps and

Chapter 1: Organisation Studies and The City – The Is and The Ought

destroying the urban fabric, the critical call that emerged prior to the protest, found very firm ground to land on. When the demonstration started, it was a matter of days until the urban-economic narrative was 'defeated' in the battle of public opinion. It seemed that the economic explanations with regards to the real-estate market, its 'natural' tendencies and the claim that it is only reflecting the supply-and-demand reality, stopped working. As a young and militant student, I remember vividly how this transformation took place in front of my eyes (and inside my head) in just a few days. It was a matter of spatial politics, as the demonstrators occupied the city's main boulevard creating their own tent-city, a matter of very assertive struggle as large demonstrations in which slogans such as: 'the market is free but we are not' were capturing (physically) the public attention, and a matter of historical opportunity as the backlash from the 2008 global financial crisis was used in order to undermine the dominant logic, with the provisional sovereignty over the occupied tent zone thus demonstrating the possibility of another reality. As these first moments were successful in transforming the public image of the city towards a much more social, politically-oriented, attitude, it was not long until the demonstrations were terminated (violently in some cases) and the economic logic has not only regained its dominant position but also took charge of the proposed solutions to the unsolved problems that were not willing to disappear (Florida, 2017). Spending time in and around the Tel-Aviv council, while conducting my ethnography, I was constantly aware of how the economic narrative is regaining the front seat. Later on, I will present some of these episodes to the readers as significant parts of the following chapters are dedicated to ethnographic descriptions of how, in our current times, most problems are framed along the lines of the economic narrative and most solutions are based on the 'natural' forces of the market. At the moment, however, my wish is only to point at the weakness of the critical approach to the city and generate this position in order to justify the necessity of our inquiry. Briefly returning to Latour's analysis of critical reasoning, I want to utilize his argument to our own purposes. Claiming that the 'solution' to the crisis of critical thinking is to stop concentrating on 'matter of facts', i.e. solid and well-established mute objects used as explanatory gateway for the research of other things, and move towards the research of

Chapter 1: Organisation Studies and The City – The Is and The Ought

'matter of concern', i.e. the way in which things gather, or rather, assemble30, while accepting Latour's argument that:

"The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naive believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly between anti fetishism and positivism like the drunk iconoclast drawn by Goya, but the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution" (Latour, 2004, p. 246)

I want to argue that the failure of the critical urban narrative to offer an alternative to the economic narrative is related to the exact same things. The critical treatment of urbanity (Brenner, 2009; McFarlane, 2011), which is based on social and political characteristics, 'ran out of steam' because it was based on matter of facts that were quickly absorbed and digested into the dominant narrative. For example, the notion of Gentrification that was used as a critical notion in order to point at the social, man-made results of capitalist greed (Clerval & Fleury, 2013) could be easily interpreted as a natural economic phenomenon (Florida, 2017) to which the stamp of it being 'good' or 'bad' no longer applies. To put it in other words, gentrification has become a cliché in the hands of the critical theorists (and critical activist) as over and over it was used as a notion that explains reality instead of being treated as an orbit that assembles many different things around it31. To coherently present the three urban narratives we progressed from one narrative to another by describing the criticism out of which each new narrative developed. Assuming that the economic narrative is the most dominant narrative to explain the city within OS, we presented the criticism of the institutional and critical narratives according to which fundamental economic notions such as the Rational Theory of Choice, are simply incorrect as they disregard the role that institutions, culture, and politics play in the organisation of the urban. Our introduction of the critical narrative was based upon similar type of criticism, but, this time, with relation to the neglection of politics found in the

30 A central term in ANT/Laturian scholarship, which can be roughly explained as a band of ‘things’ of differing or similar types bound in association with one another. In our case, gentrification, as an overarching term - can be said to consist of such various ‘components’ as real-estate value, social migration, capital transformation, market forces, capital movement, and so forth. As noted in the previous footnote, chapter three of this dissertation is dedicated to the exploration of our methodological foundations. For our current purpose, which is to introduce the reader into the research problem and the research agenda, we will do with the following example of how 'Gentrification', as a matter-of-fact, lost its explanatory powers. 31 See chapter nine for a long discussion about gentrification.

Chapter 1: Organisation Studies and The City – The Is and The Ought

institutional narrative. Our criticism of the critical narrative, however, did not follow a similar path. We did not discuss the fallacies that we found in the critical narrative but rather, using Latour (Latour, 2004), we focused on the fact that the dependency on some hidden pre-configured social domain to explain urban reality is itself the problem. It is important to emphasize the fact that this problem is not only related to the critical narrative, it applies just as much to the economic and institutional. Morgan's analysis of organisational images is useful here (Morgan, 2006). Shedding light on the fact that it is very common to understand organisations metaphorically32, Morgan explains that, "the use of metaphors implies a way of thinking and a way of seeing that pervade how we understand our world generally" (Ibid; 4). While useful, we must remember that "metaphors always produce one sided insight… [as] in highlighting certain interpretations it tends to force others into a background role" (Ibid). In addition, we should acknowledge the fact that "metaphors always create distortions… [as they] use evocative images to create what may be described as 'constructive falsehood', which, if taken literally, or to an extreme, become absurd" (Ibid). To follow Morgan, it is not only the specific fallacies that we found in each of the narratives that are important for us, but rather, the hub of our criticism is of the general attempt to rely upon an image of the city, be it the economic, the institutional or the critical image, to explain its organisation. This is not to say that each one of the three narratives cannot be used as a tool that can help us shed light on some specific matter. This might well be. However, the large majority of the OS-urban literature does not use the three narratives as tools but rather as positivistic explanations of how the urban is organised that completely adopt the view of one of the three urban narratives. Adopting Morgan's criticism, we reject the idea that we can rely on any of the narratives to understand urban-organisation and therefore we understand that we must adopt a different strategy. That being said, we must remember that, as been previously argued against ANT- oriented works by no other than Latour himself (Latour, 1999) the same criticism can be levelled against our account and therefore, when we aim to develop a new narrative, we must remember that our aim is not to simply find a better representation that will capture the 'real' image of the city more successfully. In other words, our aim will be to find a way to portray urban-organisation in a non-representational way. The following chapters, in which we discuss the works of a few OS scholars who made the first steps towards this direction and introduce our ANT-oriented methodology will elaborate more on that.

32 We understand Morgan's metaphors, or images, to be adequately similar to what we call narratives for our purpose.

Chapter 1: Organisation Studies and The City – The Is and The Ought

We shall conclude by stating that the growing importance of the city within OS, demonstrated above, pushes us to take a few steps forward, imitate similar developments that took place in other urban-oriented disciplines that already started to adopt non- representational approaches to the study of the city (Blok & Farías, 2016; Faraias & Bender, 2010), together with some similar attempts that adopted novel ethnographic approaches into the OS literature (D. P. O’Doherty, 2017), and assemble a new methodology for the city-as-an-organisation.

1.4. The First Few Steps Towards a New OS-Urban Narrative

How are we to overcome the difficulties of the three urban narratives? In this chapter we examined the radical transformations that the city has underwent in the past few decades through the prism of the 2011 social protest in Tel-Aviv. These changes include the housing crisis, the expanding socio-economic gaps, the rise of the gig-economy, and global warming. We also learned how the organisational studies of these transformation can benefit both our understanding of the city and of organisations, and introduced the contemporary OS literature that deals with these transformations. We saw that most OS-urban literature is based upon one of three urban narratives and does not in fact generate novel organisational studies about the actual organisation of the city. We also came to see that the problems that arose out of the three urban narratives, mainly the fact that they use a pre-existing, external factors to explain urban organisation thus pre- assuming the empirical reality, necessitate the creation of a new account with which to approach and interpret the management and organisation of the city. The two following chapters prepare the ground for the development of our novel urban investigation. In the next chapter we will review some OS-urban accounts that were made by notable writers such as Czarniawska and Kornberger, so as to review what scholars with similar inspirations to us did and adopt their successes (and shortcomings) into our investigation. In the third chapter we will explore ANT upon which the methodology of our research is founded. Out of these two upcoming chapters will emerge the central challenge that we face which is to portray new images of the city that will allow for (or understand the) participation of 'non-humans' in our constructed reality (Latour, 2002) and the ways in which things 'stabilize' (and destabilize) into hybrids (Latour, 1991). By which I mean, when trying to make sense of the complex reality of contemporary urbanity we will learn that one must consider the active role that things such as algorithms, buildings, tools, or real-estate values i.e. non-human actors, play in the quotidian

Chapter 1: Organisation Studies and The City – The Is and The Ought

organisation of city life, as they continually form concrete manifestations of action and reaction blind to common separations such as the micro/macro, political/professional or economic/social understanding of the city. Following the formation of the theoretical and methodological foundations of our investigation, chapter four will explain how we came to trail real-estate values as they participate in the organisation of the city and how this follow-up of real-estate values can help us produce novel urban images that allow for the development of new ways of making sense, and thereby of coping with, the 'new urban-crisis'. To summarize in brief the chapter's argument, the follow-up of real-estate values is based upon our empirical findings according to which (1) the practices of real-estate valuation are a form of politics (by other means) that, when followed ethnographically, (2) open a path that leads management and organisation studies to a more robust account of urban organisation, which can better handle the challenges brought about by the aforementioned crisis. But first, before we dig into the empirical findings, we must acknowledge the fact that, despite not being fully aligned with the criticism that we raised in the previous sections, organisation studies have made some headway into these problems. These are nevertheless outliers in the OS landscape and unfortunately do not represent the mainstream line of research. Czarniawska’s development of Action-Nets(Czarniawska, 2000a, 2002) and the work of Clegg and Kornberger, who write about urban strategy and urban planning from a pragmatist point of view (Kornberger & Clegg, 2011, 2004; Kornberger, Kreiner, & Clegg, 2011), are the most prominent examples of OS literature that deals with the city in ways that corresponds with our own urban investigation. The next chapter will be dedicated to a detailed review of the above-mentioned OS scholars. Aiming to develop a toolkit that will serve as the basis of the actual empirical investigation from chapter four onwards, we should now move to the literature review in our next chapter and then to chapter three that will revolve around a discussion of our ANT-oriented ethnographic methodology.

Chapter 2: A New Urban Narrative: The Story So Far - From Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy

2.0. Overview

After laying the foundations for our upcoming urban investigation, in which we demonstrated the lack and need of a novel urban organisational account, in the current chapter we aim to explore three urban-organizational theorists - Czarniawska, Clegg and Kornberger (Czarniawska, 2000b, 2002; Kornberger, 2012; Kornberger & Clegg, 2011), who did make some headway in the 'right' direction, which is to say that, unlike most other OS-urban scholars, their investigations are not based on any one of the three narratives but rather are studies of urban organization in and of itself, and not of organisations which merely take place within the city. By reviewing the work of these three important OS thinkers, we can gain significant insights into how to address our own, similar, research with relation to such matters as how to approach the city methodologically, which questions to raise while conducting our empirical research, how to avoid the 'traps' that Czarniawska, Clegg and Kornberger fell into, and so forth. In addition, we can also learn from the specific findings of these urban investigations, for example Clegg and Kornberger's map of the contemporary urban management 'regime', which they call Strategy (Kornberger & Clegg, 2011), is very useful when one wants to understand the internal logic of the city council, and Czarniawska's insights on how cities transform from one state to another - from Soviet to post-Soviet in her examples (Czarniawska, 2000a) can help us when we come to view the contemporary urban shifts. In a sense, this chapter is not only a literature review of the few OS scholars who walked in a similar route to our intended pathway, it is also an introduction that can help us illustrate how one should (and should not) approach the city if she wants to study its organization. The chapter is structured as follows: part one and two will review Czarniawska, who writes about the city from the perspective of Action-Nets (part one), and Kornberger and Clegg, who write about the city from a pragmatist point of view (part two). In part three we will review Czarniawska and Kornberger and Clegg's achievements - mainly Czarniawska's innovative methodology that allows her to view the city from the point of view of actions (the most fundamental entities in her approach), and Kornberger and Clegg's fascinating exploration of urban Strategy, which is the prevalent contemporary

Chapter 2: A New Urban Narrative: The Story So Far - From Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy urban governmental technique - and shortcomings – mainly the fact that both accounts are still dependent upon pre-existing assumptions such as the assumption that the city is a coherent and united whole that pre-exists their analysis - so as to refine our research purpose. Gaining profound knowledge from Czarniawska, and Clegg and Kornberger's urban-organizational accounts, as described above, our research purpose - to develop a non-representational urban account – not only did not change but, rather, in light of Czarniawska, Clegg and Kornberger's 'failures' it became even more evident that in order to study urban organization we have no other way forward but to develop a new non- representational urban account. Therefore, part four will explore a strategy that will allow us to pursue our research purpose in the most fruitful way. Knox points at Latour's account of Paris as a possible gateway from which to study urban-organization (Knox, 2010) which will come in handy in this section as it teaches us how to change the direction of our urban- organizational inquiry and, instead of using some pre-established concept of the social as the base of our inquiry, learn how to establish our investigation, first and foremost, on the empirical reality. This last section will lead us directly towards our Actor-Network Theory oriented methodology - a framework which allows one to place the empirical at the centre of investigation, instead of the theory taking the epistemological precedence.

2.1. Barbara Czarniawska, Action-Nets and the Organization of the City

Czarniawska, one of the few OS-scholars in recent decades to dedicate most of her academic career to the studies of management and organization of cities (see, for example, Czarniawska, 1997, 2000a, 2000b, 2002, 2004, 2008a, 2008b, 2010, 2012a, 2012b), produces a different image of the city when compared to the three urban narratives (the economic, the institutional and the critical). In this section we will see how she does this. Being an exceptional figure within OS, by focusing on the actual organisation of the city, it comes as no surprise that Czarniawska had to carefully explain her position as an urban-organizational scholar and frame her research agenda in contrast to all other urban-academic fields: “For the Chicago sociologists, the city was its inhabitants; for economists, the city is an arena of economic activity; for political scientists, the city is its governance; for urban planners and architects, the city is a stage to be built and rebuilt. Often compering cities to theatres, urban studies set great visionaries and rulers on the stage, citizens and tourists in the audience. But who pulls the ropes when the curtain

Chapter 2: A New Urban Narrative: The Story So Far - From Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy

rises? […] [My] research program, focusing as it did on big city management, was intended to fill [this] gap in urban studies by aspect of city life” (Czarniawska, 2002; 2,5) Czarniawska's involvement with urban-management is seemingly very different from our own discussion about urban-organization. However, as she concentrates on the general management of the city and not on the personal acts of individual-managers (Czarniawska, 2002, p. 3), while explaining that "management consists of many collective and interconnected actions" (Ibid), it seems that our understanding of organization - as a verb instead of a noun - is not essentially different from Czarniawska's understanding of management. Therefore, we can easily equate Czarniawska's attempt to generate a novel explanation of urban-management with our own aspirations to generate a novel account that will explain urban-organization. Czarniawska's urban-analysis revolves around her examination of prevalent management practices, mainly the ones which she categorised as muddling through, reframing, and anchoring. The first term, muddling through denotes the act of coping with day to day problems found all around the organization. According to Czarniawska, this managerial practice is the most central among the three managerial elements, as it involves almost everything that happens nearly everywhere (Czarniawska, 2000a, p. 8). The reframing process, as we will shortly see, is based on the common, cross-organizational and unbounded, constant efforts to modify or manipulate, the ways in which the city's residents interpret reality to allow for successful action (Czarniawska, 2000b, p. 7). Anchoring relates to the creation of consent and cooperation with regards to specific issues located within the bounds of a certain framing of reality. These three elements of modern management take place in the city in much the same way as in any other type of organization. The framing process can serve to illustrate this point. As frames, according to Czarniawska, are arbitrary, ever-changing, 'ever-fleeting' pictures of reality portrayed (and re-portrayed) by the different actors participating in it, they are the topic of constant debates and competitions between the different groups and authorities within the city. Managing the city, according to Czarniawska is dependent on being able to change frames, to assert the dominance of new ways of interpreting reality and to overcome the predominance of the old ones. One example of how Czarniawska utilizes the concept of framing is in the media's framing of the city. In her book A Tale of Three Cities (Czarniawska, 2002) Czarniawska makes a comparison between Warsaw, Rome and Stockholm, regarding the effects of the media on several issues. One of these issues is public transportation. Czarniawska demonstrates how the local media has considerable influence over the

Chapter 2: A New Urban Narrative: The Story So Far - From Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy framing of public transportation, its state and role in the city, and thus on the organization of the urban transportation networks. Being consumed by most of the actors, from residents to the mayor, the media's perspectives towards questions like 'what is important?', 'what is the problem?', 'what should be fixed?', 'what is a great scandal?' and 'what is the common vision for the city's future?' have a vital role in the organization of the city as it takes part in the “production of facts” (Ibid; 66) that are, according to Czarniawska, “utterances expressing collective experience in a manner that does not produce too many protestations” (Ibid). Another example of the way Czarniawska uses frames in her analysis is what she terms 'frames of reference'. In the case of the framing of city organisation, these include “different constellations of modal cities, but also specific, local stories of developments” (Ibid; 17), they are also supposed to “set the city apart – from all the other cities, and from specific cities” (Ibid). In her ethnographic work at Warsaw, Rome, and Stockholm, Czarniawska identified each cities' most important frames of reference - meaning the cities it wants to copy and the ones it wishes to set itself apart from - and researched the way each frame of reference was used as part of urban management. The driving forces behind the rapid creation of Warsaw's metro, for example, were related to the framing of Warsaw as an “European capital” and the 'duties' that come with this position. As the example of reframing sufficiently introduces Czarniawska's analysis of urban management, we shall leave it to the reader to further explore her utilization of muddling-through and anchoring, if she is so-inclined. Czarniawska's operationalization of the three prevalent management techniques - muddling-through, reframing, and anchoring, serve to introduce the most fundamental concept in Czarniawska's approach which she calls Action-Nets, which are treated by her as the basic ontological unit of organizations. Unlike most organizational approaches, including the economic, institutional and critical narratives, studying organizations via the lens of Action-Nets means that we are not studying the place in which organizations are physically located, the (human and non-human) actors who participate in the field, or the issues and events that are often considered to be central to it. It is rather the studies of "the ways in which certain actions33 [are] connected to one another" (Czarniawska, 2004b, p. 782) which allows us to "unveil a comprehensive picture of how organizations are formed, stabilized, dissolved or relocated" (Czarniawska, 2004b, p. 783). Czarniawska illustrates an action-net by the example of the small market producer. Instead of giving epistemological precedence to the actors (the shopkeeper, the supplier, customers, building, and transport lorry), she instructs us to focus

33 Actions, according to Czarniawska should be seen as: "movement or an event, to which an intention can be attributed by relating the event to the social order in which it takes place" (Czarniawska, 2004b, p. 783).

Chapter 2: A New Urban Narrative: The Story So Far - From Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy on the “organizing actions, such as purchasing, marketing, financing, investing and recruiting” (Czarniawska, 2000; 9). She explains her example by stressing that “it is the actions rather than the actors that are connected” and that “obviously, the actors influence the shape and kind of action preformed but, for many generations of merchants and producers in the same institutional order, production required marketing and selling” (Ibid) As practical research tools, the use of Action-Nets to study management is based upon their ability to answer two questions: "What is being done?" and "How does this connect to other things that are being done in the same context?" (Czarniawska, 2004b, p. 784). Researching the organizational changes that took place in Warsaw after the collapse of the Soviet Union (Czarniawska, 2000a), Czarniawska demonstrates how to meaningfully answer these two questions in a way that will allow one to portray a new image of the city that does not follow the regular separated domains of bounded institutions and divided political authorities. Studying Warsaw's water system, Czarniawska followed the relevant action-net that leads the city's water "from the Vistula to the houses and then from the houses to the Vistula" (Czarniawska, 2000b, p. 51). Starting from the Vistula river intake, Czarniawska describes the actions that involved the pumping of the water out of the river bottom:

"The sand and water collected by the dredger in the process were sent to the shore by 'refillers', big pipes laid on floaters making a long snake that spit the grit out near the bank, where it was strained and then loaded on the trucks that delivered it to the buyers interested in river grit" (Ibid, 52)

First pumped, and later filtered34, the water had to be transferred to the city via pipes. A seemingly simple task. However, things get complicated due to the poor state of post- Soviet infrastructure: "They were cast iron with cup-shaped connecting joints, which meant that one end opened out to accommodate the thinner end of the other pipe. This joint was riveted, then wrapped up with ligature; then lead was poured over the whole. Even if the pipes were very good; encrustation formed inside. No one really knew how to remove it, for the only method known was to pump water at very high pressure so that it would tear the encrustation away. However, how does one keep up high pressure in a water pipe 7 km long?" (Ibid, 53)

34 We will not describe all the actions that took place in the Warsaw's water system action-net, as its summery comes only to illustrate how an action-net is being used to describe urban-organization in a novel way.

Chapter 2: A New Urban Narrative: The Story So Far - From Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy

By following the water from the river to the city, we come across one of the biggest problems that the water company had to deal with – its ability to collect payments from its end-users to finance its operations: "Collecting the payments, especially from big payers, was not easy in Poland of 1994. For Waterworks it was an essential question, because the utility was not a city budgetary plant (like Metro) but an autonomous company that had to earn most of its keep from its own revenues. Typical debtors were neighbouring municipalities, which depended on the water and sewage, and treatment plants on Waterworks, and did not have the money to pay their dues, let alone to build their own waterworks. The first issue was then to diagnose the predicament correctly. Were they able to pay, and were they only temporizing with payment? Was it impossible for them to pay, as was the case with the state enterprise described in the previous chapter? The diagnosis was not simple, for delaying the payments was the most common financial strategy of all the actors in the present market, including Waterworks and city itself." (Ibid, 63) Finally, reporting on the debt collection in great length, Czarniawska kept following the Warsaw's water system action-net all the way to the actions that surrounded the water meters at the entrance of each home: "The Water Meter Department had been instructed to check the water meter reading and had done so without taking into consideration the fact that the readings were from two water meters. The problem seemed to be that Waterworks had not been aware of any order to change this particular water meter. Apparently, Waterworks' employees had been on their way to the user's neighbors, when she asked them to change the water meter. When the user sent a letter protesting the resulting bill, the manager of the Sales Department inquired at the Water Meter Department why the meter had been changed. After a long time, the Water Meter Department answered that there had been a leak, but that it was not known whether the leak was situated ahead of or behind the meter. (If the leak is behind a meter, it records a larger quantity of water than was actually used. If it is in front of it, it records only the amount of water that was used)." (Ibid, 69-70) We could have easily gone into further details on Czarniawska's follow-up of the Warsaw's water system action-net, to which she dedicated a thirty-page chapter of detailed descriptions. However, it seems that the point can already be made: the production and delivery of drinking water involves numerous different actions, all related to various fields such as finance, law, technology, engineering, trade, politics, and so forth, that cut across all bounded urban-organization and actors. Thus, from the complex image of Warsaw which unfolded as we accompanied Czarniawska in her journey, we can conclude that by following Action-Nets, as opposed to studying bounded organizations or well-defined

Chapter 2: A New Urban Narrative: The Story So Far - From Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy actors, we can produce an elaborate image of urban-organizational reality which accommodates multiple concurrent Warsaws, thus allowing for the heterogeneity of the empirical accounts encountered - a view which is radically different from the image that any one of the three urban narratives (the economic, the institutional and the critical) would have produced. Our next important stop is Czarniawska's understanding of globalization, since it is one of the key areas in which she applies the use of action-nets to the study of urban organisation. She equates globalisation with "translocalization: the phenomenon consisting of local practices, ideas, customs and technologies that are spreading to localities behind their origins – spreading, in fact, all over the globe "(Czarniawska, 2002; 7). In order to explain this global action-net, i.e. globalisation, in which local phenomena are transferred all around the world, Czarniawska points at the act of translation, i.e. the dual action of “transformation and transference” (Ibid), as a key element. The act of translation, from one place to another, transforms as much as it transfers. From this destabilization of meaning arises a need for a stabilizing substance, a metaphorical dictionary, that will take one notion from its cultural home35, transfer it to a new one and fill out the common-sense, inferred, gaps between its origin and destination. These local dictionaries and the institutes responsible for their composition are central to Czarniawska's research, where she traces the different ways in which their frames are modified. By expanding the definition of globalization to encompass any instance of trans- national act of translation, in contrast to the ways in which we usually think about globalization - as a major historical event that defines, and is limited to, the modern world, Czarniawska declares that “globalization has been known and practiced for millennia, and that certain forms of it are repeated and recycled” (Ibid; 9). The historiographical conclusion of this shift is that two things are nigh-eternal: the creation of local social-habits and the global transformation of local ideas. Even though globalization should not be seen as a unique historical phenomenon, there is still a good reason to ask what is unique about modern globalization? According to Czarniawska, our time is unique in its incessantly increasing pace of globalisation. This fast movement of “ideas, forms, customs and practices” (Ibid 11) is responsible for two competing trends: homogenization and heterogenization. The homogenization trend can be associated with three mechanisms of isomorphism - coercion, mimesis and norms. The

35 In our case it is things such as budgeting ideas, self-managements notions, forms of privatizations, building instructions, roads regulations, strategic visions and many more.

Chapter 2: A New Urban Narrative: The Story So Far - From Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy processes of coercion come into being by the use of implicit or explicit force, while the mimetic process is rooted in plain imitation (and self-imitation) based on ideology or occupational proximity, and the normative process is connected to “professional organization [that] spread and propagate 'best practice', innovations and inventions” (Ibid; 11). The heterogenization trend, on the other hand, can be associated with the fact that, naturally, every translation is different and, thus, the more something is translated the more versions there are of it. The global absorption (successful or unsuccessful) and the global resistance to the homogenization and heterogenization trends have created, according to Czarniawska, the 'global–localization' or, in short, glocalization, presented by the unique combination of the international model and the local tradition, that serve as one of the most important action-nets composing the management of the contemporary city. After we analysed Czarniawska's attitudes towards the organizational processes of cities, it is time to connect the dots and look at her broader conception of the city. Reflecting on the role of individual actors and fixed institutional structures within Czarniawska's interpretation, it is not hard to guess that these two notions are not central to her urban vision. The city, indeed, is not a collection of humans who manage it in a rational way, but a collection of actions organized by a complex, ever-changing set of action-nets. The municipal council is only one among many institutions and is not solely responsible for the city's quotidian existence. We can also conclude that the modern city is not a global phenomenon but a 'glocal' one, by which we mean that it is a synthesis of global trends, fashions and ideas with local characteristics and traditions. The central question left is how can one study the multiplicities of this complicated urban form. Czarniawska's devoted campaign for the use of ethnography (Czarniawska, 2012c), or rather symmetrical ethnology (Czarniawska, 2017), as a research method within OS, as reflected in her numerous urban ethnographies and in the many books and journals' special issues that she edited, will be later utilized as part of the development of our methodology. However, before we discuss our methodology for the study of the city, we shall review a second novel attempt at establishing a new urban organization narrative – the works of Kornberger and Clegg.

2.2. Kornberger and Clegg - Strategy as a New Form of Urban Governance

Kornberger and Clegg's numerus publications deal with issues such as how strategic decisions are planned and performed within (urban and non-urban) organizations36, how

36 Carter, Clegg and Kornberger, 2010; Kornberger and Clegg, 2011; Boersma and Clegg, 2012.

Chapter 2: A New Urban Narrative: The Story So Far - From Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy things become valuable and how values transform things37, the relations between power and organization38, the study of organizational practices39 and many related topics that deal with the core questions of management and organization studies as can be witnessed from the eminent collection of OS handbooks, educating generations of students, that they co- edited40. Writing about the city, Clegg and Kornberger's concept of Strategy – which they identify as the prevalent urban-organizational regime of our times, distinguished by its unique brand of "connection of politics and science" (Kornberger, 2012, p. 85), is the focus of our next discussion due to the fact that it touches similar questions to us, vis-à-vis the ways in which the urban is organized, while offering an innovative account of these issues. In explaining the rise of Strategy as the dominant paradigm of urban organization in the 21st century, Clegg and Kornberger look back at fin-de-siècle urban thought. Late 19th and early 20th century Urban-Planning, the urban-organizational form that preceded Strategy, and the modernistic vision of order and rationality that accompanied it, emerged as a response to the rapid and chaotic industrialization of cities, which left places like Manchester not much more than "overcrowded city slums" which "represented a moral, biological and political hazard" (Kornberger, 2012; 87). In an attempt to overcome the unbearable conditions and the utter chaos that characterized the industrial city, Urban-Planning was an attempt to synthesize the newly- emerging scientific fields and practices borne out of perceived advances in the fields of economy, mathematics and technology so as to produce a modern body of knowledge capable of overturning the urban's disposition towards disorder. Diverse solutions were brought over the years: Ebenezer Howard's Georgist ideal of the "Garden city" (Howard, 1965), where the profits from rising real-estate values were to belong to the community that created the demand and not to the individual property owner, and funnelled for the betterment and proper organization of the city, Le Corbusier’s suggestion (Corbusier, 1987) to organize the disorderly city according to aesthetic geometrical principles which he hypothesized would lead to "more pleasing cities, which would automatically result in moral and social order" (Kornberger, 2012, p. 87), and Frank Lloyd Wright's view of technology as "the force

37 Kornberge, Kreiner and Clegg, 2011; Kornberger et al., 2015. 38 Clegg, 2009, 2014; Carter, Clegg and Kornberger, 2010. 39 Simpson, Clegg and Pina e Cunha, 2013; Simpson, Cunha and Clegg, 2015. 40 Clegg, Hady and Nord, 1996; Clegg, Kornberger and Pitsis, 2015.

Chapter 2: A New Urban Narrative: The Story So Far - From Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy that would solve the urban crisis by dissolving cities" (Ibid, 88). These serve as great examples of the urban scientific-colonialism that helped Urban-Planning become taken-for-granted science that dictates how cities, their planning and organization, should be managed. Moving forward in their historical description, Kornberger and Clegg describe how, while maintaining its prominence, "planning theory turned inward and began critically analysing its accomplishments" (Ibid), thus causing urban planners to get "contaminated with the messiness of realpolitik" (Ibid, 90) and lose the illusion of Urban-Planning as a pure science. The main reasons behind this trend were (1) the emerging critical discourse of the 1960s and 1970s which challenged the façade of urban-planning as an objective non-political science, along with (2) the growing involvement of new actors such as the engineer (now more indispensable than ever, with skyscrapers becoming commonplace, for instance) and the financier (with the increased prevalence of privately funded construction) in the management of cities, which pushed the urban-planner aside, and (3) political attacks that exposed the 'real' effects of planning as responsible for “keeping plans away from the community” (Ibid; 89) and attacks by economists claiming that planning is an ineffective, bureaucratic and 'anti-entrepreneurial' system (Ibid). As Kornberger and Clegg summarize: "aesthetically, cities were not made of grand buildings and boulevards; rather, movement trumped monumentality. From a sociological perspective, cities were populated by diverse communities that looked from the height of the planner’s pedestal like a disorganized anthill. In reality, social order was more refined than the planner’s conceptual apparatus. Economically, planning appeared to be the epitome of the anti-entrepreneurial bureaucracy. Finally, planners criticized their own profession for its unwillingness to understand the complex relations between power, rationality and planning. In the words of Hall, planning was criticizing itself to such an extent that it could not claim any unique professional expertise, hence destroying its own claim to legitimacy." (Ibid, 90) It was in light of these happenings, characterized by Kornberger and Clegg as "the divorce of politics and science" (Ibid), that a new framework of managing and organizing the city – Strategy - moved into the front seat. Strategy's distinguishing characteristic is that, in comparison to Urban-Planning, it is not based on one (scientific) 'operating logic' but stands on two complementary legs (Kornberger & Clegg, 2011; 138). The first leg, which is very similar to that of Urban-Planning, is its academic, professional discourse, and is well equipped with “tools, maps, models, charts and a whole array of other techniques offering a methodology for problem solving” (Kornberger, 2012; 89). The second leg is, however, theological in nature, promising people a clear understanding of the future and an omnipotent process capable of coping with every issue that might arise. This theological aspect is based on rituals,

Chapter 2: A New Urban Narrative: The Story So Far - From Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy ceremonies and routines that come in the form of “research methods, workshop techniques, consultation techniques, presentation formats, demonstration techniques, reports and other written documentation as well as evaluation methods and ongoing controlling techniques” (Ibid). Due to its second theological leg, Kornberger and Clegg argue that Strategy has a much greater ability then Urban-Planning to gather people and bring them to action. It raises issues that otherwise would not be brought to the public and uses its mechanisms (“public gathering, stakeholder meetings, focus groups, exhibitions, briefing and a whole array of other events” (Ibid; 98)) to reframe them and create a common vision of the future. Involving the wide urban population with of the whole strategic process, and not just a mere small group of professionals, Strategy has much more progressive, or rather democratic, image than Urban-Planning. However, one of the central points that Clegg and Kornberger make is that, in reality, the exact opposite takes place. Despite its seemingly progressive image, in practice, Strategy creates a conservative environment and mostly serves as a control mechanism, giving the city's residents a false notion of being involved in, and shaping, urban organization- which grants the public administration a great deal of legitimacy to act without having to fear opposition. Thus, despite its image, Strategy is in fact: “concerned with the politics of what is doable [and not in] the open space of what can be imagined. As such it will support the status quo rather than question it." (Ibid, 101) Trying to understand, in greater detail, how Kornberger and Clegg use the notion of Strategy in their own ethnographic research, we will review their study of the Sydney 2030 strategic plan (Kornberger & Clegg, 2011). This two-year investigation was designed to help the researchers understand (1) How does strategy 'behave' in practice? (2) What types of knowledge it is based upon? And (3) What are its effects? Twenty-four months of interviews, close participation in the actual processes of manufacturing the strategic plan, review of documents, and attendance of public events were the empirical basis of Korenberger and Clegg's research. One of Korenberger and Clegg's first observations was the city's performed disconnection from the bounded physical frame - separating itself from questions regarding 'local issues' (for example, the state of the roads and schooling) while connecting to a set of global ones. This disconnection was part of a greater shift, forced on the urban administration by the strategic plan, to disconnect from the city's "territorial, temporal and jurisdictional boundaries" (Ibid, 145), and "respond to a completely new set of issues, including global

Chapter 2: A New Urban Narrative: The Story So Far - From Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy warming, rising oil prices, global competition between cities, the global quest for creative class talent, culture as an asset that fuels economic growth, city branding, and the future role of local government " (Ibid). This strategic expansion of the city's boundaries was dependent upon a complete discursive shift that was characterized by the complete domination of the economic discourse (up to a degree that 'good' and 'bad' became economy-oriented notions) over all urban- organizational issues. One example for the use of economic language during the strategic planning process comes from the plan's sustainability section. It was not the environment that was in the centre of the environmental strategic argument but rather the economic benefits of sustainability. In that light, it became common to hear such arguments as "Sydney can become one of the world’s leading green cities, making this our point of competitive advantage with other global cities. We can make sure Sydney remains Australia’s global business and cultural centre of excellence" (Ibid). Similar language was attached to most other topics, such as the condition of the indigenous people, the need to support art and artists, and so forth. Thus, Korenberger and Clegg conclude that under the new urban-management regime: "Strategy represented the expansion of space beyond the boundaries of power and geography of the city administration, but the non-spatial aspects of the city were disciplined by the discourse of economic progress. Despite the rhetoric of interdisciplinarity, the ‘good ideas’ that were marshalled were by and large ideas derived from and legitimized in the language of the economy. The urban was represented first and foremost as an economic concern in the strategy process, defining social, cultural and environmental issues as its functions." (Ibid, 147). Another central observation made by Clegg and Kornberger following their two years of research, is the performative nature of Strategy. To phrase it differently, the strategic process is not about the production of new truths (as was the case of Urban-Planning) but rather the process of mobilizing the urban residents towards the adoption of previously established, or, taken for granted knowledge. Thus, Strategy actually "functions as a ritual of verification that produces legitimate solutions as a correlate of its own" (Ibid). The performativity of the plan, that was also evidenced from the common feeling among the people who participated in the creation of the plan that "strategy does not so much describe the future as cause this future to come into existence through its process" (Ibid; 147), led Sydney's officials to view the mobilization of people's opinions of the strategic frame of reference and the creation of consent with regards to the strategic process as a fundamental matter. This need to legitimize the outcomes of the strategic plan, forced urban management to develop consultation mechanisms that will allow the community to take a part in the strategic process. Admitted by the plan's managers that these consultations did not bring many new

Chapter 2: A New Urban Narrative: The Story So Far - From Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy ideas and were mainly used in order to legitimize already existing plans41, the main effect of this process was the change in the participants' way of thinking. Originally rooted in their individual problems, the public opinions were developing into what is described by Clegg and Kornberger as 'strategic thinking', which is the ability to think from 'above' so as to see reality from a general perspective and not from an individual one. This process was involved in the lifting of people thoughts to a “higher level” (Ibid; 149) in which the centre is the “image of a far distant future in which mundane worries were banished, replaced the concerns of the here-and-now” (Ibid). This mobilization process resulted in the creation of a new form of political power that gave the city administration great legitimacy to act. This legitimacy was based on the ability to unite the many conflicting voices heard through the creation of Sydney 2030 into a coherent single 'public will'. It was done, not only by “raising people's thoughts” (Ibid) but also by acts of silencing. Avoiding any kind of conflict by keeping 'rival' groups separated, not speaking about any politically 'unsafe issues' (such as issues of race and religion), setting aside many topics to the decision of experts (the density of the housing was, for example, one issue that was marked as a 'professional problem') made strategy into a tool that can:

“cut the Gordian knot of power (democracy) and knowledge (expertise) by mobilizing the public and claiming to articulate its political will while simultaneously allowing those in power to limit the debate to 'safe issues' and bracket potentially contentious decisions as work that was an 'expert task'”. (Ibid; 151-2)

One last important point is the aesthetic change that Strategy 2030 has forced upon urban organization. In contrast to the 'dull' plans of the city planner and in order for it to work, strategy had to be colourful and exciting. It had to tell a story, or rather be a story that anyone in the city can associate with. In order to achieve this goal, the Sydney 2030 managers singled out the media as the battlefield that had to be won. The tendency of the media to look for simple stories was used, and the entire plan's vocabulary was constructed by short statements concerning visions, targets and proposed actions. Numbers became a more and more prominent tool designed to mobilise the population by (often unachievable) bottom

41 "The dominant view of the consultants, as well as the city strategists, was that consultation did not so much result in ideas but added legitimacy to the process. As one consultant told us, ‘To be honest, not a lot of new ideas came out of those consultations. They were more, kind of reaffirming some of the ideas that were already within the team and the extent of how far the community was willing to accept change as well’ (Anne, consultant). Another consultant, Jack, bluntly stated, ‘I don’t think we learned anything fundamental that I did not already know from all the years of experience.’ If the consultation was not about the exchange of ideas and learning, but about mobilizing, transforming and legitimizing, how did it unfold in practice and what were its power effects?" (Kornberger & Clegg, 2011; 148)

Chapter 2: A New Urban Narrative: The Story So Far - From Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy lines goals, dates and lists, used to "supplemented the creativity of the illustration with gestures of scientific precision" (Ibid, 153) The constant use of numbers was not an efficient tool for actual change (as is often did not make sense and certainly overly simplified things) but rather, as an "aesthetic phenomena" (Ibid), a way to legitimise the plan. For instance: "target #2 of Sydney 2030 stated that by 2030 the city would have the capacity to meet 100 percent of its energy needs and 10 percent of its water supply. While this is doubtlessly a noble target, none of the project ideas explained how to accomplish these goals. Many targets were simply outside the control of the city administration, such as target #5, which states that the city would create 97,000 new jobs by 2030. Some targets turned out to not be so ambitious. Target #7, for instance, aimed at 50 percent of all trips in the city being by foot and 10 percent by bike; in 2008, the combined number was already 50 percent. Similarly, target #10 stipulated that community cohesion and social capital should be increased as measured by more than 45 percent of people believing that most people can be trusted. The 2008 figure for the survey was 45 percent. Maybe most revealingly, the city had no programme in place to monitor progress towards these targets" (Ibid) This combination between “the dual aesthetics of the poetry of the image and the prose of numbers” (Ibid; 153) has helped strategy to situate itself as the new form of urban organization to an almost unlimited degree. Korenberger and Clegg's detailed analysis of the Sydney 2030 strategic plan, and their identification of what they term as Strategy, as an urban performative regime, serves as an exemplary account of an urban investigation from within OS. Whether or not, and in what way, their research helps our endeavour move forward will be discussed in the upcoming section.

