Ayalon Park

摘要

A hill where it was flat, a park where it was arid, a field for community where there was none. These accomplishments are fitting of Israel's early history, where the act of settlement entailed similar intensive acts of land formation and cultivation in search of a better world. The difference herein is the raw condition of the site, a pile of our own waste, the new post-industrial brownfield as Laura Starr describes it. Her blow by blow narrative of the Ayalon Park's yet ongoing design and implementation gives us a model for 'how to' rally socio-political, cultural, economic resources around the cause of the urban environment and to create ecological and community consciousness in the process. Still; the facts of this Herculean international effort mobilized to ponder the fundamental quandary of the cultural, social and aesthetic of a garbage dump in the body of expanding Tel Aviv, might warn us against its easy global replication. Perhaps Ayalon should include among its other simultaneously lovely and didactic landscapes a garden of contemplation on the nature of waste.