Haifa, City of the Future

Ceramic Tile Wall & Book

Final project at Bezalel M.Des, 2021



Haifa had a promising past. In the beginning of the previous century, buses left it for Baghdad, trains to Damascus, and taxi cabs to Beirut; oil flowed in from Iraq, and some called it the city of the future.
Herzl devoted a chapter to it in his book ‘Altneuland’, the British used it as a strategic crossroads, Europeans enamored by its charms settled in it and wrote about it. The orientalist viewpoint and colonialist ambitions of the Europeans created a fantasy about the city, with some basis in reality. The project is rich with real and fictitious archival materials, presenting a speculative picture of ‘Haifa, City of the Future’.
It is created and presented at a time when Haifa is a multiethnic city in crisis, with problems of air pollution, fragile coexistence and negative migration. Perhaps this is a good point to recall its unique past and hoped-for future