2.3. Moving Forward from Strategy and Action-Nets- Refining Our Research Plan

In this section we will reflect on the attempts of these three writers to develop new urban narratives, so as to point at the advancements that they made, and on their shortcomings - from which we ought to learn. Having reflected on the OS-urban literature, we will utilize our new insights to refine our research purpose in light of the insights we have gained. Czarniawska's work serves as a great inspiration that teaches us how to conduct an OS based inquiry of the city which is not completely bound to the preconditioned divisions, separations, fixations and generalizations that characterize the economic, institutional and critical narrative. The idea of Action-Nets helps us break from the conventional lines, and follow a new kind of entities, both human and non-human, that

Chapter 2: A New Urban Narrative: The Story So Far - From Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy are not limited by the normative boundaries of institutions, political structures, academic disciplines, and so forth, but are located throughout the city. The empirical sensibilities, derived from Czarniawska's follow-up of Action-Nets, are also extremely helpful as they help us see phenomena that we could have easily missed, such as (1) the tendency of the urban organization to revolve around the Action-Nets of reframing, anchoring and muddling through, and (2) the ways in which the process of Glocalization is responsible for the organization of our cities. However, it seems that Czarniawska ignores the difficulties that arise from the hidden assumption that lays on the background of her literature - that actions, which are seemingly clearly-defined and easily identified objects, serve as the most fundamental entities of her ontology, or to put it differently, my criticism is that actions are seen as indivisible entities. My difficulties are not only related to the fact that I feel that there is no clear argument to explain why actions should be considered as the most elementary things, but also because it seems to me that this narrative of the city as a construct of actions conflicts with our research agenda. I accept the fact that the use of Action-Nets allows us to abolish the notion of the city as a united, monolithic, whole, thus rejecting macro images that see the city as a purely economic entity or as an institution. However, it seems to me that Action-Nets allow Czarniawska to cling to the micro, or, to put it differently, to cling to an understanding of the macro as made out of clearly defined, easily explorable, basic units. By that I believe that she stops short of truly departing from familiar ways and, like the economic, institutional and critical narratives, relies on entities that are imported into the description from external sources. I believe that the only way to develop new urban- narratives so as to meaningfully account for the great urban transformation of the last few years is to find a way of viewing the city outside the three narratives' lenses, is to 'get rid' of both the macro (the city) and the micro (the clearly defined actions that are happening within the city) as external sources of explanation. Hence, I think we should avoid adopting Action-Nets directly into our research. We will, however, adopt Czarniawska's innovative style of research, which is based upon a follow-up of one specific thing that is located everywhere around the city and thus, to a great degree, it allows us to view the city from within and not from above, and will use her ethnographic discoveries, for example – the importance of framing the city as part of managing it, to guide us into our inquiry. As for Kornberger and Clegg, there can be a little doubt that their analysis of urban- organization is innovative and illuminating. While viewing the making of the city through their eyes, we are exposed to a complicated urban-image that includes multiple human-

Chapter 2: A New Urban Narrative: The Story So Far - From Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy actors such as urban planners, council-employees, the local residents, the media, and multiple non-human actors such as numbers, presentations, economic-calculations, booklets and so forth. The assembling of these human and non-human actors into a comprehensive system that organizes the city, provides us with an illuminating narrative that, in many senses, such as their observation on the performative character of strategy, diverges from the economic, institutional and critical notions of the city. Inspired by the great wealth in Kornberger and Clegg's work, while adopting their analytic framework and empirical findings into our own understanding of the urban, we cannot ignore the fact that their work is still (1) founded on some pre-established conceptions of urban-organization such as the assumption that the urban-organization is greatly influenced by external social forces that are responsible for urban organization, as can be understood from the following summary of strategy: "strategy’s performative powers constituted the city as a spatial object. The strategy of Sydney 2030 expanded the notion of territorial space, including socially constructed spaces such as the economic, the cultural or the social"(Kornberger & Clegg, 2011, p. 155). (2) heavily influenced by the critical narrative and its understanding of the urban as dependent upon external political forces42, and, more importantly on a view of the city as a well-founded, unified, ontologically independent whole that is organized by designated urban administration. The result is that despite the great wealth of Kornberger and Clegg's urban narrative it is still not fundamentally different from the three urban narratives, in the sense that it is similarly founded upon external assumptions of how the urban is organized, which means that our attempt to review the way in which OS understands the organization of the city is still missing the novel outlook. Taking all of the above into our consideration, it seems that both Czarniawska's and Kornberger and Clegg's urban accounts make very important headway in their attempts to develop an urban account that is not based upon the assumptions that the urban is an economic-unit, an institution or a political arena. However, while very successful in their first steps, their work is nevertheless still founded on one very strong external, pre-existing assumption with regards to the city - that the city, as a meaningful, united, bounded and coherent entity, pre-exists their analysis. Thus, learning from the abovementioned attempts to describe the city without recourse to the three urban narratives, our research purpose - to generate a novel urban account that will portray the city without any pre-existing assumptions about its ontological independence, did not

42 See chapter one in for our analysis of the critical urban narrative.

Chapter 2: A New Urban Narrative: The Story So Far - From Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy change. Our aim is still to study the city without pre-supposing its bounds, nature or modes of existence. Latour posits that in order for the researcher to comprehend the complexity of the urban, without succumbing to the reductionist explanatory drive, one must constantly maintain the multiplicity of the material reality as it presents itself and hold this complexity as central to one's account, instead of shunning it. We will now expand upon this imperative and how it relates to our research.

2.4. How to Approach the City as a Multiple?

After reviewing Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg's work and their shortcomings, we now understand our challenge to not only be the need to study the city without recourse to any of the three narratives, but, more fundamentally, we must portray the city without taking for granted its ontological pre-existence. In what follows, we will shorty review Latour's suggestion on how to study the city without pre-assuming its existence, which will serve as a segue to our next chapter. Latour's Paris: invisible city is a series of photographic essays43 designed to allow the readers to "wander through the city, in texts and images, exploring some of the reasons why it cannot be captured at a glance" (Latour & Hermant, 1998, p. 1). Describing the purpose of his unique presentation in greater lengths, Latour argues that: "Our photographic exploration takes us first to places usually hidden from passers-by, in which the countless techniques making Parisians' lives possible are elaborated (water services, police force, ring road: various "oligopticons" from which the city is seen in its entirety). This helps us to grasp the importance of ordinary objects, starting with the street furniture constituting part of inhabitants' daily environment and enabling them to move about in the city without losing their way. It also makes us attentive to practical problems posed by the coexistence of such large numbers of people on such a small surface area. All these unusual visits may eventually enable us to take a new look at a more theoretical question on the nature of the social link and on the very particular ways in which society remains elusive. We often tend to contrast real and virtual, hard urban reality and electronic utopias. This work tries to show that real cities have a lot in common with Italo Calvino's "invisible cities". As congested, saturated and asphyxiated as it may be, in the invisible city of Paris we may learn to breathe more easily, provided we alter our social theory." (Ibid, emphasis added).

43 Or, more accurately, a web-based exhibition that includes images taken around Paris and short texts that accompany them. The entire project can be access here: Latour, 1999

Chapter 2: A New Urban Narrative: The Story So Far - From Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy

We shall start our description of Latour's work with his understanding of urban complicatedness (as opposed to its complexity)44. Being provoked by the complicated character of the city due to (1) the size - that forces the urban researchers to make hard choices with regards to their sites of investigations, and (2) the plethora of different entities which make up the city, such as "its inhabitants, its material structures, the commodities that flow through it, the organisations that administer and govern these entities and many other phenomena besides" (Knox, 2010, p. 191) , Latour understands that it would be an insurmountable task to investigate all the relevant entities and, that, even if the hypothetical situation in which this type of investigation will be possible, it will not help us to understand the city as "cities are both more and less than the sum of their parts, the essence of the city (if such a thing exists) exceeding the details of its constitution" (Ibid). Recognizing the inability to make sense of the city by studying all its assembling elements, while rejecting any type of abstraction, Latour bases his analysis on the understanding that this complicated character of the city, which scholars tend to shun in their explanations, is actually an essential feature that must be portrayed when describing the city in order to produce a meaningful description. To not lose track of the complicatedness of the urban, we must understand that the entangled character of the city is in fact a result of the different techniques that "metre, inscribe and rationalize" (Ibid) the city, for any "rational mastery of the city" must work "through specific practices to provide a picture of a space through a logic of abstraction which involves the stripping out of superfluous influences of different orders with the aim of producing a mark, or a channel or a trace which can be tracked, reconstituted and reassembled and in the process can make the city reappear" (Ibid, 191-2). Latour suggests that best way to make sense of the city without any one of the pre- assumed divisions, such as natural/social, or economy/society, that characterized the known urban registers, is to dedicate our urban-investigation for the exposure of complexity, which is the "multifarious linkages and connections that occur between things of different orders and whose description necessarily defies the processes of abstraction described above" (Ibid; 192). Latour wants to describe urban complexity by the creation of an image of the city in its making, which is not its physical making, but rather the process of making the abstract urban complicatedness out of which "the city emerges in a complex process of rationalisation borne out of complex socio-material practices" (Ibid). Therefore, in his journey around Paris, Latour

44 Complicatedness is the amalgam of the various different ways in which techniques of rationalization narrate the city. Complexity, on the other hand, is a view of the whole which does aim to encompass it into a comprehensible form, but merely acknowledges its hybrid state of constant flux, where heterogeneous relations between entities of different orders are made and unmade – always challenging any attempt at meaningful abstraction.

Chapter 2: A New Urban Narrative: The Story So Far - From Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy concentrates on the different ways of knowing Paris: (1) the partial perspective which is the common way of viewing the city, (2) zooming in and out between the 'macro' and the 'micro' outlooks, (3) focusing on the different ways of knowing the city via maps, street signs, satellite images, and so forth, (4) giving special attention to technical knowledge and infrastructure that exposes us to what we tend to think of as invisible, (5) description of the representation of what is ruled to be the natural side of the city, such as the temperature or the season, and, lastly, by (6) focusing on human and non-human actors which exposes us to our tendency to understand action as something that belongs only to humans. Returning to the OS angle, Knox's concludes from Latour's Paris, made from within OS in an attempt to discuss the possible ways to study cities from the perspective of our discipline, that "the notion of Paris: Invisible city is striking for the only conclusion we can come to is that Paris is both there and not there – a powerful lesson for thinking about what organisation studies can offer to the study of the city, and what the city can offer to organisation studies" (Ibid). This review of Latour came mostly to introduces us to this way of thinking about the city, especially the adoption of its complexity as an important feature and not as something that we need to overcome. It opens a gate for us to deal with urban organization without assuming any abstract pre-existing city but rather to accept its complexity and multiplicity as a given. In the next chapter we will introduce Latour's classic Actor-Network Theory approach in greater length, which will guide our methodology, and will present our first empirical insight. We will do so as we remember that Latour analysis of Paris serves as inspiration for us - even despite the fact that some criticism was levelled against this (so called) classic approach to ANT. The fact that ANT suffers from all the 'fallacies' on which it points is the most important one. We will try to take this criticism, that mostly come from within the ANT literature (Law & Hassard, 1999) into account while we will conduct our empirical investigation but not in an attempt to replace our source of inspiration but rather while trying to sharpen it and make our account more accurate. To summarize this chapter, we invested most of our efforts in reviewing three important OS-urban thinkers: Czarniawska, Kornberger and Clegg. The reason that led us to focus on these scholars is the fact that they are among the very few OS scholars who took similar steps towards our intended purpose - to study urban-organization on its own means without relying on any one of the three urban narratives as pre-existing explanations. As such, Czarniawska, and Kornberger and Clegg's accounts can help us in constructing our research strategy towards the development of a novel, non- representational urban account that (unlike the three narratives) will be sensitive to the

Chapter 2: A New Urban Narrative: The Story So Far - From Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg to a new research strategy empirical reality and will not rely upon one specific urban image that, despite its aspirations, cannot adequately capture the urban organization. Introducing Czarniawska's understanding of urban organizations, we became familiar with her general understanding of Action-Nets as the central elements of urban-organization, and with her more concrete description of the anchoring, muddling-through and framing Action-Nets- responsible for urban management, and the Glocal Action-Nets that serves as Czarniawska's explanation for globalization as it is perceived from the urban perspective. With regards to Kornberger and Clegg's urban-accounts, we became familiar with Strategy – the prevalent contemporary urban regime, which, in contrary to the previous Urban-Planning, stands on two complementary legs: the scientific and the theological. Reflecting on Czarniawska's scholarship we came to the conclusion that, despite the great inspiration that we take from her methodology of ethnographically following Action-Nets that allows her to view the city from within and not from any imagined micro or macro perspective, we still do not accept her analysis that sees actions as the most basic entities. This assumption is in fact another way to come to the study of the city while pre- assuming the urban structure, and thus repeating the same 'fallacy' that most other urban- organizational accounts do. With regards to Kornberger and Clegg, our criticism was very similar as, despite the importance of getting to know Strategy as a prevalent urban- organizational regime, we came to the conclusion that their accounts also assume the existence of the city as independent of its description and thus we concluded that they are not fully invested in the studies of urban organization as they also come pre-packed with assumption of the urban organisation before they conduct their empirical studies. Coming to the understanding that in order to find a way to develop a novel perspective of urban organization that will not pre-assume the city or will be based on some partial image of it, we turned to Latour and reviewed his suggestion on how to approach the matter. We learnt that Latour understands the complicatedness of the city as one of its important features, thus as something that needs to be part of any of its accounts, and not as something that needs to be overcome. The meaning is that when we describe the city, we should focus exactly on the issues that make it irreducible and not try to force some external image upon it. The next chapter is dedicated for a long methodological discussion of Latour and Actor-Network Theory that will further explore this matter.

Chapter 3: How Do We Make Accounts – Actor-Network Theory as a Methodology for Our Research

Chapter 3: How Do We Make Accounts – Actor-Network

Theory as a Methodology for Our Research

3.0. Overview

Following our discussion about Paris: Invisible city (Latour & Hermant, 1998), and its call to embrace the complexity of the city and not treat its complexity as an obstacle that needs to be overcome, we shall further explore Actor-Network Theory so as to firmly establish our research strategy. Therefore, this chapter, that should be read in conjunction with the last section of the previous chapter, is an introduction to our method, which is based on my understanding of ANT. This chapter will first introduce the Laturian methodology through a thick ethnographic description of a Tel-Aviv construction plan as narrated through the eyes of the real-estate appraiser behind it. Pointing at the similarities between the ways in which we aspire to conduct our research and the ways in which the real-estate appraiser constructed her plan, this detour will guide our foray into the field as we embark on our urban investigation in the tracks of the appraiser. The second part of this chapter will take a more pedagogical rhetoric, as it will introduce my engagement with ANT and the ways in which I attempt to incorporate it into our investigation. Lastly, we will discuss the upcoming chapters and their relations to the chosen method of inquiry.

Chapter 3: How Do We Make Accounts – Actor-Network Theory as a Methodology for Our Research

3.1. Plan 3388b – An ANT view of a Tel-Aviv Construction Plan: The REV Appraiser as a Social Scientist

Figure 2. A visualization of plan 3388b

(a) How Real-Estate is Made Valuable (a Thick Ethnographic Description):

The picture above was captured at a meeting of the Tel-Aviv Planning Committee. During my fieldwork, I attended all of Tel-Aviv Planning Committee’s fortnightly gatherings, and this February 15th 2017 meeting was no exception. The introduction of Plan 3388b, out of which the above photo was taken, and the processing of the public’s objections to it, were fifth on the agenda that day. Seemingly, it was just another plan instructing the re-

Chapter 3: How Do We Make Accounts – Actor-Network Theory as a Methodology for Our Research parcellation45 of an empty plot of land. However, for someone who is interested in the relations between real-estate valuations and urban-organization, the scope and magnitude of this objection’s process proved to be an ethnographic goldmine. The twenty-five objections that were discussed that day, an unusually high number, emphasise just how critical this plan was. Such a process, in which the objections are publicly presented and answered by the council’s planning teams, makes for a great display that efficiently exposes the inner conflicts and tensions, the assumed background knowledge, the politics and the bureaucracy of any given plan. But the discussion about plan 3388b was promising not only due to the fact that the plan’s guts were about to be exposed in the upcoming ‘spectacle’, it was also the fact that plan 3388b was an elegant and straightforward example of the relations between real-estate valuation and urban- organizational forms.

Figure 3. An empty plot of land, stretching over 47,724 acres, upon which the construction envisioned and planned in plan 3388b were to be realised. The picture was taken from the plan’s official file found in the council planning archive.

To understand why plan 3388b is so interesting, it is better to start with a simple explanation. The lot, shown in picture #3, is divided between numerous different holders. For many years the owners were unable to do anything with their property as there was no approved construction plan for this area. Eventually, at the end of a long struggle, construction plan 3388 was approved, allowing the owners to build according to the plan's

45 The municipal parlance term for the merging and re-partitioning of a given piece of land according to planning needs. Historically, all the land in a given municipality was divided into registered plots, and any modification of this partitioning of the land must start with a re-parcellation plan presented to the council.

Chapter 3: How Do We Make Accounts – Actor-Network Theory as a Methodology for Our Research directives. However, there was no correlation between the ways in which the ownership was divided and the new plan. The original plot of land was divided one-dimensionally, into various geometrical shapes to mark the different ownerships, but after plan 3388 was approved this one-dimensional separation no longer made sense. Originally everything was equal, on an unplanned land one meter is just one meter. After plan 3388 was approved it was no longer the case. Some parts of the big plot were designated for big buildings, some for smaller buildings while some were not designated for construction at all. Picture #4, (that was cut out of picture #2) illustrates how plan 3388 transforms the flat one- dimensional empty plot of land from picture #3, into a rugged multi-dimensional terrain:

Figure 4. The transformation of a flat one-dimensional empty plot of land into a rugged multi-dimensional terrain.

The aim of plan 3388b is therefore to divide the development rights awarded by plan 3388 between the different owners. The algorithm for this division is very simple - the proportions between the old and the new stages must stay the same. If, for example, a person had 0.5% of the land prior to plan 3388 being approved, then she must have 0.5% of the land in its post-planned condition. Multi-storey buildings 'create' land, but a penthouse metre is not the same as a basement metre, in terms of its market value. So, 0.5% of an empty lot can translate, post-construction, into either 1% percent parking-lot or 0.005% top-tier penthouse metres, for instance. In other words, the comparison is not of land, but of value. Thus, the work behind plan 3388b was conducted by a real-estate appraiser, who had to produce the value of each property in the initial conditions and translate this newly produced entity into a new proportional sub-plot in the post- construction conditions. The reason that we use the verb 'produce' to describe the above process is because it best captures the various complicated tasks that the real-estate

Chapter 3: How Do We Make Accounts – Actor-Network Theory as a Methodology for Our Research appraiser must take, since value is not simply found out there nor can the real-estate appraiser deduce it algorithmically. She needs to construct it via the professional tools and knowledge that she holds. To paraphrase the process – first, the real-estate appraiser must locate a 'similar' real-estate to the one she wants to measure, establish the connections between the different plots (a process that entails hard explanatory work to provide an answer to the question of why specific plots were chosen to take part in the comparison) and then to translate, while making necessary modification, the value from the similar plots to our land. This process that, as we will later see is everything but straightforward, allows her to develop the typical value (per meter) of the plot in its initial stage. Once the land’s typical value is constructed, the value of each sub-plot must be adjusted in accordance with its unique characteristics (such as proximity of a given land to the sea or to the main road). The development of the value in the post-construction conditions is a bit more complicated due to the multitude of variables at hand, which include such factors as the lots' designation (residential or commercial), the type of buildings (low- or high-rise, for example) and the location inside them (basement or penthouse), the size of the apartments, the general location of the construction vis-à-vis the main street or facilities, and so forth. To create the typical post-construction value, the real-estate appraiser must first locate, for the sake of comparison, a few similar plots. As our plot was not constructed yet, this is a very demanding task that entails great use of imagination. After the real-estate appraiser finishes developing the post-construction typical value, she moves back to the initial state and measures each sub-plot's Real-Estate Value (REV) in proportion to the value of the entire plot. If, for example, sub-plot A is valued as 2.5% out of the total value of the land in its initial condition, the real-estate appraiser must actively create a new post-construction sub-plot, that will be worth exactly 2.5% out of the total value of the entire new land. This is an extremely complicated task that requires long months of very demanding work in which the appraiser creates a very large number of very small sub-plots, down to o.o1% of the value of the entire plot, and later groups many of these newly-formed sub-plots together to arrive at the required 2.5% of sub-plot A. To make things even more complicated, two rules guide the real-estate appraiser through that very messy and complicated process: (1) the location of the post-construction plot must be as close as possible to its location on the empty lot, and (2) the development rights awarded in the later situation must be as concentrated as possible. Spread out development rights, i.e. fractions of different development rights scattered around different locations, make the construction process and its associated value extraction much

Chapter 3: How Do We Make Accounts – Actor-Network Theory as a Methodology for Our Research more complicated as they deny the single property owner the rights to build by herself and forces her to cooperate with others in order to actualise her land rights. Most of the 25 objections raised in the February committee meeting, some representing hundreds of property owners, tried to challenge the work of the council’s real-estate appraiser with regards to these two issues. It was either that the awarded development rights were too far from the original land thus causing injustice to those who were located next to the sea and are now closer to the road, or that the development rights were too separated from each other thus causing injustice to property owners who will not be able to easily realise their building rights. The debate thus revolved around a negotiation of the pre- and post- construction value equation.

(b) How Our Urban Account is Made:

Reflecting on the above process, it is evident that real-estate values are products of many activities and tools. Indeed, there is something called real-estate value located in the hub of this network, however, as there is no possibility to make any direct contact with it, as is evident by the controversy surrounding its identification and the various assumptions, tools, and methods used by the appraising professionals to unearth, or produce, it. Its representation, in percentages or absolute sums, can be said to be an artefact, or rather, an elaborate fabrication. It includes an image that was actively collected via various instruments, of actual real-estate values that represent ‘similar’ cases, and a set of tools, activities, concepts and signals that participate in the negotiations from which real-estate values are assembled and put into action. This action is responsible for the creation of justice, or at least, agreements, which serve as the motor (in our example) that allows for an empty plot of land to become a built area. I see this image of real-estate values and its relations to the urban organization as illuminating due to the fact that the transformation of an empty surface into a constructed environment exposes very elegantly how real-estate values are created and how, in turn, they participate in the creation of the city. Later we will see other, less elegant, images that will help us produce additional urban tales that diverge from the economic, institutional and critical accounts of the city. The central point of this chapter is, however, not to discuss the manufacturing of the city in details yet, but, rather, to point at the fact that this specific tale also makes for a great illustration of how the social sciences, which include our research, make sense of the world. As account makers we are not as epistemologically different from the appraisers as

Chapter 3: How Do We Make Accounts – Actor-Network Theory as a Methodology for Our Research we may perceive, even if our ontological standpoints are quite far apart. In other words, we are not copying reality into our pages but rather, just like the real-estate appraiser, we are constantly engaged with translations, inscriptions, negotiations, assemblages and fabrications. The next pages will further explore this claim. The purpose of this chapter is, thus, to use our experience from the field while explaining our approach and discussing our plans. We will move forward now to discuss the more theoretical background of Actor-Network Theory and my understanding of it as a method to produce descriptions, and continue with an overview of the actual bits and pieces of the specific story that we are about to tell.

3.2. Actor-Network Theory - From Case Study to Methodological Application (a) Turning Our Initial Approach into a Systematic Toolkit

When trying to make sense and produce meaningful accounts of a diverse and innovative approach such as ANT, it is not surprising that there are numerous possible gateways from which one can start her exploration process. The studies of the exact sciences (Latour, 1987), law (Latour, 2002), cities (Latour & Hermant, 1998), economy (Callon, 1998), technology (Latour, 1996a) and modernity (Latour, 1991), are all highly important junctions with regards to the development of ANT, and are directly related to our research. However, having to resist the desire to dive into any of these pioneering accounts at once, it might, for the purpose of explaining our specific understanding of ANT, be worthwhile to start more modestly by reviewing a short, mostly forgotten, though extremely instructive, paper written by Latour, named 'On Actor-Network Theory: a few clarifications’ (Latour, 1996b). The paper begins by paying attention to the very common mistake of associating ANT with either a technical/technological or a social theory of networks. Latour emphasises that the common use of the term network to denote infrastructure (“sewage, or train, or subway, or telephone” Ibid; 369) has little, if any, relevance to the ANT operationalisation of the term ([“[they] lack all the characteristics of a technical network” Ibid). While pointing towards the other popular conceptualization of networks - the understanding of networks as socially constructed - Latour explains that "[he] does not wish to add social networks to social theory, but to rebuild social theory out of networks” (Ibid). In sharp contrast, Latour's Actor-Networks should not be seen as the things that connect different entities, but should be seen as a fundamental ontological unit. Or, to put it in Latour’s words:

Chapter 3: How Do We Make Accounts – Actor-Network Theory as a Methodology for Our Research

"Literally there is nothing but networks, there is nothing in between them, or, to use a metaphor from the history of physics, there is no æther in which networks should be immersed" (Ibid, 370) Such a grandiose claim must be explained carefully. For that purpose, we should turn our attention towards the 1980s and the 1990s in which ANT arose from the academic zeitgeist, led by prominent figures such as Latour, Callon and Woolgar, which were conducting ethnographic studies of science. This movement, often nicknamed Science Studies, emerged out of the confusion that ruled the social studies of science during these years. At the time, two opposing explanations for the question of who/what is responsible for the production of scientific truth dominated the scene. The first, positivist, explanation assumed that natural entities such as atoms, germs, physical forces and biological cells were the important agents, while human actors such as scientists were only responsible for exposing the pre-existing, fundamental, already established, truth. The second, constructivist explanation assumed that the important agents are the social actors, where the products of scientific knowledge are the result of social construction, and not a deterministic exposure of an underlying truth (Bloor, 1984; Merton, 1993). The confusion, out of which ANT was born, was related not only to the above bipolarity but also to the fact that while producing their explanations both sides were equally successful in producing meaningful and insightful empirical accounts that supported their claims. One of ANT's most significant arguments is that this tension cannot be resolved based on each of the accounts logical assumptions, nor is one or the other a result of some fallacy. They are both internally consistent and are a direct result of the ways in which the social sciences function. The fact that the positivist and the constructivist accounts are based on descriptive processes that accepts a pre-defined understanding of agency and are both painting images that match their pre-existing frames of references, was the centre of this argument. ANT's solution to this difficulty was deceptively simple – we should not treat our field as something that is simply found 'out-there', but, rather, treat it as something that is constructed during the description process. Or, to put it differently, we should stop treating the positivist and the constructivist accounts as representations, and start treating them as inscriptions. Applying the above conclusion, ANT's strategy was not about offering a third alternative to the positivist and the constructivist accounts but rather to approach the entire topic differently through the development of new registration techniques that will produce new types of agencies.

Chapter 3: How Do We Make Accounts – Actor-Network Theory as a Methodology for Our Research

Relying on his conclusions from the analysis of natural sciences, Latour suggested that we, the social scientists, need to learn from the natural scientists how to construct new agencies. To understand the last point, we should quickly return to Latour’s analysis of the natural sciences and see what he means when he talks about the construction of agencies. It is the fact that, through his ethnography, Latour discovered that natural scientists are constantly involved in various inscriptive activities such as calculating, making diagrams, perceiving, recording, experimenting and measuring, which is the main point of his analysis. What do the scientists do when they participate in all of the above activities? Latour argues that they are not creating representations of reality but, rather, that they are making practical tools. For example, when making a diagram the scientist gains the ability to record differences, or, even, to create differences, which allows her to distinguish between qualities (Latour, 1987, p. 75). In addition, the graph, that was created through the work of the scientist, is quickly transformed into an object with agency that can be moved to different locations and used in numerous situations. As such, it is clear why the graph should not be seen as a passive representation but rather as an active actant that can- do things. As social scientists, Latour suggests, we should learn from the natural scientists and develop our own set of inscriptive tools that will allow us to engage in a meaningful way with the world and register different types of agencies (Latour, 2005). However, accepting the fact that our task is to register new types of agencies is not enough. We need to carefully think what to do with our new sets of pens and pencils. In that regard, ANT's motivation is directed towards the creation of new images that will help us overcome the dual image that characterises the modern epistemology (Latour, 1991) – the separate domains of the natural and the social, and similar separations, so as to present a more complex image of reality. Latour’s work is full with such studies that describe reality through the transformation processes of hybrids (the ‘unsorted’ phenomena) into the shape of “/ “that appears in dualisms such as the natural/social, micro/macro, inside/outside, up/down, order/disorder, professionalism/politics and so forth (Latour, 1996a, 2002; Latour & Hermant, 1998). In order to understand this last claim, we need to briefly return to our initial conjuncture according to which Actor-Networks are the only existing entities. It is easy to see that if we take a step away from the social/natural understanding of reality, nothing is left but Actor-Networks. The explanation is simple - after debunking the existence of any preconditioned separation, it is evident that the structure of things is not preconfigured but rather a result of the ways in which actants assemble into Actor-Networks. As an object

Chapter 3: How Do We Make Accounts – Actor-Network Theory as a Methodology for Our Research can become stable only if many other things are assembled into a network, every actant is both a part and a result of these networks. Every particle of a given network can be viewed as an Actor-Network unto itself, ad infinitum, where these fractal networks are themselves always stabilized by their networked milieu. In light of all of the above, and according to many ANT-oriented accounts (Law & Hassard, 1999; Mol, 2002; Shamir, 2013), especially most of Latour's writings (Latour, 1987, 1996a, 2002; Latour B., 1999), the best path towards an understanding of the urban which does not rely on either the positivist (the economic) or the constructivist (the institutional and the critical) narratives, that will allow us to avoid any pre-assumptions about the nature of the urban, is to follow these ‘black– boxes’ ethnographically so as to reveal the chains responsible for their assembling and reassembling. By doing that we will not only be able to provide agency to new urban actants that will allow us to view the city differently but also manage to break through the social sciences' common structuring method that relies upon the preconditioned "/" and thus better understand how the urban dichotomies are created as part of these black-boxes' assembling process and therefore, to be able to make sense of our empirical findings

3.3. How to Use Actor-Network Theory for the Sake of our own Urban Investigation?

"If an anthropology of the modern world were to exist its task would consist in describing in the same way how all the branches of our government are organized, including that of nature and the hard sciences, and in explaining how and why these branches diverge as well as accounting for the multiple arrangements that bring them together. The ethnologist of our world must take up her position at the common locus where roles, actions and abilities are distributed - those that make it possible to define one entity as animal or material and another as a free agent; one as endowed with consciousness, another as mechanical, and still another as unconscious and incompetent. Our ethnologist must even compare the always different ways of defining - or not defining - matter, law, consciousness and animals' souls, without using modern metaphysics as a vantage point. Just as the constitution of jurists defines the rights and duties of citizens and the State, the working of justice and the transfer of power, so this Constitution - which I shall spell with a capital C to distinguish it from the political ones - defines humans and nonhumans, their properties and their relations, their abilities and their groupings" (Latour, 1991, p. 15)

Wishing to follow urban affairs ethnographically so as to learn how the city is organized, my aim is to listen to Latour's advice, as is described in the above quote, and

Chapter 3: How Do We Make Accounts – Actor-Network Theory as a Methodology for Our Research approach the city with the sensibilities of an 'external' ethnographer who is trying to follow the stabilization process of our field's basic distinctions such as planning/economy, nature/culture, and political/professional rather than view them as pre-defined fundamental structures of reality. This type of ethnographic research is becoming more and more popular in Management and Organization studies (Czarniawska, 2012c; Garsten & Nyqvist, 2013; D. O’Doherty & Neyland, 2019; D. P. O’Doherty, 2017) and as such we should acknowledge that our chosen methodologically is not completely foreign to the field of OS. The ability of Organization Studies to 'absorb' our ANT-oriented sensibilities so as to portray a meaningful picture of the city as a coherent organizational unit and, at the same time, as one of Calvino's enchanted entities, is related to the fact that it is one of the few disciplines within the business school to "deploy a whole series of otherwise marginal, tangential, and even apparently aberrant categories of analysis as a way of navigating or traversing business practices" (D. P. O’Doherty, 2017, p. 5). In addition, by-passing the established separations of the business school, divided into 'territories' known as "strategy, accounting and finance, corporate governance, human resources, marketing [and] leadership" (Ibid) it is not surprising that the field of organization studies is most prominent within the business school to promote ANT- oriented ethnography as an important research method. In the next chapter we will take advantage of our collected ANT sensibilities and see how they lead us to follow real-estate values and award them with agency. This line of research will be based on our acknowledgment that the three main narratives of the city - the economic, the critical and the institutional, are based on the kind of analysis that takes for granted the natural/social, economy/society separation which we want to avoid. By shifting our focus to a new kind of Actor-Network – the real-estate value, while treating it as a hybrid and showing how it participates in the organization of the city, we hope to successfully achieve our goal of developing a new urban-organization account that will not pre-assume the urban. The examples in this chapter's first section provide us with the manners and the attitudes that we need for such a journey. Just as Latour's study of natural scientists (Latour, 1987; Latour & Woolgar, 1979) pushed him towards adopting the natural scientist’s research attitude, we should also push ourselves to learn from the real-estate appraiser who is constructing the value in a similar way to what we want to do. This is not to say that we have the same aims or that we do the same things but, rather, that we are both engaged with a similar project of awarding real-estate values with agency. The real-estate appraiser

Chapter 3: How Do We Make Accounts – Actor-Network Theory as a Methodology for Our Research is doing that in order to organize the city while we are doing it in order to study how the city is organized. Our focus on the studies of REV and on the practices of the real-estate appraiser (that will be presented in the following chapters), together with the understanding that our work as social scientists is similar, in many senses, to the work of the actors in our field, push us towards a similar path to the one that Latour took in his studies of scientists. Therefore, it is our methodological decision to focus on what is often known as classic ANT (Blok, Farias, & Roberts, 2019) and not on more recent development that includes a more straight forward studies of markets (Callon, 1998; Callon, Millo, & Muniesa, 2007) and of valuations (Fourcade, 2011; Muniesa, 2012) as it is neither the market that is the focus of our study nor the specific valuation techniques but rather the professional knowledge and practices that are responsible for the creation of the market, the valuations and the city. For the same reasons we decided not to concentrate on the post-ANT literature (Gad & Jensen, 2010) as it is not ANT that is the focus of our research (even if we aim to contribute to the ANT library) but the city and therefore we find Latour's treatment of scientist to be the most suitable for such a project. The reflexive questions raised by the post-ANT literate with regards to such matters as multiplicity and complexity are indeed important and will be discussed in great length in the following sections, however it is not a critique of ANT which is the hub of this dissertation and therefore we find no reason not to focus on the more classical part of the ANT tradition. Considering everything that we went through thus far – from the description of the real-estate appraiser's work to the analysis of ANT, the upcoming parts of this dissertation will be structured as follows: In the next chapter, I will explain why real-estate values were chosen for the purpose of our inquiry and how they emerged as black-boxes waiting to be explored. Chapters five and six are dedicated to breaking the image, shared among all three urban narratives, of real-estate values as representations of the external reality. Being able to show that the three urban-images view of REVs as representations of something else does not survive an ANT-oriented empirical investigation, is the first step towards a more complex understanding of them as it dismantles the basic assumption shared by all the above narratives. Chapters seven and eight will be devoted for a deep and slow inquiry into real-estate values assembling process. We will see how they are formed and learn to look at them not as 'simple' actants (i.e. objects with agency) but also as hybrids being actively curved into the common "/' separation in a process responsible for designing the city. Chapter nine will build on the progress that we made so far in

Chapter 3: How Do We Make Accounts – Actor-Network Theory as a Methodology for Our Research developing new images of REVs and will describe how and in which ways they participate in the organization of urban reality. It is a tricky move as obviously it is hard to separate each of the things that we aspire to show in each chapter pedagogically, however, just like in the natural sciences, we will have to develop our research tools to be able to cope with it. Lastly, in chapter ten we will discuss what are the implication of our investigation to our discipline's understanding of the city and of organizations, namely how the study of unbounded entities can shed light on complex assemblages heretofore left hidden due to our dogmatic assumptions. The case of gentrification will be used as an example of the above as it exposes the gap between our accounts that see gentrification as an Actor- Network and the three narratives' view of gentrification as pre-assumed explanatory tool that represents underlaying reality.

