A European-wide project
It was in the small historic town of Koszeg in north-western Hungary in 2010, where I lectured to students of politics on aspects of European urban history on the basis of the European Historic Towns Atlas project, that the law professor in charge asked me enthusiastically: ‘Do you realize that the 400 (by now there are c. 520) European towns published from over eighteen different countries are a treasure trove? What do you intend to do with this treasure trove?’Footnote 1 (Supplement Figure 1) Not being accustomed to such outbursts of enthusiasm in either the English- or German-speaking world, I did not have an answer.
The European Historic Towns Atlas is most likely the largest European-wide project in urban history. In the 1960s, the International Commission for the History of Towns decided to encourage the publication of historic town atlases at a national level, which would facilitate comparative urban studies at a European level. Medieval historians Heinz Stoob (Münster) and M.D. Lobel (London) spearheaded the development of guidelines for the production of these atlases. It was decided to use the cadastral map redrawn to the standard scale of 1:2500 as the core map in all atlases, as a unified concept was considered necessary for the promotion of comparative studies. It was realized that cadastral maps offer a great opportunity to explore the morphogenesis of towns.Footnote 2 Most countries set up their town atlases with the help of academic institutions, while the British atlas (the first to be published in 1969) never had an institutional home.Footnote 3 While the founders focused on the pre-industrial era, more recent ‘reformed’ national atlases such as the new German Historic Towns Atlas with the town of Brunswick has expanded to include the industrial period and even aspects of the urban geography of the twentieth century.Footnote 4
Encounter with Heinz Stoob (Münster) and Edith Ennen (Bonn)
While holding an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship, I spent two years in the late 1970s at the Institute for Historical Geography in Bonn (since amalgamated with the much larger Department of Geography of the same university) where I discovered copies of the German and Austrian towns atlases. As any future editors of such a scheme in Ireland would need guidance, I went to see Heinz Stoob, the editor of the German atlas. He was keen to expand the atlas idea into the outer reaches of Europe. Our conversations focused on the question of how to finance such an atlas and which methodologies to use in producing the different types of maps, particularly in relation to the growth map.Footnote 5 I was astonished to find that in relation to the essay interpreting the maps, Stoob believed in a one size fits all policy when it came to dealing with the length (two pages of the large folio size). When I asked Stoob about the importance of historical data in the atlases, he replied that in Germany the Deutsches Städtebuch (an urban historical inventory) supplied the necessary data and there was no need to repeat it.Footnote 6
In Bonn, I befriended the German medieval historian Edith Ennen, who was the editor of the Rheinischer Städteatlas, one of the regional projects. She was trained as an archivist and therefore she perceived the primary function of her atlas to be a reference work, supplying detailed archival information on a selected number of topics, including constitutional identity, churches, defences and more. But her atlas did not contain an interpretative essay, which caused a problem for the reader, as you have to create the narrative yourself. It is difficult to understand how commissioners who set up the atlas project together and agreed on the guidelines could end up with such different products. Michael Conzen (Chicago), H.B. Clarke (Dublin) and Ferdinand Opll (Vienna) have each written a critical analysis of the atlas project and warned of the consequences of the lack of uniformity for comparative studies.Footnote 7 The only explanation as to how this state of affairs could have arisen is that back in the 1970s, commissioners were totally preoccupied with setting up national or regional atlases and they did it their own way! For example, from the outset it was agreed that original sources and research results should be kept strictly separate. It is therefore surprising that in the very welcome revived English atlas of Windsor and Eton the core map, at a scale of 1:2500 (on seven separate sheets), is not treated as a primary source but interpretative data is superimposed on it. The French and Dutch town atlases have also adopted this model. Giles Darks, cartographic editor of the English series, describes the core map of York as ‘a summary of its complex and lengthy topographical history’.Footnote 8 In a recent letter to me, Roman Czaja (Toruń), president of our Commission, wrote: ‘The strength of our project results from the interest from below. This is a strength but it also produces the challenge of a lack of central leadership.’
