PLANNING FOR A NEW NATION
Israel's environmental woes were not due to lack of planning. Rather, they may have been the result of an excessive adherence to a well-conceived master plan that had run its course. The father of the plan was a charis-matic architect named Ariyeh Sharon[6] (no relation to Prime Minister Ariel “Arik” Sharon). In August 1948 Sharon began overseeing a team of 150 planning professionals that produced a comprehensive twenty-year blueprint for the new State. It was a gifted group who were trained in Europe but whose wings had been clipped by British snobbery and bias during the Mandate period. Once the State was established, however, these professionals came into their own.[7]
Sharon began his work at the Labor and Construction Ministry and later moved to the all-powerful Prime Minister's Office. He completed the project in two years, and it was published in 1951.[8] During the course of the plan's preparation, Israel's population had doubled, with ad hoc immigrant camps heavily concentrated in the coastal region. Sharon was well aware that the exigencies brought on by this astonishing growth posed a threat to the viability of a long-term master plan.[9] He offered his vision as an antidote to the chaos and improvisation that characterized Israel's first two years. For the next twenty years it was followed fastidiously, even though it did not enjoy binding statutory authority.
The plan was based on a twenty-year projection of a population of 2.65 million people (a tripling of the 1948 population), a prediction that proved prescient. Despite an ideological commitment to agriculture, the plan was pragmatic and assumed that the vast majority of Israelis (77 percent) would remain in cities. Its goal was to settle them in some four hundred new settlements and towns, far away from the coastal strip between Tel Aviv and Haifa, which was home to 82 percent of the local population in 1948.
The next two decades witnessed a remarkable explosion of economic growth, as the Sharon map became a reality. With a clear macrostrategy de-lineated for physical development, the enormous energy and resolve of the
Although the transformation fell somewhat short of Sharon's ambi-tious objectives, the pre-State trends were initially reversed. The per-centage of the population in the Tel Aviv district dropped from 43 to 34 percent, while the Negev increased from 0.8 percent to 6.9 percent.[12] The trouble was that the planning establishment quickly became locked into Sharon's notion of dispersed and scattered settlements, which rapid development soon made obsolete. When the plan was updated during the 1960s to meet the needs of a nation with four million people, there were no conceptual adjustments. By then, what had been an underpopulated country in 1948 was already beginning to fill up. The unattractive devel-opment towns could not satisfy their inhabitants, and Tel Aviv became the uncontested destination for upwardly mobile Israelis. Planners, how-ever, were not inclined to make Tel Aviv a modern, high-rise metropoli-tan area, thus setting the stage for today's Dan Region megalopolis that some people call Nashdod (that is, containing the sprawl that runs from Netanya to Ashdod).
In retrospect, the environmental balance sheet Ariyeh Sharon and his team of planners left behind is a mixed one. Their vision opened up peripheral and marginal areas for settlement. By dispersing the country's population, they temporarily eased pressure on the crowded coastal region. In making agricultural production a paramount priority, they actually preserved enormous quantities of open spaces.[13] In addition, the Sharon plan put the first nature reserves on the map and squelched the potential for profligate real estate speculation.[14] But it also set in motion planning paradigms that became problematic as the population doubled again and again. The dissonance between, on the one hand, citizens' desire to live in big cities and, on the other hand, national policies that pushed them to settle in the periphery was ultimately resolved democratically. The people won. But a calculated neglect of urban infrastructures in the three large cities, while their populations spiraled upward, served as a