Chapter 4: Entering the Field – How Did We Come to Follow Real-Estate Values

4.0. Overview

We began our discussion with a reflective view of the city and its organisation in the last few decades, through the lens of the 2011 Tel-Aviv social protest. We then moved on to review the OS treatment of the urban where we found that most OS studies of the city rely upon one of three pre-established, external, urban narratives: the economic, the institutional and the critical. Identifying our gap in literature, we then reviewed the scholarly works of Czarniawska, Kornberger and Clegg that (more or less) share our research ambition in an attempt to understand what it means to develop a new urban narrative. Learning about Czarniawska's Action-Nets and Kroonenberg and Clegg's Strategy, we came to the conclusion that, novel as they may be, these accounts of the city are still based upon an external, pre-existing assumption with regards to the organization of the city. Trying to figure out how to develop a new urban account without pre-assuming the existence of the city, we took to Latour's advice to embrace the complexity and multiplicity of the city (Latour & Hermant, 1998) instead of shunning them. Latour's approach opened the gate to our methodological discussion on Actor-Network Theory. In this discussion we discovered that we, the social scientists, are not much different from the real-estate appraiser as we also develop tools designed to inscribe (and not describe) reality. We also came to the conclusion that in order for us to arrive at a novel account of the city we must develop new techniques of registering urban reality. In the current chapter we will offer one such registration strategy – by following real-estate values. The aim of this chapter is, thus, to introduce the practical steps that were taken in order for such novel descriptions to emerge. To put it more generally, this chapter revolves around the establishment of our empirical field - the space that will allow us to study the organization of the city and understand how it is assembled. A thick description of my experiences from the Tel-Aviv planning committee and the legal debate around the conservation plan will serve to tell the ethnographic story of my recognition of what was to become the centre of our account of urban-organization – the real-estate value. We will end by returning to our initial research goal and reflecting on how this view from the REV helps us on our endeavour.

Chapter 4: Entering the Field – How Did We Come to Follow Real-Estate Values

4.1. How to Study the City Ethnographically?

(a) Two Possible Points of Entry:

There are many urban-oriented ethnographies that focus on such things as: urban culture, politics, environment, art, sport, racial relationships, work places, schools, the health system, everyday practices, and gentrification (Lindsay, 2014; Ocejo, 2013; Pardo & Prato, 2017). However, as is elaborated in the first chapter of this dissertation, these works do not explore the actual organization of the city, but, rather, use a ready-made notion of it (derived from the economic, institutional or critical narratives). That being the case, it is clear that we could not simply imitate the methodology of such ethnographies. For our purpose, we needed to develop a new strategy - one that was to arise out of our initial, very confused, experience in the field. Facing these methodological challenges, I decided to launch my fieldwork slowly and investigate a few possible directions with the hope that one will turn out to be fruitful. The first gateway for the research revolved around the Tel-Aviv conservation plan. Inspired by a book about Tel-Aviv and the Bauhaus Movement (Rotbard, 2015), and how this architectural tradition came to be politicised in the municipal, national, and international levels, I turned my attention towards the Bauhaus-focused conservation plan the moment I came across it. Due to the immense scale of the conservation endeavour and its high publicity, it was not an easy thing to miss. It was not only the story about how the history of Tel-Aviv as a White city (White – due to the Bauhaus aversion of ornamentations) is being produced, but also a great tale of organizational efforts that involved the council and the public, the real-estate markets and the world of architecture, politics and law, economy and society. Starting to explore this route, I had a meeting with a few architects specializing in conservation, with a few protected apartment owners46, and, most importantly, with the head of Tel-Aviv council's conservation department. The second gateway was based on my acquaintance with the vice-mayor's chief- of-staff, who I knew from my previous political activities. I organized a meeting and requested permission to conduct my research as a participant-observer in the vice- mayor's office. As the meeting went well, I was offered to assist the vice-mayor with her planning committee-related duties, especially through reading some of the vast amounts

46 Protected apartment is an apartment that belongs to a building that was added to a conservation list. The inclusion in the list makes it "protected" as it cannot be destroyed or modified dramatically.

Chapter 4: Entering the Field – How Did We Come to Follow Real-Estate Values

of reading material sent to all members of the committee a few days prior to the its biweekly gatherings. It was also decided that I will immerse myself into one very big urban regeneration planning process – the re-construction of a new neighborhood in the eastern part of the city (The L Street plan) - in which the vice-mayor found specific interest. I accepted the offer with great enthusiasm. Nevertheless, my expectations back then, as indicated very clearly in my fieldnotes, were modest. I did not think that the conservation plan could serve as the leading contributor to our study. Indeed, it was one of the most significant construction plans in the history of the city and, as learning from the few ANT-oriented researches that followed construction plans in the last few years (Faraias & Bender, 2010; Shilon & Kallus, 2018), I accepted the fact that this line of research is promising. However, I was afraid that limiting ourselves to the conservation plan might teach us a lot about planning processes and about the ways in which they take part in the organization of the city, but not to a degree that will allow us to develop a new urban account. The work with the vice-mayor was located on the opposite pole. If the conservation plan seemed to be too limited and focused, I was afraid that the work in the vice-mayor's office was too boundless and blurred. As we will shortly see, this scepticism was due to disappear very quickly as I realized that there is one thing that appears in all of the above spheres and had all the qualities that our research needed – the Real-Estate Values. In order to understand how I came to recognise it, in what sense it fits our inquiry, and how this revelation can be used in our research, we should move slowly.

(b) My Past Engagements with Real-Estate Values

The next sections will tell two ethnographic tales that will demonstrate how the idea to follow real-estate values emerged from the field. The first tale is about my initial visit to Tel-Aviv Local Planning Committee. The second is about my participation in a judicial tour related to Tel-Aviv Conservation plan. As both events had a crucial role in the development of my methodological strategy, I find it important to shortly reflect on them. But first, before we dive into the detailed descriptions, I want to report on how my previous engagement with real-estate values led me to notice them in the first place. I was a young student during the 2011 Israeli social-protest, that reached, at its peak, more than half a million demonstrators from all around the country and lasted for two- and-a-half months (Schipper, 2015). The protest began when another young student was

Chapter 4: Entering the Field – How Did We Come to Follow Real-Estate Values

expelled from her rented flat and, due to the excessive rental costs around Tel-Aviv, decided that she is not willing to put up with the situation any more. Thus, instead of looking for a new apartment, she pitched a tent in one of the city's main boulevards. I vividly remember how, a day or two after the tent protests began, I was eating a pizza with some friends across the street from the first few tents and was making fun of these 'naïve' and 'spoiled' youth. A few days later, when I realized that I should join the already established social protest and pitch my own tent in the boulevard, the only place that I found was located hundreds of tents away from the first group. There are many accounts that try to explain what happened in the following days, weeks, months and years. We will not review them now as they are not important for our argument. Instead, I want to shortly reflect on what I see as the social-protest’s most important achievement - the fact that the seemingly unlimited rise in real-estate values, or, to use the protesters' vocabulary, the housing crisis, became one of the most important issues in the Israeli political arena. The scope of this political transformation, that pushed real-estate values into the front stage, was overwhelming. If, prior to the wave of social protests, real-estate values were hardly in the focus of the public eye, seven years later they populated one of the most central places in the Israeli social, political, and economic debate to a degree that the success of any local or national government is measured, first and foremost, by its ability to make real-estate values drop. As I have personally seen how real-estate prices transformed from uninteresting matters-of-facts into the most ‘explosive’ matters of concern (Latour, 2004) and, due to the fact that as a young protestor and activist I was taking an active role in this transformation, it is very easy to understand why real-estate values were on my mind when I was thinking about the organization of the city. My second engagement with real-estate values was more personal. My father is a real-estate appraiser and through him I became aware of the fact that REVs are not as dull as they are commonly seen. I have to admit that I never looked inside the 27,000 real-estate valuation files that were stored in my father’s computer and hardly listened to anything that he had to say about his work. However, one great memory is related to an evaluation my father conducted of a building located in Tel-Aviv, not far from my south Tel-Aviv home at the time. It was one of the old industrial buildings in that area which, due to their unusual structure and seemingly abandoned look, always caught my attention. Inquiring about my father's work, he told me that he was sent by the council

Chapter 4: Entering the Field – How Did We Come to Follow Real-Estate Values

in order to check how much construction the council needs to approve so as to create the right conditions that will arouse the building's owners to reconstruct it. Only if the revenues from additional construction can cover the costs of the entire renovation and restoration and generate 'reasonable' profits for the owners, will they enter this long, expensive, and fiscally dangerous process. This revelation, of the inner-workings of the council and its coercion attempts, gave rise to a new, complex image of the city and its organisation. The appraiser's, and his appraisal's, role in this entangled reality - in this case, as pawns used to coerce free-willing actors into playing according to the council's grand plan – suddenly seemed clear. Many years later, I carried this feeling with me when I started my ethnographic journey. I felt that there is something magical about these values and that the calculations from my father’s notebook must be useful while developing a new urban account.

As promised in the previous section, the above detour must quickly transform into a much longer ethnographic description of my first, mid-fieldwork, engagements with real- estate values. Thus, this section will give a thick description of my first visit to Tel-Aviv local planning committee, while the next section will revolve around a conservation associated planning tour in which I participated. The aim of both sections is to demonstrate how our research strategy – to follow real-estate values – came up from my experiences in the field. Before I attended my first local planning committee, I was given a short introduction by the vice-mayor to the workings of the committee. What follows is a paraphrasing of her brief: First, one has to remember that as a general rule, a local planning committee is the lowest planning body in the Israeli planning system. It is subordinate to the regional and the national planning committees. In most local councils the local planning committee is the first arena in which construction plans are being approved prior to the final verdict of the relevant regional committee. However, the Tel- Aviv Master Plan that was approved by the Greater Tel-Aviv Regional Planning Committee in 2015, grants the Tel-Aviv Local Planning Committee the ability to approve everything that falls under its jurisdiction, without requiring the approval of the regional committee. This unusual state of affairs sets the Tel-Aviv local planning committee apart from all other municipal planning committees. All thirty-one of Tel-Aviv' elected council members, including the vice-mayor, are officially members of the local planning

Chapter 4: Entering the Field – How Did We Come to Follow Real-Estate Values

committee. However, in practice, a sub-committee that consist of only eleven members is responsible for most of the decisions. The planning procedures in the local planning committee, include, first, a general approval to start the planning processes and a call for the public to raise any possible objections to it. In case that there are objections, there is a second discussion in which the objectors are invited to speak in front of the committee. The committee can accept or decline the objections and, either modified or not, must vote in favour of the plan in order for it to be approved. During their bi-weekly gatherings, in addition to the sub-committee members, the professional planning teams, the legal adviser, the city engineer, one government observer, one observer from an environmental body, and the Stenographer also present at the meeting. Trying to keep track of all the above detail, I still did not know what to expect when I first visited the committee's gatherings. The 12th floor relatively small room that included only one U-shaped table, 3 rows of chairs for the public and two big LCD monitors, seemed to fit more into a high school setting than into the headquarters of the richest city in the country.

Figure 5. An image of the Local Planning Committee Gathering that was taken from the public's seating area perspective.

My first few moments in that room were overwhelming. Not knowing who is who and what is what I just took a seat and tried to digest as much information as possible. One

Chapter 4: Entering the Field – How Did We Come to Follow Real-Estate Values

hour later I wrote in my notebook that "it seems that real-estate appraisers have a really really really important role in the planning process." 47 During that hour I was exposed to a few discussions that made me come to this conclusion. The first one involved the above-mentioned L Street plan. On that day, six persons came to raise their objection to the plan in front of the committee. Since a detailed explanation of the current debate, I then learnt, was available on-line, I quickly downloaded the document to my smartphone and skimmed through it as in an attempt to make better sense of the happenings. The file included an overview of the plan, relevant protocols from previous discussions, an extremely short overview of the objections to be raised, and even shorter replies already made by the council. I learnt that the plan was designed to replace five old buildings (see picture #6) with five new modern skyscrapers (see picture #7). A dispute emerged between two developers who were working separately on two separate parts of the plan, and were negotiating individually with the council, the residents, and the banks. One developer was responsible for two building that included a small council owned cabin located at the edge of one of the building's large yards. The second developer was responsible for three 'simple' buildings. The developer who was responsible for the three buildings believed that the council deprived him of his development rights, in comparison to the other developer, and came to ask for justice to be delivered. The loud and violent discussion about this issue did not only include hints of bribery and corruption but also one very important hero – the real estate appraiser. While each side raised his arguments, it was the real-estate appraiser, the only professional allowed to make judgments with regards to real-estate values, who was used to support them. Thus, the complaining developer said something along the lines of: "The fact that you allowed them to build 17 more apartments then us is outrageous. If there are real- estate valuation principles – they must be applied equally"48 The answer was very assertive: "Our original plot of land is much bigger than yours. It is a much more important factor for the value then the number of apartments. Therefore, it is clear why the valuation is fair." 49 As the committee meetings continued it became clear that the role that real-estate values played in the heated first debate of the session was not unusual. On the contrary, I started to suspect that REVs might be found in the centre of every plan. The hints were

47 From fieldnotes: 09.11.2016. 48 From fieldnotes: 09.11.2016. 49 From fieldnotes: 09.11.2016.

Chapter 4: Entering the Field – How Did We Come to Follow Real-Estate Values

everywhere. Not only in the above discussion between the two developers, but REV also kept coming up throughout the meeting - when discussing the amount of requested or approved construction, in the context of architectural design and aesthetics, in relation to existing and future infrastructure and facilities, and the possible construction of a new park that might have lasting effect on the surrounding REV. It seemed to me that real-estate values occupy all levels of urban organization from the inner-buildings' struggles about the distribution process of the new apartments50, through issues such as the above reported developer dispute, to issues such as the housing crisis, the future of the city and so forth. Therefore, I left the committee room that day with a realisation that REV just might be the key to a novel registration strategy.

Figure 6. L street

50 A very complicated process in which the real-estate appraiser must measure the value of each apartment prior to the reconstruction, grade it in comparison to the other apartments, measure the value of the new apartments and produce a conversion rate between the old and new real-estate.

Chapter 4: Entering the Field – How Did We Come to Follow Real-Estate Values

Figure 7. Visualization of the future L street.

(d) Touring Along the Conservation Plan and Discovering REV

If my experience during the local planning committee meetings gave me the first push towards a realisation of real-estate values as central to my research, then the following ethnographic tale, related to the conservation plan, gave me the certainty. During a meeting with the head of the conservation department I heard that there are ongoing hearings about the conservation plan in the Tel-Aviv regional appeal committee. We will later discuss in details what does the conservation plan mean and will closely follow these hearings. However, for now, it is enough to know that the conservation plan elevated the status of around a thousand buildings, deemed worthy of conservation due to historic or aesthetic reasons, from a 'normal' to a 'protected' status, i.e. from a situation in which a building is free to reconstruct itself, into a situation in which it is under prohibitions and liabilities that were put in place to ensure the building retains that which made it worthy of conservation in the council's eyes to begin with. This resulted in a series of lawsuits filed against the council by property owners, claiming loss of REV as a direct result of the plan and its ensuing regulations, with a total sum of around 2.5 billion NIS. The council's defence was that, while being conserved did increase the costs somewhat, and these costs were upon the owners, the very inclusion in the prestigious conservation list had a 'branding' effect which actually increased the value of the properties. Hearing about this story I decided that it might be a good idea to follow it. Contacting the head of the regional appeal committee,

Chapter 4: Entering the Field – How Did We Come to Follow Real-Estate Values

he told me that the actual discussions were over but that there are two tours in which both plaintiffs and council representatives plan to walk around protected buildings and use the physical evidence in order to make their cases in front of the arbitrating authority present – the committee chairman. Realising the ethnographic possibilities of this occasion, I immediately accepted the invitation. A few days later, at 9:00 AM I was waiting for the large group of lawyers, real estate appraisers, council officials, and the committee chairman to arrive before a long day that required, according to the tour's official invitation, "hiking shoes, water bottles and a hat"51. As I was standing on the pavement, in front of the first station - a 90 years old eclectic building, with a big sign attached to it stating that: "High level conservation and renovation works are taking place in this building"52 and promising: "Luxury apartments. Sizes range from 150 sqm to 400 sqm"53 - the group assembled gradually. One lawyer came on his bicycle, walking with them around for the entire day, while one, with whom I had lunch later, was wearing a shiny white fedora hat and a purple shirt, not unlike Batman’s joker. Following my preliminary on-line research, I was able to recognize T. - the most senior lawyer working on this lawsuit, while he and his daughter (a partner in the office) arrived by taxi. I also recognised the CEO of a big construction company specializing in conservation. Apart from these ‘celebrities’ I did not recognise anybody else. I could recognise, though, that they knew each other as they were smiling, laughing and casually conversing. I could also appreciate that the dress code - mostly t-shirts or short sleeved shirts with jeans, and maybe an extremely light jacket (perfect for the middle-eastern November weather) signalled that these people - who, as I assumed, probably spent hundreds of hours together in the committee room – were at the very least at ease with each other, the billions of shekels in dispute between them notwithstanding. The last person to arrive, wearing a flawless black suit, was the committee chairman. In his 40s and looking out of place in this group. Apologizing for being late - due to the eternal traffic jam on the Jerusalem-Tel- Aviv highway, the chairman, immediately accompanied by two sets of recording devices elevated by a cheerful, mid 40s, unofficially dressed committee employee, directed the group - at that moment around twenty man and woman from wide age groups, towards the gates surrounding the construction site in which the building stood. Entering a small square stocked with metal sticks and construction logs and blocked by a temporary wall made from cardboard, we all could observe the building quietly for the first time that day.

51 From fieldnotes: 14.11.2019. 52 From fieldnotes: 14.11.2019. 53 From fieldnotes: 14.11.2019.

Chapter 4: Entering the Field – How Did We Come to Follow Real-Estate Values

The astonishing three floor ‘mansion’ obviously knew better days. The buildings’ delipidated infrastructure - old pipes and wires, rusty window grates, swinging air- conditioner hangers, and the fading colours of the walls, demonstrated perfectly why the constitution of the conservation plan was conceived as such a great need. The chairman, accompanied by the audio technician, now wearing a heavy headset, went to the front and started to talk with the site manager. After stating clearly that, due to a lack of insurance, we should not stay for more than a few minutes in the site, the manager ordered a few of his employees to move the cardboard wall to show us the hole. Not expecting anything, I was shocked. For the first second it seemed that there is an entire city inside. Moments later I realized that the depth is only of a few floors. Pointing towards gigantic poles, the site managers explained that they are lifting the building, which is, as we speak, not connected to the ground. The argument that the private property owners’ representatives were trying to make was simple. Not being allowed to demolish the building, the additional time that is required to replace the building’s pillars, while not being allowed to do any work inside the building until the entire cellar is built and new permanent pillars are installed, is around 12 months. This extra time is so costly that it makes one of the main compensations’ mechanisms of the conservation plan - the permission to build underground - almost completely worthless. The fact that the building in front of us was owned by one of the richest persons in the state was mentioned as part of the argument in a manner that emphasised that only the most affluent people could afford such things. The council, represented by a group of real estate appraisers and lawyers working on a fixed contract, one construction engineer responsible for all the constructions permits issued by the council and a few other council employees, argued that the big hole in front of us is a testimony to the additional rights this building received, and therefore the owner has no grounds to claim loss of REV, on the contrary. “The owner is going to build two underground floors” the council’s real-estate appraiser claimed, “the lower one will be used for shelter and storage spaces while the upper one will be connected to the ground floor apartments. Also, they were allowed to build a swimming pool in the back and add another 140 square meters above the top floor. The real estate arbitrator decided that the betterment tax needed to be paid here is 1.4 million NIS” 54 he concluded his argument decisively. Not discouraged by the numerical evidence, T. (the celebrity lawyer), calmly silenced everybody and stressed that while the engineer's claim might well be true, the building in question is not a regular 'protected' building, but a rarer 'severely-

54 From fieldnotes: 14.11.2019.

Chapter 4: Entering the Field – How Did We Come to Follow Real-Estate Values

protected' one – and those lucky few got better treatment, in terms of as they were allowed to sell their unusable development rights55. His clients' case is quite different. “The property owners group picked this building in order to demonstrate two things” he modified the first argument slightly - “how complicated it is to dig a cellar under an existing building and how it is self-evident that the building is branded due to its inner values and not due to its inclusion in the conservation list."56 The construction engineer responded that he asked a few other engineers and came to the conclusion that hanging a building should not cost more than 1 million NIS. The loud construction noise, mostly hammers knocking on something below and the even louder protest from some group members who could not hear the conversation, made the engineer hesitate for a moment before he continued. This building seems double in size then a typical Tel-Aviv one, he claimed, and thus the estimated digging cost should be as low as 2 million NIS. Responding to immediate attacks he was willing to admit that valuing the sums of the money lost due to the additional construction time, was something he, as an engineer who can estimate only direct costs, was unable to do. One appraiser who was also a protected property owner, did not give up easily and explained that if a building is still standing it is difficult to dig a hole as there is no way a big construction machines can access the construction site. The engineer argued that “difficult and expensive is the same thing, if it's hard and cheap than it is not that hard”.57 The committee chairman added that “we should not be talking about difficulties, only about money”.58 Trying to figure out whether or not ‘big construction machines’ can actually be used in such a building, the committee chairman asked the site manager what machines did they use. He was silenced immediately by the engineer who argued that the site manager is not involved with prices and thus should not be asked this question. “The price per meter on the ‘decisive date’ [two weeks after the plan was officially approved] was 11,00 NIS”,59 Argued the council’s senior real-estate appraiser, “if we multiply it by the size of the building’s new floor area, reducing 10% of everything below the ground, we get around 4 million NIS. This means that we are in a 35% betterment with regards to the most extreme calculation of the additional construction costs”.60 This erupted into a heated debate, splintered into many small arguments, raising issues such as the cost of the additional construction time, whether or not it is possible to

55 Unusable, since the conserved status meant they were not allowed to diverge from the original form too much. This somewhat complicated mechanism of rights and compensations might be at this point as-yet unclear to the reader, but will receive a detailed explanation in chapter five. 56 From fieldnotes: 14.11.2019. 57 From fieldnotes: 14.11.2019. 58 From fieldnotes: 14.11.2019. 59 From fieldnotes: 14.11.2019. 60 From fieldnotes: 14.11.2019.

Chapter 4: Entering the Field – How Did We Come to Follow Real-Estate Values

work during the digging process properly (only very gentle work is allowed), what is the most profitable thing to do with the building (demolish of renovate), how many development rights the owners could have sold if they were not building the cellar, whether or not the windows need to be replaced, and what is the relation between the forced external conservation and the inner renovation costs. Eventually, the engineer stopped the havoc, and proclaimed: “We are standing here in front of a diamond and you are claiming that a chunk of glass could have replaced it. Friends, we have a rare diamond here, people are willing to pay unbelievable amounts of money to live in this palace”61 ‘It was a diamond before it was part of the list’ - it seemed that the entire property owner’s group almost shouted collectively. ‘We gave it the official stamp’ was the response. ‘We cannot witness the branding issue in this building’ the conclusion of the committee chairman was.

Figure 8."The manager ordered a few of his employees to move the cardboard wall to show us the hole"

61 From fieldnotes: 14.11.2019.

Chapter 4: Entering the Field – How Did We Come to Follow Real-Estate Values

Figure 9. The hole, behind the committee's recording man.

If it was necessary, I could go on and describe another 9 hours of such experiences. However, I hope that the description above is enough to explain how seminal that tour was for the development of my research perspective. What left the most impression on me was not the huge amount of compensation requested and not the vast resources invested in that debate but, rather, the fact that, again, real-estate values were in the centre of the happenings – since the entire discussion revolved around the question of their trend. Reflecting on the description above, that both the description of the current condition of the house and the description of what it will turn out to be, refer to the same issue – the effect of these on the value. The entire discussion, during the rest of the tour, was similar, as each side tried to prove that the plan shifted the values of real- estate this way or that. In a later stage of my fieldwork I read the entire protocols of the lawsuit and mastered all the details. At this point, I was still very confused and the reason that made me join the tour was the hope that it will reveal a hint that will help me move forward in my attempt to make sense of urban management and organisation. At that point I realized, through my participation in the tour, how central real-estate values are and how

Chapter 4: Entering the Field – How Did We Come to Follow Real-Estate Values

their associated disputes, which revolved around seemingly technical issues such as compensations, had a dramatic effect on the way the city is organized. So much so, that if the city were to lose the trial, the entire conservation plan, upon which much of the city's current branding is rooted, will have to be abandoned. I was convinced that I finally found my research strategy.

4.2. Discussion: What Does the Follow-Up of Real-Estate Values Mean for our Research?

As we have seen in the previous chapter, it is common for ANT-oriented research to set out by following one Actor-Network while conducting ethnographic studies. We have also established how Actor-Networks are seen as the most fundamental ontological unit - which is to say that everything is both part and a result of such networks. There is plenty of ethnographic research that followed these lines of investigation, such as Callon's study of scallops' Actor-Network (Callon, 1986) and Latour's investigation of the legal system via the legal files (Latour, 2002). I was inspired by such ethnographies and their ability to produce a meaningful image of reality by following the assembling process of previously invisible Actor-Networks. I therefore came to the conclusion that a similar strategy, of choosing one object and reconstructing it through attention to its Actor-Network conditions of possibility, might be useful in our case – looking at the formation process of the city via the REV lens without pre-assuming the ontological pre-existence of the urban. Thus, after finishing my first month of fieldwork, while processing the experiences described in this chapter, it was clear what our focal point should be – real- estate values. Like Callon's scallops and Latour's files, the empirical advantages of REVs are clear, since they relate to almost everything that happens in our field, as will be shown. Found everywhere across the city, from the protest movement, through the business circle, the arts, sports, and family life, all the way to the construction sites, REVs shape the sprawling infrastructure of the living city. The fact that REVs are to be found all around the city is an extremely promising premise from our ANT methodological perspective. Following them in their different states of assemblage might help us find how the city organisation is constructed, a mission that will be crucial in helping us develop a new urban account. We will later return to our discipline and review how each of the three urban narratives understands real-estate values. For this chapter it was important to focus on how real-

Chapter 4: Entering the Field – How Did We Come to Follow Real-Estate Values

estate values emerged from the field during my first attempt to make sense of what I do. We have seen that the earlier social protest and appraiser sensibilities that I brought with me to the journey were crucial for my ability to understand the urban reality to which I was exposed through the perspective of real-estate values. We then saw how my experiences in the local committee and in the regional appeal committee tour made me understand that the best strategy to ethnographically study the city is not to limit myself to bounded areas but to follow the constantly moving, extremely dynamic REVs that are located everywhere and are related to everything. I hope that by giving them the respect that they deserve, and as we will see in the next chapter that they do not receive in the mainstream narratives, we will be able to paint a new image of the city that will tell us a different story. Moving forward, the next three chapters – the heart of our study - will be dedicated to a close examination of real-estate values. We will start by following REV in the conservation plan, and specifically, in the Branding-Dispute.

Chapter 5: Real-Estate Values in the Field: On the Trail of the 'Branding-Dispute'

5.0. Overview

After realizing that the ANT-oriented follow-up of REV will be the focus our research strategy, we will continue our journey with the conservation plan, and attempt to apply our methodology. We will start by further introducing the Tel-Aviv conservation plan, a major hub in our fieldwork due to its centrality in current municipal discussions and the scope and magnitude of its influence on urban organization, in which questions of value, planning, and municipal and private property regimes come into play. We will then focus on a single issue that has raised considerable commotion within the city – a legal battle known as the 'Branding-Dispute', which revolves around the relations between REV and the conservation plan. There, we will explore the council's attempts to prove that REV are representations of some external reality, and the plaintiffs counter-arguments. The chapter will unfold thusly: we will start by following REV via the path set forth by the Tel-Aviv Conservation plan and its associated 'Branding-Dispute' - an attempt made by the council to 'scientifically' claim that the very conservation of buildings increases their value by 5%. We will see how the various stages of this dispute expose us to a messy reality in which REV is not to be found through that which it is perceived to represent. The result, which will serve as a lead-up to the next chapter, will be to propose that if the notion of REVs-as-representations is false, and yet they nevertheless play an indispensable role in our urban field, then they most probably are actors in their own right, with an active role in the (re)formation and organization of the urban, and must be treated as such, methodologically, if not ontologically.

5.1. The Tel-Aviv Conservation Plan – an Introduction:

Any such complex and multifarious Actor-Network as the Tel-Aviv conservation plan cannot be reduced to a set of assertions without succumbing to a long list of assumptions of the kind this research aims to avoid. Plans are never just their intentions nor their multiple, sometime contradictory, local applications. Nevertheless, in order to gain some semblance of the pre-ethnographic understanding of the plan, which will later be confronted with the post-ethnographic register that we aim to develop, and to introduce the reader into the field, we will now introduce the somewhat cliché image, which would

Chapter 5: Real-Estate Values in the Field: On the Trail of the 'Branding-Dispute'

seem to be the council's official point of view, and with which I was introduced to the plan. In the early 90s, the Tel-Aviv council started compiling a list of 961 privately owned buildings62 deemed worthy of extra-ordinary attention and care, together with a set of permissions and prohibitions that dictate the buildings’ future construction possibilities63. The plan’s stated purpose is to direct the buildings’ owners towards (what is defined by the council as) conservation - meaning the preservation and (if necessary) restoration of the buildings’ external parts according to specific instructions given to the building’s owners by the council’s conservation department64. The power to push the buildings’ owners towards conservation is given to the council by the fact that the owners are barred from conducting any other type of renovations and are forced to fully obey the council's specific conservation requirements if they wish to do any construction work on their (mostly crumbling) houses. In addition, some financial incentives were included in the plan in order to make the conservation process financially feasible. In order to assemble the conservation list65, the council, influenced by similar systems from around the world, picked seven qualifying parameters – (1) decoration, (2) quality of the internal and the external space, (3) quality of the construction and the materials, (4) architect, (5) location, (6) social value and (7) physical condition. Each parameter was awarded between one and six points. The 800 buildings that were announced as protected get at least 20 points while the 169 buildings that were announced as severely-protected get at least 35 points. The 961 buildings are classed as either International, Eclectic, or Special. The term International comes to signify the more common term Bauhaus, known in the professional communities as Modernist Architecture (Whitford, 1984). There is very little agreement in regards to what exactly is Bauhaus as it is a highly politicized term (Forgacs, 1995), however, it is possible to point at the origins of the style from inter-war Germany, when pragmatic construction was needed in order to reconstruct the ruins with the very limited

62 Most of the buildings have shared ownership of different apartment owners. Some are owned by only one person. We will soon learn that this separation is extremely important. 63See: (“Tochnit Leshimur Mivnim be Tel-Aviv [Tel-Aviv Conservation Plan],” 2008) 64 The Tel-Aviv council's planning department is constructed of regional sub-departments ('South', 'North', 'East' and 'Center') and special sub-departments such as Conservation and Strategic Planning. The conservation department is responsible for the actual conservation of specific buildings. Thus, the architects who work in this sub-department set the requirements for expected conservation and supervise the implementation of their requirements. The actual planning of the protected buildings-oriented construction (the making of the construction plans) is the work of another dedicated sub-department. 65 For the sake of clarity, due to the fact that this part serves as mere framework for our story, I decided to present a 'naïve' or, rather, technical, version of the list's assembling process. The reader should be aware of the fact that this subject is a matter of great controversy around the field.

Chapter 5: Real-Estate Values in the Field: On the Trail of the 'Branding-Dispute'

resources at hand. The Bauhaus school was created in order to develop suitable solutions that will allow building efficient and sustainable houses (Anker, 2010). Arriving to Palestine with the Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the Bauhaus, characterized by its straight lines, functional living spaces and white colours, was widely adopted into the local construction scene as it was celebrated by the dominant socialist ideology. Unnoticed for many years, today Tel-Aviv is considered as the urban area with most Bauhaus buildings in its city centre (Cohen, 2003). Eclectic buildings were built in Tel-Aviv mostly during the 1920s and are known, from an architectural point of view, as hybrids of western building techniques and various different kinds of decorations (Lerer & Lerer, 2013). These buildings, that were built by the very rich, look like urban mansions or castles and despite being extremely prominent they only occupy a very small part of the list. The special buildings are very few unique constructions such as synagogues, water towers and workers' communes, which fall into neither of the above categories. The Tel-Aviv conservation plan, which is the first ever plan in the history of Israel to be dedicated completely for conservation, is different from most urban conservation plans around the world as it is not a regional plan, i.e. a plan that affect one specific part of a city (Harrison & Hitchcock, 2005). Thus, location-wise, the listed buildings are non- related. As each was picked due to its own individual qualities, the buildings have no direct relations to any specific location. Most of them are indeed located around an area of the city centre known (now) as the ‘White city’, however, they do not populate the entire area as they are spread around and are located next to many non-listed buildings. The unbound nature of the plan is challenged by the location-specific UNESCO declaration of the Tel- Aviv White city as a World Heritage site from 200366. This declaration is very much related to the conservation plan and took place in the midst of its long planning period (between 1990-2008) and was accompanied by commitments that the council agreed to take with regards to constructions in the city-centre area, such as limiting approved colour palette and the number of floors allowed. These commitments are not directly connected to the plan (as they effect all buildings in the area) but, obviously, are also not completely disconnected from it. From a council's perspective, the Tel-Aviv conservation plan is seen as part of the big conservation trend exemplified by such endeavours as the UNESCO

66 See Tel-Aviv's White city's Unesco page (“White city of Tel-Aviv – the Modern Movement,” n.d.)

Chapter 5: Real-Estate Values in the Field: On the Trail of the 'Branding-Dispute'

declaration, the famous conservation of Sarona67, and a few other cases. The council made a lot of efforts to brand the White city as a place to be celebrated, with events such as the Tel-Aviv White Nights68, and with dedicated museums, exhibitions, tours, books, and movies, and, overall, the project is considered a successful transformation of the city's image, from the point of view of the council. My first forays into the ethnographic study of the conservation plan included extensive interviews with residents of protected buildings. They painted a different image, as they expressed mostly anger and resentment towards the plan, which took away their development rights and made any renovation a costly and complicated endeavour, all for no apparent reason as far as they were concerned. "All the street looks the same – some architect came and decided our building is different, and now we gotta deal with this mess"69 a protected Bauhaus building resident complained. This clash, between the council and the homeowners, and the role that REV played in these disputes, proved to be a fertile ethnographic ground and will be the focus of our coming chapter.

Figure 10. An Eclectic building in central Tel-Aviv.

67 A 19th century German Templar Christian colony in central Tel-Aviv, whose distinct remnants – after decades of dilapidation and neglect, have undergone extensive renovation in recent years and have been transformed into a high-end shopping district. 68An annual, all-night, festival celebrating the heritage of the White-city, all around the town. For the official page in English, see: “White Night Tel Aviv 2017: All Events,” 2017 69 From fieldnotes: 14.10.2016

Chapter 5: Real-Estate Values in the Field: On the Trail of the 'Branding-Dispute'

Figure 11. A Bauhaus building in central Tel-Aviv.

5.2. The Branding-Dispute

As we shift our attention back to the field, with the newfound perspective of the methodological centrality of REV in our research, we are back again on the regional appeals committee tour. Now with our fellow tourists – plaintiffs and council representatives – I was, in a way, deep within the Branding-Dispute. Inspired by my delving into Actor- Network Theory literature, I was drawn into the controversy whose near culmination I was serendipitously invited to observe. The mapping of controversies, we are taught, is a useful technique to study the world (Latour, 1987; Law & Hassard, 1999). Among other things, by observing controversies we are exposed to the different rationalizations which are only brought up to the surface at times of dispute, when the black-boxes of a given field are still open. With that in mind, the potential of the Branding-Dispute to shed light on the workings of REV and of the city is clear. Therefore, we will delve into the dispute, by first examining its historical roots and the development of the REV-cantered quarrel that emerged.

Chapter 5: Real-Estate Values in the Field: On the Trail of the 'Branding-Dispute'

When the list of buildings was more or less finalized, the time to transform the intangible conservation objectives into something more concrete came. The fact that the listed buildings were all privately owned posed the main challenge for the planning team. Conservation is an expensive process, and the council cannot force someone to conserve her house (at least not directly). Therefore, the only way to make the plan meaningful is to establish a set of mechanisms that will stimulate the property owners to participate in this extremely expensive process. In other words, the plan makers must create Market Devices (Callon et al., 2007) that will make conservation profitable. There is another side to this coin. Usually, a plan is something that adds value to a property as it most often grants it additional development rights. In the rare cases in which plans reduces the value of properties, the council is liable to pay compensations. Being very unusual, the conservation plan’s inner logic is based on limitations forced on property owners, who are required to follow very strict (and expensive) regulations in order to do what they were previously allowed to do freely. Thus, this depriving aspect, combined with the scope and magnitude of the conservation plan as one of its kind, forced the council to be extremely creative so as to make sure that the plan’s financial outcome will deny the right of homeowners to claim for compensations70. The need to incentivize the owners of the protected properties to participate in a conservation process (instead of leaving their properties untouched) together with the need to avoid any possible compensation claims, led the council to develop a few mechanisms that were based on ideas either original or borrowed from around the world. The first such mechanism was based on the list’s main separation between the ‘severely-protect buildings’ that were only to be conserved perfectly, as close to the original as possible - without any additions or changes, and the ‘protected buildings’ that were allowed some changes, additions and modifications according to the discretion of the council’s conservation department, but still had to comply with orders such as (1) the need to ‘open’ balconies that, during the years, were connected to the inner parts of the houses, (2) the need to remove bars from windows, (3) the prohibition on adding elevators and parking spots in front of the building facade, (4) the huge additional construction costs of cellars as the

70 The council was unable to 'simply' compensate the protected buildings owners for any expected loses as it wouldn’t be feasible financially to do so. As we will shortly see, the lawsuits against the council came up to be around 2.5 billion NIS, almost equal to the council's annual budget. In addition, the council is never enthusiastic about 'admitting' its faults, so as to avoid the encouragement of additional lawsuits.