Earlier unsuccessful attempts to set up comparative urban studies
The professed ultimate aim of the national historic town atlases has always been to facilitate comparative studies. Edith Ennen spoke about the typology of European towns at the history congress in Rome in 1955. She later published that paper.Footnote 9 Apparently, the atlas community did not take up the challenge, except that two of its presidents, Hermann Aubin (Freiburg) at the Commission's meeting in Vienna in 1965, and Philipp Wolff (Toulouse) at the meeting in Oxford in 1968, unsuccessfully attempted to set up comparative studies based on the atlases.Footnote 10 In 1996, Stoob wrote about the importance of towns along the Dutch and Belgium coast for European comparative urban history.Footnote 11 The concept was obviously very important for him but I am not aware that he ever initiated comparative studies based on the atlases. Instead, as director of the Institute for Comparative Urban History in Münster, he initiated an important series on urban history in Europe under the general title Städteforschung (research into towns) which generally contained a comparative component. In hindsight, I wonder if the fact that most atlas editors were medieval historians with little practical experience of working with maps made it more difficult for them to take on the task of reading the maps as historical sources? The other initiative that Stoob engaged in (unbeknown to most of his colleagues) was the production of four distribution maps of towns in central Europe at various periods. The one that interested me most showed the distribution of incipient towns in central Europe between 1056 and 1106. It indicates the close relationship between trade-routes and the early formation of medieval towns. There is some concern in Münster about the research underlying these maps.Footnote 12 It is to be assumed that Stoob considered the distribution maps as a framework for the understanding of the evolution of towns in central Europe. The individual atlas publications would then have fitted in as case-studies in their relevant category.
The fall of communism and the emergence of the European Historic Towns Atlas
The concept of the ‘European Historic Towns Atlas’ does not turn up in the early records of the atlases.Footnote 13 That concept came to the fore after the fall of communism when the east central European countries were given the opportunity to participate. The first Polish atlas appeared in 1993, and was soon followed by the Czech (1995), Romanian (2000), Croatian (2010), Hungarian (2010) and most recently by the Ukrainian series (2014). The Belgian medieval historian Adriaan Verhulst (Antwerp) was president of the International Commission for the History of Towns during the post-communist era. He anticipated the problems that the newcomers in the world of national historic town atlases would have to confront and initiated the establishment of the Atlas Working Group to address some of these issues. Ferdinand Opll (Vienna) and Anngret Simms (Dublin), later joined by Katalin Szende (Budapest), served as initial convenors of this group. In 2017, Keith Lilley (Belfast) took over from Anngret Simms. The creation of this group was a significant milestone as it actively promoted co-operation among atlas producers. It was during the presidency (until 2016) of Michel Pauly (Luxembourg) that the Atlas Working Group began to co-opt colleagues who were involved in producing atlases but were not elected members of the Commission. Four years ago, Myron Kapral set up the Ukrainian Historic Towns Atlas and he invited the conveners of the Atlas Working Group to Lviv (Ukraine) which was to be the first fascicle of the new series. The Ukrainian colleagues explained their strategy for their new atlas and it became obvious that for technical reasons their core map was not to be at 1:2500. But, after a long discussion, the Ukrainian cartographer agreed to follow the Commission's recommendation in spite of great inconvenience for him.Footnote 14
Critical voices
The publication of the first Irish Historic Towns Atlas (IHTA) (Kildare in 1986) was on the whole positively received but there have also been critical voices. Lindsay Proudfoot (Belfast) lamented the lack of a theoretical framework and Tadhg O'Keeffe (Dublin) asked questions about the people who would have walked in the streets of our atlases and what their lives would have been like. Brian Graham (Belfast) described the IHTA as having been conceived in normative terms with the focus on pragmatic empiricism. He talks of the source-driven topographical methodology of the atlas where social relations are neglected. He would prefer the atlas to move from general principles of urbanization to local specificity. It should be remembered that the Irish atlas is part of a European project that shares a conceptual background. Spanish colleagues who were to edit an atlas of European towns, that in the event did not go beyond the volume on the Iberian peninsula and on French towns, criticized the European atlas project for being focused on the pre-industrial town, for being slow in publication rates and for differences in the conceptual approach between one country and another and for the neglect of large towns.Footnote 15 The fact is that in general after the impact of the quantitative revolution in the 1970s, morphological studies were given a low status in universities as they were thought to be scientifically old fashioned. With the introduction of critical theory in the 1980s, the atlases were considered by mainstream geographers as old hat in their approach.
