Exploring Complex Interactions Between Societies and Urban Materiality Using hGIS. Paris Between the 15th and the 19th Century.

Léa Hermenault, University of Antwerpen

Long-term interactions between societies and urban materiality are often di?cult to analyze because their in-depth study requires a chronological, scalar and documentary ?exibility that does not correspond to any disciplinary habitus. In order for instance to research how social behavior and inherited urban materiality are interacting (which means not only to understand how societies shaped cities but also how cities shaped societies), we need to confront a great diversity of sources, at di?erent scales and over the longue durée. In this paper, I will show how hGIS can help researchers to explore those crucial interactions, that tend to become research dead-angles, by facilitating the comparison of sources that would be otherwise very di?cult to study in parallel. I will focus on the case study of Paris and show how I used hGIS in my PhD research to compare very di?erent kind of written sources in order to understand the complex interactions that are behind the great resilience of the Parisian commercial landscape between the 15th and the 19th century.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 152. Urban Historical GIS: Social History