Chapter 5: Real-Estate Values in the Field: On the Trail of the 'Branding-Dispute'

protected houses needed to be hanged71 during the process and (5) the possible loss of some development rights. The above list, that demonstrates the high cost of protected buildings, is accompanied by additional expenses such as the need to finance the cost of the much more expensive special materials, in either protected or severely-protected situations, than normal renovation works would require and the costs of the conservation file - a detailed historical and architectural analysis of the house that every building that wants to start the conservation process must have. In light of all of the above, the first mechanism that the council developed was to grant the buildings labelled as severely-protected the permission to sell their previously owned development rights72. The Transferable Development Rights (TDR) mechanism, based on similar techniques that were taken from the United States (Boffard, 2014; McConnell & Walls, 2009) allowed the owners of severely-protected homes to sell all their development rights. The TDR mechanism was extremely complicated and required a lot of hard work. Having to find someone to buy the rights while relying on extremely complicated valuations was demanding. Nevertheless, over all, it was a profitable trade that fulfilled its aims as it was evident that property owners wanted to conserve their houses in order to be able to sell their TDRs. The creation of companies which were buying severely- protected buildings and conserving them so as to, later, be able to sell the TDRs and make substantial profits, can confirm that these newly created entities were indeed financially attractive to some. Moving to the more substantial list of protected buildings (as opposed to the severely-protected ones), it seems that the challenge facing the council was much more serious. Due to the fact that the ownership of unused development rights was legally equal to any other sort of ownership, the council was forced to either allow the 800 protected buildings to use the development rights that they had prior to the plan, or to suffer unrealistic compensation costs73. That being the case, the council decided to allow for the simple protected buildings to use their previously owned development rights under the strict supervision of the conservation department. In that light, the protected building could not be given additional (regular) development rights as compensation, as the

71 If a developer is awarded with the rights to add a basement to an existing building, she can usually dig one up without too much preparatory work. In the case of conserved buildings, though, extra care must be taken, and the entire building is lifted on expensive temporary scaffolding as protection. 72 It is important to notice that most buildings in the list had a lot of unused development rights awarded to them by earlier plans. 73 is not clear why the council did not initiate a protected building's development rights' trade similar to the TDR mechanism that is only designed for the severely protected properties. Many raised the argument that such a mechanism could have solved the protected buildings complains at once.

Chapter 5: Real-Estate Values in the Field: On the Trail of the 'Branding-Dispute'

protected buildings could not be modified to such a degree, but nor were they given TDRs since the additional costs of maintenance and renovation were not deemed high enough. Thus, creative solutions had to be invented in order to finance the excessive conservation costs. The ground level apartments were given the rights to fence off their own gardens, the top-level apartments were given the rights to build on the roof and the right to construct service cellars that could be connected to the main building were included in the plan as means to compensate protected property owners. Unlike the severely-protected buildings and the newly adopted TDR mechanism, it seems that the protected buildings’ financial package was much more limited in its ability to stop compensation lawsuits and incentivize property owners towards the conservation of their houses. The fact that, different from severely-protected buildings, protected building often had more than one owner, which greatly complicated the conservation process, and the fact that the national anti-earthquake plan, that granted every building additional development rights as a self-finance protection mechanism, which has although excluded the protected buildings from the settlement, was still seen as a gate for potential lawsuits, sharpened the council preparation for a gigantic conflict with the protected buildings owners. Under these circumstances, a peculiar 'defence-mechanism' was hatched. According to the council - the plan was not only responsible for additional costs that were forcing the council to pay compensations but was also responsible for an increase in the real-estate values of the protected buildings due to what was later termed by the council as the branding value. Despite its seemingly over-sophisticated and excessively technical character, the idea of the branding value is a relatively straightforward one. As was clearly explained to me by a former council employee who was working in the real-estate valuation department at the time: "One of the guys in the department noticed that some offices that were located in protected buildings added a sketch of the buildings to their business card. That was the first time we were thinking about the branding factor. If someone uses his building’s image on his business card it means that the building is branding his firm and thus is a bit more valuable than what it used to be before it became protected”74. Lacking admissible defence against compensation claims, the council had to find a new way. The logic of the suggested solution was very simple: If a building’s value was negatively affected due to its inclusion in the conservation list, and its resulting incurred costs, but, in parallel, it could be shown that the building also gained some value due to

74 From fieldnotes: 23.08.2017.

Chapter 5: Real-Estate Values in the Field: On the Trail of the 'Branding-Dispute'

the same inclusion, then, the unavoidable compensation lawsuit will magically turn into a much simpler accounting disagreement, with regards to which both parties are, more or less, equal. As part of this logic, the council started to issue betterment taxes claims for the value added to the protected buildings due to what was called the Branding Factor. Calculated as 5% increase in protected houses and 6% increase in severely-protected ones, the betterment taxes claim of half of this increase were extremely large. What made this strategy successful was the fact that in these years the council’s real-estate appraising unit was still associated directly with the planning department and was involved with (almost) every plan. It was also allowed to negotiate with homeowners and use its mandate to reduce the expected betterment tax as a planning tool. Thus, if one was to agree not to seek compensations, the appraising unit had the authority to reduce his branding associated betterment taxes. In 2008, after the plan was (finally) officially approved, the council, expecting to be flooded with compensation lawsuits, offered every property owner, who will agree not to seek compensations, to nullify his future branding associated betterment tax bill. The offer to abolish the mutual claims was very tempting to many property-owners who were not as informed as the council. In addition, the fact that betterment taxes claims must be paid relatively quickly, while the payments of compensations might entail years long saga in the courts, pushed many to agree to the council's deal. Eventually, in 2011, after the time in which one can appeal to the courts with regards to compensations ended, 35075 lawsuits for a total of 2.4 billion NIS were submitted. Most of the 2.4 billion NIS compensation claims were related to the fact that the right to enjoy the national anti-earthquake plan’s incentives was denied from the protected buildings. Disagreements regarding the actual additional costs of the conservation, disputes regarding the meaning of the need to ‘open’ all the listed buildings’ balconies together with a few other issues, were also central to the 350 compensations lawsuits. The council’s counter argument for the branding associated betterment tax claim was less coherent. Most betterment tax claims are based on actual additional development rights being rewarded by a plan. If, for example, a new plan rules that all the properties within one part of the city are allowed to add 120 square meters, then, if a property owner builds these 120 meters, she will have to pay 50% of their value. The complications are numerous, the value of the additional meters is always a topic of dispute that involves very

75 Some representing entire buildings and some representing individual flats.

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basic notions such as time, similarities, the market, the interpretation of formal plans, etc. However, the basic logic stands - something very real was awarded and for that reason the debate mostly involves the quantity of the payment and not its basic justification. The fact that our case was not about ‘real’ things but about the claim that the inclusion of one's property in an exclusive list adds value to the buildings, was making things much more complicated and shifted the debate into the legal sphere. So far, we presented the Branding-Dispute and its relations to the Tel-Aviv conservation plan. We discussed the two different sides of the conservation-oriented financial coin: (1) the compensation lawsuits that were issued by the protected property owners against the council and the (2) branding associated betterment taxes claims issued by the council against the property owners. Chronologically, the compensation lawsuits were first debated at the Tel-Aviv local planning committee and after they were rejected by this council-controlled committee they were transferred (after the property owners appealed) to the regional appeal committee. The branding-oriented betterment taxes claim were first debated in front of specially appointed real-estate valuation arbitrators, after which they were also transferred to the regional appeal committee. Thus, in practice all compensation and branding issues were brought before the same committee and were handled together as part of the same proceedings. Being aware of these technicalities and understanding that everything is interrelated in such disputes, from now on we will only follow that which matters most to us – the efforts of the council to prove that it is justified to issue betterment taxes claims for the branding associated increase in the REV of the protected buildings.

5.3. Early Attempts to Prove the Branding Factor

Following, more or less, the temporal order of things, we left the Branding-Dispute while it was waiting to be brought in front of the Greater Tel-Aviv Regional Appeal Committee, where, after a long series of debates, proceedings and tours, it was to be eventually ruled upon. As I learnt from the protocols, and from interviews from participants, the committee chairman was very specific in his opening remarks with regards to the council's burden of proof. Three boxes had to be ticked so as to win the argument and be allowed to collect taxes for the branding-related real-estate values increase:

1) The council had to prove that the rise in the value of the listed buildings was larger than the average real-estate value’s rise.

Chapter 5: Real-Estate Values in the Field: On the Trail of the 'Branding-Dispute'

If the council's argument that the conservation plan branded the protected buildings thus making them more valuable is to be affirmed then, the most basic thing that needs to be shown is that the protected buildings gained some more value than similar non-protected ones. Only if one can show that this is indeed the case, one can argue that the branding is responsible for such an increase. If no increase was detected then obviously the (so called) branding could not have had any effect.

2) The council had to prove that the rise in the value of the listed buildings is directly connected to the council's actions, i.e. to the buildings’ inclusion in the list.

This second stage relies upon the assumption that the council was able to prove that there is some unexplained increase in the value of protected houses when compared to similar non-protected ones. Establishing the fact that indeed there is such an unexplained surge in value it is still for the council to prove that this increase is directly related to the branding and not to any other factors. 3) The council had to prove that it is legally allowed to claim betterment taxes for the value increase. This last stage relies upon the assumption that the council did manage to prove that the branding of the listed properties was responsible for an increase in their value. That being the case, it is still not clear whether or not the council is allowed to claim betterment taxes for such a thing. If the first two issues were real-estate valuation associated then this is a legal one. However, we will shortly see that the boundaries are not that clear. The above, very prescriptive challenge, did not appear out of thin air. Early attempt to prove the existence of the branding factor were made either during the many real-estate arbitration processes that preceded the debate in the regional appeal committee or even earlier as part of the planning process. These early attempts were based on very general comparisons between Tel-Aviv and other urban areas. These comparisons relied upon the assumption that if it is possible to prove that real-estate values are modified in a specific way in a specific place, then the same could be said for the Tel-Aviv case. We will now review these early attempts which will help us better grasp the complexity (if not – impossibility) of attempting to establish the existence of 'branding'. As was just reported, making comparisons to ‘similar’ cases, mostly from around the world, was the dominant technique of the early proving attempts. Finding suitable comparisons for the purpose at hand was not easy, especially due to the fact that

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conservation plans inherently celebrate a place’s uniqueness. Nevertheless, the council did try to construct such comparisons. Being recognised as a UNESCO heritage city, one would think that Tel-Aviv’s reference group will be constructed from other cities with the same status. In practice, no such comparison was made. Instead, the argument was based on a fragmented collection of academic articles mostly from the field of economics. One of the first appearances of such literature can be found in a 2003 report dealing with the macro-economic effects of the Tel-Aviv conservation plan (city-Link, 2003). This document, that was prepared during the conservation plan's planning process as part of the economic checks that preceded any plan, includes a detailed, but very fragmented and only somehow related, literature review of a few chosen cities such as: - Newcastle (UK): in which, as it was found in a 1996 research, 91% of the 217 interviewees agreed that it is important to restore historic buildings and 53% of them showed willingness to increase their council taxes to do so (Garrod, Willis, Bjarnadottir, & Cockbain, 1996) - Denver (US): in which, the monthly average proportions between conservation permit requests and demolition permit requests was 45 to 1, according to what was measured between April 1990 and March 1992 (Tiesdell, Oc, & Heath, 1996). - Annapolis (US): In which, the historical district’s properties values raised in 8 years during the 1970th, from 18 million USD to 38 million USD. This increase was related, according to the paper, to the council’s restorations and conservations actions (Myers, 1977). - Seattle (US): In which, during the 1970s, the commercial properties’ renting prices in the historical centre have risen by 6-8% as a result of the local conservation plan and the number of vacant apartments dramatically decreased. This happened while 20% of the historical district was conserved and the area started to attract many restaurants, coffee shops, second hand clothes' shops, art and furniture shops, galleries and bookstores (Weinberg & Atkinson, 1979). The document also reviewed the social effects of conservation, (city-Link, 2003, p. 41) and concluded that conservation has three ‘symbolic’ roles: (1) connecting society with history, (2) exposing an area’s inner values to the public and (3) providing it with aesthetic pleasure. The broad economic effects of conservation were also reviewed - especially conservation plans’ ability to help the reconstruction of city centres and ‘ruined’ neighborhoods, their ability to attract trade, businesses, culture and tourism to ‘weak’ urban spots and, most importantly - the (generally) positive correlations between rising real-estate values and conservation plans (Ibid; p. 42). The area known as Castlefield, located in

Chapter 5: Real-Estate Values in the Field: On the Trail of the 'Branding-Dispute'

Manchester UK, was presented as an example of the economic success to which a local conservation plan can lead. The proof of this success was related to the fact that the number of tourists, internal or external, in the area “raised from 0 to 2 million and the demand for housing, trade and businesses increased dramatically” (Ibid; p. 48), no mention of what happened to the low-income residents who used to live in that area was added. During my fieldwork I had many encounters with similar literature reviews used by the council in their attempt to prove the existence and positive influence of the branding factor. These were hidden in plain sight in documents, protocols and news reports, yet it seems were almost never carefully examined by the plaintiffs, arbitrators, judges, and policy makers. Their role within this debate was to give academic credence to the council's argument. Another very particular article had a most prominent position in my field as I repeatedly witnessed it in action. This article, pursuing a case in Ku-Ring-Gai, a suburb of Sydney, was often mentioned as one of the most important ‘tools’ used by the council to prove that conservation plans, indeed, branded listed buildings. According to the council's much-repeated argument, the conservation list in the suburb included 700 houses of which 83% are single family homes. The immediate rise of post-plan listed building value was 12% and a strong correlation was found between the quality of the listed property (according to the local plan’s ranking system) and the rate of value change. Reading the regional appeal committee’s protocols, I learned that during the early days of the dispute, the above paper was frequently used and a calculation based on the correlation between the Australian homes’ ‘quality’ and the rise in value was constructed. A property owner, who was part of the dispute, described this Australian issue in a very frustrated manner: “Let's look at this Australian case for a moment. When you first see it, it looks like a serious research that shows that protected buildings are indeed more valuable. However, when you check things for yourself you can easily find out that the conservations’ procedures in that suburb are completely different from our case here. You can also see that the property owners actually got tax benefits. They get money from the state to conserve their houses and nobody thought it had any effect on the prices?”.76 Quickly returning to the schedule of the Branding-Dispute - the council started to collect the branding related betterment taxes almost immediately after the plan was approved. During the first three years, in which the property owners were still allowed to claim compensations, the council signed many deals with the property owners, according to which the property owners promised not to sue the council and, in return, the council

76 From fieldnotes: 20.1.2017.

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promised not to charge betterment taxes from the property owners. This tactic was quite successful as many hundreds of deals were signed. If, nevertheless, a property owner was not willing to sign, the council charged betterment taxes from her. In this situation, the property owner could agree to pay or could appeal and ask to go in front of a real-estate valuation arbitrator. These arbitrators had a semi-jurisdictional position and were allowed to decide in favour of one of the sides or come up with their own valuation. During these ‘early’ real estate valuation arbitrations days, the literature review was vastly used and the Australian based formula commonly appeared as a valuation tool. However, the council’s efforts did not bear fruit, as the results of the Australian research, similarly to most others, could be easily explained without the need to use the abstract notion of ‘branding’. Reading the real-estate arbitrators’ explanations regarding their reluctance to rely on the literature review, one can see that the value of the houses in Australia increased because, unlike the Tel-Aviv case, the Australian owners got additional development rights, their conservation plan was suburb based, and the matching buildings were not in a similar enough size and were not part of a ‘similar’ enough plan - in other words, hardly a suitable comparison in all but terminology. In most post-2011 arbitrations and during the hearings in the appeal committee, the literature review related claims were hardly heard. Following the hearings, it was felt that there was no way to connect the economic figures of the Tel-Aviv conservation plan with any other ‘similar’ cases. The common agreement was that specific real-estate valuations are in a different sphere than the general, universal, economic ‘truths' one could potentially infer from similar cases around the world. The details are so many and the facts vary so much that it is perceived as futile to compare two different cities even if they represent similar macro-economic phenomenon. The early failures to convince the appeals committee of the branding argument through a comparison to similar cases from around the world led to the conclusion of the committee chairman that if the council wants to prove the branding argument it must demonstrate it specifically. The fact that somewhere else the value of property increased means that somewhere else the value of property increased. Nothing else.

5.4. The Kapelner Report – a Statistical Attempt to Substantiate Branding

When pushed by the committee chairman or by the residents' representatives, the council’s officials always returned to their feelings. A typical response was:

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“If our methods do not convince you, suggest different ones. We will happily take the challenge as we believe that the branding factor exists - We feel it”,77 These feelings are based on the very intuitive understanding of rarity. If you have only 1000 protected buildings then it is obvious that the scarcity will shape the ‘will’ of the ‘market’ to spend on it. The market was presented in the council’s arguments mostly through the descriptions of real-estate advertisements. As was expressed by a council clerk in one of the committee's frequent altercations: "If there is no branding, why do so many ads emphasise the fact that the house they publish is a protected one?"78 Many such examples were given during the committee meetings, illuminating the fact that in most newspaper ads, real-estate letting office listings, and for-rent signs the conservation was mentioned as a positive thing. Living next to a protected building brandishing a sign inviting everybody to buy an apartment in a ‘conserved pearl’, I could easily associate with this argument. A different set of feelings was also floating above the surface. The excessive renovation costs, the unknown future, and the fear from unexpected future payments led the discussion to the notion of ‘negative branding’ that, just like a ‘rare disease’, has no connection with any possible positive effects. As one property owner’s narrated, while advertising, he felt he had to include information about the fact that his houses are protected out of fear of being sued for misleading his clients, a tale which perfectly demonstrated this second type of mood. As feelings were not enough to resolve the three aforementioned challenges, the council needed a direct evidence for the existence of an unexplained surge in the value of the listed buildings, that can be later attributed to branding. The Kapelner report (Kapelner, 2011) came to the world in the light of this mission. The purpose of this real- estate valuation study, named after Naomi Kapelner, the real-estate appraiser who was responsible for it, was to group protected and non-protected apartments into as similar as possible couples and compare the shift in value between the post-conservation plan selling prices of each one of the apartments, so as to see if the protected apartments' surge in value was greater than the surge in value of the non-protected ones. Representing the council, Kapelner hoped that by conducting the most comprehensive comparison to date, she will be able to point at the listed buildings and show that some hidden and unexplained value was added to them.

77 From fieldnotes: 14.11.2016. 78 From fieldnotes: 14.11.2016.

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Relying on the only public library in which the selling prices of real-estate values were systematically collected - the tax authorities' database, Kapelner had to work hard in order to construct similar enough couples that will allow her to detect any differences in the real- estate values between the protected and the non-protected properties. Trying to eliminate factors that might be responsible for 'non-branding' increase in value, all apartments that were somehow concretely awarded by the conservation plan were immediately removed from the comparison. That being the case, Kapelner excluded all upper apartments (that were allowed to expand into the roofs) and lower apartments (that were allowed to expand into the yards) and was thus left only with what she nicknamed as the 'sandwiches apartments', meaning the middle-floor apartments. Due to the need to make sure that the comparison will be based on as similar as possible apartments, any apartment that had 'special features' such as parking, big balconies or garages was also removed. Real estate appraisers know how to compare apartments with different features by using ‘adjusting-parameters'. However, as real-estate appraisers base these parameters on gut feelings and due to the fact that these feelings often create many disputes, Kapelner decided that it will be better to avoid any special apartments and concentrate only on the simplest ones. Being limited by so many factors, the number of relevant apartments that could be added to Kapelner's comparison was consequently very low. As only sandwich apartments with no special features that were sold after the conservation plan was approved were applicable, only 19 protected and 30 non-protected apartments were found. After assembling the list of apartments relevant to the task at hand, the decision which apartments will be compared to which was the next very challenging task. As Kapelner had to eliminate any 'interference', meaning, any substantial differences that might be used to explain the non-similar selling price, she made a great effort to compare between the most similar apartments possible - meaning apartments that were located no more than one kilometre away from each other, that were sold during the same three months, that were in a similar size (no more than 12 square meters of difference was allowed) and that were located in ‘similar’ environments in relation to parameters such as the proximity to main roads, to public transportation, to schools and so forth. Overtaking all of the above challenges, Kapelner was finally able to use the constructed couples in order to compare the selling prices. The results were very pleasing from Kapelner's (and the council's) perspective as it was found that there is 8.5% difference in favour of the protected apartments selling prices. Some reservations to the results were indeed made such as the claims that the sample size was not big enough, the fact that some

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protected buildings were used twice, the ownership structure of the buildings that should have been taken into account, the fact that it was not clear whether or not the non-listed apartments were part of any previous conservation plans and, most importantly, the fact that the differences that were found between the 'couples' ranged between -26 (the non- listed apartment was sold for 26% more than the listed one) to +31. These, and similar, reservations made the council decrease the result a bit and decide that the actual number that should be used is 5% branding-oriented value surge for the protected buildings and 6% for the severely protected ones. The property owners’ representatives did not reject the Kapelner report completely. They did not find any reason not to accept its underlying assumptions according to which if a systemic difference in the selling prices of similar apartments could be found, it would serve as a great testimony for the existence of a hidden value. Nevertheless, being in agreement with regards to the fundamental valuation logic did not mean that the property owners’ representatives were willing to admit that the Kapelner report was well established. On the contrary, they argued that there is a serious problem with the actual creation of the list due to the fact each and every property is unique. That being the case it is obvious that there is no way to put two different apartments in direct relation with each other. When I joined the regional appeal committee tour, we spent much of the day walking between different properties that were compared to each other. Seeing the apartments from up close, the property owners’ representatives pointed at numerous differences, such as the proximity to the main road, the state of the building, the character of the street and so forth, that stood between the so-called 'similar' apartments and could, potentially, explain the differences in the selling prices without the need to use the notion of branding. The fact that the protected properties were, by definition, different from any non-protected properties by the six council approved criteria, which made them a part of the list in the first place, shed some more light on the unstable legs on which the group of similarities stood. In light of all of the above, the council had to accept the fact that the Kapelner report was not perfect. Not going as far as the property owners’ representatives to claim that there is no possibility to make an objective comparison, the council's representatives did agree that in order to fully establish their claim much more data is needed.

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“Unless we go to every seller and every buyer and interview them personally”, one council’s appraiser is quoted in the protocols as saying, “and get inside every apartment and scrutinize every toilet seat”, he continued, “we will not be able to have a better proof than what we already have”79. No serious disagreement was heard from the property-owners side. Everybody accepted the fact that real-estate appraisers are not statisticians, as it was obvious that they do not have enough data to utilise statistical tools. The real-estate appraising profession is based on limited information and usually revolves around comparisons between similar properties. The appraiser has the professional knowledge to decide what is indeed ‘similar’ and how to adjust different parameters to one united database, according to her own trained judgment. She also enjoys the authority to be the only one who is allowed, legally, to do so. As we have seen in the paragraph above, the disagreement between the real estate appraisers was connected to the actual similarities and the quality of the data at hand. The council claimed that this is the best possibility, and that ‘in the world of real-estate appraisers’ it certainly does the job. The property owners claimed that the fact that there is such a disagreement in regards to the 'fitting' of the couples means that the comparison is just not sufficient. Examining the Kapelner reports through our empirical sensibilities, I see the attempted leap from the ideographic to the nomothetic, i.e. from the individual valuation process, in which the use of similarities is very common and accepted but not for the sake of the creation of a general rule but rather for the practicality of the here and now, to the attempt to expose a general real-estate tendency, as the most revealing aspect of the Kapelner report tale. We will return to what this means for our understanding of REV, and, in turn, of the city, in a moment. But first, let us examine the council's attempts to fulfil the chairman's second requirement – to link the rise in value to the conservation list.

5.5. Linking the Rising Value to the Conservation List

Having to ignore the fact that they do not know whether or not the chairman will accept their claims and acknowledge that indeed there is some unexplained value surge associated only with protected properties, the council had to assume that its first challenge was successful and, now, prove that the unexplained rise in value is directly related to the creation of the conservation list.

79 From: Tel-Aviv region's planning and construction's appeal committee, betterment taxes and compensations, protocol 1, Page 35, 23.6.2016. (“Tochnit Hasimur 2650b - Protocols [Converstaion Plan 2650b - Protocols],” n.d.).

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Contrary to the first challenge, which was to prove the very existence of an unexplained rise in value, it was obvious to the council that to point at any type of correlation between some surge in value and any abstract factor such as the branding was not something that could be done through the use of either proper or 'quasi' statistics. To understand why, it is enough to listen to what one of the property owners shouted at the council representative in an attempt to get his branding-oriented betterment taxes waived: “You didn’t give us permission to build additional floors, you are trying to force us to pay for an abstract notion, a mere theory. You cannot rely on approximations, if you want to collect taxes for something, you must prove that this ‘thing’ exists”80 Assuming that indeed there is some unexplained surge in real-estate values – how does one prove that there is such thing as branding that is responsible for such an increase? Relying on external factors such as a list of 'similar' apartments could not work in this case as it was not the 'difference' that was needed here, but rather it is something positive (in the numeric sense) that was operating by its own means, that had to found. Not being able to rely upon any scientific style comparisons, the council had to use a different type of logic to establish this second point. Thus, it was the council's and the property owners' representatives' common-sense that was put into trial here. Looking at attempts to prove that the branding is responsible for the reported rise in real-estate values and at attempts to refute this claim, is revealing. This is due to the fact that, as we will see now, any attempt to distinguish between the real-estate values and what might be seen as their external cause, can only be hinted at (either convincingly or not), but never proven. In other words, we can say that there is no way to relate the happenings in one part of the network with the happening in its other parts. The surge in value and the branding factor cannot be associated by any means. The stubborn attempts to do that, as we will see now, prove the last point vividly, as both the council and the property owners try time and time again to claim that it is either self-evident or is not, that the list is branding the buildings, by appealing to seemingly similar lines of argument. Neither side feels challenged. The following exchange is quite simple – the council argues that it is obvious that the inclusion of something in a prestigious list is branding it, thus making it more valuable, while, according to the counter argument – the thing was already valuable in the first place and this is why it was inserted into the list. As we will see there is no clear way to decide if the branding is responsible for the value increase or the opposite, because the actors are

80 From fieldnotes: 14.11.2016.

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unable to truly distinguish between two things in the same network (the value and the brandings) nor prove any superiority of one over the other. The council’s starting argument utilized one of the most well-known lists in order to make its claim81: “When the Michelin guide determines that a restaurant is three stars its prices rise fourfold”. Another council real-estate appraiser explained during an argument in the appeal committee that "[the council is] just like the diamond’s institutes. Without their seal of approval, a diamond is always suspected as fake. They are giving certificates of authenticity and so are we." Pushing the argument further, a third real estate appraiser that was also part of the large group that was representing the council, reminded the audience that once upon a time a Van Gogh's painting was found in a cellar and was sold for millions even though it was never presented in the Louvre. Our case, however, the third real-estate appraiser argued, is different as the values of the protected buildings are not inherent to them but rather are a result of the conservation list. "We are not dealing with Rembrandt’s painting here, we have a collection of unknown baroque paintings that need our recognition’", he was almost desperately shouting. Struggling with the Micheline comparison that seemed to make the most impression on everybody, as it was the clearest example of the gains one can achieve by being associated with a prestigious list, the property owner's representatives claimed that there are big differences between the restaurants’ guide and the conservation list. The most important difference relates to the fact that every restaurant can ask to be taken out of the guide while buildings cannot do the same with the list. It was also argued by one of the home owners that all restaurant owners want to be included in the Michelin guide, while no building owners aspire to be included in the list. If it is necessary to keep the comparison, he said, then the UNESCO recognition of Tel-Aviv as a World Heritage Site82 should be equated to Micheline and not the council's list. Trying to level the playing field, the council fired back almost immediately, arguing that the list is similar to the protected flowers’ order due to the fact that just like the order it: "promises security and stability to the buildings". The answer, made by another lawyer who represented many home-owners came quick: "real-estate is different from flowers because sometimes the best thing to do with it is to destroy it completely". Moving from the domain of flowers back into the arts, a council representative escalated the argument by saying that the buildings should not be compared to unknown

81 All quoted parts in this section were taken from “Tochnit Hasimur 2650b - Protocols [Converstaion Plan 2650b - Protocols],” n.d. 82 The UNESCO declaration is not part of the plan rather an external addendum, therefore if the increase in value is a result of the declaration, then the council cannot claim credit for it.

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baroque paintings that were valuable to begin with but should actually be seen as “ugly pictures that can be found on a random wall”, meaning their inclusion in the list is the very source of their unique value. Moving forward with his argument, the council representative claimed that the list was responsible not only for the institutional recognition of the buildings but also for their social one: "We are not responsible for Marc Chagall’s paintings, however, the fact that we put them in a public museum helped them become recognised". Trying to explain that there are evident differences between the Louvre and a random ‘museum in rural Sicily’ and between Sotheby's and Ikea’s catalogues, one property owner declared that the conservation plan should not be seen as a ‘constructive’ mechanism but as a mere ‘defining’ tool. In his view, the plan merely identifies already valuable buildings and only acts as a rubber seal for their inherent value. Not losing any energy, one of the council’s lawyers declared that "it is the public that decided to recognise that the buildings are diamonds, similar to the way in which the public promoted the inclusion of the dead sea in the ‘Seven Wonders of The World’ list". With the council synonymous with the public, in his eyes, the council is thus responsible for the surge in value and is therefore allowed to charge taxes for it. The claim that the Wonders of The World list’ is undoubtedly adding value to the wonders themselves, was answered by a lawyer who described how he was waiting for two hours in the queue outside the Empire State Building, all the time not knowing that his long wait was only due to the building’s ‘Wonder’ status.

5.5. The Legal Issue

The council’s third challenge - to prove that if the branding factor is accepted as truth it is justified, legally, to charge taxes for it - presents one of the field’s most basic separations: between real estate valuation and law. One of the main arguments regarding the legality of the betterment taxes claims arises from a clause that stresses that betterment taxes should be collected from ‘everyone who earns from it’. As ‘everyone’, with relation to planning, is defined as those who can be found inside, or just outside, the plan’s lines and as the lines of the conservation plan encircled the entire city (in order to allow for the smooth transfer of development rights) it seems that all the city’s residents could be potentially charged with betterment taxes. Living next to 'beautiful ' or 'protected flowers', it was also agreed that the value of the protected building’s neighbouring apartments was the most likely to rise. These neighbors, who did not have to pay big conservation costs, could rest assured that a high skyscraper will not be constructed next to them and are guaranteed, in the future, to enjoy the view of something beautiful in their neighborhood. The council

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decided that it will not charge them for betterment taxes because they are not ‘directly’ involved with the plan. However, as the law forces the council to charge betterment taxes from everyone who earns from a plan, the property owners’ representatives tried to challenge the council’s decision: ‘You decided arbitrarily not to charge our customers’ neighbors, just like you decided arbitrarily to charge our customers’83 Deciding who is ‘directly’ related to the conservation plan and who is not was done by the creation of similarities. If a property is located next to the beach and there is a plan not to build on the shore - it is a long-established legal knowledge that there is no direct connection between the plan and the house and thus no reason to collect betterment taxes. As one council member put it - ‘the property owner who enjoys the view of the sea are just like the neighbour who lives next to the protected buildings’. Deciding which type of plan this case is legally comparable to is eventually what will determine the verdict.

5.6. Conclusion

At the time of writing, the committee chairman has yet to deliver his verdict. In any case, it is already known that whatever the decision might be, the losing side will appeal, and the ensuing legal battle is expected to continue for years to come. Not knowing who won the legal battle, we nevertheless know that the entire discussion, initially premised on scientific aspiration to prove the existence of branding without leaving any room for doubts, turned into a dispute between differing intuitions. The first challenge – to prove that there is indeed a higher increase in the REV of the protected properties in comparison to non-protected ones – was dependent upon the council appointed appraiser's construction of similarities between properties. If her coupling of properties did not manage to convince the chairman, then the entire effort to prove an increase failed. The tour in which I participated was devoted to exactly this comparison – both sides witnessed pairs of properties deemed as 'similar' by the appraiser and discussed whether or not they are. Beyond the question of similarities between properties, the second challenge was to prove, supposing that an increase in REV did take place, a causal relation between the branding and this increase. The attempt to ascribe this increase to some external factor also relies on some intuitive understanding of where the source of the value change lies. Are the properties, as the council claims, more valuable due to their inclusion in the list or

83 From: Tel-Aviv region's planning and construction's appeal committee, betterment taxes and compensations, protocol 1, Page 27, 23.6.2016. (“Tochnit Hasimur 2650b - Protocols [Converstaion Plan 2650b - Protocols],” n.d.)

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is their inclusion in the list a result of their intrinsic value? As we have seen, the chairman will once again have to reach a verdict between competing intuitive arguments. Lastly, the legal burden – to show that even if there is a branding associated REV increase, the council has the mandate to claim betterment taxes on it - though only indirectly related to REV, is another case in which the intuition takes the front seat. By the very shifting of the argumentation tone from the scientific voice into the intuition based one, we can say that the council attempts to isolate the REV and indirectly associate it with the external reality failed. The council was unable to prove that the market forces (that appeared as the branding factor in our case) are responsible for REV's changing trends and therefore it was unable to explain what REVs are. Trying to follow the council so as to learn from its attempt to identify REV's sources, we were also left with no answer to our similar question. We also have no novel knowledge about REVs other than the 'negative' understanding that the attempt to associate REV with external factors failed. The fact that we were unable to claim that REV represents something external to it is an important discovery. However, while trying to trace REV in the field so as to follow it, we will have to re-think our steps as we have just seen that the attempt to discover something external to REV, such as the market forces, and follow it will not help us in our investigation. It is important to remember that at this point, we have not yet seen REV, but only talk about REV. If REV was, as is assumed by all the three narratives, a representation of other things, than by identifying these abstracted-away networks would have in fact give us the REV, but in order to find our object of inquiry we must take a different course of action. Taking a break to re-think our steps we will realize, in the next chapter, while re-visiting Latour (Latour, 2002), that the thing that we were looking for was there all along in our hands – the REV exists in the form of material and specific documents.

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6.0. Overview

The conclusion of our last chapter left us in despair. After our attempts at registering REV as it appears in our field brought us only a negative understanding of REV – we were able to more confidently say what it is not, yet its manifestation as an active Actor-Network which one can follow around the city remained elusive. Remaining aware of the lesson that we nevertheless did learn from our study of the Branding-Dispute, namely that REV cannot be understood through what it is thought to represent, we returned to our quotidian fieldwork in the vice-mayor's office, all the while searching for a new possible gateway that will lead us to a novel understanding of the urban. Reflecting about our possible strategy forward, we were reminded of Latour treatment of legal files (Latour, 2002) and decided that a similar route might be fruitful for our line of inquiry just the same. It was his rationalisation of the ethnographic practice legal file-following that caught our attention. He dedicated an entire chapter to a follow up of legal files. Explaining his method Latour argued that: "What is more grey, more dusty, more worthy of contempt than piles of files? Yet, the ethnographer has no choice. Since he does not know the law, he must – in order to follow its particular movement – discover something material belonging to it which is visible, and that can be located and traced. Now, there exists something that traces and organizes all the activity of the Council. It forms the object of all types of care, of all conversations, and it allows continuous movement – without missing a step – from the most inarticulate complaint to the most sublime points of doctrine and even to this ersatz of eternal life made possible by the Lebon volume: it is the file." (Ibid, p. 70) For Latour, files are visible and material objects that take an active part in the organisation of the law, can be traced around the field, and, when followed ethnographically, expose us to all stages of the organizational process. It seemed to us that our research might benefit greatly from such a methodological amendment, from a somewhat loose search of REV where our informants identified 'it' to be, to a more concretely materialistic strategy which focuses on the most banal-yet-invisible material object so often passing through our hands while our gaze was turned forward – the REV file.

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At first, though, we were not as confident in the applicability of Latour's command to our elusive REV, since its document-based assembly was not as clear as one would imagine the files are to law. A preliminary follow-up of a more clearly documented object in our field, which we undertook as a side-endeavour, did eventually convince us, and we will first share this process with the reader. As mandate dictates, if we, as OS scholars, are to enter the world of documents, we must first situate ourselves within the disciplinary discourse and review its engagement with documents vis-à-vis organisations. Already foreshadowed, we will then return to the ANT take on the files, so as to direct empirical investigation in light of the recent materialistic turn (Latour, 1996a, 2007, 2014). Finally, our last step before we can fully embrace this suggested methodology, is to go back to the field and ensure that we can indeed delineate actual REV-documents which can serve as our object of inquiry.

6.1. The Active Role of Files in Urban Organization – Testing the Waters

Observing the fact that a plethora of files and documents participate, to a great degree, in the quotidian management and organization of the Tel-Aviv council - was not one of my greatest ethnographic achievements. Entering the field, not unfamiliar with the vast OS literature that deals with the role of documents in organizations (Hull, 2012; Latour, 2002; D. P. O’Doherty, 2017; Riles, 2006; Tischer, Maurer, & Leaver, 2019), I expected that an organization such as the council, known as being a 'bureaucratic monster', will require a good deal of documents for its smooth functioning. And indeed, immediately after I made the first steps into the vice-mayor's office, I was surrounded by countless files. It was not only the actual files which physically filled the chamber. Yes, large parts of the walls were occupied with cabins full of documents. However, these were mostly old files that were not in day-to-day use. It was the fact that the work itself, meaning, any planning related issue that I was expected to focus on, involved first and foremost an intimate relationship with different sorts of documents. Documents were both the life-line of, and the perpetual mediators with, the urban body84.

84 The above claim and the below example serve to enforce what was already said by such authors as Riles and Hull (Hull, 2012; Riles, 2006) on the role of documents in organizations. There is no doubt that documents' central place within organizations is a well-established fact. However, we find it important to ethnographically situate our readers inside our field and demonstrate the centrality of documents as part of the urban organization. This is due to the fact that this ethnographic view of the Tel-Aviv council can help the readers to better understand REV surroundings when they will shortly appear and will serve to show how the follow up of REV-documents can be a useful method to explore urban organization.

