The De-Branding of Tel Aviv
What remains of a city after the hype?
A few years ago, Punk icon Patti Smith was asked if she had any advice for young artists in New York City. She said “Yes, find a new city”.
Of course, she was referring to the city which had become synonymous with wealth — prohibitive for artists not born to wealthy parents.
I reflect on the city that has been my home for almost 2 decades: Tel Aviv. Reflecting on the zeitgeist and the sense of futility, I find myself living in a suddenly dead city which needed a global pandemic to reveal some deeply concealed truths about itself.
The City that Never Slept
Tel Aviv is often rolled out as an example of great city branding. It has indeed come a long way from the 90’s, when I remember being one of only a handful of foreign-born residents to hang out on Allenby St, the only street in the city that still to this day maintains a semblance of rock’n’roll of years past, before gentrification, Birthright and Les Francais.
Tel Aviv was always liberal and progressive, albeit a bit provincial. It was more like Athens than New York or London. Completely lacking a skyline, rents were sane, and you would only hear a smattering of English, German or French when you went out.
There was one Chinese restaurant, one Sushi spot and one Indian restaurant — and those were the kind of spots where you’d celebrate a special event or anniversary. Hummus, Falafel and Shawarma were the local specialties and the nightlife had a locally unique magic, lit with promise and opportunity but was far from being cosmopolitan.
Start-Up Nation
In 2009, things started to change rapidly and Tel Aviv became one of the hottest spots in the world. There was a sense of electricity, a feeling that something was happening. Every day the skyline changed , high-rise after high-rise, Philippe Starck to Ron Arad, Tel Aviv attracted a different kind of global attention.
All of a sudden you could nibble on Romaine lettuce in trendy fusion temples for a $50 business special. Every restaurant became a culinary concept and every watering hole became a cocktail bar heaven, featured in Global Timeout.
Across the globe, alongiside same-old stories of the Occupation there were new, never heard tales of disruptive technologies, mad innovators, and the White City with its Bauhaus architecture, gay parades, boutique hotels, boulangeries and raddled hipsters.
The Creative Class & Gentrification
In 2002, Prof. Richard Florida coined the term “Creative Class” — a term for people who are basically like me. Creative and bourgeois, making a living from their creativity: think of designers, filmmakers, animators, ad people, entrepreneurs…
Apparently, people like me are good for a city. We spend money, spin the wheels of the economy, drive real estate prices up, go out, have fun, and look fabulous doing it.
Regardless, the Creative Class became a thing. It became celebrated, flaunted and cleverly promoted. The local creative class, much like in Williamsburg, Shoreditch, and Kreuzberg were the driving force in turning Tel Aviv into a lifestyle destination but also inadvertently led to gentrification and ultimately uniformity. What started out as ‘alternative culture’ gradually became clone culture where uniform hipster beards, gourmand coffee and pilates parlours came to define the meaning of community.
The Monocle Hype
In 2007, Tyler Brûlé, former publisher of Wallpaper, a global design magazine, cashed in his chips after selling to AOL and founded Monocle, a magazine intended for this global creative class Florida was speaking of. To whoever isn’t familiar with Monocle, imagine a mix between the Economist and Condé Nast traveller, or as they call it a ‘global affairs and lifestyle magazine’ which has since grown to encompass a 24-hour radio station, website, retailer and media brand that quickly and wisely capitalized on the trends that they themselves were promoting.
While the magazine is estimated to have never had more than 12,000 paid subscriptions, they cleverly placed the magazines in all major airports and strategic newsstands worldwide. It had the allure of a sophisticated club that you wanted to belong to.
Monocle introduced us to the global creative class, to the movers and shakers from every far flung outpost; entrepreneurs, café and nightlife owners, brand people, second generation industrialists, photogenic and progressive politicians.
For a moment the world seemed connected by curation and fueled by a sense of discovery.
Wink Creative, their media branch soon started getting into the lucrative business of branding countries, cities and national institutions. They had a strong platform, a winning vision and a new approach to advertorials that balanced between marketing, branding and journalism.
The Story of 18
In 2009, I returned to Israel after 9 years in Canada. I had been one of the few who had heard of Monocle and I was a big believer in this approach. I also had a burning desire to change the global perception about Israel which I perceived to be an existential threat to the nation at the time.
With the help of an investor, I launched 18, a business and culture magazine which drew its style from Monocle but infused it with what was just starting out to be the chic Levantini style of Jaffa and Jerusalem, a mix of orientalism and modernity.
