It will be quiet enough when we're dead-Now is the time to live Between planning the modern city and living in it

Zoning was central to Modernist town planning. In Israel, it is impossible to understand the spatial culture without first understanding both the rationale of zoning and the life strategies of the immigrants who populated the towns. This paper outlines the relationship between planning theory and the practices of the inhabitants of Ashdod, Israel. Ethnographic examples are used to show how its inhabitants consume the physical and social spaces of this national modern city. The planners did not achieve their aim of designing a new society. Without directly rejecting the town plan, its new inhabitants took over its physical structure, and put into practice their own definitions of "labor", "consumption" and "production". In doing this, they challenged the concept of social order that the governing elite sought to impose on them as a universal, objective order.