Highway Billboards = Visual & Spiritual Pollution?
by Jesse Fox, Tel Aviv, Israel on 01.11.08
Channel 10's Tali Moreno reporting just after midnight as billboards are concealed behind her.
A strange sight was broadcast live on the news in Israel on New Years’ Eve. Billboards along Tel Aviv’s central "Ayalon" highway were being covered with enormous pieces of semi-opaque black fabric. A long legal battle waged by road safety and environmental groups had finally brought down the distracting signs.
The fight went all the way to Israel's Supreme Court, where the legal basis for removing the signs was provided by a 40 year old law originally intended "to place a limit on abandoning open spaces to ugliness, so that the fields and hills will not be stained as well with objects foreign to them" according to Israeli author and former legislator S. Yizhar.
Interestingly, State Prosecutors decided not to make due with the law and build a formalistic case, but based their case extensively on the "culture jamming" movement, and quoted specifically from Kalle Lasn's 1999 book Culture Jam. Suffice to say that a Supreme Court discussion revolving around concepts taken from the anti-corporate globalization movement was enough to raise a few eyebrows, including those of Ha'aretz environmental reporter Zafrir Rinat, who noted that Lasn describes advertisements as "venomous spiritual pollutants."
Israeli billboards "pollute" urban space in better days.
Over the past decade or so, billboards of every imaginable shape and form have sprung up along highways and at major intersections. While many are conventional poster-type billboards perched on tall posts, some are basically huge TV screens broadcasting commercials around the clock to a captive audience of drivers, including inside urban areas. We should probably note here that driving on Israeli roads is not exactly a calming experience, and many have accused billboards, especially electronic billboards, of making the roads even more dangerous.
Israel is not alone is dealing with the challenges that billboards present. A year ago, the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo banned billboards on the grounds that they constituted "visual pollution." Here are some pictures from the eerily de-billboarded megacity.
We here at Treehugger have covered other ways to reconceptualize billboards in the past, from energy generation and raising awareness of energy and water issues, to providing subsidized housing.
See also:: Green Prophet
Via:: Ha'aretz, Ynet (Hebrew)
Images:: http://news.nana10.co.il/Article/?ArticleID=529862&TypeID=1&sid=126, http://mad.walla.co.il/archive/197222-5.jpg, http://www.grey.co.il/pics/705L.jpg
in my city, there are strict rules on how many bill boards there can be, how tall they can be, where they can be, and what they can show. the vast majority of them here show public service type ads. between home and the office, 12 miles, i see just 5 bill boards.
The state of Maine in the US banned billboards years ago. Maine is fairly rural so drivers are seeing mostly trees as they drive on our highways.
Billboards should only allowed when they can hide something ugly like...um...like another billboard.
man, video billboards would be such a distraction while I'm trying to watch a movie on the screen in my console, get directions from my gps, textings my friends, not to mention maintaining some awareness of my surroundings
It's amazing how much money and time that is poured into to outdoor advertising. In this day and age,we leave our offices to get outside and get away from these distractions. Why don' t they put the effort into advertising online, where they get a much better bang for the buck and can target the appropriate audience.
Not a 1 in VT.
Not a 1 in VT.