Social Dynamics in Urban Context: open tools, models, and data -- Paris and its suburbs, 1789-1950 – SoDUCo

The SoDUCo project proposes to develop methods and models to study the evolution of the urban spatial
structure in relation with social and professional practices of the population. We will develop our study on
the reconstitution of the evolution of Paris from 1789 to 1950 using two specific sets of sources: on the one
hand, 16 master maps and the complete series of cadastral maps of the city and its suburbs, which describe
the evolution of road networks and urban fabric and, on the other hand, for the same time period, street &
trade directories, which provide the professional activities and/or the social status of people localized by their
individual addresses. As a proof of concept, we have constructed such databases from maps on a shorter
time lap which demonstrated their importance for a better understanding of the dynamics of urban societies.
Here, we propose a qualitative step forward by developping tools enabling to check, control and refine every
information extracted from various historical sources. This will be possible thanks to the digitisation of these
rich sources and to the collaborative approach that will be necessary at all stages of this project. In addition
to an important open database on the social and urban history of Paris, the main output of the project is an
open collaborative geohistorical platform to validate, correct, enrich, link and complete the database, but also
to analyse, visualise and interact with spatial and social co-evolution. Moreover, the developed platform will
be reusable in other contexts on different time periods, other cities and other scales.