“Next year in the rebuilt Jerusalem,” declare Jews at the close of the Passover Seder. In Christian tradition, Jesus looked down upon the holy city from the Mount of Olives shortly before his Crucifixion and wept over its fate.
Jerusalem, the city whose stark mountain landscape, cradled in sunlight, has inspired prophets and poets for nearly 30 centuries, today faces the most banal of threats to her powerful spiritual appeal.
Population growth of Third World dimensions, burgeoning traffic, rampant land speculation, development fever and the Arab-Jewish political battle for control of the city all are conspiring against this urban jewel in the crown of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
“There must be international oversight on development; otherwise political pressures on the city will bring about its destruction,” declares Jerusalem’s chief city planner, Uri Ben Asher, who is deeply disturbed by the development patterns being prompted by Israel’s political leaders.
“The subject of preservation of the city is an issue for all of humankind.”
While the world’s Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities have worked feverishly to preserve their respective rights to the city’s holy sites, little thought has been given to how the city, as an urban entity of worldwide religious importance, can be preserved, says Rabbi David Rosen, an Orthodox Jew who lectures frequently on Judaism and environmental matters. Almost every element in Jerusalem’s classic 41-square-mile landscape is at risk. On the Mount of Olives, where Jesus prayed before his Crucifixion and, in traditional Christian belief, later ascended into heaven, city officials recently refused to approve plans formally designating most of the area for green-space preservation.
In the pastoral Jerusalem village of Ein Kerem, birthplace of John the Baptist, plans are being laid for a controversial hotel and tourist development project to coincide with Israel’s upcoming celebration of 3,000 years since the biblical King David named the city as his capital.
“If Israel wants to fill this little mountain village with concrete, then go ahead,” says Monsignor Richard Mathis, cultural attache to the Vatican apostolic delegation to Jerusalem. “But she will have to take the blame from history for destroying a historical site.”
Jerusalem’s new mayor, Ehud Olmert, has plans to develop a high-rise capital of office buildings, housing and hotels in Jerusalem’s 17th-century downtown area that sits adjacent to the holy sites of the ancient walled Old City.
Internationally respected Jerusalem architect Michael Turner says that such new development will dwarf the city’s historical and religious sites.
“The quality of Jerusalem is that of a world spiritual and historical center. That is what gives the city meaning,” says Turner, who is chairman of the Israel chapter of the International Council of Monuments and Sites, a UNESCO-sponsored organization.
“Tall buildings generally represent money-grabbing speculative developments. What kind of values will we be projecting to the world in a skyline where these high-rises dominate?”
Meanwhile, road expansion and growing auto traffic in a city bereft of any modern mass transit system is polluting once-pure mountain air, which at sunset takes on the golden hues of Jerusalem’s stone.
And in green spaces within the city and on its perimeter, plans for some 30,000 new apartment developments could forever erase the last remaining images of a biblical landscape in which shepherds’ flocks still graze and olive groves are tended much in the way they were centuries ago.
The creeping suburban expansion threatens the urban distinction between Jerusalem and the city of Bethlehem, Jesus’ birthplace, five miles to the south. To the east, the dramatic mountain ascent to Jerusalem along a corridor of woods and green valleys-Jewish liturgy repeatedly speaks of “going up” to the holy city-is threatened by a planned suburban sprawl of apartment blocks and shopping malls.
“In Jewish belief there is supposed to be a separation between the holy and the secular. Likewise, Jerusalem, the holy city, should be separated from the settlements in its environs,” Ben Asher says.
Many of the new development pressures have been triggered by the entry of Olmert, a member of the right-wing Likud party, into Jerusalem’s city government in coalition with Jerusalem’s rapidly growing ultra-orthodox Jewish community.
Olmert sees rapid development of Jewish neighborhoods as a way to strengthen Israel’s claim on Jerusalem as its capital and also preserve the current 75-25 Jewish-Arab demographic split in the city in the face of rapid Arab population growth.
Olmert’s ultra-orthodox coalition partners, meanwhile, are anxious to expand the housing stock for their fast-growing community, where families average six children each and some 4,000 young couples marry annually.
New high-rise development “is my vision,” Olmert says.
“How else can I reconcile the expanding population and the natural need of the city for more commercial space, more government buildings, more office space, while preserving the city’s historic nature? There will be problems of transport, environment, parking. Sure there will be many problems in the course of building up the city. We’ll have to cope with them.”
Yet Olmert’s vision is beginning to stir stiff opposition among Jerusalem architects and preservationists, who fear the destruction of the city’s urban soul.
“It’s like putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa,” declares Elinor Barzacchi, deputy director of Tel Aviv University’s School of Architecture and the city’s former chief planner.
Barzacchi resigned last year in a dispute with Olmert’s administration over the direction of Jerusalem’s future development.
High-rise development, Barzacchi says, will not provide suitable housing for young families. But it will rudely break the gentle continuity between biblical relics, the walled Ottoman-era old city, and the British mandate-era commercial center, critics say.
It also will impose untenable demands for big new roads and parking space on a 19th-century urban infrastructure and block views to the surrounding landscape of hills and valleys, they say.
Jerusalem is not only a biblical city, Ben Asher notes. It is a living museum of human urban and architectural development from ancient to modern times. The conquerors, pilgrims and missionaries who passed through 30 centuries of the city’s history left an architectural legacy ranging from ancient churches and synagogues, Oriental Arab and Turkish mosques to the Bauhaus architecture of 1920s-era Jewish German architects.
British mandate officials, who took over the administration of Palestine after World War I, took pains to ensure that certain urban and architectural principles would unite old and new forms in Jerusalem’s 20th-century design.
Construction was to be in stone. The concept of the European garden city was transplanted to Jerusalem’s rugged topography. Renowned British planners such as Patrick Geddes and Sir William McLean drew plans for the city in which its hilltops would be built up, but valleys would remain green. The design ensured that in an increasingly dense city, a feeling of space would be preserved.
With a few exceptions, Jerusalem’s former mayor, Teddy Kollek, preserved much of the British planning legacy in his 26-year tenure at city hall. Although massive construction was undertaken in new suburbs, green areas were carefully cultivated and high-rise construction was discouraged. But those old rules now are being discarded.
“You can leave the Garden of Eden to one individual, but what about his offspring?” says Uri Lupolianski, Jerusalem’s new ultra-orthodox deputy mayor, who has been placed in charge of the city’s planning and development functions.
Lupolianski envisions Jerusalem not only as a high-rise city, but a sprawling metropolis nearly double its present size of 560,000 people, reaching all the way to the edges of the Tel Aviv metropolis.
Turner, the Jerusalem architect, says that a far more desirable plan of growth-but one not yet examined by Israel’s politicians-would be to preserve the city’s classic proportions, both urban and architectural, while building rapid-rail links to farther-flung satellite towns. Those communities would provide ready access to Jerusalem, while avoiding destructive sprawl.
“By opening up the hinterland of Jerusalem via really good rapid-transit connections, you could increase the space of the city,” Turner says. “And you could preserve the priceless value of Jerusalem’s green space, holy sites and architecture for priceless use by Israel and the peoples of the world.”
