Gardenicity marks 100 years of Patrick Geddes’ master plan for Tel Aviv.
Geddes envisioned a resilient, adaptive, and green city with trees, gardens, civic institutions, and public and private infrastructure, laying the foundation for the modern Garden City. Today, with half a million residents and 260,000 daily visitors, development and crises, including COVID-19, supply change disruptions, climate change, the Gaza war, demographic shifts, economic disparities, are reshaping city life and challenging its green foundations.
What Did Geddes See?
Patrick Geddes visited Palestine in 1919, 1920, and 1925 to design Tel Aviv’s General Town Planning Scheme. He observed Jaffa’s orange culture, mission-driven agriculture, Hachsharat Hayishuv and emerging infrastructure, and post-1918 influenza-era planning, all shaping his vision of a Garden City planted in the sand. This chapter provides a new contextual narrative for the Geddes Plan.
Civic Green
Inspired by biological systems, Geddes conceived a green spatial framework interrelating the leaf, the lot, the garden, the street, the boulevard, and the park. This multilayered plan shaped Tel Aviv’s growth and its “civic green” culture, where shared public and private greens seeded everyday foliate urban life. This chapter coins “civic green” as the serendipitous public, private green partnership that is the most lasting legacy of the Geddes Plan.
Growth TAMA Green
Urban renewal under TAMA 38/2 is uprooting Tel Aviv’s civic green, tree by tree, as buildings expand, underground parking displaces soil depth, and street gardens are replaced with ornamental shrubs. A century on, these TAMA streetscapes have erased the living canopy, the shade, and city life among the leaves. This chapter maps the impact of development on Tel Aviv’s green infrastructure, bringing to the fore the previously unmapped risks to its sustainable future.
The project included a public walking tour as part of Batim Mebifnim (Open House Tel Aviv) 2025; the Life, Plant, City exhibition at Liebling Haus; and the Gardenicity web-based scrollytelling triptych.
Supported by the Pershing Square Foundation.
