Geodetic data and spatial photography

The spatial approach to urban history is not new. In the nineteenth century, for example, John Snow used maps to trace the presence of cholera in London. Today, however, urban historians can use GIS far more easily. ¹ Although most scholars use big data for studies that concern the post-WWII period, town planning offices produced large data which could be used to spatialize information well before the war, thus offering material with the potential to challenge interpretations in urban history. And yet this perspective remains underdeveloped in many cases. Shane Ewen’s recent synthesis What is Urban History? devotes many pages to the ‘linguistic turn’ or to the so-called ‘cultural turn’ but says nothing about the ‘spatial turn’. ² This contribution addresses this absence, showing how the spatial – and one of its main tools, the GIS – constitutes a powerful approach in urban history, allowing us to use and combine a variety of sources including some which are not necessarily familiar to urban historians.