Social exchange: A neighborhood narrative for the Tel Aviv New Central Bus Station
Description
Tel Aviv is a rapidly changing city. Since its establishment only a century ago, the city has developed into an innovation hub, rich with culture and architectural history. Part of its hasty evolution from the land of sand dunes to the current metropolis was the construction of the Tel Aviv New Central Bus Station, the largest bus station in the world at the time of completion. Almost three decades after Israeli Architect Ram Karmi designed the station, it opened in 1993, already nicknamed the “white elephant” due to its scale and lack of integration into the surrounding neighborhood of Neve Sha’anan. The New Central Bus Station never met the architect’s intended vision of “a city under a roof” and has significantly transformed over the years, as an attempt to create purpose within the large mass. Neve Sha’anan, in south Tel Aviv, is the poorest area of the city, ridden with homelessness, prostitution and drug addiction. It is also the home to the majority of the African refugee and asylum seeker community i Israel, making up less than half a percent of the population of the country. The small community has been the target of recent refugee policy reforms, which frame them as “infiltrators” or “labor migrants.” 1 The New Central Bus Station fractures the urban environment of Neve Sha’anan and causes spatial disorientation of a community already faced with cultural marginalization. Through an analysis of the impact that top down decision making causing cultural conflict has on architecture and place making, this thesis sets to develop a solution for intervention, which considers the users and urban context as a source for re-configuring existing infrastructure.