In the face of these criticisms, the editors of the atlases reiterated that the aim of the European Historic Towns Atlas project was to provide primary source material, mainly cartographic, as a means for explaining the evolution of the physical form of towns. Atlas editors would be aware that urban landscapes are socially constructed. The essays, part of each fascicle (except for the Bonn atlas), provide an interpretative narrative of the physical form of a town, where the issue of the major morphological agents is explored.
Challenges to comparative urban histories
In the 1990s, editors of historic town atlases began to talk to each other about the need to show the academic community how our atlases were capable of contributing to the understanding of urban history. When we started out on this endeavour, we encountered a number of fundamental practical problems. The first was the difficulty of accessing large numbers of town publications that are available so far. Some major libraries, as for example the British Library (London), the Bodleian Library (Oxford), the Berlin State Library, the Bavarian State Library in Munich and the library of the Institute for Comparative Urban Studies in Münster, attempt to keep a full set of the atlases. No distributor wishes to keep such large numbers of different items in stock.Footnote 16 The second practical problem is the language barrier. With one exception, none of the German-language atlases has any translations.Footnote 17 The Hungarian, Polish, Czech, Romanian and Ukrainian atlases have all produced bilingual fascicles. In the case of the Hungarian atlas, the topographical gazetteer (except for the headings) is not translated into English, which may be an insurmountable task.Footnote 18 At least partial translations into English are crucial if language is not to become a barrier within this European project. The third practical problem is indeed the shortage of historical data in almost all of the atlases. For successful comparisons of towns in different regions of Europe, we need a systematic set of historical data. How can you compare the importance of medieval institutions in towns across Europe when you are not given the dates of their foundation? As it stands, only the Rheinischer Städteatlas, the Irish Historic Towns Atlas, the Hungarian Historic Towns Atlas and most recently the reformed English atlas supply this type of information via a topographical gazetteer.Footnote 19 Neither the Ukrainian nor the Polish atlas has a topographical gazetteer.
Pioneer comparative urban studies included Clarke's exploration of the differences and similarities between medieval London and Dublin, and Opll's comparison of medieval Vienna and Cologne.Footnote 20 Clarke noted that after c. 1200 the topographical identity of London and Dublin converged. He argued that the charter tradition to which both cities belonged greatly influenced the physical formation of the town. Opll identified that the main energy for the growth of Vienna sprang from its role as a capital city, while in Cologne the church and merchants took on the lead function. I used the cadastral map of Wetzlar in Germany and České Budĕjovice in Bohemia in order to look at the relative location of parish churches, markets and town halls in each of these towns as indicators of change brought about by major morphological agents. I found that in Wetzlar with its roots in a Carolingian royal manor the market place was closely connected with the church, while in the Bohemian town of České Budĕjovice, founded by a charter in the second half of the thirteenth century, the parish church was built off the regularly laid out main square. In Wetzlar, the church and the royal manor were the primary movers, whereas in České Budĕjovice, the feudal lord and the merchants were the driving force.Footnote 21
The publication in 2015 of Lords and Towns in Medieval Europe. The European Historic Towns Atlas Project marked the coming of age of the European Historic Towns Atlas project.Footnote 22 This volume explores the influence of lords on the formation of medieval towns by case-studies from the European core area and its western and eastern periphery on the basis of national atlas publications. Most of the contributors are active atlas producers. And yet, it is difficult not to notice that for some authors the maps included in their essays are utilized as illustrations rather than as a point of departure. As already mentioned, most medieval historians are not equipped with the skills and techniques of town plan analysis as developed by Michael Conzen (Newcastle) and his followers in the Birmingham School of Urban Morphology.
