Mass-Housing Estates and the Consolidation of the Israeli Urban Middle Class

Middle-class housing in the context of post-independence growth in Israel, where urban growth was guided by the massive construction of new neighborhoods and buildings, produced various types of shared dwellings, which became the prevailing types of urban housing. While mass housing is discussed in the context of Israel as a key device of a modernization project on the national scale, with profound consequences for marginalized immigrants and the lower classes, it has rarely been studied as a housing typology for the middle classes. Nonetheless, urban growth and national consolidation starting in the 1960s led to an emerging urban middle class whose housing was the product of diverse actors, including urban and national policy, private contractors, neighborhood associations, financial systems, architects, and planners. Yet, as the social category ‘middle class’ is muddled, how can we distinguish mass housing for the middle classes or middle-class housing? This paper examines the architectural features of three middle-class mass housing estates built in Israel in the 1960s. Asking what constitutes the middle class, we point to the capacity of an architectural analysis to identify the designed elements that construct a middle-class identity within the context of shared urban dwellings. The three cases briefly examined include the Be’eri estate in Tel Aviv, the Kiron estate in Kiryat Ono, and Shchuna Bet in Beer Sheba. The three estates, developed in the 1960s by commercial and semi-commercial companies explicitly for the emerging urban middle class, employ New Brutalist architectural and urban design principles in mitigating community and individuals, public and private, identity and property.