Camping Out in the Acropolis

Tour Groups traveling through Tel Aviv recently might have been very surprised. Down the street from the Theater and Culture Hall, right smack in the bustling central streets of Israel's largest metropolis, an endless row of colorful camping tents popped up like mushrooms. Young couples with guitars and homemade demonstration signs lay in the summer heat and humidity, men and women trying to gain attention for their worthy cause. Under the shade of the ancient sycamore trees that line the Boulevard, these demonstrations seems almost as out of place as the trees themselves. Here in a city whose residents are constantly reproached for their apathy and lack of conviction, no one thought a new movement would take to the streets.

The young rebels are protesting against the hike in real estate prices all over Israel and in Tel Aviv in particular. "We will be left with no option but to live in tents" they say. They are angry at the government who they say is not doing enough to restrain apartment prices or create new budgetary housing for students. Their rhetoric often strays to socialism although they would never admit to being socialists; often they stray to other vexing issues and seem to lose focus. Yet they seem to embody something far more encompassing then their own opinion, a notion almost universally felt and expressed.

Walking between the tents this week I couldn't help but think of Tel Aviv's modest beginnings. In Patrick Geddes's town plan blue prints from 1919, which are the foundation of the city plan till this day one finds a social utopia, a city where green urban gardens serve all classes of citizens, and shade and benches are provided for everyone's pleasure, where intimate residential blocks are weaved together to form a wider communal form of city life. The apex of this plan was to be situated on the top of the hill just off the main boulevard, an urban acropolis that would serve both as city hall and the city's cultural epicenter with theaters and concert hall. Geddes's Acropolis is today where the youth demonstrations are held.

Around the thousands that came to the acropolis to manifest their discontent the Bauhaus international style buildings for which this city is famous seem but a shadow of their glorious past. The international Bauhaus style was an ornament-less functionality-first school of architecture that became popular in Tel Aviv in the 1930's because it provided affordable and practical housing . Their white exterior gave the city its reputation as the White City.

Today the white exteriors are covered with black and grey soot, many of the old sycamore gardens where cleared away to make room for modern high-rises, and although we they are far more rich than they were, Israel's working class find much less time to engage in cultural activities at Gedes's Acropolis.

Perhaps the youth procession in Tel Aviv expresses our nostalgic longing to the social ideals this city was founded on. Even if it was only a utopia and was never realized, at least we once aspired to build a better more socially just society where every person can afford a roof over his head, a night at the theater and some pleasant shade under the old sycamore trees.