M32 - Urban Space and Inequality

Author(s)

Maarten Van Dijk (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Keywords

Inequality, Space, Waterfront Development

Abstract

Earlier studies have shown that social inequality grew substantially during the Dutch Golden Age, but this rising gap between rich and poor did not result in a change of the social topography. Seventeenth-century Dutch cities had a typical spatial pattern with rich households along the major roads and poor households around the corner in the smaller alleys. Research on early modern Alkmaar and Delft has pointed out that these residential patterns did not fundamentally change during the period between 1600 and 1850, despite some small deviations. These conclusions are also confirmed by a close investigation of the social topography of early modern Amsterdam. The friction of distance was larger in this large metropolis, but meso-segregation was still the norm.

However, the Amsterdam case also made clear that the expansion of early modern Dutch cities could change the social topography. The so-called new Canal District in seventeenth-century Amsterdam became the home of a disproportionally large proportion of the urban elite. The growing inequality in Amsterdam did not fundamentally change the social topography – meso-segregation of social groups was still dominant – but city planning and physical growth of the city did. A comparison of this pattern with the developments in Rotterdam would be interesting. Rotterdam was a fairly small city at the end of the middle ages but developed into a large port city at the end of the eighteenth century. No other town experienced such a continuous growth in the early modern Dutch Republic. This created frictions on the housing market and the Rotterdam solution for this problem was quite different compared to other cities in the Dutch Republic: the city government decided to build new urban districts on silted up parts on the river Maas. This created a new wealthy neighborhood at the waterfront and influenced the developments in other parts of the city. This paper will look at these long-term developments in Rotterdam between late medieval period and the middle of the nineteenth century.

Author(s)

Rogier van Kooten (University of Antwerp)

Keywords

Crisis, Disaster, Calamities, Economic Inequality, Spatial Topography

Abstract

From several recent historical and present day studies we learn that crises vulnerability impacts economic inequality (and possibly vice versa). Walter Scheidel, who studied the history of human inequality since the end of the last Ice Age, even claims that only catastrophic societal disruptions, like wars, famines or epidemics, are able to interrupt the otherwise autonomous and unstoppable process of rising inequality. As Scheidel demonstrates, history is full of these catastrophes. History therefore provides us plenty of opportunities to study this redistribution mechanism in more detail. What were its main components? How did they interact? And can a spatial perspective add new insights? I will demonstrate how sudden demographic decline, predominantly mass emigration, caused by war and famine affected the social topography and intra-urban spatial inequality. I will use house rent values as proxy for income distributions.

Antwerp around 1584 is a unique case study. Until now, most studies covered only small or medium sized cities at most. In the sixteenth century, Antwerp was a real ‘boom town’ becoming almost twice as large as Augsburg or Bruges and ten- to twentyfold of Nördlingen or Ivrea. Between 1495 and 1568 Antwerp’s population more than doubled from 48.000 to more than 100.000 and also the amount of houses doubled. This resulted in a merchant capitalist ‘Megalopolis’ accounting for 42% of the total Brabant population.

Author(s)

Jaap-Evert Abrahamse (Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands), Roos van Oosten (University of Leiden), Menne Kosian (Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands), Thomas van den Brink (Delft University of Technology) and Erik Schmitz (Stadsarchief Amsterdam)

Keywords

Urban Real Estate, Planning History, Geographic Information Systems

Abstract

In the early modern period real estate ownership was a vital asset to the urban middle and upper classes, and also to most entrepreneurs. Trade was uncertain and property was in many cases used as a counterbalance to spread the risks. But land ownership (or the right to expropriate) was also a strategic asset to town governments, who in times of expansion had to spend huge sums on public works, and had for a large part to rely on land revenues to keep the books balanced.

In this paper, we deal with the fascinating case of urban real estate economics in the two biggest towns of Holland in the 17th century Dutch Republic, Amsterdam and Leiden, during their parallel extensions 1610/1611 and 1658/1659. What factors determine the prices of urban real estate? To what extent did the real-estate cliché ‘location, location, location’ apply to early modern towns? Did the owners or sellers of real estate try to influence these prices, and if so, how? What can the land market tell us about the strategies of town governments when it came to town expansion projects? And how do both cities compare to each other in terms of real estate prices?

Archival sources, such as property and tax registers, have long been used to analyze changes in urban real estate markets and to map out social-economic differences. GIS software enables us to link, analyze and present large datasets of various kinds in a cartographic image. In this paper, large datasets from the two cities offer insights into the differences between the main trade hub of the Dutch Republic and its largest industrial town.

Author(s)

Justin Colson (University of Essex)

Keywords

Social Topography, GIS, Guilds

Abstract

This paper presents a new analysis based on a unique taxation record of 1538 which lists members of most of London’s livery companies by rank. Digitisation and linkage with other sources has unlocked analysis guild hierarchies by both wealth and geography within the city.

London is simultaneously one of the best and worst documented of late medieval and early modern cities: voluminous sources survive, yet it is vanishingly rare that any of those sources are comprehensive. The 1538 Harness List is a taxation record which, unusually, assessed military contributions by Livery Company rather than ward or parish. Another taxation shortly afterwards, the 1541 Lay Subsidy, was organised by ward and parish, allowing cross referencing of wealth and location. Furthermore, probate records survive for a sizable proportion of Londoners, allowing for the construction of a comprehensive digital prosopography. Crucially, London’s dense geography of 103 parishes within one square mile allows these individual’s residences to be mapped using GIS.

