ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of architecture and town-planning in the struggles of territory and identity in the city turned neighborhood of Jaffa. It demonstrates that Jaffa can be understood as both a space of negation and identification for Tel Aviv. The chapter also explores how and why this imagined architecture is so crucial to the maintenance of the community in the face of continuing efforts to 'judaize' Jaffa under conditions of globalization. It discusses the architectural and planning histories of the Jaffa- Tel Aviv region in the late Ottoman and Mandate periods. The chapter argues that 'discourse of the sands' is intimately connected to an aesthetic of erasure and reinscription which itself lies at the heart of most modernist planning ideologies, particularly Zionist/Israeli planning. Modernity—specifically, European modernity—possessed a penetrating, almost pulverizing power to reshape the landscapes of Palestine, and Jaffa in particular.