In 2009, the IHTA launched a yearly conference that focused on comparing Irish towns with each other, Irish towns with English towns and continental towns as far as they had been published in the historic town atlases. In 2015, Roman Czaja (Toruń) compared Polish and German towns of the medieval period within the context of settlement colonization. Among other important issues, Czaja noticed that in Ireland where an early monastic site preceded an Anglo-Norman borough it was incorporated into the later borough, as was the case in Kells. This contrasts with the medieval Slavic world, for example in Wrocław (Silesia), where the chartered town was built beside the older Slavic religious centre. Czaja further observed that in Ireland the religious houses were often situated in the suburbs while in east central Europe the mendicant orders were always inside the town walls. There were fewer mendicant orders in Polish towns than in Irish towns. In east central Europe, newly erected boroughs got their own parish church while in Ireland the Anglo-Norman boroughs made use of the pre-existing Gaelic church if there was one. The establishment of boroughs occurred in Ireland half a century earlier (from the late twelfth to the thirteenth centuries) than in east central Europe (thirteenth to fourteenth centuries). Czaja seemed to take some common features between Irish and Polish towns for granted and so he focused on differences with a sharp eye for detail. But he did not offer an explanation for the differences.
At the same conference in 2015, Marjaana Niemi (Helsinki) carried out a comparison between two nineteenth-century towns: Dublin and Helsinki. She focused on how important it was for capital cities to embrace ‘the spirit of the age’ in order to show association with other European capitals. Functional and cultural aspects of nineteenth-century Dublin and Helsinki had much in common in spite of differences in population figures. The growing power of central government in both countries found expression in the classical architectural idiom of monuments and institutions.
The conceptual differences between the national atlases have had a knock-on effect for comparative studies. For example, in a comparative analysis of thirteenth-century European towns based on constitutional, morphological and institutional factors, examples had to be found from the Irish, the Rheinischer Städteatlas and the Hungarian atlas as those were the only ones that produced comparable historical data. The exercise discovered a remarkable degree of unity in diversity.Footnote 23 The chosen towns were Kilkenny, Kalkar and Sopron. Comparisons showed that at different ends of Europe the parish churches, the market places and the religious houses were all developed in the thirteenth century and were representative of the dominant institutions in medieval Europe. The topographical lay-out of the markets and streets in these three towns differed considerably.
In conclusion
The publication of over c. 520 towns from 19 different countries must be considered a success. Because of the independence of the national and regional atlases, it has remained difficult to make national editors adhere to the guidelines, which were agreed upon in order to support comparative urban studies. In spite of this complication, eerily reminiscent of our political situation in present-day Europe, the project that turned into the European Historic Towns Atlas is very much alive. By courtesy of our Polish colleagues Zdzislaw Noga (Cracow) and Roman Czaja (Toruń), we held a one day conference at the end of last year's Commission meeting in Cracow focused on establishing a typology of European towns. Our colleagues Katalin Szende and Magdolna Szilágyi (Budapest) addressed the question of whether creating a typology of towns should be considered a target or a tool.
Clearly, the larger atlas community struggles with the question of how comparative urban research should be carried out. The founders of this particular atlas project were by no means bereft of a conceptual framework. They wished to introduce large-scale maps as part of original source material for urban studies. We should not forget that at that time this was an ambitious undertaking because into the twentieth century the study of towns was closely associated with constitutional research. In the meantime, the ‘spatial turn’ has occurred in critical studies and space has begun to be recognized as an important historical variable. With this new focus came the expectation in some circles that this new category of urban identity should be interpreted within a theoretical framework. Mark Hennessy, for example, has successfully used Foucault's critical theory in order to explain spatial aspects of power relations in Trim (Ireland).Footnote 24
As the above references to a number of comparative studies have shown, a great variety of approaches have been used. Some comparative studies consist of detailed observations without interpretation. Others are preceded by setting up a conceptual framework as for example focusing on the function of a capital city or referring to the framework of colonization. Another approach is to explore who the major morphological agents were that determined the foundation of medieval towns and their later transformations. Interestingly, there is more differentiation across Europe in the places that preceded the chartered town than among chartered towns that laid the groundwork for the identity of the European town. One critical theory by itself is unlikely to uncover the richness of that identity. It will therefore be more important for us to develop structured concepts that will differ from time to time and from place to place.Footnote 25 We need to find creative questions which will send us on a journey of discovery when we explore our large-scale maps. This exploration should be done in a contextual framework because then we will be better able to understand the story of an individual town. The ‘treasure trove’ that we have created provides access to a large number of towns across Europe in expectation of comparative studies.
