This presentation will address the forgotten transitional period that separated Ottoman Jerusalem from the beginning of British military rule and the beginning of the Mandate Period. War and social dislocation created new conditions of urban life-styles and practices on the eve of the British Mandate in Palestine. Famine, disease and exile contributed to the disruption of the social fabric of whole communities. In Jerusalem, as well as in other cities in the area, new public spaces and new behavioral patterns began to emerge. A substantial state sector gave rise to an enlarged civil service and investments in the national economy invigorated the mercantile strata in the coastal regions. One often forgets that the British Mandate over Palestine occupied barely three decades of the country’s modern history. In scholarly literature and in Palestinian popular imagination the Mandate has acquired a colossal (if not mythical) impact on the molding of modern Palestinian society and its destiny. A quick list of its often cited achievements (and disasters) would make this point: the creation of modern institutions of government, including a new civil service and police force, and the centralization of the national bureaucracy in Jerusalem; the modernization of the land code and the taxation system; the creation of a legal corpus to replace (and supplement) the Ottoman code; the conduct of a national census (1922 and 1931), and the creation of the population registry; the creation of the rudimentary features of citizenship and icons of unfulfilled sovereignty (currency, stamps, passports), etc. City plans during the early Mandate period, drawn by MacLean, Geddes, and Ashbe-- the heart of Ashbee’s garden landscaping schemes, which seperated the old walled Jeruslalem from its new suburbs was the creation of a “designated route through a sequence of experiences that elicited differing emotions and aroused varied associations.” The new scheme was specifically planned “to arouse in its visitors emotional or religious sentiments for the city and its walls, which bear so many centuries of evocative history. Similar to the English picturasque garden, benches were also added in locations offering both rest and enjoyment of the view.” To what extent these intentions succeeded in evoking these subjective associations, while creating a sense of privacy in public space? The paper will attempt to answer this question and contrast the British and Ottoman planning schemes in the pre- and post-war period.