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This last point is made even more evident when looking at specific examples, such as that of the oft-referenced construction plan, perhaps one of the most prevalent types of documents to circulate around the city. As all future construction around the city is subordinate to specific plans, and as each plan is an assemblage of dozens of resources, it comes as no surprise that the only way to work with such a large body of data is through a constant engagement with some kind of physical85 frame that groups all the relevant information coherently. The plans, therefore, take on the appearance of solidity primarily through files. Closely examining one of the city’s planning processes, while keeping in mind the fact that during my 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork I came across hundreds of such plans and therefore I can testify that the large majority of them follow, to a greater or lesser extent, a somehow similar path, can help us demonstrate this matter even more vividly. Commencing our description from an arbitrary segment of a planning process (while acknowledging that we could have started differently), we shall enter the field at one of the planning process's most crucial moments. It is when one of the council's planning teams86 have just finished the final draft of the plan and is making preparation towards what is known as the 'public-debate' stage. In this stage, the plan is brought into the attention of the public which is invited to raise objections to it. If raised, the objections are brought in front of the local planning committee, which is a sub-committee of the elected city council, that has the authority to decide whether to sustain the objections (either fully or partially) or overrule them87. The council's first step was to bring the draft in front of the local planning committee so as to approve its status as an official draft. In our case, the draft included information about (1) the plan's location - just next to the Tel-Aviv main highway; (2) the planning team, the developers, and the owners, which were unknow to me (despite the fact that I gradually became more and more familiar with important architects and developers); (3) the current condition of the plot – a one floor commercial building, four old synagogues and few trees designed for conservation were currently occupying it; (4) a very short summary of the current plans for the relevant area – plan 1602 that allows one to build up to 5 floors that will occupy in total no more that 190% of the plot's size and plan 2568

85 I consider virtual files to be just as physical as 'real' files. 86 The council planning department has four different regional planning teams for the south, east, north and central parts Tel-Aviv. Each team is responsible for the initial development of all construction plans in its area. 87 There are many more complexities to the planning process, but it is not important for us now.

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Chapter 6: The OS-Documents Nexus – or: Why Should We Study Real-Estate Valuation Files? according to which the synagogues must be conserved and most of the plot must be dedicated for public use; (5) the current council's general strategy for the area in the form of a list of all city wide plans that are related to our specific location such as TA-5000, known as the Tel-Aviv Master Plan, in which the area is defined as "a metropolitan employment centre with close proximity to mass public transportation systems"; (6) a detailed summery of the desired reconstruction plan's goals that includes such statements as: "help improve the area's condition by strengthening the relations of the neighbourhoods to the city" 88; (7) a detailed, highly technical, sketch of the desired plan (See figure 12); (8) very long verbal description of the plan that includes such items as (a) the permitted uses of the new constructions - described on a floor by floor basis – in our case the lower floors are dedicated for shops, the upper floors for offices while 25% of the entire constructions can be used for living purposes, (b) the new constructions' height and size specified in exact meters, leaving no room for misinterpretation, (c) the permitted balconies' size, (d) the legal status of the gardens with regards to the ability of the public the use them – in our case large parts of the gardens must be open to the public, (e) the required planning procedures – as understood by the draft makers in line with the legal advice that they received, that, unless challenged, has the authority to decide whether the local committee can approve the plan, or, whether, the regional committee holds the jurisdiction in this case, (f) parking – the draft indicates that 97 parking spots can be built, all of them underground, (g) environmental issues such as the building's energy requirements, shading solutions, the installation of green drainage systems, and so forth. Lastly, (9) a short recommendation of the planning team concludes the document. With regards to our plan, the planning team suggests approving the draft under two conditions: the developers must agree to be responsible for any future compensation lawsuits and get the approval of the ministry of transportation for their plan. During the local planning committee meeting our draft, that occupies eleven pages, was very shortly presented to the committee members which instantly approved it, claiming that "it is just a draft" 89, that "anyway, it falls under the existing plan's orders, so there is no reason to spend time on it"90, or that, "we must approve it as fast as possible before lunch"91. Not all plans' drafts are treated in the same way, and sometimes a discussion about a draft does take place, and even some modifications might be made. However, the fact that it is very likely that the plan will shortly re-appear in front of the committee again as all objections to it

88 From fieldnotes: 7.6.2017. 89 From fieldnotes: 7.6.2017. 90 From fieldnotes: 7.6.2017. 91 From fieldnotes: 7.6.2017.

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Chapter 6: The OS-Documents Nexus – or: Why Should We Study Real-Estate Valuation Files? must be heard, seems to make the committee members less meticulous in their overview. This last point can be demonstrated by the fact that during such discussion about a draft of a very big re-construction plan, a letter in which the committee members demanded to replace the catering provider circulated around the room. Seating in the back I was sure that the paper that was read very carefully by all members must be related to the committee's work. Only a few months later when the catering provider was indeed replaced (to the great pleasure of all members) I was told about the petition, and returning to my notebook I realized what was the purpose of this 'secret' paper.

Figure 12. A detailed sketch of the plan, as it was taken from the plan's draft that as it was presented to the Local Planning Committee. After the draft has been approved, the council needs to notify the public about it so as to allow anyone who owns a property around the plan's location, relevant governmental bodies, and NGOs to submit an objection to the plan. The notification process is performed through (1) publication of announcements in several newspapers and (2) the hanging of posters around the location of the expected construction. These posters, that serve as the second set of documents that we encounter along our way, include (1) information about the expected planning process in very broad terms, (2) information about the expected timetable and (3) instructions on how to submit objections to the plan. Seemingly, these notifications should be very straightforward and simple. In reality, however, they are notorious for being complicated, jargony and unclear, as is evident from the fact that, for example, parts of the description of the expected planning are delivered in very specific numbers that stand for such non-intuitive things as the permitted percentage of construction out of the entire surface area. Lately, the council started to work on a new type of notifications that will include all the legally necessary data, and, at the same time, could be understood by reasonable human-beings (see figure 13) for a

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Chapter 6: The OS-Documents Nexus – or: Why Should We Study Real-Estate Valuation Files? comparison between an old notification and a suggested version of a new one). However, despite the fact that the new notifications are much clearer, they are still not being used by the council that, for some unknow reason, prefers the old ones. When one walks around Tel-Aviv she can trace such notification around every corner. Some are very old as there is no concentrated effort to collect them. Regarding our plan, located next to the Tel-Aviv highway in a very crowded industrial area, the notifications were hanged around the existing building and were published in the newspapers, but as no residents lived in that area, and as the relevant governmental bodies, the big companies, and the NGOs are mostly subscribed to a service that alerts them about relevant plans it seems that nobody noticed the notification other than the specific companies that are being payed to follow the notifications in the newspapers. In later stages, however, the council must be able to prove that the notifications were published according to the relevant regulations and therefore it makes sure to document each and every notification and publish the documentation on-line. The fact that nobody noticed the physical notification does not make any difference.

Figure 13. The old, mostly illegible notification is on the right, the new, much improved, suggestion is on the left.

One of the most important functions of the notifications is to invite the public to the council's archives to view the plan's full draft. If one of the city residents wishes to get more information about the expected plan, she must follow this invitation and visit the

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Chapter 6: The OS-Documents Nexus – or: Why Should We Study Real-Estate Valuation Files? council in person. The full draft's binder that is handed to her during this visit, is assembled from two ingredients: (1) a detailed sketch of the planned construction works, and (2) a confusing heap of documents exhaustively detailing each part of the upcoming construction and stipulating any and all of the regulatory directives. Having digesting the draft's binder, mostly with the help of a hired professional (usually a lawyer), our resident now needs to decide whether or not to submit an objection. If she does decide to proceed with the complaint, she must first submit it as a printed file - which is the third type of documents that we encounter along the way. These objections, that are submitted either by residents or by a big cooperation, various governmental bodies, NGOs, and sometimes even by the council itself92, are brought back to one of the council's planning teams that will prepare the councils' response. The response will appear in the local planning committee's booklet which is the fourth document that we have seen so far. It includes very limited, excessively technical, description of our plan and brief, council-made, summaries of all objections. These summaries are infamously short, to a degree that even if the original objections were submitted as book-long documents, the relevant council's planning team haphazardly abridges them into a single paragraph or, in some cases, even a single sentence. Next to the summarised objections one can find the planning team's associated recommendations that mostly command in a very prescriptive tone either to accept the objections (fully or partially) or, as is most likely, to reject them. One example of an objection93 was submitted by two residents who opposed the construction of a few big buildings in their street on the grounds that the 'transportation crisis' that such a construction, which will multiply the number of residents by four, is expected to cause. To make sure that their objection will be treated respectfully, the two residents submitted a dozen pages long booklet in which one can find a lengthy and detailed discussion about the current stage of the area (including various photos, official testimonies of professional transportation engineers, results of pollution meters, collected evidences from the current residents, and so forth) and professional predictions on how the expected plan will make the lives of the local residents impossible. One section of the booklet was a discussion about parking. The residents counted the current number of parking spots, calculated the current number of cars, the expected post-plan number of parking spots and the expected number of cars in the post-construction condition (they assumed that each family will have

92 When the draft has been approved the council cannot simply modify it, instead it submits an objection to its own plan and then accept the objection. 93 We are not reporting on the objections to our exemplar plan because the objection process happened after I finished my fieldwork. Instead we will report about objections to a nearby plan that is located less than one kilometer away from our original location.

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Chapter 6: The OS-Documents Nexus – or: Why Should We Study Real-Estate Valuation Files? two cars) and showed how in the given situation hundreds of people will not be able to park around their houses. The council summarised this objection in one line: "there will not be enough parking places"94 and suggested to reject the objection as "the objection is not correct".95 Many objections are very different as they are submitted by large institutional bodies that hire lawyers to write them, and are therefore written in a professional language that includes specific discussions about the relevant laws and regulation that, according to the objection, the council did not follow. These objections, usually less likely to be rejected, are still summarized in a similar way. For example, I have seen a very long objection in which it was claimed that the council did not follow the planning and construction regulations regarding the average size of the apartments. The objection quoted the law and the plan's draft very carefully and explained why one does not match the other. The council summarised this technical objection as: "the average size of the apartments are too small"96 and recommended to reject the objection due to the fact that: "the average size of the apartments is not too small".97 In most cases, the first time the local planning committee members are presented with any of the objections, is in their heavily bridged form upon the pages of the aforementioned booklet. Thus, the booklet has an excessive power in shaping the planning process’ results. However, as each booklet is overly abundant with plans and summarized objections, as well as being written in too technical a language which is unfamiliar to most committee members, I have witnessed time after time how our fifth document - the PowerPoint presentation file serves to introduce the plan to the committee members in an easily digestible form, and is the central tool responsible for the shaping of the committee members opinions98. Almost in direct contrast to the booklet's inaccessible nature, the PowerPoint file was made to be as clear and coherent as possible. A good slide will include only a few very general sentences that provide very limited information about the plan, next to the crown-jewels of the presentation – the graphic visualizations99. These visualizations are highly sophisticated fabrications, made by specially trained architects

94 From fieldnotes: 15.02.2017. 95 From fieldnotes: 15.02.2017. 96 From fieldnotes: 15.02.2017. 97 From fieldnotes: 15.02.2017. 98 A few OS scholars have already pointed out the pivotal role which Power-Point play in the dissemination of organizational knowledge. See, for example O’doherty, 2017; Schoeneborn, 2013. 99 There is a vast body of OS literature that deals with visualization in OS, for example Basole & Patel, 2018; Blanchet, 2018; Comi & Whyte, 2018; Höllerer, Jancsary, & Grafström, 2018; Jermier & Forbes, 2016; Puyou & Quattrone, 2018.

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Chapter 6: The OS-Documents Nexus – or: Why Should We Study Real-Estate Valuation Files? using professional designing tools, that visually present the expected results of the construction work. Sometimes, the objectors present their own slides that include their own visualizations. In most cases, however, it is only the council, or a big construction company that initiated a plan, that have the capacity to produce such visualizations, thus setting the tone for the entire discussion in the committee. To understand how important the PowerPoint presentations are for the purpose of introducing the plan to the committee members, we shall describe one very serious dispute regarding the construction of a few big skyscrapers next to the sea. As usual, most committee members did not read through the meeting booklet and thus did not know which plans will be presented this day. Even the few committee members who did read the booklet were struggling with it as it was too long and complicated and consequently did not fully anticipate what is about to go on. The PowerPoint slide that was made by the architects of a private company that owned the land included a visualization of the expected construction, presented from one specific perspective (see figure 14). Seeing this image, most committee members were happy with it and therefore had no reason to vote against the plan. Obliviously, they were not fully aware of plan's technicalities and did not care about the fact that completely different visualizations, (see figure 15) could have been presented to them instead.

Figure 14. A visualization of the suggested construction plan of the two skyscrapers as it was presented to the committee members in the PowerPoint slide that was presented during the committee's meeting.

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Figure 15. An alternative visualization of the plan that did not appear in any of the PowerPoint slides that were presented during the committee's meeting.

Prior to us moving forward, I want to shortly introduce the sixth document that takes part in our planning process. It is the meeting's protocol. Seemingly very simple, we should not be surprised that in real-life many complications are attached to it. It is not only the technical issues of how to properly capture the essence of each argument without losing the coherency of the entire debate, it is also the fact that, for future purposes, the protocol is the only legally binding document solidifying the meetings’ events. Thus, all actors that participate in the planning process must calculate their steps to make sure that the protocol will do them justice. It might be a lawyer who needs a proof that she raised some issue in front of the committee in order to move forward with some proceedings, a committee member who wants to be able to show to her voters that she is a woman of her words, or one of the council's professional architects who wants to make sure that some very specific decision will be clearly (or, sometimes, as unclearly as possible) set in stone, to allow for future reference. In all cases, the important matter is that almost everyone is constantly aware of the protocol (that is projected live, during its entire writing process, on a big screen in the committee's hall) and shape their behaviour accordingly. For example, in one of the committee meetings a lawyer objected to one of the plans. Knowing that she has no chance to convince the council to grant her with the additional development rights that she demanded (having already negotiated with the relevant planning team), she clearly admitted that she wants her objection to appear in the protocol so as to prove in a future possible court hearing that she exhausted all proceedings. Therefore, when she introduced her objection, she was very carefully looking at the screen on which the protocol appeared

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Chapter 6: The OS-Documents Nexus – or: Why Should We Study Real-Estate Valuation Files? and made sure that the summarized version that was typed at the time of her speech includes everything that is important to her. When the stenographer typed anything that did not reflect the lawyer's intentions perfectly, she halted her speech to request that the protocol be mended. Needless to say, that the lawyer did not care about the reaction of the committee members to her speech. These situations, where the protocol becomes more important than the committee decision, are very common. During committee gatherings I often watched the stenographer and witnessed how she struggles to put to text every single utterance made by the twenty or so speakers. She constantly had to summarise and paraphrase, and the speakers always had one eye open towards the screen on which the protocol was projected, to make sure that she does not miss anything important and to correct her if there is a need to do so. Zooming out of our description of the planning process from the point of view of the document, I hope that any remaining doubts about the active role of documents in the management and the organization of our cities have now gone. I also hope that it is now evident why following documents can help us conduct a study of urban-organization which lends itself towards the development of a novel account that is not limited to the partial perspective that the critical, economic or institutional narratives provide us with. Moving forward, we should notice that our point was illustrated so decisively not only due to the fact that at any stage of the planning process a new document emerges, but also due to the fact that, as we have just seen, each and every one of these planning documents serves as the hub of its network. Analysing an organization as immense as the council, that operates in the context of the (unbounded) city, we are not surprised that tools such as our documents were recruited to organize things. It is clear why an objection-submission- process cannot operate without a document-based system just as much as it is clear that there is no way to transform the planning committee meetings into a 'mutable mobile' (Latour, 1987) without the use of protocols.

6.2. Documents in OS

Having understood that focusing on documents might advance our inquiry, we should first look back within our discipline of OS and review some of the different ways in which the document has been treated so as to situate our approach in relation to the broad organizational literature. Doing that, we shall divide the OS treatment of documents to two groups. The first group, that represents most 'mainstream', or, rather, 'positivistic' voices within OS and can be associated with the economic and (to some degree) the

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Chapter 6: The OS-Documents Nexus – or: Why Should We Study Real-Estate Valuation Files? institutional narratives, focuses on the substantive ability of documents to accomplish their stated purpose, which is to be "vehicles of messages, communicating or reflecting official intentions" (Freeman & Maybin, 2011, p. 3)100. In this group of OS researches, one can find investigations that compare specific documents with "other documents, academic theory, alternative normative positions, or empirical evidence" (Ibid) in an attempt to investigate whether or not "the policy apparatus proposed in the documents represents an effective way to achieve its specified ends, and to whether a policy has had its intended impact" (ibid). Kornberger, Meyer, Brandtner, and Hollerer, for example, explore the interactions between governmental files and the strive for open government. They analyse how the newly born Open Government Data (OPD) initiative is shaped, what purposes does it serve and which values are provided to the public as part of this process (Kornberger, Meyer, Brandtner, & Höllerer, 2017). In another exemplar work, Schoeneborn, who studies another type of document – the PowerPoint presentation, attempts to find out whether or not "the PowerPoint presentations… preserve the features of its primary function, i.e., presentation, or rather adapt to the new function, i.e., documentation?" (Schoeneborn, 2013, p. 1777). Two important features that appear in most papers from the first group can help us fully understand how this positivistic group of OS researches understands documents: (1) the voice that characterizes most papers is an authorial voice that stands for singular, untied and coherent organization, that might indeed be tangled in different complexities, but, however, always preserves its 'agential-coherency', (2) the arrows of time always stay aligned with the very basic understanding of temporal continuity, where the assumed future, for example, is always seen as a direct consequence of the past, without itself affecting the present (Freeman & Maybin, 2011, pp. 3–4). The second group, that represents less 'mainstream' voices within OS and can be associated with the critical and the institutional narratives, explores the textual, or, rather, discursive, characteristics of documents. This group, that understands documents as "expressions of structure rather than agency" (Ibid) consists of such studies as Flowerdew's description of Hong-Kong's attempts to discursively construct itself as a world city, i.e., a centre of "high technology, industry, trade, banking, finance, professional activity, higher education and the arts" (Flowerdew, 2004, p. 579), and Hastings' discursive analysis of The New Life for Urban Scotland document, through which he is able to gain insights about Scotland's urban-

100 Freeman and Maybin's review of OS's treatment of documents, although coming from a somewhat peripheral standpoint (they can perhaps be most accurately located within the discipline of policy studies), is nevertheless a thorough account which also shares our own ANT sensibilities when approaching the topic. We therefore find it appropriate to rely upon their work in our overview of the literature.

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Chapter 6: The OS-Documents Nexus – or: Why Should We Study Real-Estate Valuation Files? decline (Hastings, 1998). Although seemingly more nuanced, the bottom-line of this second group of researches is not essentially different from the first group, as both see the document as a detached entity that should be studied in isolation from the external world. Following the above critical statement, we should emphasize that the main issue that characterizes most OS document-oriented literature is the fact that, due to the primacy being awarded to the Document either as a representational or as a discursive entity, "[both groups] say little about the work of construction itself" (Freeman & Maybin, 2011, p. 4). In other words, both groups detach the text from its surroundings, and focus only on the content and the embedded meaning of the documents, thus fencing off their accounts before they began, barring all the relational facets of the document from presenting their role in the story. Hoping to strengthen our empirical position, obtained through our understanding of Latour's follow-up of legal files (Latour, 2002), that files are live actors and not mute representations, we will not be able to rely upon the common, positivist, nor constructivist accounts of documents. Instead, similarly to this thesis' 'macro-move' from the economic, institutional and critical narratives to our ANT based ethnography, we shall try to build on the relational-materialistic approach to the study of documents that is so vividly exemplified in Latour's work (Latour, 2002) and is also related to Czarniawska's studies of urban organization through the follow-up of Action-Nets, as was presented in chapter two of this dissertation (Czarniawska, 2000b, 2002). Adopting Latourian relational materialism as our point of view, our investigation will be based on his understanding of the material documents. Most important for us is (1) the fact that he sees documents as inscriptions, constituted through webs of relationships with their surroundings, that actively participates in the formation of reality (Ibid, p.5) and (2) the fact that he views documents as immutable and mobile entities (Latour, 1987) meaning as stabilized and multiple, or rather, firm and temporal material bodies that allow, on the one hand, for organizational members to act in various time-zones and geographical locations, both individually and simultaneously, and, on the other hand, to be a stable reference point to one specific matter. From these two premises we derive what is perhaps the most significant theoretical foundation that we take from Latour - the fact that documents are hybrids, or rather, assemblages, of various different Actor-Networks, some human and some are non-human (Latour, 1991). The strategic location of document as a nexus of many human and non- human networks, is responsible for the fact that it has the ability to make "[things that seems

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Chapter 6: The OS-Documents Nexus – or: Why Should We Study Real-Estate Valuation Files? to be] far apart … literally inches apart; domains which are convoluted and hidden… flat; [and] thousands of occurrences… [to] be looked at synoptically'" (Latour, 1987, p. 25). Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind that just as much as documents serve as hubs for many other documents, each one of them is also 'traveling' out to new documents. This process is part of a seemingly endless chain that repeatedly validates the fact that '"documents are not only material traces of actions but triggers, too." (Freeman & Maybin, 2011, p. 7). This two-sided nature of document's construction, i.e., the fact that each file is constructed by multiple other actors and actants just as much as it participates in the construction of new actors and actants, shifts the focus of the research from isolated entities into connected chains. Having explained how the ANT-oriented approach to the study of document entails a unique type of research that does not allow us to study documents in isolation, but rather call us to study them as hybrids that are constructed by various Actor-Networks, we can conclude that, if we want to study the urban organization via documents, we must learn how documents are assembled and how they participate in the assembling process of the city. By conducting this type of double-sided research, we hope to more fully view them in action and see how they force upon us a new non-economic, non-institutional and non-critical understanding of the city.

6.3. Identifying the REV-Documents

Shifting our attention back to REV, we left our ethnographer while he was trying to locate the material manifestation of REV in the field. This process was not as linear as this narrative form necessitates. After reading Latour's account of the legal files, and satisfactorily conducting the short 'experiment' detailed above, he still had doubts since, originally, the field seemed to present two opposing locations where one could identify the REVs - (1) prices, and (2) documents. To understand this statement, we need to acknowledge the fact that, generally, there is a strong tendency to see REVs as nothing more than the prices of real-estate. This was the intuitive feeling that emerged during the 2011 social protest101 in which hundreds of thousands of people argued against the rising real-estate prices and not against a material object, in the form of the file, that was unknown to them. This is also the impression one gets when reading about real-estate in the newspapers, or listening to discussions about real-estate in the evening news. The central

101 See chapter one of this dissertation for a long description of the 2011 Social protest.

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Chapter 6: The OS-Documents Nexus – or: Why Should We Study Real-Estate Valuation Files? topic that occupies the headlines always revolves around the real-estate market's shifting prices and their effect on the community, the economy, etc. In line with the above argument, while trying to understand REVs' role in urban organization, I become aware of the fact that a discussion about prices played a prominent part in almost all of the planning committee meetings. For example, one of the most memorable events, that captures the prominent place that prices play as part of urban- organizational processes, took place during one of the planning committee gatherings. It was part of a discussion about the construction of a new neighbourhood at the northern edge of Tel-Aviv. During the meeting, one committee member argued that the council did not make enough efforts to promote affordable housing: "we should design smaller apartments and force the developers to offer discounted properties for the young and for the elderly"102 she said. The answer from another, more senior, committee member came quick: "there is no point to make any substantial effort as the prices in that area are just too damn high'103 by which he abruptly ended the argument. Reporting back from the field, in which I encountered various such discussions, I can conclude that I have witnessed three trends that appeared as part of ongoing planning procedures and illustrates the frequent verbal appearance of the price around our urban field: (1) prices were used to justify an already established policy ('there is no need to build small apartments for young people, as even these apartments will be too expensive for them104'), (2) prices were used as very crude ideological tools ('we should avoid building large houses as we need to defend the city from the rich'105) and (3) prices were used for general urban-planning guidelines ('we need to increase the amount of small apartments so as to reduce the housing prices'106). A not dissimilar phenomena, which the reader might be familiar with, is a home-owner's fascination with the current market price of their property, regardless of their intentions of selling it. Being able to view how real-estate prices appear in the planning committee, I was forced to acknowledge the fact that following the prices of real-estate as they actively appear in the field was not something that could have taken me far while studying the organization of the city, as all of the above examples teach us that the prices of real-estate, in their discursive form, are very different from the material and visible objects that Latour (Latour, 2002) uses in his journey around the legal field and serve as an inspiration to our ethnography.

102 From fieldnotes: 01.03.2017. 103 From fieldnotes: 15.02.2017. 104 From fieldnotes: 15.02.2017. 105 From fieldnotes: 15.02.2017. 106 From fieldnotes: 15.02.2017.

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That being said, the futility of searching for REV in discussions about real-estate prices does not mean that real-estate prices are insignificant. On the contrary, our research found that real-estate prices have an enormous part in the management and the organization of the city. The participation of prices, representing past transactions, in numerous different types of REV files and documents, is a clear example of such role. We will further explore this in the upcoming chapter. For now, it is important to be familiar with the fact that all plans were accompanied by a few real-estate valuations associated documents that, among other things, were responsible for the economic viability of the plan, as a defence against compensations lawsuits, for the maximization of the city's tax revenues, and so forth. The valuation of real-estate is a highly professional craft in which the past prices of real-estate, along many other facts such as legal or construction rights, were added into documents that transformed them into new types of hybrids (Latour, 1991). Ethnographically, the most significant entity that I was able to trace around the field was the vehicle that took all these facts and re-organized them into REV - i.e. the valuation files. Indeed, in many cases these documents were hidden from the naked eye, as they were never as prominent as the planning committee's booklets or protocols. However, obscured behind all planning procedures were some REV-associated documents that, as will be ethnographically explored in the next chapter, played an integral role in the sprawling development of the plan and the manufacturing of the city. When I was trying to learn how the city was organized, I quickly learnt that REVs had an enormous role in almost any decision made by the council, residents, developers, etc. Under the prevalent regime of profit-oriented-development, that characterizes most of our cities, every step taken must be calculated to avoid unwanted economic results. As part of this reality, the value is very similar to a physical domain that, in order to avoid accidents and disasters, must be respected. When I was trying to learn how REV are organized, I learnt that, similarly to many other parts of urban organization, they are organized via documents as an assembly of many different entities such as prices, laws, and so forth. That being the case, the conclusion is very straightforward – if we want to understand REV so as to develop a new urban-organization account that will not pre-assume the external reality like the three urban narratives, we must dive into a detailed study of the files and documents that they inhabit.

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In light of our introductory follow-up of the planning documents, our adoption of Latour's treatment of the legal files as hybrids that must be studied as part of their environment and not as separated entities, and the introduction of the REV documents found in our field, we will dedicate the next chapter to a detailed analysis of perhaps the most pervasive and influential REV document in the Tel-Aviv construction arena – the betterment tax report.

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Figure 16. Real-estate valuation files

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Chapter 7: Opening the Real-Estate Valuation Files Black- box

7.0. Overview

In the previous chapter we ethnography followed documents around our urban field and viewed the urban planning processes in their path. This follow up of documents served to illustrate how promising this methodology, taken from Latour's treatment of the legal files (Latour, 2002), is. We also presented the constructivist and positivist approaches to the analysis of documents, came to the conclusion that, unlike these approaches, we do not see documents as bounded entities but rather as hybrids and therefore we want to study how they assemble and how they participate in the assembly process of other hybrids, instead of focusing on what the documents say or on how they say it. Finally, after we came to the realisation that we should follow documents and realised how to follow them we shortly introduced the documents that will be in the heart of our investigation – the REV documents. This chapter will begin with a review of how, upon entering the field, the different types of valuation-reports were observed in the Tel-Aviv urban arena and map their relation to one another and to the organization of the city. We will follow suit with a close scrutiny of one specific type of reports – the betterment tax files – in both their formal and informal lifecycles, which will serve as the hub of this current chapter. We will conclude with a detailed discussion that will attempt to concretize the ways in which the aforementioned documents are assembled, and stabilised, into REVs.

7.1. The Various Real-Estate Valuation Files

Before we can dive into this chapter’s subject matter, our last challenge is to re-introduce ourselves with REV reports, their common definition, and semi-official categorisations as well as some key terms and practices crucial to our understanding but are outside the scope of this dissertation. This task is not as simple and straightforward as it might initially seem, for there are more than a few types of real-estate valuation-reports that participate in the management and organization of the city at any given moment. As each type of report comes to serve some urban-organizational purpose, we shall quickly introduce them in light of their operational logic and move forward to elaborate on the specific class of reports that will be at the centre of our forthcoming investigation.

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The common denominator of all following valuation-reports is the fact that all urban plans are related, directly or indirectly, to either past, present or future construction. Consequently, all plans include a reference to the value of their associated real-estate. This reference might be a (1) current valuation of the pre-plan's associated REVs or a (2) valuation of the expected, post-plan, REVs. This temporal separation between the different states is shared among all types of valuation files, as each one of them is often modified according to some specific time-oriented requirement. The files also share the basic calculative logic that stands behind the numbers that they produce (we will explore this logic in the next section), despite the fact that they are seemingly very different from each other. While following REV files, two different taxonomies arose, from which one can approach the real-estate valuation files that were found in our field. The first revolves around the specific entities that are being valued while the second revolves around the purpose of the valuation. When categorising the files by the concrete entities valued, one can find that valuation reports contain (1) empty plots of land, (2) apartments, (3) houses, (4) buildings, (5) gas-stations, (6) bridges, (7) roads and even (8) graves. To put it differently, when looking inside reports, all possible types of real-estate can be found. When looking at things from the perspective of the report's purposes, one can find that valuation reports deal with (1) purchases and sales, (2) long- and short-time leasing, (3) expected revenues from future construction, (4) expropriations, (5) compensations, (6) betterment taxes, (7) illegal construction, (8) bank guarantees, (9) legal advice, (10) corporate financial statements, and (11) forced evacuations. Reflecting on the above list, we can conclude that the REV-documents are central entities within the urban Actor-Network, as they are attached to all physical parts of the urban and are related to many organizational activities that take place within the city. Existing in such a large variety of colours and shapes, each class of documents serves as an urban-organizational hub which is, for our purposes, a black-box waiting to be opened. Due to the limited scope of this chapter, I have made a conscious decision to direct our investigation towards one specific type of documents – the betterment tax files. The reasoning behind this decision is simple – as witnessed in the field, betterment tax reports are commonly found in the centre of urban disputes. The betterment tax files are issued by the council to collect taxes from property owners who benefited from a new construction plan. If a new plan is approved and grants additional value to a property owner, and if the property owner takes advantage of this

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newly added value (i.e. she sells her newly up-marketed property or uses the newly added development rights to re-construct it) she is obligated to pay 50% of the newly added value to the council. As the council was granted with a legal mandate by the state to enforce the payment of betterment taxes, the residents were awarded by the state with the right to issue an appeal to real-estate arbitrators. These arbitrators are private real-estate appraisers who are licensed to serve as mediators in betterment tax disputes. This structure of the betterment-tax process offers an advantage for us as outside observers, as it gives us access to three different valuation files that refer to the same valued entity. Being loyal to the Latourian tradition that sees controversies as the 'gold-mines' of ethnographic expeditions (Latour, 1987), it is evident that these tangled betterment tax documents have the potential to serve as useful tools that can help us shed light upon the hidden corners of all REV-documents and, consequently, due to the fact that REV appear only in files, as a REV '[does not] exist until a file exist' (Freeman & Maybin, 2011, p. 6). We will now begin our follow-up of the betterment-taxes' REV-reports. We will start with the first council's report in which the added value was 'born', move forward through the residents' counter reports, and finish when we arrive to the arbitration results.

7.2. On the Trail of a Betterment Tax File: The Structure of REV Documents

Establishing the betterment tax REV documents as this chapter's subject matter and laying down our relational approach to our OS-oriented study of documents, it is time to move into this chapter's main section and introduce the betterment tax files in great length. The upcoming presentation of the betterment tax documents is designed to help us comprehend the ways in which the REV Actor-Networks are assembled via the consolidation process of these files. After we will understand how the REV is assembled as an important urban-organizational entity, the next stage, that will take place in the next chapter, will be to present how these entities actively participate in the organization of the city. Our presentation of the REV files, that will be extremely long and detailed, will be divided into two parts: the first, that appears in this section, will revolve around the structure of the file and will present to the reader how the betterment taxes files are structured. The second part will rely upon a more relational approach and will report on the process responsible for the creation of the files and the numbers that appear in them so as to show how the REVs are assembled.

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Despite the fact that they are even more tedious than Latour's legal documents, the introduction of the cryptic betterment-tax files into one's life often leaves a very strong first impression. Trying to either sell a property or request a permit to construct on it, a resident is often surprised to learn that if she wants to complete her deal or obtain a permission to follow her (re)construction plan, she must first settle some strange and as- of-yet unknown debt – the betterment tax. Being approached by our bewildered resident asking for the exact sum, the council's betterment-taxes unit forwards her request to receive a betterment-tax invoice to one of its real-estate appraisers and asks her to come up with a valuation out of which the expected tax will be calculated. A month or so later the betterment-tax bill and its affiliated valuation file are sent back to the resident. The sum that results from the delivered betterment-tax document might be surprisingly low or shockingly high. These feelings do not only reflect the typical response of someone who is not familiar with these types of valuations. As I have often witnessed, these emotions also reflect the response of many professional real-estate appraisers who find it difficult to predict what will be the council's policy with regards to various specific factors that might greatly modify a betterment tax bill. When facing an excessive betterment's bill, the resident, who might have just realized that her housing dreams suffered an unexpected blow, quickly learns that if she wants to appeal, she is allowed to hire her own private real-estate appraiser and ask her to prepare an alternative valuation, that, naturally, despite the seemingly objective, or, rather, scientific, representational character of all valuation reports, will be completely different from the council's report. This new valuation is sent to a state-nominated arbitrator, who is responsible for the writing of a totally new and independent betterment tax valuation, that often (though certainly not always) produces figures that are located somewhere in between the two previous reports. It has been mentioned to me more than a few times that the council's real-estate appraisers strategically position their valuation in an attempt to secure themselves from the potential results of an arbitration process. I also heard that the residents' appraisers position their valuation in strategic relation to the first council report in an attempt to create the conditions that will draw the arbitrators' valuation towards their end. Arbitrators also makes strategic decisions, based on their fear of appeals and, as my informants informed me, on the fact that they are getting paid per case which motivates them to make

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the arbitration process profitable for the residents so as to make sure that the arbitration system will be widely used. Zooming out, we should remember that the above template is only one of multiple ways in which the betterment tax valuations participate in urban-organization. Other cases, for instance, can involve large corporations that build huge skyscrapers or entire neighbourhoods and have departments of lawyers and real-estate appraisers at their disposal. That being the case, the basic facts are still similar – a request for betterment tax valuation is submitted, a first valuation is sent to the company that often replies with its counter valuation and so on107. This uniform structure organizes the betterment tax collection across all across the city – from the city's biggest building to one small additional room in its poorest area. Describing the mode in which the betterment-tax valuation-files exist, we shall turn our document on its head and shift the direction of our gaze. Rather than viewing the document as a stable entity that takes part in the organization of the city, we shall destabilize it now so as to trace its assembling process. Picking up a few documents that will help us demonstrate how the betterment is constructed, we should remember that there are differences between the numerus betterment files and that some valuation reports look different from the following description. However, the basic logic from which the betterment is 'extracted' is very similar, almost identical, between all relevant files. Moving forward to describe the ins-and-outs of the betterment-tax valuation files, we will now review the official structure of a betterment tax report, section by section, in the form of bullet-points108.

7.3. The Structure of the Betterment Tax File

The following bullet points are based on the structure of the betterment tax files, which is similarly divided: 1) All betterment-tax valuation-files begin with a title-page. In it one can find (1) information about the type of the report ('a betterment tax valuation'), (2) identifying details of the valued property in line with the Cadastre system109, (3) the valuation's

107 This system was developed at 2007. In earlier times the council was allowed to negotiate the betterment tax with the residents as part of a system that allowed the council to take into consideration other needs that might be more important than the collection of the taxes. 108 For a thorough overview of the use of bullet points in documents, from which this section takes inspiration, see (Strathern, 2006). 109 A British land recording system that was brought to Israel during the British Mandate for Palestine and map all authorized properties according to their assigned lot and block.

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decisive date110, and (4) the real-estate appraiser's name, usually watermarked on the pages, along with his logo.

2) The second part of our file is the table-of-contents. The ten or so following section headlines show-up for the first time in here.

3) The next section introduces the report's purposes. It includes the type of the valuation ('valuation of the betterments'), the legal clause that instructs and authorizes the valuation, the details of the person or organization that ordered the valuation and the circumstances that led to the decision that a valuation is needed (such as the approval of a plan, the approval of additional construction, and so forth).

4) This section puts forward the property's identifying data. It includes the property's (1) exact location within the national Cadastre system, (2) address, (3) type, i.e. its size, age, height, purpose (residential or commercial), and ownership (private or governmental, complete or partial), (4) exact location inside the building (if applicable), and (5) a sketch of the property and its surroundings.

5) Being provided with all the property-oriented information relevant to the valuation-report, this section consists of a long 'qualitative' description of the property and its environment. This description includes (1) a treatment of the property's environment that provides details about current trends in the area such as industrialization, gentrification, conservation, etc., and more fine facts about the specific condition of the street and other parts of the local infrastructure, the neighbors, parking, parks, and so forth, and (2) a detailed description of the actual property's condition that includes information about the physical state of the building, the businesses and residents that currently occupy it, the shape of the lot, the size of the roof, the neighbouring buildings and so forth. In addition to the verbal descriptions, this section also includes maps and pictures of the building and its surroundings.

110 As all valuations are relevant only to the specific date in which they took place, the valuation date must be very prominent.

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6) The above qualitative description is followed by a statement that the licensed real-estate appraiser, who wrote the valuation, has either visited the property herself or sent another appraiser to visit the property in her name. The fact that almost all relevant information can be found these days on-line makes it seemingly unnecessary to visit each and every property. However, the viewing of properties is one of the most treasured customs for real-estate appraisers, who use the opportunity to 'sniff around' the property and its associated 'market' so as to find information about such things as (1) 'secret' prices of real-estate in the associated area ('sometimes the local real-estate agent knows better than the tax authorities'), (2) the condition of the house ('the only reasonable thing to do with this crumbling structure is to take it down') (3) the current use of the valued building ('when you find out that the local mafia inhabit the building you need to increase the evacuation fees threefold') and so forth.

