Abstract
The Lyons historical GIS was developed from the end of the 1990s. Its aim was to reach a new understanding of the transformation of urban and social spaces by spatializing data at the buildings’ scale. We thought that by such a jump in precision of a factor 100, from a subdivision by 36 quarters to one by 3,500 buildings in the modern period, the mapping would lead to new perspectives and results in urban history. This involved working through two centuries of numerous and heavy archival records, taxes registers, censuses, building permits, property changes…, each record comprising generally between 3,500 and 8,000 entries, in order to create critically researched data bases followed by vector GIS layers. This required developing a method to reveal the implicit spatiality of these written sources, and to establish a mapping topography, allowed by a careful and geometrically checked reconstruction of the city’s plot pattern together with its variation before 1800, with the help of numerous archival maps. It was also necessary to take into account the space transformation, studied at the actual scale of individual investments, owing to the building permits checked with the still extant constructions, and the administrative record. The changing built-up and social spaces are a constant preoccupation in our work. In short, understanding this process of change is absolutely necessary to analyze a situation at a given date, and its significance at different time scales in itself. This paper describes the way we achieved the intended goal, working together as a geographer who was also an historian, and an historian who became geographer. It develops some results and draws the research lines on which the work is in progress, or still to be done. One very interesting aspect of the method is that, once the historical address system has been established, in attributing successive owners to the same building, many sources become ‘spatializable’, including non-serial ones, and so deliver new historical insights.
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Notes
- 1.
Lyons Municipal Archive (hence LMA), DD series registers.
- 2.
For example LMA 2 S 26, Atlas de la rente noble de l’archevêché; Archives Départementales du Rhône (hence ADR) 10 G 2338, St-Jean chapter; ADR 15 G 188, St-Nizier chapter.
- 3.
This plan was first drawn by hand in the early 1990s (Gauthiez (1993) Lyon, formation et évolution d’un espace urbain, 1.- cartographie du site et Moyen-Âge. Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Lyon, Vaulx-en-Velin). It was vectorized and its geometry corrected in the mid 2000s.
- 4.
This peculiar aspect of the building pattern in Lyons has to be explained. It developed in a first phase in the early 16th century, and became dominant from the 1640s. It implies that average financing units emerged from a capitalistic development, and a dwelling pattern adapted to the low wages of the silk industry, on which the city’s wealth was based, in fact the wealth was confined to only a small part of the population, notably the marchands-fabricants. In contrast, the average early 17th century building looks like raised houses, which they often were. In the course of time, the proportion of low incomes passed 80 % and the wealth became concentrated (Garden 1970), as a consequence, whilst the average building grew in size, the average number of new constructions decreased accordingly. The concentration of real estate and economic wealth was extreme in 1789. For Paris, see Cabestan 1997.
As a consequence of the growing size of the new buildings, their increased number of floors up to seven, and of the grouping of 2–3 previous plots to build them, the built-up area at Lyons expanded by about 30 % between 1600 and 1789, although the population had more than tripled, from c. 40,000 to c. 150,000 inhabitants.
- 5.
LMA 921 WP 023-025.
- 6.
LMA 921 WP 005-010. The numeration system established in 1790 is an evolution of the previous one, determining a lesser number of quarters and attributing the number to a given building, rather than to the order place of a proprietor.
- 7.
The 20th tax is annual and based on 1/20th of the rent value of a property, generally a single building, but sometimes a group, or a part of a single building. As the annual rent value is about 1/20th of the real estate value of the building, the 20th tax amount equals more or less 1/400th of the total value of the building (or group of them, or part of it).
- 8.
LMA DD 56.
- 9.
The Consulat decided in 1698 to establish a public street lighting system, which was financed by a tax based on the building’s value, LMA FF 0754-0755. The 1680 Règlement Général d’alignement is a by-law adopted in December 1680, to determine for all streets and squares the façade lines each new building had to respect. Its goal was to regularize the street width in a context of rapidly growing traffic, and to organize the embellishment of the city.
- 10.
The Consulat went bankrupt in 1677. Among various measures, it was decided to impose a loan on all the rich people in the city. An inquiry followed in every quarter, but half of the results are unfortunately lacking, LMA CC 4187. The mapping of the wealth in the city, despite being partial, is quite interesting.
- 11.
LMA 3 C 52.
- 12.
LMA 2 II 160.
- 13.
LMA FF 0754-0755.
- 14.
LMA CC 4187.
- 15.
Many still extant buildings also bear the initials of the owner’s name, placed in wrought iron over the main door. Some rare dates are still in existence. This was made by undertaking a field survey.
- 16.
But it tends to nearly always represent the same places. And the iconography is somewhat rare at Lyons.
- 17.
The obvious method would be to make a ‘juncture’ between a layer of polygons and a database, but, as the lines in the tax database do not systematically correspond to a single building, but sometimes also to a part of one or a group of them, each line has to be reexamined. For instance, the 1789 20th tax documents list 3,821 entries, but only 3,431 buildings existed in 1786 (Brac 1787).
- 18.
The number of pennons varied slightly through time, but the central ones remained constant. Their limits also varied slightly.
- 19.
LMA EE 11, LMA 3 S 693.
- 20.
LMA HH 578.
- 21.
LMA 921 WP 151-158.
- 22.
The exact number of floors can be difficult to define precisely, as the roof can be partly used. This was increasingly the case through the 18th and 19th centuries, with the addition of roof windows. It was generally a space not used previously, as the roof slope is low.
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Gauthiez, B., Zeller, O. (2014). Lyons, the Spatial Analysis of a City in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Locating and Crossing Data in a GIS Built from Written Sources. In: Rau, S., Schönherr, E. (eds) Mapping Spatial Relations, Their Perceptions and Dynamics. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00993-3_5
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