Neither Village Nor City

Communitas

Acknowledgments

The Kibbutz Planning Archive project was made possible, above all, through funding by the Jewish National Fund, initiated by Dr. Gavriel Alexander whose interest in the project and encouragement throughout the ten years of its preparation were a major factor in its realization. Additional funding came from Yad Tabenkin and Yad Ya’ari under whose auspices the project was carried out; the A.B. Planning Office as the natural successor of the Kibbutz Planning Offices; the United Kibbutz Movement; the Council of Building Preservation and the Haifa Technion Ne’eman Institute. My thanks go to all of them.

The project came to its fruition in the Hebrew book Neither City nor Village – The Architecture of the Kibbutz 1910–1990. The English version presented here is an abridged and more concise edition, adapted to a wider readership.

In the late 1990s I was interviewed by Architect Simona Michaeli who had just embarked on her thesis in English on the architecture of the kibbutz. We held many interesting and fruitful discussions and I was happy that I was able to help in her endeavors. Simona completed her thesis, The Loci of Utopia, and received her doctorate and then tragically died. Her work was passed on to me by her family, and her research, especially her unique case study of Kibbutz Hazorea (which I have included as a case study here), has become an important addition to the Kibbutz Planning and Architecture Archive, and I have used material from it in narrating the following story, which is her story too.

My personal involvement in my kibbutz, Bet Haemek, and for some 50 years as an architect planner in the Kibbutz Planning Departments, justifies a more individual note in the narrative which follows: from time to time I interject – thus - my own experiences and reflections and for the same reason I have also used my personal sketches and illustrations rather than professionally drawn diagrams.

My personal thanks go to my wife Hannah, who first urged me to tell this unique story in English even if it meant prolonging the hours I spent at the computer or in my office, and less of that precious time together in our old age; perhaps there will be more of that now…

I am particularly grateful to my late friend, fellow kibbutz member and historian Prof. Henry Near, who contributed the Overview chapter, read and reread the manuscript, suggested textual changes, and made sure as to the correctness of the historical narrative. I am no less indebted to Anthony Berris and Margalit Rodgers, also fellow members, who edited the final text professionally with sensitivity and understanding. Finally, my gratitude to Kibbutz Bet Haemek and through it to The Kibbutz, which enabled me and my family, to live and experience a full, meaningful and good life, while allowing me to fully participate in the building of a unique community, its planning and architecture.

Preface

Until quite recently, little has been written and published in English on the subject of kibbutz planning and architecture; however, since 2010, the 100th anniversary of Degania, the first kibbutz, we have been presented with three new publications dealing with the subject from various angles:

In their wonderfully detailed The Changing Landscape of a Utopia, Ruth Enis and Shmuel Burmil trace the planning of the kibbutz through its landscape and gardens, in itself a unique example of total integration of function, complement, and beauty. On the other hand, in their Architecture and Utopia –The Israeli Experiment, Michael and Bracha Chyutin present a comparative study of the kibbutz and the moshav, including a didactic comparison between urban and kibbutz structures. All four authors describe the dissolution of the kibbutz with regret, yet none of them relates to the kibbutz movement as a unique spatial phenomenon, a communal alternative to the capitalist city. It is precisely this aspect that guides the narrative that follows, which also describes the acquisition of kibbutz planning by the kibbutzim themselves, and the creation of a specific discipline resulting in an architecture which was presented at the 2007 Venice Biennale as without precedent.

What they do have in common, however, is their preoccupation with imbuing the early kibbutz with Utopian intentions and then tracing the origin of its configuration to idealistic diagrams of past Utopian fantasies or abstract expressions of perfect order.

I have always been more than wary about this correlation between the origins of the kibbutz and Utopian thought and practice. It is somewhat tempting to wallow through those fascinating architectural simulations of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and Kropotkin, of Oneida, of Amana, and even the very practical efforts of Owen, the elegant frugality of Hancock and other religious and secular communes in America, and try to relate their historic precedent to the pragmatic reality of the kibbutz; it is far more realistic to assess the result as a hard-headed attempt to face the needs of the time, revolt against bourgeois convention, and create a new and alternate reality.

Nevertheless, present-day communes, including the kibbutz, are at times referred to as Utopian¹ in the sense that they represent the endeavor to create this very alternative to the existing and flawed world order. As such they have become the subject of extensive study, and the overall concept has even created a number of world organizations through which they are researched and debated at international conferences.

A review of the many subjects and aspects of communes and their various connections to Utopia indeed reveals the wide range of interests the subject engenders: political, economic, social, cultural, educational, even artistic and poetic. Little, however, has been mentioned of another possible focus of Utopia: as the potential replacement of the ubiquitous dystopia Metropolis as the flawed world order.