Finally, an important issue for the future will be the answer to the question that Daniel Stracke (Münster) has posed: ‘Will the digital turn bring about a paradigm shift?’ The digital future of the historic towns atlas will be the subject of the next section of this article.
ANNGRET SIMMS
Historic town atlases – the digital perspective
The future of the historic towns atlas is intrinsically linked to digital technologies and the potential they hold. Several of the national projects are uploading content to the web, some with interactive mapping functionality.Footnote 26 In 2014, the Institute for Comparative Urban History (Institut für vergleichende Städtegeschichte – IStG) in Münster, Germany, launched a web portal, which includes information but also a database and interactive distribution map of published towns – this provides links and access to all the national projects.Footnote 27 What about common standards for the creation and output of digital historic towns atlas material? Workshops dedicated to this question have been in organized (since 2012) with recognition that funding is key to progress.Footnote 28 At a meeting of the Atlas Working Group in Clermont-Ferrand, France in 2014, it was agreed that all projects should work towards bringing their published towns online and the new atlas publications should include georeferencing.Footnote 29 Projects have been recommended to use GIS (Geographical Information Systems) in the production of their forthcoming towns. There are challenges of resources and expertise but the strengths of the technology in data exchange, management and analysis hold much potential for the future of the scheme.Footnote 30 Facilitated by Daniel Stracke, a group of practicioners (including colleagues from the broader field of historical urban mapping but not directly involved in the historic towns atlas scheme) from 11 European countries came together over four days in the IStG, Münster, Germany, in March 2017 for an exchange of practical demonstrations and theoretical concepts for a workshop entitled ‘GIS-based cartography – a change of media or a change of paradigms for Historic Towns Atlases’. A forum has been set up to ‘act as a bridge between the Historic Towns Atlas projects and the scientific community dealing with European towns, topography and urbanism at large’.Footnote 31 The Münster exchange established some basic common standards for digitizing historic towns atlas maps and sparked discussion about the questions we wish to ask of our future digital atlases.
Irish Historic Towns Atlas: a case-study in continuity and change
The national projects of the European Historic Towns Atlas scheme, despite their comparative emphasis in content, have very different stories. Some projects are in their first phase (Ukraine, Hungary), others have been completed (Austria), while some of the longer-established schemes (Britain, Germany, France) have experienced reinvention. In this context, the Irish narrative is one of continuity and change.
Continuity
The IHTA was established in 1980 under the auspices of the Royal Irish Academy as one of its long-term research projects. As well as firm institutional support (in the provision of premises with a library and two staff positions), the small editorial board has remained interdisciplinary, focused and committed to a common aim, which is at its most essential, the production of town atlases.Footnote 32
The format and content of each Irish town atlas has remained fundamentally the same with a strong emphasis on the use of text to provide both reference (topographical information, bibliographies, appendices) and interpretation (essay) for the maps. The inclusion of a detailed gazetteer with names, dates and references for sites – the topographical information – has been a constant source of both strife (for authors particularly as the research and editorial effort is considerable) and potential (the data is laid out in 22 thematic sections and is comparable across all Irish towns).Footnote 33 The only other projects to present historical information in this forensic way are the Rheinische Städteatlas and the Hungarian atlas. The maps in the IHTA have followed the more standard model across Europe, where town plans are reproduced at common scales (1:2500 and 1:5000) and historical maps are reproduced in facsimile to allow morphological comparison.
