The long arms of spindly construction cranes lurched across the horizon as David Reznick, an architect who emigrated from Brazil nearly 50 years ago, worried that “this mystical city, this city for the world,” may one day be ruined by skyscrapers rising from its hills and desert stone.
“Jerusalem, she is like a virgin: `You can’t touch me here; you can’t touch me there,’ ” said Reznick, a pink-faced man with a taste for metaphor. “There are only certain places we should build on her landscape.”
But the city may not remain so choosy. Jerusalem is running out of room for her living and her dead.
Immigrants pour in every year by the thousands. Cemeteries are full. Land is at such a premium that tiny apartments sell for $300,000 and a developer can pay $15,000 per space to build a parking garage.
Traffic is ceaseless; the breezes around the walls of the Old City reek of exhaust fumes.
The debate over the future of Jerusalem is peppered with history and politics.
Traditionalists argue that the city should exist as in the pages of the Bible, a collection of hilly neighborhoods that roll around the pinnacle of the Old City.
Many politicians counter that Jerusalem–with a tide of modern urban problems, including a rising poverty rate–has to grow economically and be recast for the 21st Century.
“You can say we don’t have to develop Jerusalem anymore,” Mayor Ehud Olmert told the Jerusalem Report news magazine recently. “I don’t hold this view. Jerusalem cannot be stopped. It’s a city emerging after hundreds of years, and there are thousands of people who want to come to Israel only if they can live here.
“I don’t have any problem building tall in the periphery, 30 floors, even 40.”
Underlying Jerusalem’s identity crisis is the question of who will ultimately control the city–and the politics that contribute to keeping it crowded.
Arabs, who make up about 30 percent of the city’s 600,000 residents, want mostly Arab East Jerusalem as the capital of a new Palestinian state, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is adamant that Jerusalem be united and under Jewish control for eternity.
Toward that end, the government encourages new housing for Jewish residents.
Israel’s controversial plan to build 6,500 homes for Jews in East Jerusalem, announced last month by Netanyahu, is the latest attempt to string together Jewish settlements at the city’s eastern fringes.
City planners predict that the population–fueled, in part, by the increasing proportion of ultra-Orthodox Jews, who often have families of between six and nine children–will grow to 810,000 by 2010.
Several prominent architects believe that Jerusalem should not grow beyond 700,000 residents, especially if the result would mean a slew of high-rises.
Today, most buildings in Jerusalem are eight stories tall or shorter. The city is a rippling landscape of hand-hewn stones and red tile roofs, with olive groves stretching through layers of neighborhoods that date from ancient times or the Ottoman Empire or the more recent colonial influences of the British.
It still is the law that locally quarried “Jerusalem stone” must predominate in building.
But that charm may change. Contractors are seeking approval for nearly 50 high-rises across the city.
The tallest–such as the multitower “Holyland Project”–would rise as high as 35 stories and consume large swaths of land.
With no comprehensive city plan updated since 1959, applications are being decided on a case-by-case basis, something that could quickly ruin the skyline, architects argue.
“All these buildings should not be allowed,” said Israel Kimhi, a city planner at the Jerusalem Center for Israeli Studies. “In Jerusalem, we have a skyline and a topography on the human scale. You put high-rises on such a delicate fabric, it becomes a problem for our city.”
“No one is thinking about the big question of how the city should be developed,” said Ziva Sternhell, a professor of architecture at the Bezalel Academy of Art. “It’s just taking place in bits and pieces, with scattered high-rises.
“The one good thing the British gave us during their mandate,” Sternhell added, “was that they understood that the Old City was the diamond in the crown of Jerusalem. If we build too high and alter the landscape, in a few years, we’ll have to climb up on high-rises just to see the Old City.”
Most architects, however, agree that the burgeoning population demands more high-rises and that balance and placement are key. They envision Jerusalem developing like Paris, where beauty and history remain at the center as more modern buildings rise along the fringes.
Lou Gelehrter, an architect and member of the Jerusalem Institute for Urban Environment, says his office is trying to solve the problem of creating housing while preserving the historic area.
On a topographical map, he pointed to Katamon, a neighborhood west of the Old City where 15,000 people live in one- and two-story homes built in the 1950s and ’60s. He said his office was working on a plan to tear down the homes and build structures five or six stories high.
“I call it urban recycling,” Gelehrter said. “If we build up a little, we can save some green space and reuse the land properly. And, also, we’ll get 40,000 people into that same neighborhood.”
His office also is doing some recalculating for the dead. His finger moved north.
“This is . . . the main cemetery for Jerusalem,” he said, squinting. “The cemeteries are full.
“We have a big problem there. See, the graves are moving down toward the road. We’re going to have to look at alternative ways of burial, maybe stacking.”
He added that he does not worry that Jerusalem might become too prickly with skyscrapers.
“High-rises are expensive, and Jerusalem is a poor city,” he said. “Not many could afford to live in them.”
