Urban property in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro

This chapter explores the use of historical GIS in the service of a spatial history of property in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Exploration, as a way of conducting spatial history, emphasizes passages through space and time that are partial and probabilistic rather than complete and fixed. ¹ Although the analysis avails itself of the seemingly exact tools of GI science, and it produces synoptic and distant views from above and far away, it cuts against these same tools and tropes of representation by purposeful selection of spatially distinctive categories and units of analysis including idiosyncratic individual case studies. It also improvises and uses tools and methods in novel ways, allowing for the intersection of network analysis with GIS methods.