The modern ‘Hebrew City’ of Tel Aviv is largely associated in popular culture with the city’s Bauhaus architecture, produced by German immigrants of the 5th Aliya, as the backdrop for the development and flourishing of Hebrew culture, language and identity. The cultural legacy of Tel Aviv is thus one of a built environment produced by - and for – capital accumulation, and as designed by German-educated architects for bourgeois immigrants. This ‘capitalist-built oasis’ historiographical narrative shapes Tel Aviv’s modern urbanism.
Nonetheless, Tel Aviv’s iconic status as UNESCO-declared modern city, as well as First Hebrew city, are closely tied to its urban master plan of 1925 by Sir Patrick Geddes, designed explicitly for female workers in mind. Examining Geddes` planning report and documents, this paper points to the female worker and her children as Geddes` imagined clients, to produce a city whose design principles would make urban living possible for female workers and their families. Historical findings in the archives and the built environment indicate that Tel Aviv`s 1925 masterplan indeed found resonance in the worker community, and especially among female workers who were key agents in realizing this plan by forming semi-autonomous worker neighborhoods at the edges of the city, including Paula Ben-Gurion, wife of Israel`s first Prime Minister. Moreover, as this study shows, these urban workers have shaped Tel Aviv as a worker city in the 1930s-1940s by producing semi-autonomous worker neighborhoods at the edges of the plan, constructing their own houses using DIY labor and finance based on their future wages. Worker self-housing was a major cultural product of the city in the 1930s-1940s, not only serving worker socio-economic and political needs, but also shaping the city as a cultural representation of the female worker and her family.