To expand our understanding of the making of modern Jerusalem, we coordinated our research with a team of researchers at Kadir Has University, Istanbul, headed by prof. Yonça Erkan, an architect and UNESCO Chair on the Management and Promotion of World Heritage Sites: New Media and Community Involvement. Prof. Erkan's team was outsourced to identify and locate a selection of visual images and documents on the urban development of Jerusalem stored in the Ottoman Archives of the Prime Minister’s Office. Focusing on the years between the Tanzimat Edict until the end of Ottoman sovereignty (1839—1917), the team reported finding a vast number of documents relating to spatial changes that occurred in the Ottoman Jerusalem, or as it is referred to in the archive: Al-Quds Al-Sharif (The Holy Sanctuary). To limit the scope, they focused on religious and public buildings, searching for the attitude of the Ottoman administration to building activity and prioritizing archival documents that includes architectural drawings, photographs, or other visual material. The 200 documents they retrieved – written in Ottoman Turkish - were divided into three units: repairs of existing buildings; replacement of existing structures or adding of extensions; and construction of new structures, both within the boundaries of the Old City and outside it.
As the researchers explained in the report they attached to their findings, the documents provide an opportunity to examine how Ottoman modernization expressed itself in Al-Quds Al-Sharif which came to life as part of the delicate balance between state intervention and local demands as reflected in the correspondence between the central authority and the local government. Moreover, As Jerusalem was never planned on an urban scale (unlike other Ottoman cities at the time), the research allowed to unveil the inherent urban agenda behind these independent interventions and to question whether they can be considered parts of an organized urban agenda of local modernization.

The report prepared by the researchers served as basis for cataloging the documents. The original documents were scanned and can be found on the Ottoman Archives of the Prime Minister’s Office website

The official collection of the British planning of Jerusalem between 1918--1948 was kept at the Jerusalem Municipality and naturally became a major component in its historical archives. As a result, Jerusalem Municipality Historical Archives (JMHA) hold archival records of some 1,000 British town planning schemes and approved plans, hundreds of maps, and minutes of the planning committees from the entire period. The collection was researched for the project by Mr. Benny Weil, who gained an intimate acquaintance with it during his years of working in the municipality. Mr. Weil traced various filing systems and produced an innovative, unified listing of the collection. In the report that accompanied his research, he complied the files into a total of four series, spanning different years and attempting to remain loyal to the original planning procedures and approval of the plans.
The Town Planning Schemes Series holds the most detailed and complex information, encompassing all the other series and constituting both the main source and cross-references between the various series, linking, and connecting all the additional series described in the abstract. The series consists of correspondence files for specific plans of various sizes, usually from the initial submission of the planning proposal until its approval. It continued to serve as the basis for the numbering of the city planning files even after the end of the Mandate period, and in the case of the files of Town Planning Schemes, remained in use until just a few years ago. One important sub series consisting of files 1-27 holds 27 of the most important plans in Jerusalem during the British Mandate, including 16 districts or neighborhood plans that contain most of the built-up area in the city, plans for future ring roads, and plan for the City Walls and a park around them.
Mr. Weil's report served as basis for the cataloging of 1500 documents. The documents were not scanned.

Related links:
Jerusalem British Mandate Planning Collection, report, May 2019 (English)
The Significance of and the Threats to the British Planning Collection, Noah Hysler Rubin, Jerusalem Architectural Archives Conference, January 2022.

Ben Zion Guini was born in 1869 in Izmir, Turkey, and moved to Ottoman Palestine in 1883. He studied mechanical engineering in Paris and in London, and in 1911 was appointed, by the Ottoman government, city engineer of Jaffa. In 1917 Guini was invited by the mayor of Jerusalem, Hussein Salim al-Husseini, to serve as Jerusalem's first city engineer. Guini continued in this position under the Mandate regime, as the first British municipal engineer in Jerusalem, until 1926. As the city engineer of Jerusalem, Guini worked in urban planning of neighborhoods, planning main roads in the downtown area, infrastructure, and the parcellation of various neighborhoods. He also designed several Jewish public buildings in the Old City and engaged in the development and renovation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Guini is well known to those who examined the modernization and development of Jaffa. In Jerusalem, Guini's work is much less known, mainly for lack of material: there is no official archive of Guini's work, and his work is not catalogued under his name. Thus, his private collection, which is kept with his family, holds an important key for understanding the shift from Ottoman to British urban planning. As Guini was the key practitioner in the planning of Jerusalem in the transition between empires, the documentation of his work provides a closer, more personal, look at the actual practicalities of the change.
Guini's collection, composed of four boxes and holding some 2000 documents, was arranged by our catalogers into four units: architecture; personal matters; newspapers and publication; and general historical matter. Within the architecture section, many plans for famous public buildings in Jerusalem were found, including the Zion Cinema, the San Remo hotel, the Moshav Zekenim hospital; plans for the Porath Yossef synagogue and the Batei Mahasse neighborhood in the Old City; flooring for Meah Shearim neighborhood and parcellation for Shaarei Hesed, as well as plans for Guini's family home on King George Street.
The documents were fully catalogued and scanned by the project and they are available on the National Library of Israel website.