7) The description of the status of the ownership, that comes next, includes legal information about the building's owners, official information from the tax authorities about the property's previous selling prices, information about letting agreements, debts, collaterals, and so forth.

8) We have finally arrived into the heart of all valuation files – the description of the property's statutory planning status. We already know that new planning processes are the root from which betterments grow. Therefore, we should not be surprised that at the centre of the valuation file one can find a long and detailed description of all plans related to the valued property. The list of plans is divided between old111 and new plans. In the following sections of the file, the appraiser will use the old plans as her baseline, move forward step-by-step112 from the starting point, known as the 'previous condition', through all the following plans until the most recent one, and calculate the value that was added to the property at each plan's decisive date113. For example, we shall look at a typical case of one Tel- Aviv house that was sold in 2017. True to form, the transaction’s associated

111 They are 'old' because they were issued prior to the new tax regulations of 1975 or because that betterment was already paid for them. 112 The question whether to collect taxes for the total betterments that were added to a property over the years or to collect it on a plan-by-plan basis was debated at the Israeli high court, in a very controversial trial, in which it was ruled that the tax must be collected on a plan-by-plan basis due to the law specifying that betterment rests on specific plans and not on any observable general trends. 113 Which is the date of its official approval.

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valuation file consisted of two lists - one of the old plans and one of the new. Among the plans categorized as old, one finds a plan from 1946 that "classified the area as commercial and permitted the construction of 70% of the surface x 2 floors for the purpose of living, offices, hotels, and crafts”114 and another plan from 1962 that increased the building permissions to "75% of the surface up to 192.5%". The associated list of new plans includes one plan from 1981 that "permitted the construction of 23-meters on the building's roof", a plan from 1985 that "permitted the construction of two basements at 100% of the plot size", a plan from 1994 that "increased the permission to build on the roof by 23 meters", a plan from 2001 that demanded that for each apartment bigger than 120 meters "some parking solution will be organized", a plan from 2003 that modified a few of the instructions regarding the basements that were given by the 1985 plan, and a plan from 2007 that "increased the permission to build on the roof by 40 meters". The appraisers' next task (that will appear in the next section of the valuation file) is to analyse each new plan individually (in light of the old plans) in an attempt to see whether or not it was responsible for the creation of new value. The focus of this stage is first and foremost a calculative one. The goal is to measure the number of additional meters that were added by the plan and to infer the change in value of the existing meters as a result of the planning process. This should not be seen as a simple numerical practice, as the appraiser needs to put herself in the property's owners' shoes and think about the best possible use of the property, meaning the most economically rational action. Thus, for example, a plan might reward the permission to build a basement, but the actual building of the basement might have been too expensive at the decisive date that it had no economic benefits and thus no entailing betterments. The imagined rational property owner would then, the appraiser would surmise, have no reasonable cause to actualise the development rights rewarded. In other words, as one appraiser described it, "the permission to build is sometimes value-less, in the grand scheme of things. A right is not a fact until it is worth the investment"115. We shall remember that these calculations are yet to appear in our current section. For the moment, we are only provided with two lists of plans that include information about (1) the decisive dates and (2) the specificities of each plan's instructions. On the surface, it may seem that these specificities are merely

114 All following quotes are taken from the fieldnotes: 01.02.2017 115 From fieldnotes: 10.02.2017.

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technical, straight forward enumerations, but, a more careful reading reveals their interpretational aspect – where the current meaning of each stage is expanded on in regards to the specific instance in question, out of the generalized unclarity of the construction plans.

9) Perhaps the most obscure part of the valuation report, titled principles, factors and argumentations of the valuation. It is a long list of general meditations about the logic that stands at the background of the valuation. Some relevant laws and rulings are brought into light in this section together with crucial details about the plans that will be used for the upcoming calculations, reflections on the property's state (if it is taken into account during the valuation) and some other related thoughts that add up into what is being experienced as the appraiser's 'mood', i.e. her abstract (almost philosophic) strategic view of the valuation and her suggestions how to deal with the problems that arise from the specificities of the matter at hand. The quandary that floats to the surface during these deliberations revolves around the possible paths which one can take to solve the valuation riddle. There are three primary approaches to the calculation of the values of real estate. The one considered to be the most reliable, and is the default choice among appraisers, is (1) the comparison of a property with 'similar' properties. The less employed approaches are: (2) The property’s current revenues (from rent, business, etc.) used as a baseline to signify the minimum REV on top of which certain adjustments and estimations (such as expected local development or planned renovations) are made to approach the ‘real’ value, and (3) extraction of the property's (as yet unknown) value from the (known) value of its assembling components – the empty plot of land, the construction costs and the development expenses. The real-estate appraiser needs to decide in every valuation what is the best plan of attack. Thus, this section often tends to consist of musings about the appraiser's indecisions and passing thoughts on whether this or that method will produce the most reliable results in relation to the information at hand, to the special characteristics of the property, its associated plans and so forth. 10) After traversing through the majority of our document, the calculations of the betterments finally appear in this section. Basing the calculations on a plan-by-plan progression, the appraiser asks three questions about each plan while putting

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herself in the mind of the property owners who are 'naturally' taking the most efficient steps for the maximization of the property value: (a) How many meters were added to the property due to the plan? (b) What was the post-plan value of an average meter? (c) What was the pre-plan value of an average meter? The equation that construct the estimated betterment value is very simple: (a) Each new meter increases the value of its associated property (apart from very rare edge cases). (b) Any substantial changes in the nature of the property, such as a permit to build on what was previously an agricultural land, greatly modifies the value of each meter. Thus, the betterment value is calculated by virtue of: (a) The amount of the newly added meters (according to their value at the plan's decisive date). (b) The fluctuation in value of each meter that was brought about by the plan. Therefore, the possible scenarios are116: (a) A plan added a certain number of meters to a property without changing the value of each meter. (b) A plan increased the value of each existing meter without adding any meters to the property. (c) A plan added new meters to a property and increased the value of the existing meters. (d) A plan had no effect on either the number of meters or on the value of each meter. (e) A plan has negatively affected the property by reducing the number of meters or diminished the value of its existing meters. The presentation of the calculations on the actual text is relatively simple. Each plan is separated from all other plans. Being isolated, the appraiser reviews every plan from the rational property owners' eyes and indicates how many meters were rewarded by it. Doing so, she relies on commonly accepted apprising conventions to adjust for different types of meters. For example, according to convention, one meter from a balcony equals only half of a 'normal' meter.

116 A few more permutations of these variables can be thought of, but are left as an exercise to the reader.

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Calculating the number of added meters, the appraiser moves forward to calculate their price. She does so mostly through the above-mentioned first method – comparison to similar cases - meaning the equalization of our property with properties that the real-estate appraiser considers to be of similar nature (from the perspective of their location, size, type and so forth) that were sold around the same decisive date. Out of this set of similar properties the real-estate appraiser extracts the typical value per meter that matches the entire group and extrapolates it to our property as well. The information about other cases from which the list of similarities was gathered is taken either from the tax authority database, that records all real-estate transactions in the country, or from precedent, i.e. previous decisions regarding similar properties that were made by arbitrators. If the appraiser chooses any one of the two other methods (extraction of value from its revenues or from its compound value) she might use the Construction Costs Guide, the tax authority's information about the prices of empty plots of land, and information about revenues, usually privately acquired by the appraiser herself. After the appraiser calculates the added meters and the pre-plan and post-plan prices, she moves forward to calculate the betterment value. She does so using very simple arithmetic: if the prices did not change then she multiplies the added meters by the new prices per-meter, and if the prices did change, she sums the differences between the stages. For example, if the pre-plan is valued at 10,000 NIS per meter and the post-plan at 30,000, with 100 meters added, then the betterments are valued at 20,000 times 100 (the difference between the pre- and post-plan values times the number of meters). The betterment tax is therefore 1 million NIS, 50% of the betterments. 11) Approaching the document's end, this section is dedicated to the valuation's bottom-line results. A prominent chart displays the calculated betterment values that each relevant construction plan was responsible for at its decisive date, from which 50% is taken as the betterment tax. It is also mentioned that the calculated prices are based on the plan’s decisive dates, and should be attached to the consumer price-index, so that the final cost to the owner is usually much higher than the specified sums.117

117 One often sees seemingly ridiculous sums, as low as a few Agorot, specified in contemporary valuation reports, but when attached to the price index, they become substantial sums.

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12) The document concludes with the appraisers' signature along with her declaration that she does not have any personal interest in the property. 13) Lastly, as an appendix, we can find the detailed calculations, up to the last digit, of the betterment values, including some other accompanying documents such as leases, protocols, etc. Presented above is the formal structure of the betterment tax reports, as they appear in our field. We will now map their assembling process in the urban Actor- Network.

7.4. A Relational Analysis of the Betterment-Tax Files

As we will see, time after time again the technical jargon and ceremonial performance in and around the valuation files served to deflect challenges to the council's levying of betterment taxes, which finance large parts of the city’s budget. When viewed from the perspective of the affluent Tel-Aviv council, it seems that a tax that progressively collects revenues from private property owners is just and fair. It also makes a lot of sense that, for the purpose of maximizing its profits and minimizing its risks, the council makes great efforts to take the betterments calculations into its consideration during all stages of the planning process. If, in the process, some 'casualties' are expected, in the form of sometimes excessive taxes levied on a citizen here and there - from the council’s point of view, the greater goal justifies all bureaucratic means. Travelling around the country and spending time around planning communities of poorer cities such as Acre and Nahariya, I learnt that the fact that each city collects its own betterment taxes is seen as the cause behind some of the great socio-economic gaps between cities such as Tel-Aviv, in which the high REV results in higher betterment taxes, and councils with low REVs and respectively low betterment taxes. The case of the implementation of the Israeli National Anti-Earthquake plan known as TAMA-38 in the city of Acre illustrates this point well. For our purposes, the important part of this plan is its inner mechanism, according to which all buildings in Israel that were built prior to 1981 are allowed to add two and a half additional floors without paying betterment taxes. The money that would have gone to betterment taxes must be used by the building's owners to finance the protection of their property. If a council wants to collect betterment taxes from buildings that undergo the TAMA-38 process it is allowed to prepare alternative plans that include the TAMA-38 development rights together with additional rights and force the residents to pay betterment taxes for the additional

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construction that was not rewarded by the TAMA-38. These are extremely expensive plans118 that only budget-rich cities such as Tel-Aviv can afford to commit to. Budget-poor cities like Acre are unable to do so and thus are trapped with the basic type of TAMA-38 that denies any betterment taxes from the council. While perhaps interesting and important per se, it is out of our scope (and perhaps in the purview of the critical researcher) to determine whether the betterment-tax system is contributes to the expanding budget gaps between municipalities. What we want to achieve is a more primary understanding of the REV files through a follow-up of the networks that constructs these entities, with the aim of better describing the workings of the city and its organisation through these material Actor-Networks. For that purpose, we shall acknowledge that for most real-estate appraisers the fact that the self-claimed scientific system used to trace the values of real-estate, to which we were exposed in the previous section, stands on a shaky ground. 'It is impossible to isolate factors coherently and point at one element that was responsible for a value shift… the appraiser must feel it'119 I was told by a few real-estate appraisers in different occasions. "Good appraisers feel the value" I was told by a few other appraisers, who also mentioned that "you can always find something to compare a property with. Even the first house in a new city can be compared to similar houses in similar cities"120. What we learn from the almost mystical mood above is that in order to understand how the REV files assemble, the image portrayed through the 'scientific' method that was designed to trace the value is not sufficient. This is despite the fact that we do, indeed, learn from the previous section how the betterment-tax valuation files look and, in a general and broad sense, how the REV is born. We know that, in most of its 'public appearances' the REV is displayed as an undisputable scientific black-box, completely inaccessible to the wider public. We should, however, acknowledge that real-estate appraisers view this document on completely different terms. Their awareness of the document's complexities and entanglements are the foundation of the various REV-oriented associated disputes in which they participate. The next few pages will be dedicated to a close follow-up of these, non-formal sections of the valuation-report, to which we were exposed in our ethnography and will help us gain a better understanding of urban organisation. These are brought into focus by viewing the

118 One must remember that like any bureaucratic endeavor, the very planning is a costly process that includes payments to council employees, architects, city planners, lawyers, computer software to name but a few, as well as many related expenses. 119 From fieldnotes: 12.12.2016, 11.1.2017, 15.4.2017 and 1.6.2017. 120 From fieldnotes: 10.1.2017.

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tension-points and disputed matters, which bring to the surface all 'hidden-corners', tensions, and disagreements of the REV and its associated report. The bottom line is that REVs are hybrids in which both the 'formal' structure of the valuation (the formality is also an actor) and any other 'non-formal' elements combine to create the final value. Thus, what we take from the follow-up of the disputes is the ability to learn about the relationships between the concepts, beliefs, arguments, and tools related to the valuation process and the formal requirement of an official black-boxed document that is the final product of the process. The result is a full image of the REV documents (the only forms of REV that we were able to trace) which undresses our entities from their aura but, at the same time demonstrates how they construct magnificent and complicated fabrications. In that light, we shall move forward and portray a few of the ethnographic moments that were captured while I was following the REV-document as they participate in disputes.

7.5. REV-Documents in Controversies

(a) Measuring the Value in its Old Condition

To recap, in order to evaluate the betterments that are (naturally) associated with specific plans, the appraiser must calculate the gaps between the New Condition (NC) - that represents the value of the property in its post-plan state and the Old Condition (OC) - which represents the value of the property in its pre-plan state. The calculated gap between NC and OC is taken as the betterment value. Seemingly, we are dealing with a straightforward technical calculation that demonstrates the elegance of the real-estate valuation’s scientific appearance. However, when following these calculations in action one quickly become aware of the fact that the actual happenings are not as smooth and unruffled as they initially appear. The Old Condition's valuation process offers a great opportunity to understand these complexities. To demonstrate, we shall dig into two relevant stories: (a) In line with the real-estate appraising regulations, the new value of a property is always measured at the plan's decisive date, which is exactly 15 days after the plan's final approval. However, most real-estate appraisers assume that the 'market' was aware of the planning procedures for many years, and could have predicted (to a certain degree) the planning outcomes at a much earlier date than the decisive date. Thus, the assumption is that

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the real-estate market value already incorporates at least parts of the expected rise stemming from the (possible) plan. A regular planning process usually takes between five to ten years that include (1) long preparation processes such as the purchase of lands, the gathering of the local residents, negotiation between the property-owners and the council, the banks, the local-residents, the government, the tax- authorities, developers, and so forth, and (2) long approval process that might require two or three meetings of the local planning committee, meetings of the Regional Planning Committees, arbitrations and court hearings. In that light, the assumption that the market was blind to the long planning process seems absurd. To demonstrate this absurdity, I can recall how I participated in the 'city engineer forum' - an inner, non-formal, forum of the council's planning department, in which a plan for a new building was discussed. Being very remote from the plan's final approval, the developers started to sell apartments in the expected building through a very massive advertising campaign just a few days after the forum's meeting. Due to the fact that the purpose of the betterment tax collection is to tax a property owner for the revenues that she received as a direct result of a plan's approval it is obvious that appraisers are unable to ignore the pre-decisive-date associated betterments. Or, to put it differently, when an appraiser attempts to measure the value of a property in its Old Condition, she must be very creative in order to isolate all factors that are related to the expected, upcoming, new plans and extract only the 'pure' parts of the property's value in its old condition. Following the work of the real-estate appraiser when she attempts to isolate the 'real' value of the property in its pre-plan state from the effects that the expectations towards the upcoming plan create, we find that she uses creative methods to do so. One method includes the comparison of the property at hand with similar properties in similar areas in which there are no expected plans. According to this method. the value of these similar yet remote properties is the best representation of our property's real old value. Another method includes the deduction of some parts of the value, according to an accepted variable, from the value of the property in its post-plan condition. The variable is

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determined according to agreed-upon valuation conventions based on the shared real-estate community's common-sense. In most cases, however, there is no need for any sophisticated techniques to discover the property's value. This is due to the fact that often real-estate appraisers bypass this problem by using existing agreements about prices taken from real-estate arbitrators who, due to their semi-judicial role, are seen as a source of authority from which one can copy a price without the need to re-evaluate the price vis a vis the market’s expectations from a future plan. (b) Betterment-taxes are not only related to the betterment-outcomes of 'full' plans. They are also related to the outcomes of 'partial' planning processes that modify parts of existing plans in relation to some of its specific properties. Many valuation disputes are related to the relationships between the partial and the full plans. These disputes revolve around the original source of the betterment value estimation. If the betterments were already included in the major plan, then when the partial plan is approved there is no surge in value and thus no betterments. If, however, the entire surge in value is related to the partial plans then all the betterments should be associated with them. The questions raised during this process involve such issues as the attempt to understand the logic that led the property owners to ask for a modification in the plan. From a rational perspective, it is obvious that one would start such a long modification process only if she finds it profitable. However, maybe she just needed to make some small bureaucratic adjustment in order to use her already existing development rights? This topic entered public discussion recently when a related dispute arrived to court. The council claimed betterment taxes from a person who couldn’t use his development rights without an additional planning process that will modify a few, strategic, orders of the original plan. The court decided that the council is wrong and that if one cannot build then one should not be required to pay betterment taxes. Allegedly, the council lost, but, as the rumour says, one very cleaver real-estate appraiser has seen the great potential that this loss holds and convinced the council not to appeal. Since in the original post-plan state the owner did not actually receive any

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betterment (according to the ruling), then the common scenario of an owner requesting and receiving a special easement modification to the plan, the council reasoned, should be treated as if it were a plan of its own. In other words, it is accounted as a full increase, and thus liable to pay the entire betterment value, instead of just for the gap between the original plan and the gain brought about by the easement awarded. An example for such a scenario is the case of one Tel-Aviv building, to which a Master Plan granted 5 additional floors. Long after the betterments for these floors were paid for, as part of some transaction or another121, the developer requested a slight modification to the plan in order to actualize it. Specifically, the same number of square meters were requested, but spread across 4 floors instead of 5, which for some technical reason would allow the developer to fulfil her building rights. The council, in line with the above ruling, demanded that she again pay for the entire 5 floors’ worth of sqm, because this slight modification is for all intents and purposes considered a plan of its own, while the original un-actualisable plan does not count as a betterment in itself. This is another example of how the seemingly simple notion of the previous-value is not as smooth and coherent as we might be led to believe.

(b) Meters Without Value?

Development rights might be awarded yet not taken advantage of for many years, sometimes decades. Looking at things from the perspective of a ‘rational actor’, it is safe to assume that those right held no added value to the property, and therefore, they should not incur any betterment taxes. For some, the last claim may seem absurd. How could it be possible that actual development rights that were technically awarded have no value? This would mean that the price of a property with a certain amount of development rights is equal to the price of an identical property with no development rights. In one arbitration hearing that I followed, this issue formed the core of the quarrel. "The owner had a property and we gave him permission to add some extra meters to it, there is no doubt that this permission has some value, this is obvious, the question is how much?" one real-estate

121 Since from the point of view of the betterment tax collectors, when one purchases real estate, one does not pay for the actual, concrete, building, but for what this structure could potentially be according to the latest plan.

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appraiser said. "No" he was quickly answered by the arbitrator, "it is possible for added meters to hold no value". This seemingly semantic argument is intriguing when viewed in relation to the logic behind the valuation reports. On the surface, it might look necessary that if the original meters held some value than any additional meters will similarly hold some value. However, this is not necessarily the way in which value behaves in the internal logic of the appraiser profession. What appraisers look for is simply whether or not the property could have been sold for more due to the added meters, and in some scenarios, this is, indeed, not the case. The appraiser must put herself in the mind of a market participant who was looking for a property at the decisive date (1994 in the case I followed) and decide whether or not she would have agreed to pay more for the property due to the newly added meters. It might be that the market participator does not want to use the extra meters but she still believes that in the future they might be useable, this would be considered a viable reason to pay more, and therefore should be appropriately taxed. It might also be the opposite, and any potential value the added meters might add is negated by the cost of its actualization. This type of dilemma exposes us to the uncomfortable truth that not all meters are created equal.

The act of relating each betterment claim to a single plan is located at the hub of many valuation disputes. The structural hierarchy of all planning procedures consists of a division between national, regional, and local plans. It might be that the national plan, that was approved first, is responsible for the betterments, or, perhaps, it is the last local plan, subordinate to the national one, that is responsible for the betterments. Again, we witness a seemingly semantic debate that can teach us a lot about the valuation documents. The decision of which plan is responsible for the betterments is important because each plan has a different decisive date thus a different betterment bill. To understand these complexities, let us focus on two examples: (1) the first is the use of the New Tel-Aviv Master Plan, which was approved a few years ago, and allowed the council to authorize plans without higher order plans being a prerequisite. When a property in Tel-Aviv is sold, the council issues a betterment tax bill, even though the amorphous nature of the Master Plan requires more specific plans to be approved before any construction can commence. There are many cases in which some Master Plan is used

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to collect the betterment taxes despite the fact that it cannot be used directly for construction. The difficulties in associating specific plans with specific betterment value increase is also evident in the case of (2) TAMA-38, the national anti-earthquake plan. As reviewed above, this plan allows for some construction that will not be charged with betterment taxes. When the council issued a more general plan for the area which includes in it all development rights that were awarded by the TAMA-38, an argument about the source of some of the development rights arose. I have read a case which revolved around the height of a planned roof. TAMA-38 allows for a 'normal' roof height, without specifying the exact measurement, while the new Master Plan allows for a specific height (3 meters). The council demanded that this inferred gap be paid for, claiming that the ‘normal’ is 2 to 2.5 meters, while the counter-claim was that 3 meters is part of the norm, as thus already included in the TAMA-38 order and is therefore exempt. What we learn from all of these entanglements is how a valuation document must directly associate betterments to plans. In some senses, what qualifies a good document is the sturdiness of these attachments.

(d) Creating Value Out of Nothing

Sometimes, when evaluating the effect that old plans had on the value of some given property, the valuation seems to make little sense. For example, one case revolved around the value of agricultural land in a remote part of the countryside, at the plan’s decisive date of 1979. As the land was very cheap in those days (if you were from the 'right' ethnic group and were willing to use it for agricultural purposes) its price was just a few Agorot per meter. The debate revolved around whether the land was valued at 19 Agorot per meter or at 23. It was obvious for all participants that such a small difference is insignificant when dealing with the value of real-estate (which is usually valued for thousands of NIS per meter and certainly not in Agorot). However, once the betterments are set in their 1979 value, they are adjusted to our times, which can turn a gap of a few Agorot into a substantial sum. The somewhat absurd act of digging up the value of a de facto almost free real estate in retrospect (even when adjusted to inflation), for the sake of formality, teaches us that this adherence to the technical structure seemingly creates value where, officially, there was none - figuratively creating something out of nothing.

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(e) How Many Additional Meters does a Plan Reward?

The belief that each specific plan can be clearly associated with specific development rights is tested time and time again. A commonly found discussion, exemplifying the above claim, revolves around the number of meters rewarded by a plan to a specific property. The actual measurement of the property is an inherently controversial science. Some of the difficulties arise from (1) Measurement Convention - How does one treat the thickness a wall? Thicker walls mean better insulation, but use up valuable space - does this change the counted meters, or does the usefulness negate the loss of usability? How does one calculate the total meters added by a flight of stairs, the stair rooms or the landing? Obviously, these are not the same as a ‘normal’ meter, but what is the operationalized proportion between them? The same applies for any other ‘special’ meters, such as balconies, basement, parking, yards and so forth, that are all actual awarded meters, yet their weight in the total measurement is clearly not the same as regular floor space. This gets even more complex once we remember that properties are usually three dimensional, and the role of the height in the total surface is not a straightforward calculation as well. (2) Measurement Technicalities - in a city where one meter can be worth upwards of forty thousand NIS, the slightest change in measurement can translate to a hefty sum. I have witnessed a great deal of disagreement, and even acknowledged mistakes, that were made by measurement makers. The importance of these measurements in the process in the association of meters to plans, stems from the fact that plans are never worded in specific meters, but in relative proportions, i.e. in percentages vis a vis the existing infrastructure. Some economic calculations might also lead to the conclusion that it is impossible to fully use all plan-awarded development rights due to such arguments that it might be "too expensive to dig a basement on the top of a rock" or that the "time factor for such a construction makes it unreasonable". The physical shape of the plot also complicates the translation of a plan into actual meters. Thus, one of the most important parts of the valuation are the exact relations that the document must trace between the Master Plan and the specific situation, as only the directly awarded meters are relevant for taxation purposes. This example brings back to the equation the ‘rational property owner’, but also adds other actors such as the physicality of the building, the materials, the measurement conventions and tool, etcetera.

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(f) How Many Similar Cases are Needed to Form a Convincing Evaluation?

We have seen that the most popular method to value properties is to match a property with what is understood by the actors in the field as similar properties. Based on a very simple intuitive understanding of similarity, it is not always clear how many similar cases are needed in order to form a convincing evaluation of a property. The decision of how many examples are enough, is obviously an intuitive one, that relates to the 'quality' of the data - i.e. the amount of available comparisons which is dependent upon the ability to find data about properties in similar locations that were sold around the same date and share the same features (size, condition, age, etcetera). Following many disputes, I have often witnessed these types of discussions, in which one side brings forth one group of similarities, while the other either brings an opposing group or find reasons to refute the opponent’s claims. In one case, a building in Tel-Aviv was compared with a group of other buildings that were located half a kilometre from it (an unequivocally short distance by all means), but in a wholly different neighborhood in terms of characteristics. The first building is located in an area undergoing a ‘gentrification’ process and is therefore seen as a lucrative place for property investments, while the other, separated from the first one by only one road (that serves as a hidden border) is full with immigrants - a notion that intimidates investors. The dispute which required arbitration revolved around whether these did indeed constitute a set of similar properties, and therefore can serve as a basis for the value appraisal.

(g) What is Similar

Following the above point, we should emphasize the fact that it is not only the superficial similarities that that take part in disputes, but the very notion of similarity is hotly debated. How can one decide if, for instance, the noise, the view or the pollution at one street matters to a degree that makes it essentially different from another? In most cases, the accepted understating of similarities is borne out of intuitions and conventions that were solidified in arbitration rooms and in courts. Sometime these conventions are very general (when you go up a building it is known that each floor is valued 10% less in old buildings that don’t have an elevator and 5% more in new buildings with an elevator) while sometime they are extremely specific (it was established that the value in street X is similar to the value in street Y).

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(h) Reification of the Market through Practice

A very interesting point arises from cases were betterment tax claims are issued for properties that were just sold. It would seem reasonable that the price of the transaction is the property’s value, as it is commonly understood as analogous to what the market was willing to pay for it. However, real-estate appraisers do not accept the equation between the selling price of the transaction and the value. The reason being that one can never assume that a transaction was conducted between two rational economic actors, as it may be that hidden factors play a role in the sale. Thus, they reify the market while through practice insist it is not acting according to its own rationality. Therefore, despite the fact that the appraiser holds the seemingly most important data - the actual selling price - a normal valuation document must be prepared in a similar way to any other property, as if the evident market value is not available. This point is of interest as it exposes the impasse between the ‘macro’ and ‘micro’. Where in the former, the role of the actual sale price is paramount, when dealt with on the ‘micro’ level, these evidences lose their epistemic superiority.

(i) The Number of Appraisers as the Number of Valuations?

It is not rare that several arbitrators issue very different valuation for similar properties. The structure of the arbitration process according to which there is no hierarchy between the arbitrators is responsible for the fact that such different outcomes from similar valuation are technically possible, and indeed are commonly found. No one from inside the profession is surprised from such discrepancies, for as the idiom goes - ‘the number of appraisers as the number of valuations'. This is not to say that the entire profession is in anarchy. This is certainly not the case as the regulations and conventions hold great power over the valuation files. But the fact that these situations are at all possible without necessarily denouncing one of the valuations as wrong, demonstrates very clearly that there are substantial differences between what is understood as science and what is understood as valuation. This scenario also helps us to reflect on the fact that the valuation file is sometimes seen as representation of the market value and sometimes as representation of ‘justice’. The document can be 'accurate and unjust' (if for example, it taxes someone for something very uncertain that might be modified very soon), or 'just and inaccurate' (the valuation uses a lower value per meter from the 'real' one because there is an already established convention regarding a certain type of property).

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One example that can help illustrate this matter revolves around an arbitration dispute that has lately emerged. Having approved a new construction plan of the city centre, the council started to issue betterment tax bills for all new development rights that the plan was said to award to the area's buildings. Seemingly a straightforward matter, it was discovered early on that the council is demanding betterment taxes for development rights that were previously awarded by the state in the National Anti-Earthquake Plan (TAMA-38). These rights, as the TAMA-38 stipulates, are to be exempt from betterment taxes, in an effort to stimulate property owners to implement anti-earthquake measures. The council's main argument in defence of its decision, was that while the development rights awarded by TAMA-38 are not related to the new plan, they are nerveless dependent upon the new plan, as there were not financially feasible before the new plan and therefore the collection of betterment taxes is justified. This argument convinced a few arbitrators who approved the betterment tax collection. A few other arbitrators ruled differently arguing that it is unjust for the council to collect betterment taxes on development rights that were not directly granted by it. This long saga, still ongoing, teaches us not only how open for interpretation the betterment tax dispute might sometimes be (although we presented two sides on this matter, in actuality no less than five different verdicts of various arbitrators were given) but also how the notion of 'justice' is sometimes attached to the arbitrators' decisions.

(J) Delphi Research

As we have previously seen, not all meters are equal. It is known that one meter from the main part of the building is valued as two meters from the balcony and three meters from the basement. These calculations are based on established real-estate conventions. However, there are many disagreements regarding the adjustment system that are yet to be agreed upon. The conventions and disagreements are both based upon intuitions. One tool that helps to solidify intuitions is known as 'Delphi research', which is an opinion poll sent annually to all real-estate appraisers in Israel and asks them to intuitively judge in a few issues. These include very broad and general questions on which there are neither enough evidence nor any established conventions. Some examples of these questions are:

- How much value does a swimming pool adds to an urban cottage? - What are the differences in value between different types of parking spaces?

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- What are the differences in value between an apartment with three air directions and an apartment with two? - What are the expected revenues from the development of office spaces in the heart of a provincial town? The answers to these questions are aggregated and presented in graphs that show the average answer along with some other variables. In many disputes, when there is no evidence considered to be good enough for the creation of meaningful comparisons, the results of the Delphi research are used. To give one example of such Delphi analysis we should look at the question that was answered by twenty real-estate appraisers that were asked for their estimation regarding the "effect (by percentage) of a train that is located in walking distance but outside the 'noise- distance' of a 'typical' suburb cottage on the value?" (“Haarachat Shovi Mekarkein Beshitat Delphi [Real-Estate Valuation in the Delphi Method],” n.d.). According to the average results of this research, such a train is responsible for a 15% increase in value. The graph below represents the twenty different answers to this question as it appeared in a booklet, that was sent to all registered real-estate appraisers in Israel and included hundreds of such questions:

Figure 17. A Delhi research-oriented graph It is very easy to find examples for the use of a Delphi research by real-estate arbitrators. As one can easily spot them in many arbitration reports. To give but a few examples, in one arbitration dispute that I attended, the valuation of the arbitrator was

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based upon the data from a Delphi research according to which in areas with very limited parking solutions an average value per meter of an apartment with no parking equals 90% of a value of an apartment with parking. Another arbitration process has ruled, according to the data that was taken from a 2013 Delphi research, that the value of undeveloped land in a cellar equals 40% of a developed ground floor meters.

(K) Additional Construction Costs

In many cases it might be that the value of the added meters and their amount are agreed by all sides. However, an argument about what is known as the 'additional costs' of the construction might be the centre of the debate. For example, it might be agreed upon that two parking spaces were awarded by a plan, but the expected cost of their construction is disputed. The means to resolve these types of disputes include the construction cost guide and, in many cases, the deliberation with a specialist is added to the procedure. The active role of externalities in the formulation of the betterment document can be gleaned from some common disputes as well. If, for example, a plan awards a property with the permission to build a new floor while also instructing the construction of a new road, the damage from the new road must be balanced with the newly added floor. This damage is calculated via the same system of similarities – meaning a search for similar properties that are built next to, or far away from, a road and comparison between the two prices.

7.6. Conclusion

Reflecting on all of these complicated scenarios, we can see that real-estate valuation files are hubs of many different human and non-human entities that construct the value and allow us, due to their entangled character, to view the city, via this vehicle, in its complexity and multiplicity. These entities include numbers, the shape of the land, the tax authority on-line system, the old archival information from which one can learn the meaning of old plans and the prices in previous times, strategic needs of different actors, the physical condition of a property, the way in which appraisers imagine the markets, the way in which the different actors understand similarities, physical factors that make properties different or similar, the formal structure of the arbitration system, the differences between types of meters, the economic reasoning of the rational actor, the shared understanding of time across the field, files and everything that is written inside them, and the prices, are all parts

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of the REV-document’s Actor-Network and as such they are part of the urban- organization. We have seen that valuation is not scientific in the common-sense meaning of the term (Latour, 1987) but rather it is more a craft that is borne out of intuitive understanding of similarities, wide spread field conventions, and various sorts of actors, that we tend to not associate with the 'pure' domain of fiscal examination. More importantly, this view of REV, through its turbulent assembling process, lends itself to a more complex view of the city and its organisation, due to REVs centrality in so many urban affairs, many of which we already discussed or mentioned. Urban organisation can no longer be understood through the prism of either the economic, institutional or political (i.e. critical) narratives, but as a complex, ever-shifting assemblage of diverse actors, networked together to form the hybrid often referred to as the city. After seeing how the REV looks from within and how it is structured, we have crossed the first goal which was to understand how REVs are constructed, or to put it differently – what REVs are in the relational sense. Our next challenge is to learn what REVs do, and this we will address in chapter eight. Learning what REVs do, or to put it differently, how the REV-documents actively participate in the organization of the city, will help us better portray the urban organization as it will allow us to close the circle and view all urban matters that assemble into the REV and all urban matters that the REV are assembled into. Aiming to conclude our empirical process in which we study how REV are formed and how they participate in the formation process of the city we will dedicate chapter nine of this dissertation to a theoretical discussion, with the help of the OS literature that deals with documents' role in organizations and which was central in this chapter. This discussion will deal with the entire process of describing the REV from within and from without and will show how this entire process helps as shed light on urban-organization from an OS perspective.

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8.0. Overview

After we opened the black-box of the REV document, and saw how it is assembled, it is now time to take a step back and follow REV, as a now-familiar black-box, as it participates in the assembling of the urban organisational Actor-Network. In line with our ANT sensibilities regarding the follow up of documents – as was presented in chapter six, we came to the conclusion that in order to view the REV-document relationally, it is best to conduct our inquiry in this pincer movement – from 'within' and 'without', in other words, to see how REV is assembled and how it participates in the assembly of other things. Needless to say, that we could have inscribed a different story in which the REV-document Actor-Network would have looked differently. These cartographies of 'within' 'without' are our own constructed fabrication foisted upon our field so as to create a novel account of reality, as per Latour's imperative. Therefore, much like the previous chapter, we will choose one type of REV (Betterment Tax above, Economic Viability Exam below) with which to start our ethnographic exploration. We will start by casually introducing the Economic Viability Exam, or Standard-21 Document, to the reader, as it is commonly understood in the field, and continue by following it as it participates in several urban plans – the La-Guardia road and the Atarim Square plans.

8.1. Introduction

(a) The Standard-21 files

To best introduce the Standard-21 document, we find that a description of it in action is most suiting. Therefore, we shall quickly visit one construction plan. This plan is located by the Ayalon road, one of Israel's main highways that crosses the country’s entire central region and divides Tel-Aviv into two zones. The central part of the city, located to the west of the road, and the more suburban part to the east. Separated by this big man-made barrier, east and west are only sporadically connected, via a small number of bridges that stretch over the highway, kilometres between them. In line with a growing world-wide fashion (Moore, 2018), the Tel-Aviv council decided to bury the highway underground and build a park as its overpass, so as to connect the two parts of the city. While an

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overwhelmingly popular idea, the council decided that, due to its enormous costs, new economic mechanisms needed to be developed in order to finance it. That being the case, it was decided to trace possible plots along the highway that will be suitable for the construction of very tall skyscrapers. Private developments companies who wish to take advantage of these newly added development rights must first agree to pay for the construction of the overpass park.

Figure 18. The Ayalon highway in its contemporary condition.

Figure 19. A visualization of the post construction park.

How does one know how many development rights should be awarded to the developers so as to make sure that they have the funds to pay for the construction of the park in addition to substantial profits that will attract them to join the plan in the first place? The basic mechanism that was developed for that purpose by the Appraiser Standards Committee

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is known as 'Standard-21'122. This standard instructs real-estate appraisers on how to conduct economic viability exams for urban-regeneration plans. The logic of the exams is very basic – the gap between a plan’s expected costs and expected revenues must be between 25% to 30%. In other words, in order for a plan to be considered as financially feasible it must generate profits of 25% - 30%. These seemingly high profit-rates are seen as a reflection of the great risks that urban-regeneration processes hold and the great expenses that they entail. For example, the early planning fees, paid for the architects, might reach a few million NIS; The residents might decide, after the fact, to choose another developer; The requested plan might not be approved by the city council; The banks might not furnish the developers with a loan or might give them a very bad deal; The housing prices might fall together with the expected revenues and so forth. With such great risks, it was decided that 25%-30% is the average profit ratio that an urban regeneration plan is expected to generate in order to be considered as feasible. In light of the above, it is important for us to notice that when a plan becomes more certain - the expected profits drop. In the plan's final stages, just before the actual constructions start, a similar report to Standard-21, known as Zero-report, is made as part of the negotiations between the developers and the banks. As the level of risks in this stage is considered much lower, the Zero-report’s expected profit ratio is also much lower than the Standard-21 expected profit ratio, somewhere around 10%-15%. The Standard-21 reports are very similar in their appearance to the valuation- reports which were the focus of our previous chapter. However, unlike the betterment-tax reports, the Standard-21 calculations are not based on the gap between the old and the new conditions, but, rather on the gap between the expected costs and the expected revenues. The expected costs are based on a valuation of the old buildings' demolition costs, the new constructions' costs, the post-construction apartments that must be handed back to the original property-owners, all expected taxes, expected advertising costs, financial costs, rent paid for the property-owners during the construction-period, management costs for the new buildings123 and a few additional factors that change from one project to another. The expected revenues come from one factor only – the expected selling prices of the newly built properties.

