BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 43 NO 4 539 HIGH-RISE URBANISM IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE Reaching New Heights: Post-Politicizing High-Rise Planning in Jerusalem GILLAD ROSEN and IGAL CHARNEY Introduced by British planners, height restrictions were a key planning principle that shaped modern Jerusalem in the last century, making tall buildings largely uncommon and exceptional in the city. However, since the turn of the century, and similar to other European cities, a new municipal entrepreneurial agenda has fervently promoted a more permissive planning policy. Using numerous planning documents, media coverage, and interviews, we argue that the  and disputation that characterized previous rounds of high-rise planning in Jerusalem. As a              transparency and impairing public accountability, the development of tall buildings thus epitomizes the lack of a true democratic debate. Unlike a century ago, when skyscrapers were considered almost exclusively American, high-rises today epitomize urban develop- ment in diverse environments across the globe (Ford, 1994; King, 2004; McNeill, 2009). Rationalized by economic logic and iconicity, high-rises have become perhaps the most visible urban beacon of late capitalism (Barr, 2016; Glaeser, 2011; Graham, 2015, 2016; Sklair, 2017). Despite the growing number and extent of high-rises across the globe, some cities (such as Paris, Rome, Washington DC, and Jerusalem) have enforced diverse sets of restrictive planning regulations in an attempt to protect much-admired monuments and views of their historic cores and renowned skylines. For most of the twentieth century, Jerusa- lem’s skyline was subject to strict preserva- tion guidelines. A pervasive height restrictive doctrine was established in the early twenti- eth century by British colonial planning, and many of its chief principles are valid to this day. As an imperial project, the pre-eminence of Jerusalem’s Old City and its surroundings was to be preserved and protected (Efrat, 1993; Efrat and Noble, 1988; Hysler-Rubin, 2011; Pullan and Sternberg, 2012). Following the establishment of the State of Israel the restrictive height approach enjoyed broad consensus within Israeli planning institu- tions, and was applied beyond the imme- diate limits of the Old City. This restrictive planning policy, which prioritizes urban preservation, echoes the European planning approach of the time (Ford, 1994; Hall, 1988). Moreover, introduced in early statehood, Is- raeli planning principles and codes had been shaped by a mix of European (mostly British and German) planning ideas, models and approaches (Wilkof, 2016). Nonetheless, the dominance of the preservationist approach        the twentieth century (Charney and Rosen, 2014; Ganan and Alfasi, 2015; Yacobi, 2012). Today, attempts to tackle and facilitate urban