One of the major factors determining the confessionalization of the writing of Jerusalem’s history is a reliance on isolated communal records which reinforce the sense that religious communities lived in a vacuum. In contrast, Ottoman imperial records shift the frame of reference perceptibly, but they have been remarkably understudied in the case of Palestine, notwithstanding recent works on petitions, municipal protocols, and government documents. This paper focuses on another of these rich, virtually untapped sources – the records of the three Ottoman censi (1880s, 1905, 1914) and affiliated population registers. The census registers are indispensable for quantitative analysis of Jerusalem society, at the same time that they leave important textual clues about urban marginality, social hierarchies, and networks. First, this paper analyses several Jerusalem neighborhood census records in depth, sharing insights on migration, profession/occupation, family composition, and urban change over time. Second, the paper maps these census records using GIS, in the process uncovering surprising patterns in mixed neighborhoods. Third, the paper juxtaposes additional archival sources (biographical, press, legal) alongside the quantitative and cartographic sources to flesh out our understanding of the urban landscape. For example, geographers have used GIS to model route-to-work, social networks, and change over time, important considerations that succeed in ‘unfreezing’ census and map and in providing a more dynamic interaction between space, place, and agency. At the same time, we can examine public and semi-public spaces in Jerusalem, such as streets, markets, cafes, gardens, as well as qualify the unwritten ‘confessionalization of space’ that took place, particularly around religious sites and at times of religious festivals. Overall, this paper contributes to better understanding the ordinary inhabitants of late Ottoman Jerusalem, too often left out of histories of the city entirely or overshadowed by non-representative elites. Close neighborhood studies also allow us to weigh the relative importance of ethnicity, religion, and economics in terms of understanding the urban topography. Urban citizenship in Jerusalem was not only an institutional and intellectual project, but also had spatial implications. A multilayered GIS platform can take into account some of the various ways that residents used, claimed, and fought over their shared city.