Vol. 16 No. 1 (2025)
Special Issue: Spatial Humanities and Contemporary Geographical Approaches

The Birth and Life of Buildings: High-Resolution Analysis of Historical Building Trends through the Digitised Municipal Archive of Tel Aviv-Yafo

Elad Horn
BDAR Lab, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
Or Aleksandrowicz
BDAR Lab, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
Daniel Rosenberg
BDAR Lab, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
Ido Baum
BDAR Lab, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
Construction chronology in Tel Aviv-Yafo, 1920-2020: (Y1) building birth years.

Published 2025-01-01

Keywords

  • Building age prediction,
  • Building documentation,
  • Building information databases,
  • Architectural historiography,
  • Spatial humanities,
  • Tel Aviv-Yafo
  • ...More
    Less

How to Cite

Horn, Elad, Or Aleksandrowicz, Daniel Rosenberg, and Ido Baum. 2025. “The Birth and Life of Buildings: High-Resolution Analysis of Historical Building Trends through the Digitised Municipal Archive of Tel Aviv-Yafo”. European Journal of Geography 16 (1):s45-s63. https://doi.org/10.48088/ejg.si.spat.hum.E.Hor.45.63.
Received 2024-09-01
Accepted 2024-12-01
Published 2025-01-01

Abstract

Inconsistent temporal definitions of key events in a building's lifecycles, and especially of its "birth" date, usually impede a large-scale, high-resolution analysis of building trends and construction fluxes based on municipal building datasets. This study addresses this shortcoming by proposing a reproducible ontological dating formulation of major construction activities during a building's lifecycle using the building permit as the most common, reliable, and consistent indicator of a building's age. We tested this approach by analysing the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality's Engineering Administration Archive, which consists of around 5.3 million digitised documents spanning between 1920-2020 and arranged in more than 28,000 building files. We combined permit data with supporting taxation and construction completion documents to automatically extract the date of "birth" or major reconstruction of each of the dataset buildings. The resulting dataset enabled us to generate detailed diachronic maps of urban growth at the resolution of an individual building. Despite challenges such as data discrepancies and archival gaps, this analytical method highlights the value of working directly with raw administrative metadata to uncover valuable insights into historical transformations in the built environment. It also demonstrates the utility of building permits as critical indicators of economic and architectural activities. By applying this approach to urban-scale building datasets, it is possible to predict building ages with reasonable accuracy and, thus, to enhance the understanding of urban growth and transformation dynamics.

Highlights:

  • Definitions of key dates in a building's lifecycle are inconsistent across public databases.
  • We propose an ontological formulation of a building birth date for large quantitative analysis.
  • Automatic processing of building permit dates and quantities can reliably extract building ages.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

