Représenter la ville (Moyen Age-XIIe siècle)

It is from the Middle Ages and in Modern times that the icono-cartographic production concerning the city develops and highlights the image we have of the Urbs. To this day, historians, archaeologists, geographers, urbanists, etc. still submit their representation of the ancient or actual town. It is this history of urban imagery in the long term that this book seeks to interrogate based on two main topics; first, the ancient image of the port town, on which the study was focused. From the Middle Ages to the start of the 19th century, from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean through the Atlantic coast, the contributions gathered here analyse the pictorial, planimetric, and cartographic techniques used in the city and its harbour’s sights and maps, but also in the staging that underpins them and prompts the creation of emblematic images. 

The city, in its historicity, supplied, from the birth of historic and archaeologic fields in the 19th century, a cartographic production destined to offer, from gathered data, restitutions of its layout and its landscapes at a given moment in the past. It remained secondary for a long time, but this area of historical cartography was deeply renewed in the last few decades, especially with the use of the Geographic Information System. The map then imposed itself as a source, a tool, or even an end, to spatial analysis, and as the essential conveyor to think about the make of a city in the past as well as in the future. It is the second axis which the book addresses – urban representations – by introducing some current French and English “schools”, and the conceptual and methodological tools that they implemented to translate, by a graphic expression, the urban trajectories and their dynamics in space and time.