Change
Despite consistency in the Irish project, it has evolved. The long-term nature of the endeavour has allowed for technical changes but also the opportunity to respond to reflection and experience. By 2002, egged on by the confidence of having reached double-digits in the list of towns published and having produced the first city atlas, the project sought to widen the net for those interested in the urban landscape. This corresponded with the increasing importance of outreach to a more general public within the Royal Irish Academy's own strategic priorities. Based on the material in published atlases, ‘pocket maps’ have been produced for Dublin, Belfast, New Ross, Limerick and Galway. Reasonably priced and handy to carry, these have proved popular with the tourist market. Recently, more people have been drawn to the project through the publication of books of map extracts with accompanying commentaries. These publications have become bestsellers.Footnote 34 There have also been more specialist ancillary books dedicated to interesting map collections.Footnote 35 At this point, the project went from making atlases to making, adapting and using the results within urban studies more generally.
By 2009, 20 IHTAs had been published. There was concern that though the atlases were heartily welcomed in the towns themselves as an almost quintessential local history and source for further work, they were not reaching their full potential as pieces of the larger comparative urban study. The initial aim of the project was to produce 40 towns. With half the sample now available, it was considered time to put the atlas to the test. Since then, annual seminars have been run with this objective in mind. The resulting volume from the first three, Maps and Texts: Exploring the Irish Historic Towns Atlas, takes a series of town comparisons alongside several thematic studies. Elements of similarity emerge such as the location of ‘Irishtowns’ in Kilkenny and Limerick or county town status as a driving force for public buildings; while divergent histories have their place too.Footnote 36 The final section of the book is dedicated to critical thinking, which provides comment (with reference to the IHTA) on the dependence on empiricism, the absence of the human experience and the role of digital technologies.Footnote 37 The next volume, More Maps and Texts looks at sources – how the evidence has been used and how the IHTA has fared as a source for urban study itself.Footnote 38
One factor that has emerged from the seminar and Maps and Texts series is the different emphasis each atlas has depending on its author's background despite the rigid structure of the scheme. This diversity is evident in what people expect from and how they use the atlas too. Some seek a more theoretical framework or point to the difficulties in carrying out meaningful comparative analysis, while others would wish for more data and description from which to draw their own conclusions. Evidence has shown that the most common use of the IHTA is local history research followed by teaching, mainly within third-level.Footnote 39 The guidebook initially produced to help teachers use the atlas – Reading the Maps – has in fact become a key introductory text for the study of town life in Ireland.Footnote 40
A reoccurring question has been the limited treatment of the twentieth century in the IHTA as the cut-off point for topographical information is 1900.Footnote 41 Another is how to cater for the vast suburbs that are intrinsically linked to the city centres. A recent initiative responds to these challenges and the first publication in a new IHTA Dublin suburbs series was launched in December 2017.Footnote 42 This publication has a different format to the regular loose-sheet ‘town’ series and traces sites up to a date of c. 1970. Otherwise it follows the standard system of maps and texts. For the first time, we see entries for car parks and housing estates in the topographical information and are exposed to the street plans of the twentieth century.
The digital revolution has changed how atlases are produced and disseminated and holds great potential for the comparative nature of the whole scheme. Since 2006, the IHTA has been creating digital outputs from their work in various forms from CD ROM to GIS online.Footnote 43 In 2015, a digital working group was established with the remit to ‘co-ordinate the project's creation, management and dissemination of digital content for both published and future atlases, with a view to increasing reach and interaction with existing and new audiences’. In 2016, IHTA Digital was launched. This contains three component parts. The first is dedicated to online editions of published atlases (IHTA Online).Footnote 44 These were released over the course of a year in thematic groups of towns according to their origin and were accompanied by blog-style expert essays by IHTA editors. Through this resource, promoted via the IHTA social media networks, the project is now reaching a wider audience than ever.Footnote 45 A second component provides online atlas material specifically for teaching and learning (Additional Resources). The final component of IHTA Digital gives access to experimental work being carried out on interactive and GIS atlas mapping (Digital Prototypes). This is part of ongoing work, which sees the project transitioning to a GIS-based method of production and links up with broader developments and collaborators nationallyFootnote 46 and internationally via the European scheme (see above).
SARAH GEARTY
Supplementary material
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926818000238
