Numbers are all they know

Almost without exception newspaper articles on real-estate in Israel, on the net or statements by national and municipal government officials responsible for planning and building- spew numbers – the number of recent sales or rentals, the number of apartments built or approved, percentage of rise or fall in prices, how many luxury or less expensive apartments have been sold, interest rates on mortgages, sizes of apartments sold and on which floors they are located, and needless to say, the heights of the latest towers built or approved.
There were even those interviewed in a widely distributed newspaper who compared the heights of towers built in Tel-Aviv with those in Jerusalem, as if the two cities were one and the same. Capping unsocial media’s response to the costly and formative issue of planning and building – aggressive branding, marketing and advertisements to themselves, all smiles, the top of the top, this at a time of an existential war.

Never a single word on WHAT is being built, the quality of these buildings or their negative impacts on our society, for on this all- important matter our ministers, mayors and the public at large, are absolutely ignorant.

The deep moral crisis clearly reflective in Israeli architecture over the last thirty years is of course not exclusive to a single field or country. Markets without morals exist the world over. The present cultural climate includes growing incivility and aggression, exploitation and manipulation, along with the inability of far too many to hear opposing views.

For there to be any hope for positive change in the quality of building, real-estate economics must radically change from short-term profit maximization as its primary goal to value maximization with significant social, economic and environmental benefits for the quality of our lives, helping to strengthen our communities, the keystones of our society and heal the present dangerous divides that have opened in Israel.

To restore what has been lost, among these values would be long-term sustainability with concern for future generations, respect for our architectural heritage, appropriate relationships to the pre-existing natural and built environment, human scale, comprehensive and three-dimensional planning having unity, continuity and diversity, pleasant to the eye.

Segregating rich and poor, young and old, can be avoided by offering a wide range of housing types, designing and building our environment with a sense of shared belonging and collective responsibility, education, as always, the key.

Gerard Heumann