122 The appraiser's standards are a group of regulations, written by a professional committee that sits at the Ministry of Law, and instruct real-estate appraisers on how to craft their reports. Standard-21 instructs them on how to conduct economic examinations of urban-renewal projects (these are a specific class of projects, but the basic calculative logic of Standard-21 is being used in most construction plans). 123 Part of the council's requirements from the developers is to finance the first ten years of the new buildings management costs so as to make sure that the old residents will not be forced to leave the area.

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As one would imagine, looking inside the Standard-21 valuation files, we can find very similar complexities to those that were at the centre of our discussion of betterment- tax reports. For example, it is considered very hard to decide what will be the selling prices of the new apartments, as the decision must be depended upon the comparison of the post-construction apartments with similar apartments that were already sold in the free market and serve as indicators of the price. The difficulties in deciding what are 'similar' apartments to the yet-to-exist ones, the fact that the new construction itself would likely impact the character of the area and therefore its market value, along with a plethora of other factors of varying magnitude, turn this seemingly straightforward task of evaluating the post-construction selling prices into an arduous and entangled process. The same goes for all other factor that take part in the Standard-21 valuation report – the construction costs, the expected taxes, etc., are all matters of almost eternal disputes. As these entanglements are very similar to what we have described a few pages back we shall leave it to our readers to imagine how the Standard-21 black-box looks like when it is opened up. Instead, in line with this chapter’s intent, we shall maintain the operationalized unity of the Standard-21 files and follow them as they act as financial mediators in the field of the urban-planning processes. But first, before we can report on that, we should shortly present the specific planning processes that we will later follow, with a focus on the role the REV documents play in them.

(b) Reviewing a Few Reconstruction Processes – Setting the Scene for the Exploration of REVs' Urban Praxis

It did not take long after entering the field before it became obvious that any extensive understanding of the matter in question must rely upon a fastidious dive into the specificities. Therefore, I decided to invest my attention in a few specific construction plans and dedicate large parts of my time comprehensively studying them. Hence, I collected hundreds of relevant documents, participated in professional and political planning- oriented meetings, public participation gatherings, court hearings and residents' assemblies, interviewed a few dozen council members and employees, developers, architects, lawyers, real-estate appraisers, and residents, and travelled around the relevant areas extensively in an attempt to better familiarize myself with the zones in question. We will therefore closely examine three planning processes through the prism of the Standard-21 documents. The first planning process I focused on is the renovation of La-Guardia Road - a central, semi-suburban street at the heart of Tel-Aviv Eastern District. La-Guardia is a long street. It begins as a semi-industrial area bordering Ayalon Road - the unofficial border

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that divides the city between east and west. Proceeding east, the road stretches along a crowded intersection, known as La-Guardia Bridge, that serves as a hub connecting the city and the highway that passes through it. On the eastern side of the bridge, the noisy environment and the inner-city havoc shifts dramatically into a suburban area that, one might assume, has not been touched since the 1950s. Two long lines of relatively low terraced houses, separated by large courtyards and a wide road in between, stretch monotonously for a few additional kilometres. The courtyards are full of either nurtured grass or untreated weeds and the narrow pavements are surrounded by numerous eucalyptus and populus trees “that reflects the street’s green identity” 124., as noted by a council’s Tree Conservation expert.

Figure 20. Eastern La-Guardia Road

The renovation plans for La-Guardia Road are based upon the council's declared desire to reconstruct a new Iban-Gavirol street125, the city’s longest and most fashionable semi- commercial semi-residential road, that will serve as a new residential-commercial hub of the city's Eastern part and will, as a consequence, expand the 'city-centre product' from west to east. More specifically, the council's plan126 is to tear all existing buildings down

124 From fieldnotes: 13.3.2017. 125 Iban-Gavirol is considered around the Israeli planning community to be a role model for new streets. All around the country I have repeatedly heard of city-planners desires to imitate it. 126 We will not currently delve into the specificities of the plans, as these are too complicated and will divert us from our focus. However, it is important to be aware of the fact that there are around 8 different plans for the street, with each being a combination of a few buildings, and that each plan has its own unique characteristics.

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and replace them with new, much larger, constructions that, instead of pointing to the yards, will face the road and create commercial fronts.

Figure 21. Visualization of the post-renovated La-Guardia road

As we will extensively see in the next section, the Standard-21 documents accompany the La-Guardia Road planning process through all stages of the reconstruction plans - from the area's first strategic plan, that initiated the entire process, to each individual plan along the street. Similar to all other cases, the official purpose of the Standard-21 documents, in relation to La-Guardia's renovation works, was to determine the plans’ financial feasibility in order to make sure that the council's plans can, and will, be executed. The second planning process is the re-construction of the Atarim square. This brutalistic square, located at the edge of one of the city's central avenues, only a few meters from the sea, is known as one of the most neglected corners of the city centre. Originally designed to be a commercial hub, the poor planning of the square127 together with long struggles between the different owners, was responsible for the fact that this strategically located square became the city's 'white elephant', infamous for being one of its dirtiest, most deserted and underdeveloped nooks. Recently, the council started working on a new plan for the square that included the construction of a few skyscrapers, a shopping centre and a revamped public agora. Not long after the plan was initiated it became the locus of a political struggle that involved many of the city's residents and, during the 2018 municipal elections, frequently brought up in the running platforms of a few of the local parties. The

127 For example, most of the shopping area is located in an underground tunnel completely hidden from the sea.

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argument made by those opposing the project revolved around what was perceived as excessive construction, which the council deemed as essential in order to properly finance the project and retain the open nature of the square. For our study, we find the relations between the 'project' and its related Standard-21 documents128 that were at the centre of this political dispute as of particular interest.

Figure 22. Atarim square in its current condition

Figure 23. Atarim square in its current condition

128 With regards to the Atarim square project and also with regards to the next plan that we will discuss, we are not dealing with Standard-21 files per-se but, instead, with very similar economic valuations of the projects that, for all intents and purposes, just bear a different name.

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Figure 24. A visualization of the post-constructed Square

Figure 25. A visualization of the post-constructed Square

The third planning process which we will review, revolves around the reconstruction attempts of one typical city-centre building. The twelve residents who own apartments in this building collectively decided to try and initiate a re-construction project, and had to enter into negotiations with a few developers. As the Standard-21 files had a decisive role on the bargaining table, we find the story of this building to be ethnographically fruitful and will utilize it for our purposes in the upcoming section.

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8.2. Following Standard-21 in Action

(a) How Valuation Files Participate in the Financial Organization of the Urban-Sphere

The Standard-21 files delineate the economic boundaries of all construction plans. This role emerges from the prevalence of the privately financed, developers-led, construction in Israel, which leads all councils to approve plans if, and only if, they are situated well within the accepted economic perimeters. As described in the previous section, it was decided to place these economic limits around the 25% profit mark129. This profit ratio is seemingly high, but, due to the great risks and costs that early planning processes entail, it was established as the minimum barrier for all construction plans. In addition, due to the fact that the government wanted to secure the rights of current property owners130 and limit any "excessive and unnecessary" construction, it became a convention that the same profit ratio of 25% will be used as the maximum rate in relation to which all plans should be measured. The authority of Standard-21 over all urban-plans is so great that in most cases it leads to the plans being effectively subordinate to it. To illustrate, when a valuation report suggests that the re-construction of one specific building must be accompanied by a permit to build three new floors so as to arrive to the 25% expected profit ratio, the council does not have much choice but to approve the prescripted amount of construction. As a general rule, the Standard-21 documents131 have the capacity to decide what will be the scope and magnitude of all construction plans. A public’s participation meeting that took place in the northern city of Acre taught me that the Standard-21 files are not simply responsible for the amount of the newly added construction, but, as a result of the same calculations, are responsible for the very viability of construction itself. The meeting that was held in a derelict high school was organized to collect information from the residents as part of a protocol that accompanied the initial steps of every plan. Introducing the plan’s aim to some forty residents, mostly older immigrants from the former Soviet Union, the planning team’s members described the various benefits of the urban regeneration processes. The

129 I.e. - the revenues must be 25% of the expenses. 130 The assumption being that if the developers earn too much it must come on the expense of the current owners. 131 It is important to remember that we are dealing with the actual physical documents and not with some economic reality that they proclaim to represent. To demonstrate the last point, we should notice the fact that for most actors in our field the Standard-21 documents' black-box (that, as we have seen, might be highly controversial when opened) is left untouched as, in most cases, the actors encounter only the Standard-21 bottom-line results.

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residents’ sober minded attitude and sheer lack of faith in the council’s grandiose proposal, which was reflected in their preference to discuss the area’s ‘cultural problem’, such as the prevalent habit of throwing garbage from windows to the street, instead of sharing in the excitement about the city’s future development, exposed the tedious nature of the happenings. And, indeed, the numbers were not cooperating. According to Standard-21, developers in Acre will be able to invest in the area only if they were allowed to replace each old apartment with six new ones. These one-to-six ‘multipliers’, the biggest I have witnessed during my entire fieldwork, made the future regeneration process highly unlikely. Seeing as these economic conditions made any further planning under these terms unattainable, the planning team explained that its central challenge is to find ‘solutions’ to this economic reality. These solutions were based on the merging of multiple small plots into a few sizable lots on which extremely tall skyscrapers will rise. Hoping that the mere existence of a plan will provide some certainty regarding the future of the area, which means less controversy regarding the estimated profit margins, which in turn will increase the local REVs and entice developers, the planning team tried to create the conditions that might allow for this to happen. The picturesque descriptions of the head architect, which portrayed a bright future where this dusty neighborhood is transformed into an ‘urban pearl’, with a high street that (not unlike the La-Guardia Road plan) will resemble the coveted Iban-Gavirol ideal, could not disguise the fact that the ‘planning perspective’ was pushed aside in favour of the economic necessity according to which only if a huge, most definitely untenable, number of new apartments will be built, is there some hope that one day, in the remote future, the area might be reconstructed. This disregard for the actual needs and material conditions of the area in question was obvious to both parties. Not only does the stupendous cost of such a gargantuan building endeavour stands in sharp contrast to the means of the local population, but the hypothetical end result - of some sleek high-rise cityscape - is a practical anathema to the current city-planning professional consensus. The Acre example teaches us that the Standard-21 documents are not only responsible for the quantity of construction, but, in areas with low REV, our documents might prevent construction altogether. We have also seen that the only way to cope with this excessive power of the Standard-21 documents is to try and secure prospectors’ confidence by issuing sometimes preposterous plans, in an attempt to increase the local REV. Moving

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forward, we shall quickly review the way in which the Standard-21 REV files shape the scope and magnitude of construction in our three example cases:

1) The La-Guardia Road’s multipliers (between 1:3 to 1:4) were constituted as part of the first strategic plan for the area that was designed by the council more than a decade ago. Since then, all other plans that were made for the street strictly followed these calculations (without seriously taking into consideration the fact that the area's REV has most definitely seen a sharp increased since then) and thus permitting only the construction of buildings that are 3-4 times bigger in size then the existing ones. This limit, put in place by the Standard-21 document, not only set the minimum construction but also, as we have discussed above, the maximum quantity of construction. The state of affairs gave rise to some bitterness, relayed to me by a manager of a private company responsible for drawing up plans in the street: “The result is the reverse of what was seemingly intended - instead of the standard being used to make sure that the planning is feasible, that you are not building 4 floor and losing your investment - it became a tool that decides how many building rights the council can grant. Nobody cares anymore about what is right from a planning perspective. If 25% profit equals 15 floors, we will never be granted any more floors even if that would make the most planning sense… What will happen if one were to earn a bit more!? Standard-21 became a tool in the hands of the council to justify placing a maximum limit on developers. Instead of going about it from a planning point of view, they are thinking about it all as an economic matter.132”

2) The wrangle around the expected future construction of the Atarim square revolved around the exact same issues - the establishment of the minimum amount of construction needed in order to ensure that the plan to save the square can be fulfilled. The main part of this story is about the fight over the validity of the square associated Standard-21 document. While the residents argued that the document is inflated, and thus, unjust, the developers and the council stood behind it. We will tell the story of this argument in the following sections, however – what is important for us right now is to acknowledge the fact that all sides were in agreement that the files have the authority to decide what will be the scope of

132 From fieldnotes: 07.03.2017.

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the construction, and that the argument was only about what should these files contain. 3) With regards to our typical city centre building, the story is a bit more obscure. As the plans for the area are already set in stone, the developers could not simply re- shape them. Thus, they needed to rely upon the permitted amount of construction that was set by existing plans and see whether or not they can plan a new building by using the existing multipliers. That being the case, while the developers were examining the economic feasibility of all possible re-construction (through a process that is basically identical to the Standard-21 review) the only thing that they could do is to check whether the 'costs' and the 'revenues' columns of our document allow them to find a 25% profit-generating solution. Located on a slope, our building is a bit different from most other buildings around the area as this allowed it to have three additional apartments. As a result, all ten developers who examined the building decided that the need to account for these three extra property owners incurred further costs, which made economically justifying the project even further out of reach. Reviewing the above descriptions of urban-planning processes and their relations to the Standard-21 documents, the dominance of (what is considered as) the economic reality – as relayed by the accounting practices - over (what is considered as) the planning reality is almost self-evident. This we learn from the fact that the economic calculations always occupy the most important seat around the planning table, to a degree that only if they, or their calculators, are satisfied can the planning move forward. Following the Standard-21 documents further, we will now see how their affect carries over beyond the mere approval of a plan into its finer details and characteristics.

(b) How the Standard-21 Files Shape the Relations Between the Professional and the Political Domains

In the previous sub-section, we have seen that the Standard-21 documents are behind the scope, magnitude and very approval of all construction plans. The purpose of the current sub-section is to push the argument forward and present a considerably more entangled image of the Standard-21 participation in urban-planning processes. Arising from our upcoming ethnographic expedition, we will conclude that Standard-21 is responsible not only for the shaping of all construction plans' boundaries but also for all other parts of the

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planning process, to a degree that our documents start to resemble an orbit around which the entire planning solar-system revolves. All urban-plans must first be approved by a local planning committee, which in turn either greenlights them, or passes them upwards to the judgment of the Regional Planning Committee133. On the one hand, the unsalaried members of the local planning committee are elected council members that do not have, in most cases, the planning expertise nor the time to properly familiarize themselves with the hundreds of excessively technical pages that are sent to them in advance of each bi-weekly meeting. On the other hand, the planning documents are put together in a long assembly line of planning professionals and procedures, before they reach the committee's desk. Generally, the planning process starts with one of the quarter-specific sub- departments (East, South, North or Centre)134 that assigns an adjudicator to supervise the work of the architect, whose drafts must abide by the planning needs and constraints. To put it differently, when a developer wants to promote a plan, she chooses an architect to do the planning work. The architect must then get in touch with the council's relevant planning sub-departments to get all the relevant data and to be assigned a referee that will accompany the plan's creation process and instruct the architect with regards to the council's stand on all matters of concern. When the referee is satisfied with the draft, the architect is required to consult with all other specialized planning sub-departments135 to get their remarks and edit the plan accordingly. Finally, the draft must face the city Engineer's Forum - where delegates from all planning sub-departments, headed by the city's engineer and his second, the head of the planning department, meet our architect and his planning team to hold a comprehensive discussion about the plan and its place in the city’s fabric. Following this ceremony, it might be decided that some modifications are in order, or that the plan can pass on to the Local Planning Committee, whose final approval (or, seldomly, rejection) is the last stamp in the planning process, unless it is deemed that the plan must go up before the Regional Planning Committee.

133 Due to recent modification in the Planning and Construction Law and the approval of the Tel-Aviv Master Plan by the Regional Planning Committee, most plans nowadays can be approved independently by the local committee with no need for further discussion in the regional level. In fact, the attempt to 'avoid' the need to get the regional planning committee's approval is essential to the work of the Tel-Aviv planning bodies that are trying to limit construction, as much as they can, to what can be approved on the local level. The exact boundaries of jurisdiction, be they local or regional, are a matter of common dispute, and I have personally attended many a meeting in which the arguments revolved around whether a plan is of regional or local concern. 134 Planning-wise, Tel-Aviv is zoned into 4 areas - The Ayalon highway serves to divide between East and West, with the west further divided into North, South, and Centre. 135 Transportation, conservation, strategic planning, education, infrastructure, the city-architect, economic valuation and law.

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Once passed through the city Engineer's Forum to the Local Planning Committee, the draft can be said to be backed by the entire professional planning department. This is reflected by a promise made to a developer by the city's engineer -"the plan will be approved in the local planning committee if I want it to136". This promise reflects what the planning process is from the point of view of the planning professionals – the professional planning department is responsible for what we would ascribe to The Planning, while the elected council representatives are just one additional factor that the planning department needs to overcome137. I was once told by a senior architect who works with the council that if he was the city’s engineer, the only thing that he would care about is "to provide certainty to the developers that everything that was agreed upon with the planning department will be approved by the local planning committee…[as this is the only way to make sure that] developers will cooperate with the planning department and all planning processes will go smoothly" 138. The council's planners encountered describe the various techniques used to 'bypass' the local planning committee members. The large number of plans brought up in each session and the vast, highly technical reading material, successfully deny most committee members the chance to meaningfully participate in the planning process. Political obligations push some committee members to sit silently during entire sessions and vote according to the planning department's requests when the voting takes place. The Standard-21 documents also appear as part of the planning department’s arsenal in the 'defence' against the elected. When a plan is presented in front of the committee, all Standard-21 are solid facts, or, to put it differently, they play the role of the agreed-upon foundations upon which all further planning is dependent and their claim to truth cannot be challenged. Thus, during discussions, one can often hear arguments that explain why a plan cannot be amended or even slightly modified as it would never pass the economic viability test. This is due to the fact that the Standard-21 is an immutable black-box which is not up for discussion – not by the planners nor by the committee members. It is just as it is – and comes into play only due to the fact that its special features allow it to be used. During the La-Guardia Road meetings, this configuration was frequently employed, as

136 From fieldnotes. The quote was taken in the city's Engineer's forum at 11.9.2017. 137 This state of affairs is not solely a result of the professional teams’ desire to 'run the show' and avoid all interference from the amateur politicians but is also an inherently political matter. It is the mayor’s office who directly controls the planning departments and their excessive power is a result of the current mayor’s policy, which also sees the planning department as much more important than the elected council members. Sometimes, when the committee members cause problems', the mayor, who is not officially a member of the committee, is subtly called to come into the room. In these situations, the fact the municipal head is quietly sitting in the proceedings, looking at the happenings from the corner of the room, is enough to make most 'problems' disappear. 138 From fieldnotes: 15.08.2017.

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every attempt by the committee members to challenge the reality forced by Standard-21 found a similar retort - "the request to decrease the amount of construction is not possible as all quantity is based upon the Standard-21 document"139. It was the same with the Atarim Square construction plan. The economic viability check that accompanied the planning blocked all possible discussion about any alternatives. Despite the clear examples that were given above (and will be discussed in greater length later on), in most cases the enforcement of the economic-viability imperatives is not a clear-cut strategy that is expressed out loud but is rather quietly acknowledged in back-rooms and canteens. Viewed ethnographically, during my year-long participation in all of the Local Planning Committee meetings, the Standard-21 documents appeared in a very similar way to other 'factual' numbers (such as the size of the land, the expected number of the newly constructed meters and so forth) – mostly in the beginning of the plan’s draft or the PowerPoint presentation, or inside some excessively technical table, as part of the hard facts which make up the plan. It is important to note here that it is not merely their representation which is described here, but the actual role of these figures in the planning meeting's Actor-Network as hard facts that shape the debate. Indeed, we already saw how Standard-21-produced numbers determine the measurements of all construction, however, as we will shortly see, there are many 'soft' facts related to the Standard-21 files that can be very easily modified or played with. We learn that the support that the Standard-21 file gives the professional planning teams revolves around the hard facts just as much as it revolves around the soft ones. To put it in the most general way, we will shortly see how Standard-21 is associated with every factor in the planning process to a degree that not only the general plan, but also the nuanced decoration, the size of the apartments, the fate of the local residences, and many more such issues, are determined via a negotiation process between the different sides, when the Standard-21 is the benchmark, or rather, the foundational facts, that one must comply with if one wishes to win the argument. In that light, the fact that when the plan advances from the planning department to the planning committee, the Standard-21 logic - to secure a 25 to 30 percent profit margin, stabilizes the entire planning network. The planning department is responsible to make sure that the plan works according to the Standard-21 instructions. We will further explore this point in the following pages. The political committee is not in a position to destabilize the economic foundations of the plan,

139 From fieldnotes: 15.02.2017.

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and therefore, we can say that in most cases, our ethnographer discovered, that the Standard-21 blurs the division between the political and the planning. The central argument is as follows: We do not want to describe a reality in which Standard-21 is actively used by the planning teams to manipulate the elected, but rather, we want to produce an image of Standard-21 as a solid entity that cannot be argued with in a level playing field. Standard-21 takes an active role in the planning process – it is an valuation standard, but we can see that the economic considerations are in fact part of the planning not only because they set the boundaries for the plans but also because they actively shape the frame for the committee's conduct and thus are responsible for the end result of the plan. This description of the relationship between the planning department and the elected is applicable to the relations of the planning department and developers just as well. We will now discuss this observation.

We saw how the Standard-21 documents determine the quantity of all construction. In the following pages we will learn how the Standard-21 documents are also behind the quality, i.e. the finer characteristics, of all construction. We remember that the Standard-21 documents are studies of the economic viability of construction plans through a detailed calculation of the plans' expected costs and revenues, and that, as a rule of thumb, the expected profit should always stay around the 25% mark. Neither below nor above. Its authors, though, are far from passive calculators, and it is a well-known secret to all parties involved that their description is in fact inscriptive, which is to say, the strive for the 25% mark shapes the plan, and not the other way around. Thus, when trying reach the 25% expected profit-ratio, each and every element that belongs to any one of the two columns, costs and revenue, is shaped by the attempt to arrive at the expected profit-ratio. The planning document is shaped by a negotiation process, with each side - developer, planning departments and appraiser – trying to pull the numbers in their direction, with a common understanding that the end result must always be, as stated, 25% profit. The developers, for example, as we will shortly see, always aim for more building rights, and so will try and estimate lower revenues and higher costs, so as to force the planning department to grant them the right to make up the difference

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to 25% profit. The planning department's interests are much more complex140, and often change, but the logic of their negotiation is always the same - be it pushing the numbers upwards or downwards, always improve their standing vis-a-vis the 25% constant ratio. Our review of this stage of the negotiation process begins with the parameters which make the overall estimation of the costs - the most straightforward of which is the quality of the materials. "I don’t pretend to know better than the developers what is the cost of the construction, I just ask them for explanations141" said the council’s economic adviser when explaining that her responsibility is to review whether or not the construction costs that were provided to the council by the developer are correct. Indeed, there are various sorts of price lists that estimate the average price-per-meter of different types of construction, based on the materials they use. However, the calculation is not simple, as developers can choose to build in a 'standard' quality or in a 'premium' one, and the line between the two is far from clear. The difference between the two is manifested in the level of the finishing products (in contrast to the building's foundations, whose price is overall consistent and pre-determined), such as the quality of the tiling, heating, the window glasses, the kitchen counter-top, and so forth. The decision that faces the developers is to either build in a ‘normal’ quality and expect to sell the new apartments in a normal price or, to take the risk of paying more for the construction with the hope that the ‘luxury’ apartments will bring in revenues higher than the additional construction costs. This decision is dependent upon such factors as the area and its inhabitants, the current trends, the experience of the developers, his liquidity (meaning his ability to wait longer before he sells his apartments) and so forth. In any case, whatever the developer chooses to do she must first account for the estimated construction costs, as part of the Standard-21 review of the project, and then explain her strategy carefully – why would construction in such and such quality lead to sells in such and such prices? The cost of construction is intimately related to the what is usually the central item in the cost list – the expected dividend to the current residents. This connection is not only a result of the fact that the developer must build all apartments in the same level of quality

140 The council is not only responsible for planning and approval. It is also (1) a property owner, as is the case in the La Guardia Road project, where the council owns apartments as well as partial ownership of yards and roads. Therefore, the council’s holding departments has an interest in expanding the urban regeneration projects above the 25% line, just as any other property owner/developer. All the while, the council is also a (2) tax collector, whose interest is that the developers will earn more than the 25% and thus pay higher taxes. In Atarim square, the rumour goes that the council’s fervent support of the immense reconstruction project stems from the potential hundreds of millions of dollars in betterment taxes which the sea-side skyscraper is expected to bring in. On top of that, the council also owned around a third of the land which it sold to the developers as part of the it own planning process. 141 From fieldnotes: 20.03.2017.

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(the ones that she keeps and the ones that she hands back to the current residents), but also due to the fact that the promises made to the residents with regards to the quality of the construction are a very important part of the negotiations between the developers and the residents, from the earliest stages of planning142. I have been in various meetings in which a developer that wanted to convince some residents to sign a deal with her and not with other developers made promises about the quality of the construction that she promises to give to the residents143. Sometimes the differences between the developers are great, while sometimes, they revolve around trivial minutiae144. Putting the cost of supplies aside – the most important parameter in the list of expenses is the new apartments that the developers give the residents. The norm, that was established as part of the Standard-21 regulation, is that each property-owner must get a new apartment and an additional 25 meters. However, some developers, as has happened in the first project in La-Guardia Road, promise many more meters so as to convince the residents to sign on. In these situations, the developers often have problem to achieve their 25% profit goal, which leads them to ask the council for additional development rights. However, the council regulation does not allow them to compensate the developer for any promised meter above the standard 25. In fact, recently, the council attempted to decrease the number of given meters to 15 (a move that was blocked in the local planning committee) so as to decrease the costs' section in the Standard-21 file which, in turn, will modify all other parts of the construction, and give the council more freedom in the negotiations. The negotiations between the developers and the residents is further complicated by such factors as the apartment’s location in the building, parking spaces, special features such as gardens or balconies, and so forth - the quantification of which is another major point of debate between the council and developers. Further important factors include: (1) the rent that the developers need to pay for the property owners during the renovation works which naturally appears in the Standard-21 documents. The fact that if many residents will need to rent properties in the area around the same time, will impact the local rent prices, further obfuscates any predictions of the eventual rent prices of the

142 The mandate to provide equal quality of construction and finishing to both existing residences and new apartments is a deeply rooted consensus that stems from competition between developers over the hearts of the residents and, is some cities, from local regulations. In reality there is a lot of tension between residents and developers, with the former suspecting the latter of dishonesty. 143 In most cases, when a building or a group of buildings want to start a regeneration process, they ask for offers from a few different developers. The one with most supporters receives the contract. But in any case, there must be 80% agreement among the residents to for the plans to go forward. 144 In one meeting between residents and developers, the developer touted his promise to supply each new apartment with an in-wall USB charging plug (the cost which is mere pennies) as if it was a new additional room for each apartment.

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constructed apartments (2) the need to build parking spaces (as demanded by the Planning and Construction Regulations) is another major issue that is sometimes responsible for a project’s non-profitability. Parking is a very complicated matter in light of the Standard-21 documents. In Central Tel-Aviv, one parking space equals around 5% of the apartment's price, which means that any minor addition to the parking space greatly adds to the expected revenue for the developer. This matter is even further complicated, when we take into account the different values of parking spaces (over or underground, electronic or not, size of parking space). When looking at the costs column of the Standard-21 document, we discover that the cost of parking construction is excessively high and thus has a heavy impact on the overall cost of construction, sometimes (as in our La-Guardia case) even doubling the total cost (3) The public area around the buildings and, surprisingly, the depth of the land around the property, are also included in the costs, and are thus highly involved in the calculation process. (4) The developer is often asked to perform public works, i.e. to build something for the use of the public, such as kindergartens or dog-parks as part of the project. These works naturally cost money and therefore appear inside our Standard- 21 file. If the general profitability of the project is high, the public works might be used to 'balance' it, while if the public works would cause the project to be economically infeasible, the council might grant the developer some more development rights to balance her spreadsheets. (5) Finally, and perhaps the thorniest of parameters, come the taxes. The council and state levy various different taxes, such as betterment taxes, income taxes, VAT, property tax and so on, each with its own set of clauses and peculiarities. These come with many tax reductions and exemptions, given to the residents to encourage them to renovate their property. Due to the ambiguous nature of tax collection in general, along with the inability to produce a reliable approximation of the future setting prices, the total final tax is always another unknown and its estimation is utilized by both sides in their definitions of the contested reality. We now move on to the revenues section of the valuation file, which is even more debatable then the costs section due to the fact that all revenues will come from the future selling of the apartments in a market-environment that is, by definition, as of yet unknown. While the future and its predictions played a major rule in the construction of the costs column, the revenues are made up entirely of projections, apart from the rare cases in which the properties are sold as far back in advance of the plan’s approval. There are many techniques to predict future revenues, such as looking for 'similar' areas, finding similar trends, and the like, and extrapolating from them regarding the planned construction. We

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have already investigated these real-estate valuation techniques and conventions in detail in our previous chapter, and focus, now, on their role in the Standard-21 documents and their effects on the organization of the urban. First, it is little wonder that the developers will often try and downplay the expected revenues so as to be granted further construction rights. Talking to developers I was told time after time that they have two system of calculations: a pessimistic one used for negotiations and an optimistic one (it is an old wisdom that developers must be optimistic) for their own calculations. The straightforward average price-per-meter valuation plays the major role in the final revenue estimation. This relatively stable factor shares the responsibility for the revenues along with such less-stable factors as: (1) which apartments will be handed back to the residents and which will remain in the hands of the developers. This is crucial, as the higher a property is, the higher its value, with each floor worth around 5-10% more than the one below it145. The decision of who gets which apartments is mostly made as part of the negotiations between the developers and the residents, with the common scenario being that every resident household gets upgraded by one floor from their initial location, while the developer gets the garden apartments and the upper floors. (2) Apartment characteristics. In another discussion with a real-estate appraiser who was responsible for the draft of one project's Standard-21 document, he told me that "due to the fact that there is greater demand for small apartments, their value per-meter is much higher.146". The fashion, or, perceived market demand, for certain types of living spaces, detached from the mere number square meters that the project was rewarded with, also plays an important role in the calculation. (3) Final details. Talking to an architect working on one of the biggest La-Guardia Road plans, he explained to me that "currently all La-Guardia's apartments have two or three air directions. After the reconstruction some will have only one. We are not sure what will be the price of those apartments, but we are certainly afraid that it will be very low147". Such seemingly minute details, such as the air-directions, ceiling height, window size and balcony direction, can have a great effect over the Standard-21 calculations.

145 This is, of course, only if the building in question has an elevator. In older buildings, this formula is reversed. 146 From fieldnotes: 01.05.2017 147 From fieldnotes: 17.03.2017

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The lesson we learnt from this overview of what makes up a plan's costs and revenues match the demands of the Standard-21 document, is that almost everything that we tend to think of as pure planning activity, based on specialized planning-oriented knowledge, participates in the cost/revenues table of the Standard-21 file and is thus also falls under the jurisdiction of the valuation professionals, if indirectly. Effectively, we cannot separate between the planning and the valuation domains, as every phenomenon that we would relate to one domain is, evidently, also related to the other. We began this chapter with the intuitive knowledge shared by our three urban narratives that the valuation and planning domains have different roles within the organization of the city. In this view, it is supposed that it is the valuation which sets the boundaries of the conditions for the existence of construction, while it is the planning activities which are based on a professional mode of existence, that is responsible for everything located within those financial boundaries. As we have now witnessed, when ethnographically viewing the actual organization of the city, this assumption turns tenuous.

8.3. Reflections

We have seen that as part of most planning processes, the Standard-21 files support the council's professional planning teams as black-boxes in the Local Planning Committee. We have also seen how the Standard-21 files become the hub of all planning processes due to the fact that the valuation files have the capacity to make all other planning consideration subordinated to their underlying logic that demands a 25% profitability rate. What remains is to follow these two conclusions as we shift our gaze back to the city. The first lesson that we learn about the financial-city while looking at it from the Standard-21 perspective is that all planning in the contemporary city is completely dependent upon the REV documents. In some places no construction is possible, with either entire areas or specific plots that for one reason or another have low REV being marked as financially unfeasible. For example, I have met residents from a poor south Tel- Aviv suburb and heard from them that after a long planning process, accompanied by the council's planning department and the council's (non-profit) planning company, they were told that it is impossible to reconstruct their building as "the REV-multipliers just don’t add up"148. This situation is similar to the situation of our typical central Tel-Aviv building in which the residents met with ten different developers only to be told that the specific features of the building, in comparison to the area's standard buildings, i.e., the fact that it

148 From fieldnotes: 12.11.2016.

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has three more apartments, "ruins the Standard-21 calculation as the costs of handing three more apartments back to the residents is just to big"149. These situations in which all construction is blocked are relatively rare in Tel-Aviv (naturally, it is another story outside of Israel's richest city). That being the case, they still make a very strong example of the fact it is impossible to separate the financial domain from pure planning needs. In the large majority of cases, the Standard-21 regime forces the council to plan only where it allows so. The La-Guardia Road projects demonstrate the last claim from an opposite perspective, as the planned reconstruction works are located in an area in which the economic factors are not as significant as in other locations, due to the high expected profit of these sought-after properties and their inflated REV. The fact that the council is able to plan the new road according to some greater good (the need to expend the city-centre product) is indicative of just that, where the certainty of profit allows for much greater freedom of planning.150 We should remember, however, that such scenario in which the council is able to make some 'pure' planning decisions is possible only as a result of the Standard-21 files that allow this to happen.

(a) When the Standard-21 is Pushed to its Limit - The Atarim Square Plan

The Atarim Square project makes an even more extreme example as it teaches us what happens when the logic of the Standard-21 regime is being pushed to its limits. To understand the background behind the square reconstruction plans, we should quickly look inside its associated Standard-21 document. Similar to all Standard-21 files, the projects' expected profits are based on the listed selling prices of ‘similar’ nearby apartments. When calculated according to this standard procedure and measured against the expected costs, the Standard-21 document decided that to be profitable the Atarim Square project must include three buildings, each made up of forty floors. Although it did not attract any initial attention, it was not long before it was discovered that the square location - just by the sea - changes everything, as there is a gigantic REV-differences between the sea frontline and everything else. It is not only that the average prices per-meter is many times more expensive in front of the sea in comparison to all other street in the city, but it is also the fact that when valuing seafront buildings, the appraiser must take into account the fact that

149 From fieldnotes: 03.05.2017. 150 This relative freedom which the council enjoyed while planning the reconstruction works of the La- Guardia Road revolved around its ability to push forward with its general policy for this area. This is not to say that each and every item in the planning-notebooks did not have to be negotiated between the developers and the council, in line with the Standard-21 document's prescriptions.

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the upper floors prices are so expensive (in the hundreds of millions of dollars) that they have no connection with the local real-estate market. Thus, it might be that one apartment will be sold for the same price as forty others, which makes the idea of measuring the project's profitability rate while extrapolating the expected revenues from the average prices of similar nearby buildings quite absurd. This project is one of its kind. In sharp contrast to the specificities described above, when the Atarim Square plan was debated in the Local Planning Committee no questions were asked about the Standard- 21 documents and certainly no meaningful answers were given. However, the numbers behind the plan were so exaggerated that it quickly caught the attention of local residents and NGOs that effectively opened the document black-box and exposed it to the public eye as part of a big protest movement that started to emerge. The fact that the square's REVs were so high allowed the protesters to offer real alternatives for the construction plan. Thus, voices calling to build only two buildings instead of three were heard, in addition to loud demands for the inclusion of public housing in the project, demands to turn the buildings on their sides so as to avoid blocking the wind from entering the city, and even (radical) demands to keep the square completely public and just built on its outskirts were made and were, in sharp contrast to most other parts of the city, gaining legitimacy with the public. On the surface, it would seem, the story of the Atarim Square is not unique as we already know that the numbers inside the Standard-21 documents have an excessive power. However, the protestors’ partial success teaches us what happens when the Standard-21 document's superiority collapses and allows the planning to lead the discussion without of the questions of economic viability (since, in this extreme case of one of Israel's most valuable real-estate, the economic viability is virtually guaranteed). "I believe that to put forty-floor buildings in the square is the right thing from a planning perspective”151, said the city-engineer in one town-hall gathering in which the protesting residents and the council officials met. Seemingly, just another empty statement, this sentence alerted our ethnographer’s sensitive ear as he sensed that the city-engineer practically gave up on the economic argument as he understood that in very rare case, it will not stand152. Giving up on its strongest weapon, the council planning department has lost the argument. As the opposition mounted, it seemed that more and more were ‘smelling the

151 From fieldnotes: 02.07.2017. 152 The Standard-21 file was so unfounded that some people believed that the council’s plan all along was to concede one of the three originally planned buildings as a “settlement” to appease the crowds.

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blood’, and the topic became the most important political battle of the 2018 municipal elections with the parties opposed to the plan winning many votes and entering the newly elected coalition only after the mayor promised that he will share with them the responsibility of making a new plan for the square. The relative success of the public protest against the Atarim Square can only happen in a place in which the REVs are so high that they bend the eternal financial laws which seemingly govern the Standatd-21 logic and allow some freedom in which, at least partially153, planning is separated from the valuation. The story above can be seen as an exception which teaches us about the general rule - when the valuation gives way to the planning, whereas, in most cases, the planning is subordinated to the economic viability document and leaves very few degrees of freedom outside of its limited boundaries, the economic-planning hybrid is exposed. When the economic is stripped away, so as to expose the bare planning mode, the intermingling of the valuation and the planning, outside of this outlying case, is highlighted, and it becomes clear that this melange is so well engrained into the urban organisation process that any attempt to surgically separate the two spheres in a meaningful operationalisation is a futile endeavour. In other words, the lesson one can learn from this unique situation follows the above made points, that is – the inseparability of the valuation and the planning, which are often detached on the rhetorical surface but are, de facto, a well-known hybrid to all parties involved.

