Session M37 - New Technologies and Methods for Historical Cadastral Studies (1500-1950)
Coordinators: Isabella di Lenardo (isabella.dilenardo@epfl.ch), Frederic Kaplan (frederic.kaplan@epfl.ch)
Read Session abstractThe ongoing digitisation of cadastral sources offer new potentials for Urban History. Cadastre (land registries) are the first large scale numeric survey of the city in Europe and Overseas. In addition, these metric maps can be used to realign many other historical information extracted from other documentary sources.
For this reason, the historical cadastral data, extracted from maps and registers, are not only the key source for reconstructing the evolution of a city through the land development but also to understand other social and economic data.
Many cadastral sources are now on line at the disposal of scholars and the general public. Even if they were elaborated in different contexts and historical periods, they were generally produced for similar purposes and can therefore be used to retrace the evolution of properties, taxation, social composition of people, and other spatial-temporal relationships. To fully exploit historical cadastral sources, several technical and methodological challenges remain to be tackled.
From the technical point of view, images of cadastral sources must be first transformed into vectors. This includes several challenging steps that will be discussed in this session : machine vision methods for interpreting cadastral drawings, georeferencing strategies, automatic diachronic alignment, automatic associating of cadastral identifiers with associated information in registers, etc. As existing systems that tackled some of these challenges are usefully adapted to a specific typology of cadastres, it is important to progress towards more generic solutions capable of adapting to larger variety of drawing conventions.
From a methodological point of view, the possibly of exploiting such large amount of historical information invites to formulate new historical questions and consider new kinds of answers. Essentially, full processing of cadastral information allows for the first time to analyse the entire city structure beyond specific cases studies. This permits to cross the gap between qualitative and quantitive studies, replacing it by continuous multiscale approaches.
The sessions will discuss the historical relevance of cadastral digital studies, focusing in particular on cases in which such approaches have led to the requisitioning previous assumption concerning the morphology, the sociology and the economy of the city. Through the comparative studies of different cities, the ambition of this session is to discuss how cadastral studies may shed new light on the processes of change and persistence throughout time and space.Keywords: urban history; cadastre; digital history; HGIS
Friday 31st August 2018
Room 11 14.00-15.30, 16.00-17.30
PAPERS
Mapping elite utopia’s: Integrating cadastral and pre-cadastral sources in historical GIS for the socio-spatial analysis of upper-class residences in Antwerp´s broader metropolitan area (16th-19th centuries)
Rogier van Kooten, Iason Jongepier, Tim Soens, Ilja van Damme
For a Digital Atlas of the City of Florence: Digitizing the Tuscan General Cadastre for a Geographic Information System on the Historic City
Gianluca Belli, Fabio Lucchesi, Paola Raggi
Digitisation of Cadastre, Images and Models for better understanding the past of the City
Catherine Denys, Nathalie Dereymaeker, Laurent Grisoni
Exploring mechanisms of the resilience of urban fabric : contributions of cadastral studies to the understanding of the stability of Parisian roads network between the XVth and the XIXth century.
Léa Hermenault
The Spanish cadastre of Ensenada and its usefulness for the study of landscape history: new results through old data
Estefanía López Salas
The Digital Cadastre of Venice in 1808
Bastien Tourenc, Isabella di Lenardo
Streets, Services and Spatial Equity in Sixteenth-Century Leiden
Arie van Steensel
Imitation and emulation in Rembrandt’s neighborhood– deciphering transmission of ideas among artists living around the corner
Weixuan li, Marten jan bok, Menno den Engelse, Ivan Kisjes
Modelling the Internal Micro Structure of Grid Patterned Cities: Vienna’s Gründerzeit Structure and Barcelona’s Pla Cerdá
Angelika Psenner
