Jerusalem

This review assesses the 1973 Atlas of Jerusalem and its companion volume on the city’s urban geography. Drawing on surveys conducted in 1940, 1963, and 1967, the atlas contains more than one hundred detailed colour maps covering Jerusalem’s history, urban morphology, land use, institutions, transportation, population, and planning. The reviewer praises its cartographic clarity, visual quality, and comprehensive treatment of the entire city despite political division and conflict. Particularly valuable are the comparisons of religious population patterns between 1944 and 1967 and the presentation of eight planning schemes since 1918. Limitations include minimal map commentary, missing dates on historical maps, limited temporal analysis, and insufficient social detail. Nevertheless, the accompanying essays and source annotations substantially compensate for these weaknesses, making the work a major contribution to urban cartography and urban geography.

This review assesses the scholarly, cartographic, and practical significance of the Atlas of Jerusalem. Comprising 105 maps and a companion volume on urban geography, the atlas systematically documents Jerusalem’s physical setting, historical development, urban structure, land use, institutions, transportation, population, and planning. Particular strengths include its sophisticated visualization of computer-processed data, high production quality, planning-oriented scales, and updateable 100-by-100-meter land-use grid. The reviewer emphasizes how the maps illuminate the combined effects of religious traditions, inherited urban forms, British colonial policy, warfare, migration, and political change on the city’s morphology and functions. Although inconsistent transliteration, several insufficiently differentiated thematic categories, minor cartographic defects, and textual errors require correction, these shortcomings are limited. Overall, the atlas is judged an exceptional contribution to urban geography and city cartography and an essential acquisition for geographical libraries.

This review evaluates the 1973 Atlas of Jerusalem and its companion volume, Urban Geography of Jerusalem, with particular attention to their cartographic scope, scholarly value, technical execution, and political implications. The atlas comprises 108 coloured maps at multiple scales, organized into ten thematic sections covering the regional setting, streets and quarters, historical development, urban structure, land use, public institutions, transport, population, planning, and post-1967 change. The reviewer assesses the maps in terms of clarity, methodology, completeness, and usability. Particular praise is given to the historical maps, geological representation, mapping of urban structural elements, transport and population data, and the detailed documentation of Jerusalem’s functional geography. The demographic maps especially reveal the spatial separation of Jewish and Muslim populations between 1948 and 1967 and the resulting planning challenges. Shortcomings include omitted historical municipal and ceasefire boundaries, inadequate multilingual labeling, limited climatic information, occasional weaknesses in colour differentiation and symbolization, and some unexplained methodological choices. The companion volume supplies essential historical, economic, ecological, transport, and planning context, as well as indispensable documentation of data sources and map construction. However, its multi-author format produces repetition, stylistic unevenness, weak integration with the maps, proofreading errors, and the absence of both an index and a dedicated chapter on political geography. Despite these limitations and possible objections to the atlas as an assertion of Israeli territorial authority, the reviewer concludes that its information is substantially objective and factual. Together, the two works constitute an outstanding benchmark for measuring Jerusalem’s past and future urban change and are considered essential resources for institutions and scholars concerned with the city.