MAPHIS: Mapping History--What Historical Maps Can Tell Us About Urban Development

Little is known about the patterns of city development during the structural transformation of economies. This project will systematically process high-resolution and manuscript historical maps to make a dormant body of information about our cities' and regions' past accessible.

The proposed research will advance our understanding of long-run urban growth through the development of three innovative methodologies, which will overcome practical limitations of historical data sources: 1) A technique to extract land use patterns from historical colour maps applied to France (1750-1950); 2) A recognition algorithm to detect, tag and geo-locate points of interest in historical high-quality maps of the 70 largest urban centre in England and Wales; 3) An algorithm to geo-locate address information from Micro-censuses and trade registers.

We have identified four main research questions that will be developed in the following separate research projects. In Project 1, the main question is: what are the long-term empirical patterns of urban development, most notably the persistence of the spatial organisation of economic activity and the role of building infrastructure in shaping such persistence? In Project 2, the main question is: How do environmental disamenities and their unequal distribution within cities affect the spatial organisation of consumption amenities and production? In Project 3, the main question is: Do cities grow towards their bad parts, their neighbourhoods with the lowest environmental amenities? In Project 4, the main question is: How does vertical growth and advances in building technologies affect the spatial organisation of cities?

To address these research questions, we will organise our workflow in six inter-connected work packages (WP):

WP1--Classification of land use in France (1750-2015): The objective of WP1 will be to recover land use information at a fine scale from digitised maps using state-of-the-art machine learning techniques;

WP2--Digitisation of micro-features embedded in Ordnance Survey (OS) city maps of England and Wales (1870-1960);

WP3--Geo-localization of residents and production units in England and Wales (1851-1911);

WP4--Dynamic model of city growth with persistent building stock: WP4 builds a general equilibrium model of spatial economic activity that embeds the durability of housing and infrastructure and exploits the three hundred years of population settlement data produced in WP1;

WP5--Pollution and the long-run development of cities: WP5 builds on WP2,3 and proposes to study the joint dynamics of residential sorting and the location of production within cities to understand how a major environmental disamenity-industrial pollution-affects the spatial organisation of cities in the longer-run;

WP6--Horizontal and vertical urban growth in Montreal and Toronto: WP6 will bridge between the previous working packages WP1, WP2, WP4 and WP5, and study--empirically and theoretically--horizontal and vertical urban growth.

The project will be jointly led by three teams. The French team will be composed of Gobillon (PI), Combes (CoI) and Duranton (TM) who have contributed to the development of major theoretical approaches in urban economics. The Canadian team will be led by Heblich (PI), who is a lead researcher in urban economics/economic history, and Fortin (Co-I), a lead in GIS analysis. The UK team will be led by Zylberberg (PI), who is an economist specialist in data extraction form historical sources and remote sensing. Shaw-Taylor and Schürer, advisory board, will help design the analysis of the population micro-censuses between 1851 and 1911 (WP3). The collaboration partner, Redding (TM), involved in the design of WP3 and the implementation of WP6, is one of the World lead researchers in urban economics.

Outputs will include articles in top economic journals, and detailed algorithms to extract relevant spatial information from manuscript maps.