  1. Aleksandrowicz, O. (2024). From within the box: the architecture of Bar Orian [in Hebrew]. Babel Publishers.
  2. Allen, E. (2005). How buildings work: the natural order of architecture (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195161984.001.0001
  3. Ammon, F. (2018). Digital humanities and the urban built environment: Preserving the histories of urban renewal and historic preservation. Preservation Education & Research, 10, 11–31.
  4. Archipedia. (2024). Society of Architectural Historians. https://sah-archipedia.org/content/FAQs
  5. Biljecki, F., & Sindram, M. (2017). Estimating building age with 3D GIS. ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, 4(4W5), 17–24. https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-IV-4-W5-17-2017
  6. Bruno, G., & Corea, C. (2019). Do building permits act as a leading indicator of Italy short-term production in construction? Electronic Journal of Applied Statistical Analysis, 12(2), 416–428. https://doi.org/10.1285/i20705948v12n2p416
  7. Daniels, M., & Peyceré, D. (Eds.). (2000). A guide to the archival care of architectural records: 19th-20th centuries. ICA - International Council on Archives.
  8. Duvshani, G. (1993). Architect Yehudah Magidovits [in Hebrew]. Ministry of Defense.
  9. England, H. (2018). Principles of Selection for Listed Buildings (Issue November). https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/757054/Revised_Principles_of_Selection_2018.pdf
  10. Esmaeili, H., Woods, P. C., Thwaites, H., & Hashim, K. (2014). Digital archiving of architectural heritage. Reinventing Cities and Places: Proceedings of the International Urban Design Conference on ‘Cities, People and Places, 97–107. https://www.academia.edu/34815708/Digital_Archiving_of_Architectural_Heritage
  11. Ferreira-Lopes, P., & Pinto-Puerto, F. (2018). GIS and graph models for social, temporal and spatial digital analysis in heritage: The case-study of ancient Kingdom of Seville Late Gothic production. Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, 9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.daach.2018.e00074
  12. Ferreira-Lopes, P., & Pires Rosa, M. (2023). Metodología de captura y análisis de datos del patrimonio inmueble industrial de la Eurociudad del Guadiana. Ge-Conservacion, 24(1), 56–68. https://doi.org/10.37558/gec.v24i1.1205
  13. Finnish Architecture Navigator. (2020). https://finnisharchitecture.fi/
  14. Golan, A. (2023). Boundary making in the formative years of Tel Aviv Township, 1920–1923. Urban History, 50(4), 757–772. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926822000177
  15. Het Nieuwe Instituut Collection. (2024). https://zoeken.nieuweinstituut.nl/en
  16. Hoffmann, J., & Horn, E. (2021). POMO: Architecture of Privatization [in Hebrew]. The Avie and Sarah Arenson Built Heritage Research Center, The Technion.
  17. International Code Council (ICC). (2021). International Building Code 2021 (IBC): Chapter 2 Definitions. https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/IBC2021P2/chapter-2-definitions
  18. Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS). (2024). Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics: Definition Glossary. https://www.cbs.gov.il/en/Pages/All-Terms.aspx?k=Construction+begun
  19. IView. (2024). Tel Aviv-Yafo GISN. https://gisn.tel-aviv.gov.il/
  20. Karmi-Melamede, A. (2018). My Father, Dov Karmi [in Hebrew]. Babel Publishers.
  21. Li, Y., Chen, Y., Rajabifard, A., Khoshelham, K., & Aleksandrov, M. (2018). Estimating building age from Google street view images using deep learning. Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics, LIPIcs, 114(September). https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2018.40
  22. Merritt, F. S., & Ricketts, J. T. (2000). Building design and construction handbook (6th ed.). McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing New York, USA.
  23. Münster, S., Apollonio, F. I., Bell, P., Kuroczynski, P., DI Lenardo, I., Rinaudo, F., & Tamborrino, R. (2019). Digital cultural heritage meets digital humanities. International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences - ISPRS Archives, 42(2/W15), 813–820. https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLII-2-W15-813-2019
  24. Ogawa, Y., Zhao, C., Oki, T., Chen, S., & Sekimoto, Y. (2023). Deep learning approach for classifying the built year and structure of individual buildings by automatically linking street view images and GIS building data. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, 16, 1740–1755. https://doi.org/10.1109/JSTARS.2023.3237509
  25. Philadelphia Architects and Buildings Project. (2024). https://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/pj_display_alldates.cfm/5854
  26. Ravid, B. (2004). Joseph Berlin, Architect: Between little Tel-Aviv and the White City [in Hebrew]. Binyan VeDiyur.
  27. Ravid, B. (2008). Josef Tischler: Architect and town planner [in Hebrew]. Bauhaus Center Tel Aviv.
  28. Rosser, J. F., Boyd, D. S., Long, G., Zakhary, S., Mao, Y., & Robinson, D. (2019). Predicting residential building age from map data. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 73(August), 56–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2018.08.004
  29. Salimi, H., Fadaei Nezhad Bahramjerdi, S., & Tootoonchi, R. (2025). The Role of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in Participatory Conservation of Heritage Areas. European Journal of Geography, 16(1), s1–s11. https://doi.org/10.48088/ejg.si.spat.hum.h.sal.1.11
  30. Sun, M., Zhang, F., Duarte, F., & Ratti, C. (2022). Understanding architecture age and style through deep learning. Cities, 128(May), 103787. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2022.103787
  31. Szekely, I. (2017). Do Archives Have a Future in the Digital Age? Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, 4(2), 1. http://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol4/iss2/1
  32. Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality. (2024). The Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality’s Engineering Administration Archive. https://handasa.tel-aviv.gov.il/Pages/default.aspx
  33. The Getty Research Institute. (2021). Art & Architecture Thesaurus® Online. http://vocab.getty.edu/page/aat/300004792
  34. Thornes, R., & Bold, J. (1998). Documenting the cultural heritage. Getty Publications. https://books.google.co.il/books?hl=en&lr=&id=HYL9EAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&ots=7js7v1Tn1x&sig=_4Gd-zJCBEv7PQ_RmC7uu0smktw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
  35. Tooke, T. R., Coops, N. C., & Webster, J. (2014). Predicting building ages from LiDAR data with random forests for building energy modeling. Energy and Buildings, 68(PARTA), 603–610. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2013.10.004
  36. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. (1997). International recommendations for construction statistics (Series M, No. 47, Rev. 1). https://unstats.un.org/unsd/distributive_trade/SeriesM_47rev1E.pdf
  37. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. (2017). Principles and Recommendations for Population and Housing Censuses, Revision 3. In Statistical Papers (Vol. 3, Issue March). UN. https://doi.org/10.18356/bb3ea73e-en
  38. Van Hoesen, J., & Letendre, S. (2013). Characterizing the spatiotemporal evolution of building-stock age in Poultney, Vermont: A GIS-based approach to improve thermal efficiency in historical buildings. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 40(4), 630–643. https://doi.org/10.1068/b38085
  39. Visocka, S. (2010). An analysis of building construction based on building permits statistics. In Eurostat: Statistics in Focus 55/2010. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-statistics-in-focus/-/ks-sf-10-055
  40. Zeppelzauer, M., Despotovic, M., Sakeena, M., Koch, D., & Döller, M. (2018). Automatic prediction of building age from photographs. ICMR 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval, 3206060(c), 126–134. https://doi.org/10.1145/3206025.3206060