This article discusses the nature of urban development practices implemented over a considerable period of time in Tel Aviv, Israel. Its empirical foundations rest on detailed research of high-rise development projects completed in the city between the early 1950s and 2009. The research revealed that the skyline has changed dramatically in the interim, with planning practices adapted to match post-Fordist concepts and globalization. Yet, a persistent national hegemonic narrative still underlies most projects and binds luxury high-rise building, land privatization and erasure of the physical remains that bear witness to the pre-state past. The article thus relates to urban development practice in terms of continued path-dependent process and its necessary social legitimation. The empirical section maps these concepts within the local process while attempting to define the nature of continuing planning and development practices.

High-standard entrepreneurial ventures are usually justified as a means of stimulating capital investment for social, spatial, and financial side benefits for the public. We show the unequal consequences of these ideas in Tel Aviv—Jaffa, where the location of the projects subject to such obligations is not really mitigated by the location of municipal public flagship projects and by the spatial distribution of the municipal development budget. As in many other urban centers, planning bureaucrats in this city advanced numerous expensive residential ventures to finance a variety of municipal initiatives and increase public budgets. Despite their success in attracting private investments, collecting developers’ taxes, exactions, and revenues, the more complicated issues and the less affluent communities see less private and public spending. We link this tendency to the growing fragmentation of urban planning, to the supremacy of the local plan—practically operating as a planning deal—and to the emergence of various municipal tools supporting the feasibility of the deal. We thus claim that while the entrepreneurial planning practice fosters the connections between flexible planning and urban economy, a short-range financial conclusion is unavoidable—most of its products are directed to attract additional similar projects. By tracing this institutional conduct, we claim that while current urban planning is subordinated to market logic and investments, it is actually trapped in a vicious cycle of deepening its own economic appeal. Simultaneously, planners are losing the ability to direct public goods to where they are needed.

Several master plans have attempted to lessen the divide between the poor southern neighborhoods of Tel Aviv–Jaffa and the well-off central and northern ones. We compared the planning visions, the main policies and detailed schemes, financing methods, and actual implementation efforts. We found that each planning generation has promoted different development locations, regulations, and allocation methods, and yet implementation has generally been much more durable and with superior socio-spatial impacts in the more affluent areas. To analyze and explain these findings we studied planning allocations in the light of ideas of distributive justice and of urban regime practice. We found that while the welfare state's direct allocation of housing and infrastructure for communities and individuals was not really equal, the later indirect allocations by neoliberal regimes mainly stimulated market forces in the more affluent or attractive areas. We also found that while planning allocation varied in different neighborhoods, the pace and order of planning and realization became crucial elements in urban inequality.

This article probes the Israeli ‘Clearance and Construction’ urban regeneration programme, which encourages apartment owners nationwide to turn their old dwellings into new tower-clusters. By comparing distinct planning communications on such projects, we aim to contribute a class-related perspective to the debate on post-politics in planning. Planning literature addresses the neutralizing effects of the neoliberal ethos on urban regeneration, highlighting the techniques through which planners dismiss community needs, use values and local voices. We respond to scholars calling for more nuanced perspectives by analysing a dataset of objection hearings in different cities, tracing how planners present their decisions and advance projects, and how different social groups accept and/or reject planners’ rationale. Our findings point to two main outcomes: first, we show that most participants accept the entrepreneurial rationale but their discourse often mixes acceptance with dissent; second, we show that such mixed discourses vary across locations and reflect socio-spatial distinctions. The more affluent participants objected more and highlighted use values and the public interest, yet their discourse largely echoed planners’ discourses. Conversely, the poorer objectors, who focused on exchange values, disrupted the consensual planning order by highlighting their own hopes and personal struggles. Who, then, were more submissive to neoliberal ethos? These results, we argue, call for a nuanced analysis of current planning relations. We argue that such analysis should specifically look at synchronization between consensual planning and co-optation, dissent and socio-spatial deviation.