Per un Atlante storico digitale di Ferrara : Note sul progetto-pilota Ferrara1881

A small interdisciplinary working group, with the help of students’ workshops, can create the ‘pilot’ of a broader historical-urban Atlas: this is the case of Ferrara 1881, a WebGIS project under construction. The project is based on the welding of family sheets of 1881 census (which also contain information on houses) and cadastral cartography, through the mediation of the owners’ repertories, which establish relationships between cadastral parcel numbers and historical civic numbering (verifiable on other census registers even beyond residential uses). More than seven thousand records outline the image of an urban population in an ordinary European nineteenth century city: an image which will be specified by the connection to urban geography. Not without surprises, such as the existence of a dialectic between center and periphery, therefore of elements of social segregation, even in the confined spaces of the intramural city and in their small population (less than 30,000 inhabitants).