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Book Review: Urbanization in Israel by ELISHA EFRAT. London: Croom Helm. 1984. pp. 225. £14.95

Urbanization in Israel is a long awaited book. Although Israeli scholars in all urban-related fields publish in Englishlanguage journals, their works are scattered, and not one, in itself, tells the whole story. Israel, as a country of immigrants, grew from 750,000 inhabitants in the year 1948 to more than four million today. Waves of newcomers from almost every country on the globe were directed to old and new towns to create a hierarchically ordered urban system. This book presents to non-Hebrew readers an overview of the process of urbanization, its origins and factors. The overall view is supplemented by a description of the developmental history of the three big cities as well as several other representative sample towns. The 16 chapters of the book can be classified into five sections. The first three chapters discuss the origins and factors affecting the development of the urban system, while the impacts of town planning traditions are presented in the last chapter. The decision to postpone the presentation of this last topic to the very end of the book may mislead readers into thinking that town planning issues were not among the factors shaping the Israeli urban system. This perception will change, however, if one successfully constructs a bridge between the last and the first three chapters. Chapters Four, Five and Six constitute a second section. They are devoted to the description of the evolutionary development of the three big cities of the country: the capital city of Jerusalem, the city of Tel-Aviv and its conurbation, and the city of Haifa and its suburban satellites. For each city the author provides a skilful account of the mutual spatial organization of population growth and land use developments but it is the city of Jerusalem that receives the greatest attention. Its special status is emphasized not only by the discussion of its role as a capital city but also by a more detailed presentation of the development of its layout and by the largest number of cartographic artworks presented in any single chapter. This section could have benefited, however, from a comparative analysis of the divergent paths of development and competitive performances of the three big cities during this century. The titles of three other chapters promise a general treatment of three types of towns existing in Israel: old towns (Ch. 7), Moshava towns (Ch. 8), and the new towns (Ch. 10). Each of these types of towns justifiably deserves special treatment because of the differing ways their developmental history affected their current socioeconomic realms. Actually, only the two latter chapters present a general overview on the group of towns concerned. In contrast, Chapter Seven uses the general title 'old towns' to present in some detail the specific conditions prevailing in the old towns of Sefad, Tiberias, and Acre. Two chapters examine urbanization on a regional basis. These chapters are particularly valuable since they shed light on the scarcely researched administered territories of Judea and Samaria (Ch. 14) and the Gaza strip (Ch. 15). The greater part of these two chapters deals with the analysis of change in total population by sub-districts, and the rest describes the trends of growth taking place in four West Bank towns: East Jerusalem, Hebron, Nablus, and Ramallah, and in the city of Gaza on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. In another group of four chapters, the author elected to present in some length the specifics of four towns located in the southern part of the country: Beer-Sheva (Ch. 9), Ashdod (Ch. 11), Elat (Ch. 12), and Arad (Ch. 13). All four of them started from scratch 20 to 30 years ago, and each has its own significance: Beer-Sheva has developed into the administrative central place for the regiopolis of the Negev; Ashdod was built as a southern alternative deep water harbour to the port of Haifa; Elat was first established as the gate to the high seas of the Indian Ocean and it has recently been transforming itself into an international tourism resort; while the successfully planned new town of Arad is considered 'the diamond of the crown' in the short Israeli town planning history. The author gives a special emphasis to land use composition in the towns and cities selected for presentation. Thus, almost all relevant chapters include nicely-designed land use maps that facilitate comprehension of the prevailing spatial layout of the respective places. Altogether, the book presents a well balanced mix of the general urban mosaic, interlaced with a selection of special cases exhibiting representativeness on the one hand, and some unique features on the other. It is apparent that the book has been written with the intention of familiarizing the reader with the Israeli urbanization scene rather than dealing with analytical issues. Thus, the author avoids the use of such tools as central place theory and rank-size supremecy dichotomy. The avoidance of professional jargon makes the book an important source of knowledge for scholars and laymen alike. SHAUL KRAKOVER Ben-Gurion University of the Negev