Social reform and federalist option in an early 1920s’ Zionist pre-State regional planning scheme

In Israeli architectural history, both the official dominant position and the emerging critique usually trace the birth of Zionist comprehensive regional planning policy back to the 1930s and to the rise of the so-called Bauhaus-style modernist architecture and urban planning. Looking back to the early 1920s, the Jewish colonization of British Mandate Palestine experienced a major shift, turning from a sporadic and experimental phenomenon to a conscious mass strategy. The Zionist Organization and its many agencies gained a hegemonic role in driving the “Return of the Jewish people to the (Promised) Land” and to agriculture. Hence, Zionism faced for the first time the problem of establishing the forms and features of the Israeli Nation-Space.A key figure in this process was the German-born Jewish architect Richard Kauffmann (1887-1958), which planned most of the new agricultural and urban settlements promoted by the Zionist Organization in Palestine.Placing side by side each of Kauffmann’s plans, an early pre-State regional planning scheme emerges. One that envisioned the Jezreel Valley as the future “core” of the Israeli nation-state shaped as complex polycentric urban network. There, a new national identity based on social reform, agrarianism and the reinterpretation of local geographic possibilities would have developed along an “ancient-modern” transcontinental route between the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Discussing Kauffmann’s contribution to the architectural and landscape expression of this ambitious and controversial resettlement project against geopolitical, agricultural and ideological issues, an alternative narrative of Zionist modern architecture and planning might open up and present-day architectural and planning practice’s “lost of the centre” can be usefully questioned.