ISRAEL / TEL AVIV
it’s 22/dec but it’s not a real winter here in tel aviv. nice warm sunny days, and a bit colder at night. which isn’t all positive since we don’t have water left in the country.
but it’s not the weather to blame: a short-sighted and corrupt governments, and criminally ignorant urban planning causes Tel-aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa to spill every almost raindrop of drinking water directly to the sea on the concreat and asphalt slides and over synthetic playgrounds.
Ancient people who lived here 2000+ years ago build successful cities in the desert, and even though academies studied and analized to the bone the water preservation concepts, the mayors in israel are more focused on fast profits and taller buildings with less trees and natural ground.
july 2011:
Urban view in telaviv is not pure white anymore. its green dots are surrounded with gray of concrete, metal, pollution, and being aggressively mutilated by the city authorities to make them more „beautiful“ (i.e. – fit into narrow patterns of human order). the water in the river are calm but poisonous – some people who fell into the water died shortly after.
Jerusalem and haifa, sitting on mountains, have still bigger spots of groves and forests which endured due to being more difficult to „cultivate“.
Tel aviv is not white, but the colors of its people is what attracts visitors like moths to its streets and to my couch.
A lonely guava tree in my rented house struggles to bloom despite the ash and lack of water, and succeeds, and a dried tree trunc i found thrown in the street sends a new tiny but lively green leaf :)
I’m wrote all the above in the shadow of the latest housing costs demonstrations. people start to realize that government has nothing to do with them, as if we were living in the middle ages. the river is sold to the chemical factory „Sano“ as a sewage canal. the water in the pipes are deliberately polluted. people are hired at below-the-minimum wages while others sophisticatedly drain the people’s hard-earned money.
we started to protest, but the real deal is changing the capitalist mind into a real socialist, so money and energy will flow and not be acucmulated in secret bank accounts and excessive private luxury from fortune being made of lies and manipulation.
december 2010 and july 2011
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urbanofeel 