Environment and Urban Restoration
Tel Aviv is ranked as the greenest city in Israel. Since 2008, City lights are turned off annually in support of Earth Hour. In February 2009, the municipality launched a water saving campaign, including competition granting free parking for a year to the household that is found to have consumed the least amount of water per person.
In the early 21st century, Tel Aviv's municipality transformed a derelict power station into a public park, now named "Gan HaHashmal" (electric park), paving the way for eco-friendly and environmentally conscious designs. In October 2008, Martin Weyl turned an old garbage dump near Ben Gurion International Airport, called Hiriya, into an attraction by building an arc of plastic bottles. The site, which was renamed Ariel Sharon Park to honor Israel’s former prime minister, will serve as the centerpiece in what is to become a 2,000-acre (8.1 km2) urban wilderness on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, designed by German landscape architect, Peter Latz.
At the end of the 20th century, the city began restoring historical neighborhoods such as Neve Tzedek and many buildings from the 1920s and 1930s. Since 2007, the city hosts its well-known, annual Open House Tel Aviv weekend, which offers the general public free entrance to the city's famous landmarks, private houses and public buildings. In 2010, the design of the renovated Tel Aviv Port (Nemal Tel Aviv) won the award for outstanding landscape architecture at the European Biennial for Landscape Architecture in Barcelona.
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Famous quotes containing the words environment and, environment, urban and/or restoration:
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