Of all the many and varied physical accounts of utopian scenarios, very few, if any, envisage an Urban-Megalopolitan reality as the ultimate solution; the preferred venue is Arcadian, ex-urban, relatively small, close to nature, and as such can be regarded as the paradigm of Man’s ideal state in some distant future. The commune is thus a harbinger of The Urban Alternative whether as a discrete rural community or an in-urban association: both basically reject the alienation of the amorphous city conglomerate in favor of togetherness, solidarity and participatory management of their immediate environment. In their rejection of the world order, they tend toward isolation and insularity, preferring local social action and avoiding converting others through political involvement on a wider scale. As the only propagators of a future Utopia in today’s global reality, the commune clearly redefines the new Utopia as a future alternative to the present ubiquitous capitalist, neo-liberal city-state, and according to this definition demands the revolutionary drafting of its social and physical content.

The kibbutz movement still sees itself as deeply involved in the world’s commune phenomenon which, in turn, still sees the kibbutz as one of its most developed branches; this relationship, however, needs closer investigation; there is a clear distinction between the commune and the kibbutz which, through its size and development, has, by definition as neither village nor city, created itself as an urban alternative. It was this spatial aspect, made potentially relevant through its size, solidarity, political involvement, and geographic dispersal, which gave the Israeli ex-urban space its uniqueness before the basic kibbutz structure changed and diluted itself into a pseudo-suburb.

National goals have changed, agriculture has lost its mythical value, and the introduction of industry and its concomitant adaptation to the global market economy has totally changed social and economic priorities, affecting the very basis of equality of labor, allowing for differences between individual contribution and recompense. The previously accepted definitions of cooperation and togetherness are no longer valid in this changing situation. The postmodern kibbutz of today no longer conforms to a uniform, monolithic image; the heroic paradigm has changed into a variegated format, and the term kibbutz has many meanings which depend upon size, geographic location, proximity to neighboring settlements, means of production and livelihood, recompense, social security, etc. Kibbutzim have become renewable and they differ as to their revised future, differences which will, given geographical location, become even more marked in the future.

Of 270 settlements defined as kibbutzim, at the time of writing only some 30 remain fully communal, the rest, now known as The New Kibbutz or The Revised Kibbutz² have separated production and community, thus fundamentally altering the participatory aspect of democratic management, and have become privatized, adopting differential income, allowing private accounts which finance the upgrading of private housing, ownership of cars, and the right of inheritance to their children. This lifestyle is to all intents and purposes similar, if not identical, to the Community Settlement established through the Jewish Agency in the 1970s. These villages became the means whereby large tracts of hilly land in the Galilee were settled by young families (quite a number of them former kibbutz members) who were offered attractive terms for purchasing a plot of land and building their new home in a community environment. As no means of production were established, incomes were dependent on outside employment, mainly professional and hi-tech, which necessitates car ownership and a high degree of commuting. Local services and facilities are limited to preschool kindergartens, minimal shopping, small clubrooms and synagogues, and basic municipal administration. Established mainly in developed regions, these villages have become the mainstay of post-pioneering settlement and today number more than 100.

Essentially these settlements have turned into ex-urban garden suburbs, and as such have to be recognized as an inconsistency of national planning which discourages setting up new settlements within the country’s open spaces, and conversely calls for increased urban densities, stressing the importance of existing cooperative agriculture as an integral part of land preservation. It is in this context that the organic link between community and production distinguishes the kibbutz from the community settlement, and stresses the inherent danger of this separation (and privatization), thus causing the ‘revised’ kibbutz to lose its relevance and become another form of ex-urban suburb.

This book attempts a comprehensive overview of the architecture of the kibbutz: its essence, its history, its constant change, and its physical planning and architectural expression and management, and relates to this unique spatial alternative from a holistic viewpoint: the kibbutz in all stages of its development, from the Kvutza as a micro-utopian commune to its physical configuration as an autonomous-autarkic complex arising out of its basic social, economic and educational structure, and its later stages as a potential ‘macro-utopian’³ regional entity, envisioning a real alternative lifestyle to the capitalist metropolis. It is about its beginning and also about its end… and what might perhaps be its new future…

Chapter 1: ‘Neither Village nor City’

…it is our wish to build here neither village nor city … Yitzhak Tabenkin

Urban alternatives: - Historical Background

Human concentrations living in gathered settlements, their economy based on services, crafts, commerce, administration, government, law, religion, and so forth, are well known from the dawn of history. These cities existed in a natural symbiosis with the agricultural sector, which supplied the food and in return sought the services and security necessary for a peaceful and prosperous life. Yet this human concentration we call the city is the fruit of Man’s adaptability, ingenuity, and labor, and does not exist as such in nature; it is an original, possibly unique invention.

