Estimating Irregular Urban Growth for Guadalajara Using Remote Sensing
Edith JIMÉNEZ, Heriberto CRUZ and Jesús RÁBAGO, Universidad de Guadalajara
ejimenez@cucea.udg.mx

Urban Metamorphosis: Using Maps as a Portal to Exploring Art and Culture
Michele Ferrier Heryford, University of Pittsburgh
ferrier@ucis.pitt.edu

The "Imag(in)ing London" Project: Building a GIS for Exploring the Evolution of Canadian City (1855-2005)
Dr. Jason Gilliland & Zhaohua Chen, University of Western Ontario
jgillila@uwo.ca & zchen8@uwo.ca

Virtual Shanghai: A Resource & Research Platform in the History of Shanghai
Christian HENRIOT, IAO-Université Lumière-Lyon 2
christian.henriot@cnrs-dir.fr

Abstracts

Estimating irregular urban growth for Guadalajara, using remote sensing
Edith JIMÉNEZ, Heriberto CRUZ and Jesús RÁBAGO
Universidad de Guadalajara
México

One of the characteristics of urban growth in most of Latin America is the proliferation of irregular settlements that develop outside current laws and regulations. The rapid growth of these areas and the inefficiency of the traditional techniques used by local governments to record them, means the records of the development of these settlements are out of date, which is a serious problem for urban planning.

This paper proposes the use of modern programmes and techniques for measuring the development of irregular settlements, that are able to keep up with rapid urban growth. Using the ER Mapper programme and high resolution images, we ran a supervised classification which identify irregular growth and estimate its extension. This allows us to make an estimate of irregular urban growth the metropolitan area of Guadalajara.

Urban Metamorphosis: Using Maps as a Portal to Exploring Art and Culture
Michele Ferrier Heryford, University of Pittsburgh

Twenty-two Japanese studies faculty at the University of Pittsburgh are working in four teams to create undergraduate curriculum units on Japanese studies for the World Wide Web. "Perspectives on Japan: Tradition and Modernity," will be a full semesters course on modern and traditional Japan exploring themes and introducing concepts relating to art, theater, music, the humanities and the social sciences.

One lesson within the project will focus on the "creative print movement" (Sosaku hanga) of Japan that occurred between 1929-1933. Such well-known artists of the times as Maekawa Senpan, Fujimori Shizuo, Henmi Takashi and five others collaborated informally to create modern images of Tokyo using
traditional woodblock methods. One of the artists' most enduring successes was called "One Hundred Views of New Tokyo," a set of prints that was later acquired and exhibited in its entirety by the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh in March of 1999.

Using the prints from the exhibit (with permission from the Carnegie Museum) the goal of this lesson is to give students the opportunity to understand Japan and the print movement from many perspectives. One of the primary portals to the prints is via a map of Tokyo from 1933 thus giving the user an entrée directly to the neighborhood in which the print depicts. By scrolling over the actual place on the map the user will have the ability to click into the neighborhood and see a depiction of the site as the artist saw it in the 1930's juxtaposed with a modern photo of the same site. Text and other supporting materials will be available for further exploration as well as an online catalog of all images that can be cross referenced by artist.

Maps are used with permission from the University of California, Berkeley, Earth Sciences and Map Library.

The “Imag(in)ing London” Project: Building a GIS for Exploring the Evolution of Canadian City (1855-2005)
Dr. Jason Gilliland & Zhaohua Chen

Increasing experimentation with geographic information systems (GIS) in urban historical research in recent years has coincided with the rising popularity of micro-history approaches, which, in turn, have been stimulated by the increasing availability of place-based historical data in digital format. My presentation will describe some of the objectives, methodological issues, preliminary analyses and ongoing applications of a historical GIS project on the city of London, Ontario, Canada. The primary objective of this new initiative, called “Imag(in)ing London”, is to generate a series of rigorously-controlled, multi-layered databases – from the city’s incorporation in 1855 to the present – as a spatially-integrated framework which can be easily extended and shared among students, city planners and researchers to permit comparative analyses for exploring long-term social and environmental change. Socioeconomic data on London and area households, businesses, and property owners were collected from nominal sources (e.g. census, city directories, tax assessments), entered into a relational database, and linked in a GIS to representations of various spatial entities (e.g. buildings, lots, streets) digitized from selected high-quality cartographic sources. A secondary objective of the project is to develop and test techniques for automating steps in the creation of different GIS layers which can be easily and affordably replicated in other projects, and this presentation will report on some of early experiments in this area. The “Imag(in)ing London” H-GIS project aims to offer a precise, compatible and user-friendly means of managing, analyzing, presenting, and sharing historical data on location, juxtaposition and movements in the urban environment.

Virtual Shanghai: A Resource & Research Platform in the History of Shanghai
Christian HENRIOT, IAO-Université Lumière-Lyon 2

Virtual Shanghai represents an attempt at writing the history of the city through the combined use of textual (essays, original documents), visual (photographs, movies, images, drawings, etc.), sound (sound tracks, tunes, etc.) and cartographic documents. In its present stage, it provides mostly essays and textual records, photographs, and maps. There are three main gateways into Virtual Shanghai. The first one takes the reader to textual documents. This section will include essays written by scholars, original archival documents, and chronologies. It will be possible to read through the texts as in a book, or to browse through topics, or move alternatively between text and related visual and cartographic documents. The second gateway opens various visual paths. All items of the visual collection are related either to textual records or/and cartographic data. They carry their own set of information. The third gateway offers a cartographic account of the city. It includes a large collection of historical maps from the earliest ones to satellite views of the city. A representative sample of historical maps is available in georeferenced format (GIS) and linked to the visual database. Finally, the GIS server presents numerous possibilities to see Shanghai at various times, under different angles, from the city level down to the block level.