The inception of the modern practice of town planning is dominantly traced to 1909, when the first Town and Country planning law was published in Britain. This law was transformed to the various British colonies in the early decades of the 20th century, forming planning laws and practice throughout the empire. In 1921, the law and its derivatives were introduced in Palestine, by then under British Mandate, forming the first modern planning basis for the area. British planners as well as local practitioners, including newly arrived, European Zionist architects, soon engaged with the new planning regime, shaping anew a local urban and rural landscape. British planning is considered an act of modernization, and an introduction of an advanced practice and discourse into the backwards, traditional landscape of Ottoman Middle East. Recent scholarship, however, sheds new light on the period prior to the British mandate in Palestine and questions the alleged backwardness of local governmental practices and conventions. In my paper, I will examine the actual transformation from modern ottoman town planning to British planning, concentrating on the following topics: 1. How different was modern British from modern Ottoman planning? 2. Which networks were dominant in each planning regime, and were they different or continuous? For example, who were the foreign architects and engineers advancing modernization and urban planning in each period? And finally, 3. How did these affect practices of land ownership, parcellation and development, producing different notions of the city and its society? The paper will focus on the life and work of Ben Zion Guini, the Jewish municipal engineer of Jaffa in the first two decades of the 20th century and the municipal engineer of Jerusalem during the time of the transition from the Ottoman to the British empire. Guini was born in Izmir, studied in Paris and worked both under Ottoman Empire and British mandated, working alongside many practitioners, both local and foreign. Guini's life and practice embody many of the transitions and networks the research wishes to explore.