ABSTRACT
From 1948 to 1953, Arieh Sharon established and then served as the head of the government planning wing in the Ministry of Labor. The People's Administration, the new nation's provisional government, decided to set up a body that would take charge of the physical planning of the state. Expecting the arrival of large waves of immigrants, the administration believed the new nation needed a masterplan and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion asked Sharon to take on this mission. Sharon's staff included architects, geographers, engineers, artists and more. Together, they came up with a masterplan that was based on principles of decentralization. The plan's main goal was to disperse the waves of immigrants in scattered locations and thus gain firmer control of the state's entire territory through Judaization. This chapter returns to Israel's first masterplan, which is often referred to as the Sharon Plan, and discusses the concept of decentralization upon which it is based and how the masterplan's design articulated this concept.
