White City, Black City

White City, Black City is a story of two intertwining narratives which reveals the hidden history of the region where now stands modern-day Tel Aviv. The new architectural landscape of this city, its Bauhaus-influenced modernist architecture glittering white, represents one side of the story, that of the White City, which rose from the sparse sand dunes to house a new Jewish society.But there is a second story - that of the Black City of Jaffa, the traces of which lie on the outskirts of the region, and which are rarely mentioned.In this book, Sharon Rotbard blows apart this palimpsest in a clear, fluent and challenging style, which promises to force the reality of what so many have praised as 'progress' into the mainstream discourse.White City, Black City is, all at once, an angry uncovering of a vanished history, a book mourning the loss of an architectural heritage, a careful study in urban design and a beautifully written narrative history. It is in all senses a political book, but one that expands beyond the typical.

A hidden history of colonialism and war in Jaffa and Tel Aviv as seen through its changing architectural landscape

Part I: White City
Book of Paper, Book of Stone
Writers and Builders
The White City Exhibition
The Invention of Normality
Conservation
Whitened City
White Lies
Round Corners
Good Old Eretz Israel
Whiter than White City
Built on Dunes
Part II: Black City
The Black Patch
War
Fleeing Jaffa
Bypassing Manshieh
Spatial Contradiction
Those Polish of the Orient
Separation
British 1930s
Urbicide
Cleansing
Jaffa Tel Aviv
An Occupied City
Hebraized City
The Big Zone
Antique Jaffa
Green Dunes
Raping the Bride of the Sea
The Orange Route
The Children of Jaffa
The Menorah
Part III: White City, Black City and a Rainbow
Uncritical Modernists
Blue and White
Multicultural City
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Bibliography
Index