Ayalon Eco Adventure

Location: Tel Aviv

With the implementation of the Ayalon Park Drainage Plan, Tel Aviv gains an exciting new landscape: The Eco Adventure Park.

Our proposal treats the hydrological program to form a labyrinth of paddy fields that offers an efficient and sustainable solution for urban water problems and at the same time creates a wide range of possibilities for new kinds of land use and nature experiences.

This Eco Adventure Park is an attraction within the greater Ayalon Park. Surrounded by the cultivated boundaries of Ayalon Park and as a ‘negative imprint’ of the intensely used Hiriya Mountain it can become the ‘wilderness heart’ of the park, an exciting challenge to visitors to enter into unknown territory.

Although actual flooding occurs only now and then, the possibility is always there, like a desert waiting for rain. Depending on the frequency, the paddy fields can be a rock garden, a free-for-all mountain bike terrain, a grazing field for cattle, a desert museum or an adventurous hiking forest. More permanent water streams are used to create a green network of shadowy canyons with paths between the paddy fields. The potential of the water is further used by bringing the main rivers closer to the park edges, thus making a clear demarcation of the zone of the “wilderness heart” and providing attractive river banks for urban recreation.