Jane walks took place today, Friday, 01/05/2015, throughout the city of Haifa and will continue tomorrow in a large number of centers. We went on a fascinating tour of the Ein Hayam neighborhood, with the residents of the neighborhood.
During the tour, we made a circular route in the neighborhood, and even visited the house of a resident of the neighborhood.
The residents of Ein Hayam guided us and told us about the coexistence that exists in Ein Hayam, which is a mixed neighborhood (Jews and Arabs). We saw the (many) difficulties faced by a resident trying to get to the sea and cross the busy road and railroad.
It's hard not to be impressed by the enormous potential of Ein Hayam, which may be realized if and when they sink the railroad underground and allow an open passage to the beach.
I interviewed Dr. Ziva Kolodani, leader of the "On the Way to the Sea" project in Haifa
Watch in HD-1080P. It is recommended to enlarge to full screen
Tomorrow, Saturday, 02/05/2015, the tours will continue. Please stay updated here:
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And here:
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Jane Jacobs who changed the way we look at cities
Written by Yanon Geva - Vplan company
Jane Walks Festival It is named after Jane Jacobs, who passed away almost a decade ago, but for those who deal with what is called "urbanism", she is still one of the most important writers. The reason for this is that Jacobs changed the way we look at cities. For planners - in Jacobs' time as well as today - a city is made up of neighborhoods, and neighborhoods are a closed unit with a school, a commercial center and a park. Everything an average citizen needs, but without too much soul. But Jacobs understood that we love our city and our neighborhood because these are lively places full of complexities, different activities and different people. Instead of looking at the city from a bird's eye view, Jacobs showed that the parts we like the most in the city are precisely the places where there is diversity and wealth, and that these places can only be found from the perspective of a pedestrian on the street.
This is also the main point that guided me in our walks in Haifa. In the tours I participated in, the guides were mainly professionals, experts in their field - architects, archaeologist, agronomist, school principal. Each of them faces dilemmas and professional decisions on a daily basis in order to serve the elusive thing known as "the public good". In a meeting with a public of interested residents, these dilemmas turn from an internal dialogue to an external dialogue, where the public learns something from the professional process, and the professional turns the work into a folk tale, which has twists and anecdotes and most importantly - an audience that listens and responds.
The city is above the pavement
But of course, for a conversation only, you can stay in a closed room, and our goal was to get to know the city from the height of the sidewalk. It was especially fun to see how a mostly Haifa audience (with quite a few natives of the city who spent their whole lives there) getting to know new places, or getting to know familiar places anew. How many Haifaites can, for example, say that they once wandered through the Shaar Aliya neighborhood? In fact, for those who grew up on the mountain and facing the bay, the landscape in the neighborhoods of West Haifa looks almost un-Haifian. And yet it is a significant part of the city, and it has assets and community forces of which these neighborhoods are proud.
Scale of individual streets
I will finish with another taste of Jacobs, who tried to break the modernist model of "neighborhood". Our sense of "neighborliness", she argued, can exist on the scale of individual streets where everyone knows everyone else, but also on a much larger scale.
The great Vplan "neighborhood" company is the one that is not physical but communal and cognitive, and connects people across the entire volume (and this was written in the early 60s, long before the Internet). For me, the most important strength of this festival is in the potential of creating such a neighborhood, which is a sense of belonging and guarantee born from the fact that we know the city, with our eyes and especially with our feet.
Pictures from the tour in Ein Hayam
Photo: Yaron Karmi - lives here in the sea
eye of the sea
The activists in "Sobb Ein Hayam"[bs-thumbnail-listing-2 columns="4" title="Our Sea" tag="409" count="4" pagination-show-label="0" pagination-slides-count ="3" slider-animation-speed="750" slider-autoplay="1" slider-speed="3000" bs-show-desktop="1" bs-show-tablet="1" bs-show-phone ="1" paginate="slider"]