Two floors will be added to Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Center shopping mall, on top of which a public park will be laid out, and kindergartens will be constructed. These are the main points of an ambitious plan being promoted by the Tel Aviv Municipality and the owners of Israel’s best-known mall. The outline of the plan will be presented to the public at a meeting at the Lev cinema tomorrow.
Dizengoff Center is not exactly a mall of the kind built today, and it opened almost a decade before the first shopping mall proper in Israel, the Ayalon Mall. It is, however, a commercial center not unlike a mall. It was built in 1977 by the Pilz family, headed by Aryeh Pilz. The family currently owns a quarter of the property, and it will be represented at tomorrow’s meeting by Dizengoff Center co-CEO Dan Pilz.
Dizengoff Center has 350 stores, and employs 150 people directly. Its turnover last year was estimated at NIS 60-65 million monthly. The center has come in for much criticism. It has aged, and there are complaints about its design, but the fact is that it has survived the years and is popular, largely thanks to its incomparable location on the corner of Dizengoff Street and King George Street.
The Tel Aviv Municipality decided to carry out an urban renewal plan on the site that will include turning the adjacent 1240 Street into a pedestrian walkway, adding floors, and turning part of the veteran commercial center into public amenities. Two and a half floors will be added to the center, consisting of small apartments for subsidized rental, and hotel and work spaces.
"This is the greenest and most socially aware project imaginable," says architect Gidi Bar-Orian, the designer of the addition to the center. "It includes two and half floors of inclusive housing, a hostel, and expansion of the pool and the cinema, and the entire eight dunams of roof will become a public park with kindergartens. As far as I am concerned, this is a super-conceptual project that takes more from faculties of architecture than from life itself."
The meeting that will take place tomorrow is described as "updating the public" rather than "consulting the public", indicating that it will be more about providing information, and will not be a forum for hearing objections and ideas.
The plan itself has a long way to go in the planning process before it is realized. It has to pass both the local and the regional planning committees.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on September 18, 2024.
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