The magazine aimed to capture the great cultural, creative and entrepreneurial energy of the time and it was a collective effort of many like-minded people who wanted to tell a different story about the mis-represented place they were from. They wanted the same respect their contemporaries from Williamsburg, Shoreditch and Kreuzberg were getting.
At the time, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had created the Brand Israel department, headed by the brilliant Ido Aharoni who would later go on to become the Consul in New York. Through my work with 18, I met just about everyone who was dealing in city and country branding. Aharoni liked the magazine and it coincided with his agenda of telling a parallel story. The Ministry purchased a few thousand copies of the 1st issues and distributed them to all the embassies and consulates who were happy to have a different story to hand out.
Hype & Reality
It was at that time, on the heels of the national initiative, and seeking to capitalize on the winds of change and the influx of capital, the City of Tel Aviv created their own — Tel Aviv Global City.
The city’s new logo was unveiled and it looked just like a bunch of other cities that had undergone a similar process at that time.
This was also around the time of the financial crisis in 2008 when the wealthiest Jews across the globe began investing in their own insurance policies in the face of instability and the expected rise in Anti-Semitism. This caused a further acceleration in the city’s growing costs and rapid yet unsustainable growth.
Tel Aviv’s stock was on the rise but beneath the surface a disconnect was already beginning to occur. The city ranked amongst the highest in the world in terms of cost of living, but still average salaries were closer to those in Madrid and Rome, rather than London and New York.
In 2011, the city was awash with the first protests against the rising cost of living, which at their peak brought 400,000 people to the streets. The city started developing a split personality; a welcoming global city that was beginning to turn its back on some of the locals.
In the South of Tel Aviv, a 5 minute walk from Rothschild blvd, you were already in a parallel universe, one brimming with violence and racial tensions between tens of thousands of illegals, mostly from Africa were living in squalor and the local underprivileged long time residents. As Mayor Huldai forged forward servicing the city’s strongest interests, focused on business and tourism, he learned to sweep all of the city’s dirty secrets out of sight and out of mind.
The city brand that was built on diversity and an endless energy was getting older, richer and much less diverse.
Locals who weren’t core founders of successful startups, inheritors of property or charming enough to marry into wealth, got left behind, gradually leaving the city and taking with them some of the charm that had made the city desirable to begin with.
The AirBnB Effect
Like many other cities such as Barcelona and Berlin, AirBnb radically changed the urban landscape. It altered the way we think about property, it gave us freedom to travel and it provided us with a more authentic way of experiencing the cities we visit. It also made flats even more scarce and even more obscenely over-priced. Sure, foreigners could taste some of that authentic Mediterranean Dolce Vita, but for others life was never quite the same after 4 Germans from Dresden partied all night as if the Wall had just come down.
In many ways, this period signalled the zenith of the city’s transformation and from here it was only decline. Even as I continued to frequent the city throughout the day and into the night, I could already sense the massive shift that was occurring.
Just like a turn-of-the-century dandy consumed by syphilis, Tel Aviv was living off the fumes of hype.
On the surface, business as usual, the skyline full of cranes, the cafes and restaurants bustling and hotels and AirBnb’s fully populated. But if you put your ear to the ground in most of the city’s restaurants, bars, and lounges you would primarily hear English, French and Russian.
Most of my friends, many of whom come from affluent families returned to the suburbs once their first kid was born and those that remained in the city admitted that the only thing keeping them here was Tinder, force of habit and the absence of any other urban alternatives.
Crisis & Opportunity
It might be too early to say, but it appears that the current pandemic is acting as an accelerant of across-the-board trends that were already in the making, such as the global transition to online and the city becoming less attractive as we spend more time in controlled environments.
Zoom and other video conferencing softwares are giving new meaning to proximity and after being cooped indoors for 2 months, we are re-evaluating the importance of simple notions of wellbeing, such as a welcoming flat and a bit of nature.
Drinking beer in the park with 2–3 friends has suddenly not only become a fun and novel experience, it also raises the question how much do we really miss what appeared to be so integral part to our life a mere 2 months ago?
How much did we really buy from local designers? How often did we really go to gallery openings and new launches of a boutique hotel?
Sure, gourmand coffee and brioches are essential, but can’t they be found elsewhere? All of a sudden all that glittered no longer shines.
In the meantime, I still live in the city with which I continue my love-hate relationship. I am enjoying this prolonged siesta and beyond curious to see how this plays out. This period has also given me a new found perspective on branding, a more humble one, one where there is a constant paradox between growth and truth.
<DL>