(b) Ezra and Bitsaron – The Council Fights Back

In light of the total grip of the Standard-21 documents over all urban planning, the council decided that it must therefore encourage its municipal-corporation, Ezra and Bitsaron, to get more and more involved in construction projects. The idea was very simple - as the demand for 25% profit was made in order to negate the effects of the great risks as well as great costs in the early planning moments, the council can take responsibility for these initial planning steps in relevant areas, thus letting developers join in on the planning process at later, not as dangerous, stages, which will allow them to be satisfied with smaller profit margins. Planning with a smaller number then 25% in mind, the council can gain back some of its planning authority and take better care of the local residents and the environment. While I was following the work of Ezra and Bitsaron it was evident that things are not as simple as they initially seem. The cost of planning was high even for a

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council-owned entity (that had to balance its books) and the local community was very suspicious of the council's work, preferring in many cases to trust private developers and not the big leviathan. However, Ezra and Bitsaron work is a good example of the council's attempts to fight against the Standard-21 document's regime and as such it validates the fact that, in many senses, the financial documents have become pivotal in the entire planning Actor-Network. In the large majority of cases the Standard-21 document became the sheriff of the town.

8.4. Conclusion

The above example teaches us what happens when the city loses control to the REVs, sometimes so excessively high that even the strongest organizations, in our case the banks’ headquarters, are forced to relocate to lower-rent pastures, leaving the city to contend with the results. We also witness how the 'city' is not a single and united entity, as the ones who were most affected from this predicament are the city’s own employees, which will not be able to afford to live in the city after the banks’ departure. It was them that were in a panic - not the mayor or the head of the financial department. But the above example is but an edge case, where existing construction already exists and a decades old plan that could not have predicted the wild fluctuations of the REVs, succumbs to ‘the reality of the market’. We have seen how the superiority of the REV files is usually manifested in much earlier stages, exacting its influence from the initial planning onwards. We witnessed the way the Standard-21 shapes each and every stage of planning, from the plan’s very existence to the minutiae of its design. This is true for both the ‘political’ forum of the Planning Committee (which is, as we saw, completely powerless in the face of Standard-21) and the different ‘professional’ apparatuses. In fact, it would seem, in accordance with the senior architect’s words, that there is no possibility to plan according to some abstract planning needs - one is always forced to comply with the given situation in any specific area as it is shaped by the local REVs. It is interesting to note that while these pages are written, the chief government appraiser declared that the arbitrary policy of 25% being both the minimum and the maximum profitability must be put to an end. There must not be an upper limit on profitability, he declared, and a corresponding appeals committee concurred - the maximum is not a council matter, it was claimed. The chief appraiser even elaborated that his reasoning behind this move is that currently “the economic considerations are leading the planning”, whereas ideally, “there should be a concrete planning policy - and the planning needs should

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not be compromised for the sake of some arbitrary economic principle”(Mirovsky, 2019). We cannot yet predict the outcome of such a policy change, but can be certain it will be felt throughout the city, where Standard-21 permeates throughout. We asked, how does our document take part in the management and organization of the city? It re-organizes it as it becomes the hub around which the entire planning process revolves. Standard-21 holds the consensus, and it is around this consensus that standard-21 related disputes are held. And indeed, we were not able to isolate any instances of ‘pure’ planning from the smallest detail up to the most general planning strokes. Our conclusion from this chapter joins our dissertation’s main theses - that the obliviousness of the prevailing urban OS narratives to the agency of REVs is in their detriment - we have seen without a doubt that the REV documents, in the form of Standard-21 files, play an active role in the shaping of urban reality. The next chapter will be devoted to a theoretical wrap-up of empirical parts of our investigation, and will include, among others, a detailed review of the literature referenced in the start of the current chapter.

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9.0. Overview

This concluding chapter reflects upon our ethnographic investigation and examines our success in meeting our research purpose – the development of a new urban account. Reflecting upon our research achievements, implications, and limitations, we will return to the three urban narratives in light of our empirical findings, revisit Czarniawska, Korenberger and Clegg, and discuss the importance of our research both for our home discipline of Organization Studies and for the broad academic community. We will conclude with some suggestions for future research, informed by our study.

9.1. Introduction – a Summary of the Thesis

Launching our ethnographic study of Tel-Aviv, we started by reviewing the existing body of OS literature which deals with the city. Finding a rich and vibrant discipline, we could identify three main overarching narratives in urban OS, which unfortunately - once our field work commenced - did not conform to the empirical reality which we encountered. Furthermore, we observed that the vast majority of urban OS did not, in fact, deal directly with the city as its object of inquiry, but rather focused on organisational phenomenon that takes place within the city, where the city merely serves as a mute background. We were unsatisfied with the three urban narratives, not only due to the empirical mismatch, but also due to our disagreement with their initial premises and assumptions – and with the very reliance on a narrative, which, following Morgan (Morgan, 2006) we see as a metaphorical image which serves to obfuscate as much as it helps tell stories. Therefore, we decided that the aim of our research will be to develop a new urban account that will not rely upon a pre-set narrative or external explanatory mechanisms. With that in mind, after a short de-tour to the works of Czarniawska, Kornberger and Clegg where we picked up insights by reviewing Czarniawska's Action-Nets and Kornberger and Clegg's Strategy, we arrived at the conclusion that our research purpose is to develop a novel urban account. Trying to find our way forward we introduced Latour into our thesis and explored the ways in which ANT sensibility might help us develop this new account. Since our goal was to avoid relaying on pre-assumed notions of our field and register an account of the city which arises out of the empirics, ANTs view of reality as

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constructed through Actor-Networks and its suggestion to conduct our inquiry by embracing the multiplicity and complexity of the city into our account, appealed to us. We learnt that to develop a new account, our task is not to better explore the city but rather, relaying on the assumption that narratives in social sciences are not descriptions but inscriptions, we should find a way to register the city differently in a way that will allow one to see its complexity, for example by giving agency to non-human actors as much as to human. Once again in the field, the time that we spent in the local planning committee and around the conservation plan community made us realize that REVs, due to their centrality in a plethora of heterogenic matters across the urban field, serve as a unique Actor- Network through which the workings of the city organisation are assembled and therefore following them provides a promising strategy that will allow us to register the city in a novel way. Thus, we launched our investigation by following REV as it appears in the conservation associated Branding-Dispute, and after we came to the conclusion that this first experiment failed - due to the inability to identify REV in what it is thought to represent - we shifted our gaze, informed by Latour's use of the legal files (Latour, 2002) in search of concrete objects that can lead our inquiry and found that REV-documents are in fact our most promising lead. We then concentrated our research on these files' assembling process and on the participation of these files in the assembly of the city. We will now return to our first observation – of the futility of viewing REVs as representations – and expound the implications of this understanding, before turning to our second observation, regarding REVs manifestation as documents, and further elaborate on our findings.

9.2. Real-Estate Values and the Organization of the City – a Post-Script Reality

(a) First Observation – the Failure to Show that REVs are Representations?

As we have seen, through our mediated realization of the futility of viewing REVs as representations of underlying reality – as we watched the council's representatives scramble to defend their notion of branding – we needed to adopt a different strategy if we were to find the REV Actor-Network and use is as our foothold in our investigation of city organisation. But if we are to dwell, for moment, on this negative understanding, we must conclude that it is itself somewhat ground-breaking, when viewed through the old

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vanguard prism of the three narratives we started our journey railing against. Therefore, we will now attempt to construct what REVs would have been expected to be, were any of these three narratives adopted, and address their problematics individually. Among other things, this move will allow us to better defend our rejection of them, on top of furthering our understanding of these approaches, since apart from being internal to the academic OS discipline, they play a role in the actual organisation of the city, through mechanisms of double hermeneutics. The economic, institutional and critical narratives that currently govern most of the urban-related literature within OS, share the foundations of their understanding of real- estate values. According to this shared attitude, real-estate values are mere symbols, or rather, representations, of other things. As we will shortly see, this collective approach is behind the limited empirical treatment of real-estate values, both within the business school in particular and the social sciences in general. Following the above, the purpose of this sub-section is to (1) understand this shared topological perception of real estate values as representations of other things, so as to allow us to (2) review later our empirical findings from chapter four, in which we followed the Branding-Dispute, in the light of the three narratives' shared approach and show how real-estate values can be viewed in a way that does not assume them to be representations. In order to follow the route offered above, we will start by reviewing how each of the three narratives' account for real-estate values' representational character. Being perhaps the most prominent and influential narrative, the economic narrative is first in line. This narrative, that views the organization of the city according to a business-oriented logic and puts notions such as Supply and Demand in the forefront, is clearly evident in the scholarship of Richard Florida (2002, 2017), one of the most important urban thinkers of our times. Florida's most well-known theory, known as the rise of the creative classes (Florida, 2002), will serve as our 'hub'. This is due to the fact that Florida's thesis had a great influence on the urban OS literature154 and, as our ethnographer has witness during his time working for the council, on the actual management of numerous cities around the world (Tochterman, 2012). Florida's basic idea is very simple, in order to flourish, cities need to compete over a new kind of resource known as Human Capital. To attract this resource, cities must invest in things that can make them more attractive for young, skilled, educated and creative people. “Walkable, pedestrian-friendly streets, bike lanes, parks, exciting art

154 See: Evans, 2009; Pearson & Pearson, 2017; Pratt, 2008; Thiel, 2017.

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and music scenes, and vibrant areas where people could gather in cafes and restaurants” (Florida, 2017, p. 14), are a few among the many important new urban-management tools, designed to attract members of the creative class. Florida's suggestion signalled an overwhelming urban-managerial shift that led to what was often framed as an ‘urban renaissance’ (Formica, 2017; Goldstein, 2017), and was widely related to the fact that “[despite] all of the challenges and tensions they generate, cities are still the most powerful economic engines the world has ever seen” (Florida, 2017, p. 25). Florida' view of the city can be traced to his understanding of real-estate values as mere indicators symbolizing the status, or, rather, the quality of any specific city or any specific area within a city155. As indicators, real-estate values have no agency, they are 'just' numbers. Thus, in order to explain their fluctuation, there is a need for external economic explanations, such as the following: "the astronomical real estate prices of superstar neighborhoods and cities - and the staggering gap between their prices and those of almost everywhere else are the product of the underlying motor of capitalist development: the clustering force" (Florida, 2017, p. 36). Trying to ameliorate this explanation, regarding the great increase in the values of real- estate, Florida adds that:

"the urban land nexus is not just a consequence of natural economic forces - that is, of limited supply in the face of surging demand. It also stems from the efforts of urban landlords and homeowners - some of re-urbanization’s biggest winners - to restrict what is built, and in doing so to keep the prices of their own real-estate holdings high." (Ibid, p. 38).

Seeing real-estate values as indicators of the demand of the 'city-as-a-product', is a very straight forward way to look at real-estate values economically. The fact that this demand might be a 'natural' phenomenon related to the quality of the place, or an 'unnatural' phenomenon related to such things as the active efforts of home-owners to restrict the construction in their area is irrelevant. The basic logic according to which real-estate values serve as indicators of the demand in direct relation to the supply, is relevant in all scenarios. There is hardly a doubt that the supply-and-demand angle is the most common way to understand real-estate values through the economic perspective. However, we should not ignore the fact that the neo-classical economic thought about the origins and the meaning of real-estate values is much more elaborate from what the above simplification might suggest. To demonstrate the last point, we shall quickly review a paper published in the

155 See: Florida, 2017, p. 36,37,38,42,44,46,52,66,69,83.

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Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports, titled: "What Drives Housing Prices156? (Kahn, 2008). The paper offers a few economic explanations for real-estate values' shifts. The first two explanations, based on suggestions made by the writer, are related to income levels and technological progression. According to the first suggestion, when people get wealthier "they may prefer to have more of their consumption coming from housing services, the price of which will tend to rise because of its being relatively intensive in land" (Ibid, p. 2). The second suggestion implies that different technical advancements in the housing services' sector as opposed to other services are responsible for the relatively higher real-estate values due to the fact that they are dependent on "large share of land and structures, two inputs usually thought to be less amenable to embodied technical progress" (Ibid). Offering the above two points as his explanations for the housing prices, the writer moves on to offer six suggestions from the relevant economic literature (Ibid, p. 3). Similarly, to the first two suggestions, all six suggestions, as we will see now, try to explain the changes in real-estate values through a review of factors related to possible modifications of either the demand or the supply. The suggestions are (1) the demographic shift in the post-baby-boom era (Ibid), (2) the result of "artificial supply restrictions" (Ibid), (3) the 'inelastically' of land supply (Ibid), (4) "monetary policy [and] credit market frictions" (Ibid), (5) mortgage policies and borrowing regimes (Ibid, 4), and (6) what they term the 'bubble hypothesis' (Ibid). The entire economic debate, as seen above, is dependent on such notions as Standard Market, Rational Choice, Equilibrium and so forth, all of which refer to the Market Value of real-estate. This market value, that can only be 'exposed' by the professionals responsible for such investigations - the real- estate appraisers, mirrors the happenings in the real, external economic world. The advocates of the urban-institutional narrative generally adopt the positivist vision of the neo-classical school with regards to Market-Value, but, in contrast to the economic narrative, they bring to the fore some 'non-economic' institutionally-oriented actors and actions. Lambooy and Krabben who wrote an extensive account of the institutional approach to land and property market (Lambooy & Krabben, 1994) name the local government and property developers among the most important institutions to shape real-estate values. In their account they argue that an analysis that takes into consideration not only the rational choice of individuals but also the logic and the dynamics within institutions is necessary. This is due to the fact that "the urban economic world is explained in terms of information flows and transactions, modes of communication and governance. [But] in reality,

156 In chapter six we discuss the differences between values and prices. For our current discussion, the very conflation of 'price' and 'value' in the economic narrative serves to indicate their inability to properly grasp the distinct agency of REV, outside of the mere current market price of a given property.

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transaction and coordination processes are part and parcel of more comprehensive economic systems, including production and labour processes, labour and capital relations, transportation and logistics, etc." (Ibid p. 218). Kamarudin, who wrote a seminal review, from within the property management literature, about the various approaches to the analysis of real-estate values, describes the differences between the economic narrative and the institutional as a matter of emphasis with regards to the role that institutions have in "determining actor’s behaviour in the property market process" (Kamarudin, 2015, p. 9). Indeed, there is a common agreement that "institutions do matter in property market[s]" (Ibid), however, it seems that they are important mostly with regards to the ways in which they shape the behaviour of the rational individual actor who operates within the limited framework of the real-estate market, which is assumed to pre-exist the institutional logic. That being the case, it is clear that the inclusion of institutions in our urban arena does not fundamentally change what real-estate values represent. Being related to either 'pure' economic entities or to institutional, socially- related, ones, real-estate values serve in both situations as mere "mathematical functions, [i.e.], variables that form the market [and] can be manipulated through the rules of demand and supply" (Ibid, p. 3). While it shares the above commonality, in regards to the representational nature of real-estate values, the critical narrative sharply rejects the ways in which both narratives understand the underlaying, fundamental organization of the real-estate markets. If the economic and the institutional narratives see the happenings in and around the real-estate markets as, more or less, natural phenomena that can be mapped and explained scientifically, then the critical narrative is focused much more on what is commonly understood as the political side of things. Thus, when viewing the city through the critical narrative's lenses, the urban vocabulary shifts from the economic towards such social/political-oriented terms as Production, Power, Classes, Society, Gentrification and Neo- liberalism. Harvey's book which tackles social justice and the city (Harvey, 1993) demonstrates the last point vividly. Arguing against the economic premise that the true nature of the housing market is to be 'free', Harvey attempts to argue the exact opposite: "in reality…there is never a free and open housing market nor do all operators in it have perfect information." (Ibid, p. 64). Rejecting this economic dogma about the nature of the real-estate market, Harvey's counter argument is that in reality real-estate markets are shaped by various different sorts of 'externalities' which are "constantly hovering over the land and property market" (Ibid, p. 64-5). This influence of different powers over the real-estate market is translated, through the exact same representational mechanisms as the economic and the institutional narratives,

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into the values of real-estate. The entire process is so delicate that even seemingly insignificant factors have the ability to shape the value. For example: "a new source of pollution will lead to a decline in land values, [and] a new park facility may lead to a rise in land value" (Ibid, p. 65). As evidenced above, the bottom line is that the critical narrative's structural understanding of real-estate values is similar to the other two narratives. In all three cases there is a straight-forward dichotomy between the real-estate market, that stands for reality, and the real-estate values, that occupy the role of passive representation, or rather, mute reflections of their associated market. My Tel-Aviv based ethnography, that took place in and around the urban council and the city's planning bodies, pushed me towards a different type of understanding. Launching our journey in Tel-Aviv by following REV as they take part in the Branding-Dispute around the Tel-Aviv conservation plan, we expected to find simple answers to the questions that were raised during the Branding controversy: (1) is it possible to identify a value surge in one specific group of buildings in comparison to the general urban trend? (2) assuming that we can identify such a surge in value, can we identify the reasons behind it? And (3) If we assume that the council found a value surge and was able to associate it with the Branding factor, is it legally allowed to charge betterment taxes for it? Spending twelve months following the Branding-Dispute, I quickly became aware of the fact that these seemingly simple questions aroused a lot of confusion that repeatedly emerged in the form of heated debates. To get to the reasons behind this confusion, we should review the council's attempts to answer these questions. In their attempt to prove that an average protected building gained more value than a simple average house, the council had to supply some empirical facts. Therefore, the first thing that the council had to do was to operationalise a base for comparison between the protected buildings' group and the general trend. The only way to produce such a base, that will allow the council to directly compare between the two groups and thus prove that there is a repeating pattern according to which the protected apartment gained more value than the non-protected ones, was to match as many comparable-couples as they can muster. Their first task was to find all the protected buildings that could be used for the comparison. As the purpose of the comparison was to find out if the inclusion of a building in a conservation list made it more valuable, the council had to find data about apartments that were located in protected buildings and were sold just before and just after the conservation plan was approved. The inclusion in

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the protected building list would thus explain the variance measured, with all other variables controlled. Finding very few, protected and non-protected, apartments that fit this bill, the council had to decide how to form the said couples. This part was the most important stage of the entire process as the decision – the choice of apartments matched, greatly shaped the result of the entire experiment. The only way to resolve this matter was to rely upon the notion of similarities – the council will compare the most similar apartments with each other. How does one decide which apartments are similar and which are not? One can only rely on her intuition. As there is no decisive answer that will determine whether apartment A (which is located 350 meters off the main road and 475 meters off the sea) is similar to apartment B (which is located only 475 meters off the main road and 350 meters off the sea), the entire comparison was dependent upon intuitions and therefore the constructed proof, in the form of the Kapelner report, that did show that the conservation plan was responsible for a surge in value, leaned on extremely shaky grounds. When following the above process up-close, as we did in chapter five, one can see that the entire comparison between one specific group of buildings and all other buildings in the city is based upon incompatibility between two different classes: the 'typical' building - that stands for the macro, and the protected building - that stands for the micro. This very loose comparison between one specific group of 1000 unique buildings and another group that includes all other 'normal' buildings (i.e. not deemed worthy to enter the conservation list), teaches us that the REV cannot be smoothly reduced in such a manner that will allow for the 'macro phenomena' to be translated into the 'micro level'. When dealing with special properties such as their protection status, the building's characteristics are so specific that it makes no sense to claim that some particular REV was modified due to the fact that a 'macro' general trend occurred. Referencing back to the literature, it is evident that our conclusions are foreign to the economic, institutional and critical perspectives. As we have seen in our review of the three narratives' understanding of representations, all three narrative would assume that REV's represent some external reality. Therefore, it is assumed that in the hypothetic case of an economic downfall, a corrupted urban-managerial culture, or some political crisis all REVs will consequently fall. In our case, it is likely that all three narratives would assume that the Branding- Dispute can be easily resolved – we need only to find out what is the market demand for the protected properties in relation to their supply. If the demand/supply ratio of the

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protected properties is larger than the corresponding ratio of the non-protected ones, it is obvious that the protected buildings generated more profits. Indeed, the explanations that the three narratives will offer to this trend will naturally vary: the economic voice will point towards the rational-actor, the institutional voice will view the formal and the informal rules of the city and its administration as responsible for the value shift, while the critical voice will try to analyse the forces that manufactured the demand of the protected properties. However, the basic logic still stands - all three narratives would reject our empirical findings according to which one cannot meaningfully utilise the demand-supply ratio to deduce the REV, for there is no hierarchical differentiation between the REV Actor-Network and that of the demand-supply ratio. In other words, REVs are part of the causal agency that assembles the demand-supply ratios. This conclusion is extraordinary and is almost counterintuitive. Therefore, it is not surprising that we needed the two empirical chapters to further explore this notion. And yet, the Branding-Dispute tale does not leave us much room for interpretations. We have seen that the fact the we have the knowledge of all the transaction costs in the history of Tel-Aviv is not enough to formulate a general rule about some specific group of buildings. We had all the information that we wanted and yet we were unable to identify whether the branding factor had any direct effect on the protected buildings' REV. One might say that if, for instance, an economic disaster will occur157, its effects on the REV will be evident and we can assume that the entire urban REV will fall. Indeed, this might very well be the case – an economic or political catastrophe might be followed by a sharp drop in REV, thus seemingly confirming our common intuition. However, we would still not be able to make any further claims about realty that will supplement this broad and general statement, nor will we be able to say that the REV is indicative of its proceeding crisis or by which longwinded way did the hypothetic crisis translate into one or another evaluator's REV assessment. We would not be able to predict the different realities, the many complex ones, that will emerge out of such crisis. We will also not be able to understand what happened to one urban part or another just by knowing that some 'macro' event has been said to occur.

157 We remind the reader, that from our theoretical point of departure, the very reification of an 'economic crisis' commits the same fallacy with which we contend in our criticism of the three meta-narratives, namely – that by coalescing some convoluted and sprawling network of actors and events into a singular explanatory tool such as 'crisis', one ignores the contingent hermeneutical reality behind such turmoil.

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The only way to come to terms with the REV, and as a result, with the city, is to treat it as an actor with agency that actively participates in the urban organization158. Adding such an actor to our image of the urban and thus presenting the city in its multiplicity, which is assembled by a plethora of varying, always shifting hybrid entities manifesting its organization, in a way that challenges our understanding of the macro/micro division, is one very important first step towards a new urban account.

(b) Second and Third Observations – the Assembly Process of the REV-Document and the Participation of the REV Document in the Assembly of the City

Reflecting on the three narratives' shared understanding of REVs as mere representations of the external reality, we have seen that by abandoning this conjecture, we discovered previously unknown parts of the city. Therefore, it can be said that the cornerstone of our novel urban account is the attempt to break from the understanding of the city as organized via a pre-existing macro/micro dichotomy, that in our case stands for the separation between the external reality (the macro) and the REV (the micro). Our next step was to assume that if the REVs are not representations of the external reality, they are more likely to be actively involved in the organization of the city, for, following Latour (Latour, 1987), we know that various different types of non-human actors participate in the organization of our reality. Therefore, we decided to specifically study how these newly recognized actors shape urban organization. To actively follow REV so as to see what these entities do, we had to physically trace them in the field. Unlike most other OS-oriented scholars who followed documents in their fields (Hull, 2012; D. P. O’Doherty, 2017; Riles, 2006), finding REV's physicality turned out to be one of the most counter-intuitive challenges that I had to cope with. The fact that I was used to thinking of REVs as simple prices159 that represent underlying market reality and thus have no physicality, was responsible for these difficulties. Nevertheless, when I had to meet this challenge, I eventually identified that REV appears only in the form of a document. These documents were circling all around the city in various forms and shapes. As an ethnographer, I invested a lot of efforts trying to locate the relevant REV documents, read them, observe real-estate appraisers when they inscribe them and follow them in the different urban arenas in which they appeared.

158 We are fully aware of the fact that we did not show yet how REVs act. However, by demonstrating that it is possible to view REV as a non-representational entity, it is implied that it is also possible to view it in action. 159 We have seen in chapter five that the prices are factual numbers of previous transactions sums while the REV serves as much more complicated and entangled predications of the future.

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In chapter seven of this dissertation we presented the first fruits of our newly born approach to the study of REVs. The central part of this chapter revolved around one type of REV documents - the betterment-tax files. We have looked inside these files to see how they are assembled and found out that despite their seemingly scientific character that is based upon rigorous use of numbers, the betterment tax's files are in fact assembled via complex human and non-human Actor-Networks such as "numbers, the shape of the land, the tax authority on-line system, the old archival information from which one can learn the meaning of old plans and the prices in previous times, strategic needs of different actors, the physical condition of a property, the way in which appraisers imagine the markets, the way in which the different actors understand similarities, physical factors that make properties different or similar, the formal structure of the arbitration system, the differences between types of meters, the economic reasoning of the rational actor, the shared understanding of time across the field, files and everything that is written inside them, and the prices"160. The eighth chapter of this dissertation went in the opposite direction. Instead of looking inside the documents, we decided to study the relations between the documents and their surroundings. We did so by following another type of REV document, the Standard-21 file, that serves as an economic viability check that accompanies every urban project. Out of this follow-up, we discovered an image of urban organization that destabilizes our pre-configured assumptions of urban reality as divided between a planning domain (which holds its pure epistemology) and the valuation reality (that is allegedly separated and independent). We gave up on our previous perception of the above separation as we learned that the expected profit-ratio of 25%, that was the hub of the Standard-21 file, serves as an orbit around which all planning are assembled - from the 'major' decisions of an overall construction of an entire area to the most minute choice of window type, all planning decision could not be separated from this valuation measurement. Our conclusions that the planning/valuation division does not help us understand reality and our ability to portray it differently were important steps in our development of a new account. Not only have we seen a completely different city than the one that we know from the three urban narratives, a city in which the most mundane entity – the document, opens a path for various different actors to participate in reality. We have also become aware of the futility of the attempt to make sense of the city without acknowledging that REVs have an enormous part in its organization.

160 Quoted from chapter seven, section 7.6.

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The reader might wonder about the brevity of our summary of the last two observations. The very summery of our novel accounts entails a construction of a new account needed to hold all the assumptions and imagined possibilities that are required for such an abstraction. Therefore, our new accounts are presented at length in the dedicated chapters, and these detailed accounts are in themselves the bottom line.

9.3. Reflections

We shall look for a moment at how we used to view the city, prior to our empirical investigation while relying on previous researches and how we currently see it. Doing that, we will focus on one specific example – that of gentrification. This exercise is an attempt to apply the lessons we learnt throughout this dissertation on a separate phenomenon from which we have reviewed. A phenomenon that we did not actually study, but did tentatively observed throughout our fieldwork. Gentrification is one of the most fashionable161 terms used to explain urban organization. When described in a quotidian fashion, its operational logic is very simple: First, bohemian artists and creatives are drawn to the low-cost urban area and establish a community, followed by young, mostly of middle-class origins, people, who gradually move into the underdeveloped and neglected urban area in which there is a Rent Gap, meaning a discrepancy between the current values and the 'real' potential of the area162. As the young people come in, they start a chain reaction that will completely modify the character of the area. The housing costs rise as a result of the surging demand, the trade changes to meet the needs of the newly arriving middle-class members looking for restaurants, trendy coffee shops, art galleries etc., the properties are refurbished (as the capital investment follows the new urban-immigrants) and, as I have repeatedly heard during my time around the Tel-Aviv council, the neighbourhood starts getting better treatment by the authorities as these new people are believed to know better how to operationalize the political system for their favour and therefore the area gets better cleaning, policing, education services and other infrastructural supports. Seen as an effective process by many urban administrators, who sometimes actively encourage such

161 The term gentrification was coined by Ruth Glass in 1964 and since than stayed in the heart of both the academic debate (for example, since 2003 it was to topic of six journal's special issues) and of social and political struggles all around the world (Slater, 2011). 162 As most gentrification hubs are city-centre neighbourhoods that were neglected during the expansion to the suburbs, location wise they are extremely promising (Slater, 2011).

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processes163, the negative results of gentrification are believed to be the inability of the original communities to survive under the new conditions of soaring prices and changing nature of their environment. Gentrification's last stage, the common understanding would narrate, happens when the young population that served as the spearhead that started the process of 'occupying' the neighbourhood are also forced to leave (and move to the next neighbourhood waiting to be gentrified) as the excessive cost-of-living becomes unbearable. Farias illustrate this gentrification process in his edited volume of ANT and the city:

"Nowadays gentrification has become such a prominent public discourse, not just in social sciences, that it is difficult to imagine gentrification process occurring in such a subtle and almost automatic ways in which they were first thought: artist and creative scenes moving first into a neighborhood, followed by bars and restaurants, refurnishing of buildings, young middle class etc. Around the corner of my place there is a sign that says 'please gentrify this', and the irony of the graffiti is that it can be read as a quite legitimate political demand, for city governments are explicitly aiming at the gentrification of city areas." (Faraias & Bender, 2010, p. 292)

When viewing gentrification from the point of view of our three narratives, the economic argument is located vividly in the foreground of the argument164 as all three narrative generally adopt the "neoclassical economists’ take on gentrification as a natural, inevitable market adjustment process" (Slater, 2011, p. 574). We can portray the process as follows: in the first stage the demand to the real-estate of the underdeveloped neighborhood is low and therefore the value of the houses is low. When the demand to the housing-products increases, the REV also increases. When the REV increases to a high enough level, sufficient to close the Rent Gap, the gentrification process is over and the neighbourhood can be said to be gentrified. This implies gentrification is a spontaneous and autonomous ‘market’ phenomenon. This simple correlation between the demand for the neighborhood and the values of its real-estate, portrays real-estate values as automatic entities that simply move back and forth as a result of a seemingly straightforward economic mechanism. Indeed, each of the three narratives might have a different underlaying explanation with regards to the reasons that created the demand and the supply in the first place. The

163 For example, in Tel-Aviv the council financially support student who are willing to live in the poorest areas of the city, using the language of gentrification to justify such subsidiary programs. 164 Originally gentrification was a critical notion as it was developed out of a Marxist tradition in line with the view of "class inequalities and injustices created by capitalist urban land markets and policies" (Slater, 2011, p. 571), however, as we discussed in the first chapter of this dissertation it can be said that the economic discourse as gentrified gentrification.

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economic argument relates mainly to the market activity of the rational-actors, that, as expected from members of the creative classes (Florida, 2002) can easily identify the Rent Gap and take advantage of it. The institutional narrative portrays "how local institutions, in a complex context of competition and conflict, help to structure upgrading by controlling financial, political, and social resources" (Wilson, p. 268) and the critical narrative will focus on the uneven political distribution of resources that led to the creation of the rent-gap in the first place, in addition to global trends such as globalization that shifts urban industries towards services and thus moves the urban focal-point from the industrial zones in the suburbs to the heart of the cities (Harvey, 1993). However, the basic logic according to which the demand to the area is completely responsible for the end result of the REV, is relevant to all narratives. Following our urban organization analysis, we see things differently. As, in line with our ANT-orientation, we do not view urban organization from a causal point of view but rather from a relational one, and thus do not see gentrification as a pre-existing ontological phenomena that takes place within the city and is responsible for its organization, but, rather, we see it as an effect actively produced by the three urban- narratives as they interpret the city. To put it differently, we will not be able to point at any specific direction and claim that gentrification is what is, as there was no such thing as gentrification walking around our field. We will only be able to find the notion of gentrification as it was employed by the ones academically studying the city, those who were taking part in its management, and those who were simply living it and were either afraid or hoping for gentrification to come. As all these groups are part of urban organization, we can now assume, based on our study, that by examining gentrification through the lens of REV, we will be able to study gentrification as an urban organisational phenomena in a way that does not pre-assume its character and therefore paint an image which acknowledges the complexity of such a uniquely prominent Actor-Network. This exercise is, of course, not unique to gentrification and can be applied to a plethora of urban issues. To launch this follow-up of REV and gentrification, we can tentatively say that we have observed during our fieldwork how a fear from gentrification modifies the behaviour of all urban actors. A quote by Richard Florida, in an interview that he gave to The Guardian will highlight this point: “Everything is gentrification now ... Kids come to my office in tears. They say: ‘I took this class in urban geography and I want to make my city better, but they say everything I want to do is gentrification. A

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better school is gentrification, empowering artists is gentrification, working to improve the condition of parks is gentrification. What can I do?" […] Assuming that most urban actors were either afraid of, or looking forward to, gentrification, while, at the same time, completely believing in its powers to transform the urban and also in some cases hoping to use it165, I would not be surprised to find REV in the centre of these happenings. If we would have followed gentrification in line with our original chapter division, we will first see how the REV documents themselves were assembled in line with the notion of gentrification and then how the same notion modified the ways in which REV took an active part in the organization of the city. While we assume the structure of this inquiry, it is important to note, that we can, of course, not predict the specifics of what this research will entail, and in line with our ANT methodology that is exactly the goal of such a study. When looking inside the documents, we remember that the REVs are dependent upon similarities – as the REV is a file that is dependent upon the ability to estimate the future price of real estate to determine its current value, the question of gentrification is extremely important. The real-estate appraiser must be able to predict whether the area will be gentrified or not. If it will be, then the appraiser can assume (and perhaps help bring about) that the future prices will be higher than if gentrification will not happen. One can see how the REV-documents are full of hints that can teach the appraiser what will happen to the area. Therefore, when reading the REV-documents one should not be surprised to find mentions of the local population characteristics, the local trade, etc., that can teach the appraiser about the future of the area. In addition, an intuitive notion of similarities is always in the background as the appraiser will assume that if the valued area is similar to another area in which gentrification happened then it is likely to happen in the valued area as well. I remember a conversation that I had with a senior real-estate appraiser that explained to me that he did not buy a property in what became, decades later, the most gentrified area of Tel-Aviv, since he was inferring from similar cases. "We never expected this sudden REV boom in Florentin since our eyes were directed at sea-side areas because that is where we saw gentrification before".166 The fact that the appraiser will have to sense whether or not gentrification will happen had a lot of performative influence over the future of the area as a place that will

165 It must be said that despite the fact that the council did use gentrification deliberately in some situation such as with the payments to students that were mentioned above, this has become more and more rare and the justifications became more and more vague. 166 From fieldnotes: 17.07.2017.

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be gentrified will have higher REVs, will get better financial support which will be used for better development. The same goes for the opposite: a place in which gentrification is not expected by the appraisers, the REV estimation (and the corresponding betterment tax) will stay low, which leads to less investment, fewer resources for infrastructure and so forth. It is important to remember that two different areas, in terms of REV, could very well just be two side of the same street. Shifting our gaze from the assembling process of the REV document into its active participation in urban organization, the relationship between gentrification and the REV becomes even more vivid. As we have seen, the Standard-21 document expected 25% profit-ratio is responsible for urban organization to a very large degree. This requirement for a 25% profit is understood by many as responsible for gentrification. Such a big margin of profit forces the council to make concessions towards the developers and approve a lot of their demands, as we have seen in chapter eight, despite the fact that these demands are blamed as the cause of gentrification. To name a few, these demands are related to factors that make the new apartments more expensive such as the apartments size, quality of construction, density, parking spaces, etc. The opposite situation also occurs in which the expected profit is much higher than 25% and the council can demand from the developers to actively fight gentrification. It does so by forcing the developers to pay for public or affordable housing, to pay for the building management fees, and other profit-reducing measures (or, from the point of view of the residents, a cost-reduction). In addition, the fear from gentrification modifies the planning process itself as the council tries to put its subsidiary, as we have seen in chapter eight, in charge of the planning process and thus decrease the developers' risks, as they can join-in on the plan without spending expensive resources on a plan which is never certain to take place, and therefore the associated 25% expected profit can be reduced. If the profit is reduced the planning can take the local residents into consideration more fairly, according to the council, and thus minimize gentrification. When looking at such a commonly misrepresented urban phenomenon as gentrification through our newly-founded understanding of REV and the city, we see how this view, of REVs as active participants in the definition and organization of the urban, changes the way we perceive gentrification, from a deterministic, uni-directional phenomena with either economic, cultural or political roots, to a contingent turn-of-events where the very notion of gentrification plays an active role in the assembly of the REV Actor-Network. By giving REVs the agency they hold, one sees how the city is heuristically

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assembled through circumstantial process involving many actors of seemingly different fields. This analysis of gentrification can connect to the growing body of literature that deals with urban financialization outside OS (Aalbers, 2016). Aalbers work comes from a very different academic tradition of political economy which is, in many senses, part of the critical scholarship. However, his work167 can contribute to the urban-OS literature as it serves as an illuminating map of the changing nature of our houses that gradually (but quickly) become financial assets. What is interesting about Aalbers work is the fact that he is not taking the straight forward route analysing only the ways in which real-estate became financialized (whatever this term means) but he also takes the opposite route describing how the financialization of homes takes part in the transformation, or rather organization, of the entire society. As such I believe that our account of gentrification, that attempts to do the same thing, can contribute to Aalbers' project by offering a new angle (the one of the REV) to look at the above processes, just as much as we can learn from Aalbers' general approach with regards to the relations between (what is perceived as) the isolated real- estate markets and the external society, and from its empirical findings - such as the specific modes of financialization that take place in reality, the differences between the emerging markets and the western world and the various different power relations that appear in and around the housing field. Following this reflexive section, we turned to discuss how our exploration of the REV helps us develop a new urban account, and discovered that by following REV we are able to see the city outside the common macro/micro vision prevalent in the three urban narratives. We also discovered that our broad understanding of the REV assembling process and participation in the assembling process of the city does not only teach about urban organisation in its own means (as, during the process we were exposed to the guts of the city) but also helped us see the logic behind such complicated urban-organizational phenomenon as gentrification in a complex way that departs from the familiar ways of seeing the city as pre-existing to its description. We were, of course, limited to a small exploratory study of a single city by a single researcher for short period of time. Were we working under ideal circumstances we would have designed this study to encompass multiple cities across the globe so as to better identify the unique circumstances behind the phenomena we encountered, and on the other hand see the similarities across the different urban fields. Although ANT is an

167 Aalbers' work is part of a greater academic circle, known as The Real Estate/Financial Complex, that concentrates around the university of Leuven in Belgaum. See: https://ees.kuleuven.be/geography/projects/refcom/

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inherently nomothetic endeavour, which does not draw overarching conclusions, it can nevertheless prove a fruitful undertaking to apply our methodology beyond the scope of Tel-Aviv. This limitation can also serve as the ground for a future line of research, where a series of concurrent investigations might not only shed light on the idiosyncrasies of different municipalities as they relate to their unique organization, it can also highlight the points of contact so often left of view, which connect the national urban landscape. The field of OS will do well to heed Knox's call (Knox, 2010) to apply the lessons from such an unbounded study to the study of organizations in general, and the methodology we have advanced is well suited to apply just such an imperative. The city is indeed a prime example of an unbounded organization, and yet this call can be taken one step forward if one were to follow Actor-Networks such as REV as they traverse beyond the still-limited scope of a single municipality, or even beyond national borders.

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