Since the establishment of the ancient cities, the city as such has been the prime mover in technological, commercial, cultural, religious, and political development and until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the balance between the city and its agricultural hinterland was more or less preserved.

During the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in the absence of any viable alternative, the cities attracted huge numbers of people to their new factories. The cities grew haphazardly and quickly became government and services centers serving the vast and undefined housing areas whose main purpose was housing the multitudes working in the new industries. This situation led to inhuman conditions, deep contradictions in social relations, and an unjust governmental structure. On the other hand, and in parallel, the new city gained power and the ability to develop hitherto unknown government institutions, culture, and entertainment, and with the technological surge laid the foundations of the modern metropolis.

In the early stages of this development, however, some did give serious thought to possible alternatives to the city as the absolute focal point of industrial development. Some proposed industrial decentralization among rural canters, preservation of the social balance, justice for all, and the equality of Man. The efforts of reformers such as Robert Owen in Lanark and others in the United States were aimed at creating balanced rural-industrial communities based on the principles of land ownership, social justice, and worker participation in management.

These alternative approaches were divided into two separate courses of mutual influence. On the one hand, proposals and detailed plans for industrial community settlements were aired, and on the other, planning of modern, ideal, industrial cities was rife. The result was a distinction between the development of a city as a creation of free commercial enterprise, and the ideal of balanced, organized, planned, and controlled human development. The results are well known: the victors were the urban capitalists. Yet those very humanitarian principles acted as the political thrust on the developing discipline of urban planning, creating a more balanced and controlled urban environment

But the dream of a dignified life outside the confines of the city (or different from it), in harmony with nature, fully involved in production, in society, its culture and welfare, remained.

Since World War Two and following the dismal failure of the new cites as modernistic utopias, it has become clear that our ability to plan the city is extremely limited, but at least we have learned that short of revolutionary change, we can intervene in the existing urban texture and change it, bit by bit, into a better environment.

So we are left with the two possibilities that have already been mentioned in the context of urban alternatives: on the one hand, the creation of independent and involved cooperative communities within the urban texture, and on the other, the creation of ex-urban, communities that offer a cooperative alternative to the city’s contradictions and are opposed to all that is negative and alienating in the developing global megalopolis. Evidence already exists showing that some kind of process toward community awareness inside the contemporary metropolis has begun worldwide.

To assess the uniqueness of the kibbutz as human settlement and potentially, in its regional macro-utopian form, as an urban alternative, it is necessary to conduct a short comparative study of parallel attempts to create alternative habitats to the ubiquitous city and especially the Capitalist City of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s. We can leave behind the Ideal Cities, Renaissance and Baroque; they can remain as structural models, but the initiatives which created them have historically become irrelevant to our purpose, as have most of the Utopian models, religious as well as social.

So where else can we find examples of attempts at creating a real alternative society to the Capitalist City? We have to define alternative as of two things, mutually exclusive; (strictly) to choose between two things; (loosely) either of two possible courses (Concise Oxford English Dictionary), and real as an attempt, revolutionary in its basic intent, to negate the economic ‘reason’ for the capitalist city and substitute instead lateral concepts of alternative economic and social politics: socialist, communalist and/or those based on a form of ‘post-political’ pragmatic, democratic and egalitarian liberalism.

I propose to assess three case studies regarding their ability to meet the above criteria. Generically⁴, these examples are identified as three seminal categories:

• Reformist – Ebenezer Howard’s Social City

• Revolutionary - The New Urbanism and Dis-urbanism in post-Revolution Russia

• Evolutionary - The Kibbutz

Ebenezer Howard’s Social City

Ebenezer Howard’s manifesto for a Social City, (influenced to no small extent by the writings of Edward Bellamy), was an attempt at integrating land reform, economic realities, social issues, and planning concepts into an alternative spatial realization of human settlement.

The concept was based on three interdependent axioms:

• Optimal size of each Garden City and its planning patterns within a network of such cities.

• Full integration of resources and alternative economics of agriculture, industry, land ownership, use and employment, ensured by regional interdependence through rational transport systems.

• Negation of the Town/Country dichotomy; instead, the creation of a single spatial context of Urban/ex-Urban space: Neither Urban nor Rural : the Social City.

Howard’s ideas have been ably documented⁵, as have their trials, tribulations and ultimate distortions through the Garden Suburb, originally in the Hampstead Garden Suburb development, and to a no lesser degree, the New Towns of postwar Europe. Lately, Howard’s ideas have seen a revival in the literature and accompanying English regional planning, and even in its American form of the New Urbanism.

It is important to understand Howard’s ideas as spatial: his city is a node in a network of cities, interlaced with open agricultural land, parks and natural reserves. The City, as described and fully detailed, is the model for an incremental human habitat: neither town nor country as understood in his day, or for that matter in ours.

Limiting the population of each city to a manageable