Tel Aviv is known as the “White City” because its 1930s Bauhaus style buildings, mostly designed by Jewish architects from Germany who escaped Nazi rule for what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. But architect and city historian Sharon Rotbard argues in his book, White City, Black City, that this narrative only tells half the story. Before Israel’s founding in 1948, south Tel Aviv was part of Jaffa, a neighboring majority-Palestinian municipality. Rotbard characterizes areas like it as the “Black City” because of their long history of institutional neglect and marginalization. “From the very definition of the White City, all the other places to do not make it into the story and the definition of Tel Aviv”.
