“One day, the Mayor approached me and said, ‘Nitzan, you know the long council estate building at the entrance to the city? It looks bad. Let’s find a way to change it.’ The classic solution, urban renewal, costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time. Before we went down that route, we decided to do something quick and out of the ordinary: we painted the building in bold colors. The day after we finished working, we started to receive phone calls. What had caused this? Who went to all that effort? The residents of the building felt valued. And residents of other buildings wanted theirs painted
A year-and-a-half ago, I stepped into my role as Petah Tikva’s City Architect. I began focusing a lot of my time on the public space; how residents experience and use it. It took no time at all to identify the pain point – the city center. Petah Tikva is a longstanding city with a proud heritage. Over the years, the city has expanded outward, with new neighborhoods, new construction and new commercial centers, and only the city center has been left far behind. The buildings became dilapidated, the infrastructure aged badly, and those who could, began leaving for greener pastures in newer neighborhoods. When I looked at the city plan, it jumped out of the page: the most central part of the city was the most run-down. I harbored some hope that if we could change the aesthetic appeal and the image of the city center, I could change the image of the city as a whole at the same time.
I got to work, diving into hundreds of plans, trying to understand what had already been done. I discovered that I had not been the first to tackle this problem: there were dozens of plans titled “Regeneration of the City Center”, but not a single stone had been turned out there, where it actually mattered. Time after time, the plans failed to be executed. When I started talking about this in the corridors, I understood the extent to which these attempts had exhausted the system: ‘Nitzan, you’re not the first. We all know that it needs to be dealt with, we’ve poured huge sums of money on planning, and nothing has ever come out of it. Let it go.’
I realized that making plans was not the way to convince anyone. I had to show results on the ground.
I knew the really big changes would take time. Evacuation and reconstruction programs (so-called “pinui-binui”), urban renewal, new commercial centers – these are not things that happen over the course of a few days or even months. So how do you achieve quick results on a limited budget? Through what is known as ‘tactical urbanism’, making small and easy-to-implement changes in the landscape on a low budget, and gauging the public reaction as quickly as possible.
COVID-19 fit in wonderfully with my plan—the shopping centers were closed, and residents needed safe and inviting public spaces more than ever. When we were given the task to renovate five commercial centers and adapt them to the circumstances of COVID-19, I went out on a trip with the Mayor and heads of infrastructure to scope out the situation and see the old commercial centers in question. We looked for the run-down places where we would be able to make small changes that would make a big difference. And within a few days, the center looked like a whole other place.
Firstly, we added lighting so that residents would feel that the area was safe and not in a state of disrepair. We planned benches with shade right outside the post office so that people waiting outside due to COVID-19 restrictions not allowing everyone to be inside at once would have somewhere to sit. And most importantly: we used bold colors that really caught the eye. When the shade canopies are in bright, bold colors, no resident will fail to understand that something has changed.
The positive feedback flowed in. We made changes that cost almost no money, but the residents felt that someone was thinking about them, taking an interest in where they could sit. Following the success, we’re raising money for our next project: integrating street art into the city center and building a tourist trail that includes a tour of the artworks and historic buildings and ends at the commercial center.
In a time when everyone is closed off in their own homes, and venturing out into public spaces is rare and often uncomfortable, we want to make every such journey a positive experience.