The day I learnt a biologist designed Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv is endlessly varied. One moment you’re on a wide, leafy boulevard, the next you’ve ducked into a quiet residential street, then suddenly you’re back among cafés, chatter, bikes, dogs, music. And then there’s the green. For a city in a dry climate, it’s everywhere. Trees arching over streets. Pocket parks. Long stretches of shade that feel like relief rather than decoration.

I’m especially fond of the boulevards. You know the scene. Families gathering late in the afternoon. Kids zigzagging on scooters. Dogs everywhere. Someone selling juice from a folding table. A makeshift café that looks like it was assembled five minutes ago and might vanish just as quickly. A man slicing watermelon. A guitarist under a tree. Mini playgrounds tucked just off the footpath – nothing fancy, always busy.

It all feels easy.

But have you ever stopped to ask why it works so well? Why Tel Aviv feels so walkable, so human, so easy to roam?

I’ll be honest: I always assumed it was luck, culture, or Israeli improvisation.

Well no, it wasn’t.

In fact – and this still delights me – a large part of the answer turns out to be a Scottish biologist.

His name was Patrick Geddes. And once you know that, Tel Aviv starts to make sense in a completely new way. In 1925, Tel Aviv’s mayor Meir Dizengoff invited the urban thinker Geddes to prepare a master plan for the young city.

Geddes allowed streets to follow the land, existing paths, and patterns of movement. The result is a city that unfolds gradually, rewarding curiosity rather than punishing it.

Geddes was born in Aberdeen in 1854 and trained not as an architect, but as a scientist. He studied zoology and botany, and became fascinated with systems rather than individual specimens – how living things relate to their environments, how balance is maintained, and how health depends on context.

By the late 19th century, as industrial cities across Europe were choking on pollution, overcrowding and poor health, Geddes began asking a bigger question: what happens when cities ignore the basic needs of human beings?

When he later turned his attention to cities, he didn’t abandon biology. And this is the bit I like most – he simply scaled it up.

You see, the more I read about him, the more I like this idea: for Geddes, cities were analogous to living organisms. I admit I’m taking a bit of creative licence with the wording here, but you’ll see what I mean. He saw streets as circulation systems, parks and gardens as the lungs, neighbourhoods as ecosystems. Get the relationships right between movement and rest, density and air, work and home, and the city thrives. Get them wrong and, well, no amount of concrete will fix it.

So if we go back to 1925, when he came into the picture, Tel Aviv was only 16 years old and growing fast. It had spread north of Jaffa along streets like Allenby and Bograshov, with Rothschild Boulevard already emerging as a central spine. Dizengoff knew the city needed a guiding vision – something that could handle growth without crushing daily life – and commissioned Geddes to write a master plan.

What Geddes delivered was not a cold technical blueprint but a lively, opinionated report – 68 typed pages, in fact – about what makes a city good to live in. Grids and skyscrapers? No, thank you. Instead, he proposed a garden city adapted to the Mediterranean climate: shaded streets, green boulevards, modest building heights, and neighbourhoods organised around shared inner gardens.

This is where things get fun.

Geddes believed cities should be designed around children. He urged the planting of fruit trees and vines. He encouraged vegetable gardens. He criticised the destruction of existing orange groves. And when it came to worries about children stealing fruit, he was refreshingly blunt. Children wanting fruit was proof of health, as any biologist would say.

The solution, in his view, was not restriction, but abundance. Plant more. Let children eat. Let them climb, explore and learn where food comes from. A city, Geddes believed, should feed its children, literally as well as culturally.

His ideas shaped Tel Aviv in ways we still feel today. Streets were kept relatively narrow and shaded to soften the heat. Boulevards were designed as green arteries rather than traffic corridors. East–west streets were aligned to draw sea breezes inland. And crucially, he avoided imposing a strict grid.

Which brings me, briefly, to, you guessed it, Melbourne.

By contrast, Melbourne, famously, was designed around a neat 19th-century grid – efficient, rational, excellent for surveying and selling land. It’s a city you navigate. Tel Aviv is a city you wander.

Geddes allowed streets to follow the land, existing paths, and patterns of movement. The result is a city that unfolds gradually, rewarding curiosity rather than punishing it.

Neighbourhoods like Neve Tzedek still carry this DNA: intimate streets, human scale, and an unspoken invitation to explore on foot.

Did Tel Aviv turn out exactly as Geddes imagined? Of course not.

The pressures of mass immigration in the 1930s, particularly as Jews fled Nazism, meant the city had to densify. Buildings grew taller. Plots were used more intensively. And as sad as it is, the fact remains that children are not casually plucking oranges outside their windows today.

But here’s the remarkable thing. The bones of Geddes’s plan survived: The block structure, the walkability, the shade, the greenery, the (mostly) low buildings.

Later modernists, Bauhaus types included, didn’t erase Geddes; they nested inside his skeleton. The city thickened, sure. But it did so with its pores still open, density arriving hand-in-hand with air and light. That, I suspect, is why wandering Tel Aviv feels so weirdly good on foot: you’re in a dense city, but your body never files a complaint. Your eyes get a steady beat of white walls, trees, then an unexpected courtyard; your skin gets shade, your lungs little ambushes of air when a street widens or a garden suddenly appears. You’re held just enough to feel cradled, but never quite hemmed in.

And that brings me happily to nature: Geddes also refused to separate nature from culture.

His report devoted serious attention to synagogues, libraries, theatres, cinemas, universities and music. It seems like culture, for him, was the garden’s equal partner.

I can only imagine that Tel Aviv today is louder, faster and more crowded than Geddes ever imagined. And while I’ll admit I’m hopelessly biased, Tel Aviv has me by the ankles. For all its flaws, it’s still one of the most walkable, humane, and quietly head-turning cities I know.

Once you know this story, it’s hard not to see it. A biologist planned it. Someone who normally worries about petri dishes and cells. Instead, it looks like he had a great time laying out boulevards and backstreets.

And every time you head out with no plan at all, the city proves he knew exactly what he was doing.