Related links:
Shir Yaacov and Elad Shpindel, Ben-Zion Guini's Jerusalem Papers, Jerusalem Architectural Archives conference January 2022
Once-Upon-a-Time in Jerusalem: Zion Hall Diaries, Bezalel Pavilion July 2022

About 4000 sites are listed in Jerusalem's 'conservation list', based on a list initially compiled by the British and augmented in Jerusalem master plan of 1968.. About 1000 of them were researched and documented in elaborate documentation files, sometimes only during the preparation of a development plan which threatened the building. These files, prepared by architects and planners, contain historical maps, air photographs, building plans, photos, technical details and other architectural background of the building and its building contexts. They vary greatly in terms of length and research intensity.
Of the 1,000 files, about 350 are accessible on-line as PDF files on the Jerusalem Municipality website. We analyzed these and catalogued them. As part of the analysis and cataloging process, we identified many basic documents - such as historic maps aerial photos – which tend to repeat in multiple files, such that over the years, a basic corpus of documents has formed, serving as popular references to the mainstream historical tale of the urban development of Jerusalem.
In additions to the individual heritage sites documentation, 17 documentation files were made for larger compounds or neighbourhoods, generally located within the historic, or inner city, also sometimes called 'Jerusalem of the Mandate period'. We received and cataloged files for the following compounds: East Jerusalem CBD (central business district); A-Tur; the German Colony; the Greek Colony; Talbiye; Kerem Avraham; the Van Leer Institute; the Hiram compound (Romema neighborhood); Old Katamon; Bayit Vagan neighborhood; Mekor Haim neighbourhood; Teddy Park; and Shimon Ha'Tzadik tomb compound (neighbourhood).

The Jerusalem City Model was created in 1978 by Dick and Ethel Harvey. The process of the model building relied on extensive photography, resulting in some 20,000 photos, taken in 350 specific locations within the inner city, supplying a unique snapshot of the city and capturing it at a specific point in time. 120 planning survey sheets were used to map the photography sessions, with the exact location of the photographer, and the direction of the photography, marked on them. The model and preparatory documentation was eventually given to the Jerusalem Municipality, which uses it for purposes of planning, tourism and research. Over the years, newly developed areas have been added to the model, and photographs also have been accumulating.
We catalogued all 120 plans and 350 photograph files and scanned all 120 plans and 20,000 photographs. They are available on the National Library of Israel website.

The original list of sites for conservation in the Old City has been compiling since the British Mandate and annotated by Israeli planning and the Antiquities Authority over time. Upon the declaration of the Old City and its Walls as an UNESCO world heritage site (1981) additional documentation was carried out, the produced shape files were given to the Jerusalem Municipality. Finally, a detailed survey was carried out by teams at the architectural Offices of Mike Turner and Ari Cohen, who mapped streets of the Old City and many sites by walking along them, creating an impressive pool of photographs, drawings of architectural elements, buildings and street views, and many details about the actual daily life on site. Each file presents a snapshot of the findings. We received and catalogued 80 of the totals of 120 files, all digitized and stored at the Jerusalem Municipality.
All files were catalogues and are available on the Jerusalem Municipality website.

Within this collection of personal architects' collections compiled at the National Library, we identified 1100 listings which were relevant for our Jerusalem database, including the works of many Jerusalemite architects and local building plans, such as the building of the National Library itself; the planning of the Ramot neighbourhood; proposals for the planning of the Municipality and the Supreme Court; and the rehabilitation of the Jewish Quarter at the Old City. After identifying these individual listings, we cross-referenced them to the Jerusalem database we Had created.