Expressway urbanism: highway planning and the reimagining of Tel Aviv-Jaffa

The Ayalon route is an infrastructural corridor serving as the principal northern and southern entrance to the city of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, bundling together multi-lane expressway, railway tracks, and a flood regulation canal. Its planning history, changing from a meandering seasonal river to Israel busiest traffic route, was a lengthy and incremental process, generating several plans by different planning agencies with different ambitions. Since the inception of the idea to implement a highway on what was described as ‘natural opening’ – the beds of the Ayalon (Musrara) river, this area became a landscape of opportunity, inciting social imagination among urban planners, municipal and national officials who used the road as an organizing device for the development of the city and the nation. This historical research explores the co-production of urban planning and transportation planning, not as rivalling forces but as coproducing processes.