“A city is built exactly like history”-writes Sharon Rotbard – “Always by the victors, and always for the victors. Those who have the power to shape the physical space in accordance to their needs can shape it in accordance with their values and stories”.
“White City, Black City” is a historical, architectural and cultural book – but it is above all a responsible, sharp, critical project, in which Rotbard reads the Zionist representations of Tel Aviv, first and foremost “The White City” and “The City that emerged from the Dunes”. He describes their shaping from an imagined and mobilized reality, produced to create to itself a past and justify a future.
Tel Aviv was not born from the dunes. The most important site of the normalization of the Jewish people was not born on a Tabula Rasa in the Ahusat Bait lottery on the dunes, and it did not started by flourishing the wilderness. Tel Aviv was born in Jaffa. Rotbard writes: “The war of the White City for the conquest of the symbolical and historical space of the city is the war of Tel Aviv against Jaffa. The Story of Tel Aviv is planted in Jaffa and is nourished from Jaffa, since, in order to establish the new city as a modern, ordered, normal, clean and white city, it had to shape Jaffa as a mirror image of it, as a dirty, criminal, devastated and black city. This war was conducted in both military and municipal fronts by the means of “restoration”, “preservation” and demolishing, through songs and shows that naturalize the political deed, and even by the means of mobilizing the international architectural history in order to receive the “Bauhaus” validation to Tel Aviv’s white and clean history.
Rotbard shows the natural colonial cycle, from which orchards and vineyards, neighborhoods and inhabitants were erased in favor of an imagined and well administrated process of desertification - the transformation of a populated agricultural area to a “desert”, only to “flourish” it and to settle it.
Rotbard’s book is written with a political and esthetical responsibility: not only in relation to his discoveries, but also in relation to the censored political story of the Tel Avivian landscape, that its false signs are freedom, secularism and progress. Rotbard demonstrates how the cultural imagination marks its narrative on the place, and more important from this, he draws a straight line between the fiction of “the flourishing of wilderness” and the actual contemporary violence that is supported upon it.