This analysis illuminates intricate commercial and social geographies at just the time when economic and demographic growth was reconfiguring London’s Companies from relative homogeneity to much more pronounced inequality. Spatial clustering which had been defined by around occupational identity was beginning to give way to economic segregation between the heart of the city and its margins, and more functional clustering which divided merchants from artisans and retailers. While this was not yet a stark division between rich and poor, this snapshot of the mid sixteenth century illustrates the social and spatial adaptations of a city adapting to its growing centrality in international trade networks. These changes were obscured by the ossified conventions of guild identity yet can be revealed through digital prosopography and GIS analysis.

Author(s)

Ewa Kaźmierczyk (Jagiellonian University in Kraków)

Keywords

Urban Space, Social Topography, History of Inequality

Abstract

The paper is focused on inequalities in the 18th century Kraków, one of the main cities in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. After the Great Northern War the city was in decline, many buildings were destroyed and this situation affects also the social structures. We could track in which way social inequalities changed during the whole century – after the war, during slow recovery, the Enlightenment, but also after the 1st Commonwealth’s Partition (and change of local markets, city’s economy) and with the suburbs’ destruction in 1768. The study is mainly based on tax records – these sources could indicate the wealth of city dwellers. Unfortunately they are limited to heads of households and omitted nobility and clergy, majority of the poor. On the other hand they included information about occupation and it is possible to combine occupational structure and wealth distribution in the city. Moreover based on municipal books the ownership structure of real estates was reconstructed with some (although limited) data about estates’ prices. It shows not only in which parts of the city the wealth gathered their property, but also how important were the other social groups such as clergy and nobility as they owned big part of the city space. Prices of property and data about abandoned estates or houses in poor condition could be used as a good indicator of the attractive/bad areas of the city. Furthermore in these kind of analysis Geographic Information System (GIS) was used to better understand the connection between city space and society – people and amount of tax as indicator of their wealth, information about estates’ owners were linked with poligons (real estates) of vector map based on old maps (the cadastre from 1802-1808 and earlier, not so accurate, city plan from 1785). In this way we could track the changes in the space, not only aggregated numbers about wealth distribution (e.g. Gini coefficient) – to discover the attractive and underdeveloped areas of the city cluster analysis was used.

Author(s)

Arie van Steensel (University of Groningen), Roos van Oosten (Leiden University), Thomas Vermaut (Fryske Akademy), Martin Hooymans (Heritage Leiden and Region) and Mark Raat (Fryske Akademy)

Keywords

Historical GIS, Social Topography Economic Inequality

Abstract

After a period of contraction in the sixteenth century, Leiden’s population doubled in less than two decades following the Siege (1573–74), making it the second largest town in Holland. However, many of its 24,000 inhabitants lived in poverty. Although the macro-effects of demographic and economic expansion on economic inequality and social segregation have been subject to lively scholarly debates in recent years, our understanding of their causes and effects at a micro urban level is still limited. We aim to shed light on the long-term evolution of inequality and segregation in Leiden between 1500 and 1850. Taking the household as a unit of analysis, we will assess the impact of economic and demographic growth on the spatial distribution of household wealth, occupations, housing quality, service access and health hazards. In other words, how did spatial distributional patterns take shape and how did they reinforce the clustering on the basis of occupation or class?

We will analyse series of fiscal data, censuses, property deeds and archeological findings, which have been unlocked and geocoded as part of the historical GIS developed by the Mapping Historical Leiden-project. Three stages are important: the situation before the population boom (data from 1498 and 1561), the period of rapid growth (1581, 1606), and the long-term outcome of these changes (1832). The available data offers a unique diachronic perspective on the evolution of premodern disparities and its historical determinants.

In the first section of the paper, we will address methodological issues related to the use of a historical GIS. We will present a number of conceptual and technological solutions to the challenges of spatially analysing heterogeneous data from different periods. In the second section, we will present the preliminary results of our analysis, demonstrating how the economic and demographic expansion of premodern Leiden went hand in hand with differentiated and refined patterns of growing spatial inequality and segregation. Using indicators of wealth and well-being, we will show how households coped with changing socio-economic conditions over time. As such, we hope to make a meaningful contribution to the study of urban history from a spatial-computational perspective.

Author(s)

Heidi Deneweth (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and Wouter Ryckbosch (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

Keywords

Social Relations, Neighbourhood, Inequality

Abstract

The spatial analysis of economic inequality in urban contexts has allowed for new insights into trends of segregation and neighbourhood transformation in the early modern and modern city. However, if we want to assess social relations between people of different social standing, spatial proximity often serves as a convenient – but rarely studied – shorthand for social interaction. Did people of different social backgrounds living in the same street frequently interact, or did their social interactions cluster among neighbours of equal status? And were neighbourly relations more intense and frequent in poorer and more segregated neighbourhoods than in rich ones? This paper aims to shed new light on how segregation and gentrification affected everyday social interactions between neighbours in urban areas with different social and economic profiles on the eve of modern urbanisation in the Belgian town of Bruges. In order to do so, we combine a GIS analysis of fiscal data with social interactions detailed in witness statements before the local criminal court, and with information on servitudes between neighbours.