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Thinking spatially: new horizons for urban history

Part of: Thinking Spatially: New Horizons for Urban History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 April 2020

Richard Rodger Open the ORCID record for Richard Rodger [Opens in a new window]  and
Susanne Rau
Richard Rodger*
Affiliation:
School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, EdinburghEH8 9AG, UK
Susanne Rau
Affiliation:
History Department, Erfurt University, Nordhäuser Straße, 99089Erfurt, Germany
*
*Corresponding author. Email: Richard.Rodger@ed.ac.uk
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Abstract

A new opportunity, and a new challenge, presents itself to urban historians. In order to obtain a deeper understanding of historical urban space and spatial relationships, the contributors to this Special Issue deploy new techniques of spatial analysis using mapping tools to explore the density, frequency and proximity of various features of towns and cities. The contributors focus on case-studies at various urban scales – from major commercial centres (New York, Rome, Paris and London) – to smaller towns in the urban hierarchy. They also range across the tenth to the twentieth centuries and so challenge a common assumption that mapping the town is essentially an approach best suited to the modern period. Individually and collectively, the authors demonstrate how the urban morphology of the city developed and how durable that spatial patterning can be.

Type
Introduction
Information
Urban History , Volume 47 , Special Issue 3: Thinking spatially: new horizons for urban history , August 2020 , pp. 372 - 383
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Higher resolution, colour versions of the figures in this article can be viewed online as supplementary material. Follow the URL at the end of this article.

†

The authors wish to express their appreciation of the constructive comments provided by the referees, the thoughtful input of our readers, Michael Taylor and Katharine Wilson, the care invested by Urban History’s Editor, Professor Rosemary Sweet, at all stages in the process, and the input of the production team at Cambridge Journals for their attention to detail in the final stages of publication. Richard Rodger wishes to acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (award AH/K0002457/1) in relation to the MESH project (Mapping Edinburgh's Social History, now known as Mapping Edinburgh) and the helpful advice of Eric Grosso. Susanne Rau would like to express thanks to the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD, travel grant). Parts of the editing process were funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – FOR 2779.

References

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9 For overviews of the development of the field, and for applications in specific locations, see the Historical GIS Research Network www.hgis.org.uk/bibliography.htm, accessed 27 Dec. 2018. See also DeBats, D.A. and Gregory, I.N. (eds.), Special Issue ‘Introduction to Historical GIS and the study of urban history’, Social Science History, 35:4 (2011), 455–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gregory, I.N. and Healey, R.G., ‘Historical GIS: structuring, mapping and analysing geographies of the past’, Progress in Human Geography, 31 (2007), 638–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Logan, J.R. et al. , ‘Mapping America in 1880: the urban transition historical GIS project’, Historical Methods, 44 (2011), 49–60CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Hochmuth, C. and Rau, S. (eds.), Machträume der frühneuzeitlichen Stadt (Konstanz, 2006)Google Scholar; Rau, S., Räume der Stadt. Eine Geschichte Lyons 1300–1 800 (Frankfurt am Main, 2014)Google Scholar.

10 See for example:

German ‘Geoportal’: www.geoportal.de/DE/Geoportal/geoportal.html?lang=de; Library of Congress www.loc.gov/maps;

Harvard Library: http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/maps/collections/digital.cfm;

National Library of Scotland: https://maps.nls.uk/towns/index.html#edinburgh-city;

University of Chicago: www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/collections/maps/mapdigi.html; New York Public Library: http://maps.nypl.org/warper/; Gallica Bibliothèque National de France: http://gallica.bnf.fr/html/und/cartes/cartes; Kartenportal Thüringen: http://web73.server1.justorange.org/index.php?id=422; Kartenportal Gotha (under construction): http://web73.server1.justorange.org/index.php?id=463, accessed 27 Dec. 2018.

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12 Rau, S. and Zeller, O., ‘Police des voyageurs et hospitalité urbaine à Lyon à la fin du XVIIe siècle’, in Burkardt, A. (ed.), Commerce, voyage et expérience religieuse, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles (Rennes, 2007), 113–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In terms of research methods, annual directories used in conjunction with geocoded addresses can achieve clarity on this issue.

13 National mapping arrangements vary from country to country so this column cannot take account of every circumstance.

14 See app at https://maps.me/.

15 See http://opendefinition.org/licenses/cc-by-sa/, accessed 27 Dec. 2018.

16 R. Rodger, ‘The facade of power and the power of the façade’, Urban History, forthcoming.

17 On house numbering, see the Special Section in Urban History, 39:4 (2012), 607–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rose-Redwood, R.S., ‘Indexing the great ledger of the community: urban house numbering, city directories, and the production of spatial legibility’, Journal of Historical Geography, 34 (2008), 286–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar, briefly instances examples of European early house numbering practices; Laxton, P., ‘Richard Horwood's Plan of London: a guide to editions and variants, 1792–1819', London Topographical Record, 26 (1990), 214–63Google Scholar, shows limited house numbering in 1792.

18 URL: http://varoudis.github.io/depthmapX/, accessed 30 Dec. 2018.

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20 Exemplified by the case of the history of Lyons. See Rau, S., Räume der Stadt. Eine Geschichte Lyons 1300–1800 (Frankfurt am Main, 2014)Google Scholar.

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24 Jansen, H., ‘Wrestling with the angel: on problems of definition in urban historiography’, Urban History, 23 (1996), 277–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Katz, M.B., ‘From urban as site to urban as place: reflections on (almost) a half century in U.S. urban history’, Journal of Urban History, 41 (2015), 560–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and further contributions in the same issue by L.H. Lees, T. Gilfoyle and N.D.B. Connolly; Katz, M.B., ‘The existential problem of urban studies’, Dissent, 57 (2010), 66–7Google Scholar; Rodger, R., ‘In pursuit of the indefinable? The urban variable reconsidered’, in Supphellen, S. (ed.), The Norwegian Tradition in a European Context (Trondheim, 1998), 47–56Google Scholar; Ewen, S., What Is Urban History? (Cambridge, 2016)Google Scholar, provides an overview of the topic. Storper, M. and Scott, A.J., ‘Current debates in urban theory: a critical assessment’, Urban Studies, 53 (2016), 1114–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, provide a provocative approach to studying the urban in a contemporary setting. The authors in Fray, J.-L. et al. (eds.), Urban Spaces and the Complexity of Cities (Cologne et al. , 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, see cities through their different spaces.

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