Transitions: City, Nature, Sea.

Year: 2016

Can nature and the city share a joint future on Tel-Aviv’s waterfront? 

‘Transitions: City, Nature, Sea’ is a competition entry for an ‘urban nature’ park on Tel Aviv’s northern waterfront extension.

The undeveloped landscape and urban proximity are a given. A limestone ridge, sand dunes, local coastal vegetation and wildlife, naturally ‘protected’ by beach-rock on the waterfront and 80 years of real-estate barriers, make the site an anomaly on Tel Aviv’s coast.

‘Transitions: City, Nature, Sea’ offers a strategic plan based on ‘minimum intervention, maximum exposure’ to catalyze an ‘urban nature’ waterfront park for the city’s northward growth.

Key to the plan is enabling access and circulation across the site, letting visitors experience the existing natural assets, connecting the sea and future emergent city, while leaving the landscape for the most part, unscathed, to naturally evolve and change over time.

The proposed park entrances and six trail sections define a series of differentiated walkways, to and from the waterfront, to immerse visitors in the ‘found nature’ on the site.

Four new large recreational programs are introduced each leveraging specific site conditions:

‘The Great Shade’, an event space and viewing platform is located at the peak of the ridge, replacing the defunct military base with a large scale shading and solar energy destination, with expansive views of the city, park and sea.

‘Dune Park’, a large sand dune for recreational use, offering a new ‘soft’ entrance to the ‘Ridge Beach’ (Hof Hatzuk) to the south of the Sea & Sun Gated Development;

‘Waterfront Sports’ park, the reclamation and expansion of a sand swimming beach expandingRidge Beach’ (Hof Hatzuk) and the introduction of new sports facilities for play and exercise, including a salt water olympic pool looking out to the sea, soccer and other playing fields, and underground municipal parking;

‘Geddes Boulevard’ a watershed park perpendicular to the waterfront, forming the sixth shaded urban promenade in Tel Aviv, flanked by two walkways, tree canopies and a bio-swale for seasonal water treatment.

Taken together, the coastal ‘urban nature’ park and the linear bio-swale promenade offer a ‘green’ civic infrastructure that works with the existing assets, jumpstarting  Tel-Aviv’s growth northward, while creating a spatial infrastructure that at once protects and traffics the site. The plan promotes site access, for its immediate use, independently of the tumultuous real-estate pressures that will inevitably shape the built environment over time.

In collaboration with KAV Landscape Architecture.

Partner/s:

Rebecca Sternberg, Anai Green