Jason A. Gilliland and Mathew Novak on Positioning the Past With the Present: The Use of Fire Insurance Plans and GIS for Urban Environmental History

Gilliland, Jason A.; Novak, Mathew

doi:10.1093/envhis/11.1.136

Cited by 11 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…The overcoming of the US/Canada border and the representation of an urban development over time are only the beginning of possible uses. While historians and geographers were first attracted to historic maps as a tool for determining the size and physical form of a city, coupling them with the spatial power of GIS allows historians to remap the city to fit their research using primary sources (for examples, see Rumsey and Williams, 2002;Parmenter, 2007;Gilliland and Novak, 2006). The georectification of historic maps may also call into question the historiography of the settlement of our earliest cities as it increases the spatial accuracy of people and places.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rescaling the Past through Mosaic Historical Cartography

Lafreniere

Rivet

2010

Journal of Maps

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Researchers of our past have long used historical maps to place events and to uncover the physical form of an area. A series of maps may be employed to understand a region beyond the extent of a single map. However, rarely are these maps included in publications of research findings. At best, a modern cartographic reproduction will be created to depict the research area. Our maps, created for a historical atlas of Sandwich, Ontario, Canada, are noteworthy for their use of original historical maps in a mosaic to recreate the past. Our objective was to overcome the international boundary between Canada and the United States, a borderland that has succumbed to vast generalizations on the part of the cartographers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the use of ArcGIS, we georectified and fixed the extent of our maps, creating a series of maps that depict the changing urban growth of Sandwich over 200 years. This methodology can be extended to allow for the cartographic visualization of economic, political, social and spatial relationships that exist beyond a single map.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rescaling the Past through Mosaic Historical Cartography

Lafreniere

Rivet

2010

Journal of Maps

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“…In a French article, Delahaye et al in 1999 were already using declarations of industrial establishment from archives with maps of the cadastre and GIS as a tool for urban managers to identify chemical risks on the left bank of the Seine [10]. Similarly, Gilliland and Novak (2006) used GIS together with fire insurance plans to position past industries on current maps [11]. Inspired by this technique, Leonard and Spellane used archival research and chemistry to unveil the petroleum past of Newton Creek in New York City [12].…”

Section: Theory and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Long Live the Heritage of Petroleum—Discoveries of Former Oil Sites in the Port City of Dunkirk

Hauser

2020

Urban Science

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In the early days of the petroleum industry, oil infrastructure had a short lifespan. Individuals were creating their own company and competing with others, without the financial means of current great companies. Many oil facilities were established in port cities like Dunkirk, because they were the entrance gates to many nations. In the case of Dunkirk, many former oil sites became houses and schools in the current urban tissue, and official records lost track of many others. The limited data available on official records to inform the people on the pollution of their soil is a threat to their safety and health, and an obstacle for the planning strategies of public authorities. The analysis of archival documents, past and present aerial pictures, paintings and mapping techniques related to geographic information systems (GIS) can reveal lost industrial sites, and thus indicate potential pollution. This paper investigates the oil history of Dunkirk as a background for its petroleum history and its transferability to other petroleum related cities. A cross analysis of sources will attempt to complete French files and locate oil sites. The objective is to illustrate the transformation of former oil sites, and why the current land use is often not compatible with its history.

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“…National surveys reveal similar inconsistencies in how cities and states define, identify, and collect information on potentially contaminated urban brownfields (Coffin, 2003; Yount, 2003). Detailed site histories developed from fire insurance maps, property and tax records, or aerial photography and geographic information systems (GIS) software (Bookspan, 1991; Gilliland & Novak, 2006; Litt & Burke, 2002) offer important advantages over official tracking systems, but they remain costly, time consuming, and offer portraits of specific urban neighborhoods that only hint at the scope and complexity of the problem under investigation (Colten, 1994; Gorman, 1997).…”

Section: Postwar Urban Theory and Relict Industrial Wastementioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental Dimensions of Urban Change: Uncovering Relict Industrial Waste Sites and Subsequent Land Use Conversions in Portland and New Orleans

Elliott¹,

Frickel

2011

Journal of Urban Affairs

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Contemporary urbanization has brought well-documented shifts in the social and economic foundations of U.S. cities through deindustrialization, gentrification, and residential segregation. To these widely recognized shifts, we add historical-environmental changes associated with "relict industrial waste" that accumulates and becomes hidden as cities change over time. This study advances a new analytical framework and data collection strategy for uncovering these relict industrial waste sites and the processes that influence their location, frequency, and conversion. Results affirm that hundreds of potentially hazardous sites exist in older cities and that the vast majority of these sites have converted to other uses, hiding potential relict waste from public, scholarly, and regulatory view. Results also indicate that the types of neighborhood settings in which these sites are found and likelihood of subsequent land-use conversion vary significantly by the city in question. Implications for future research and broader conceptualizations of urbanization are discussed.The social and economic foundations of older U.S. cities have changed dramatically over the past half century through processes of deindustrialization, the emergence of new service economies, rising income inequality, gentrification, and hyper-segregation. These changes are all well known to urban scholars, but missing from these accounts is a well-theorized understanding of the environmental changes wrought, and often then concealed, by these same historic forces. In this study, we address this limitation of prior research by introducing a framework that situates historical-environmental change in relation to the widely recognized social and economic forces that transform cities. At the center of this framework is "relict industrial waste," which refers to hazardous waste that accumulates on industrial sites and remains there, forgotten, when those same sites later convert to more visibly benign land uses, such as offices, restaurants, parks, schools,

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Jason A. Gilliland and Mathew Novak on Positioning the Past With the Present: The Use of Fire Insurance Plans and GIS for Urban Environmental History

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

Rescaling the Past through Mosaic Historical Cartography

Rescaling the Past through Mosaic Historical Cartography

Long Live the Heritage of Petroleum—Discoveries of Former Oil Sites in the Port City of Dunkirk

Environmental Dimensions of Urban Change: Uncovering Relict Industrial Waste Sites and Subsequent Land Use Conversions in Portland and New Orleans

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