The machine in the garden city: Patrick Geddes’ plan for Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv is a pedestrian‐scaled city of neighbourhoods supportive of an active civic life. This despite a building fabric clad exclusively in International Style garb, an architecture said to be antithetical to humane urban life. The city's success lay in the tightly controlled and binding plan provided by Patrick Geddes in 1925. Applying both a variation of the ‘super‐block’ — in a manner that actually fosters the growth of communities — as well as a platting strategy responsible for the development of a distinct building typology, Tel Aviv has managed to resist anti‐urban propositions. These characteristics, coupled with Tel Aviv's narrow streets, its interstitial spaces and its extensive planting produce a city that even proponents of traditional urbanism could applaud.