Exploring Landscapes through Modern Roads: Historic Transport Corridors in Spain (original) (raw)

BORIANI MAURIZIO - HISTORIC ROADS AS CULTURAL HERUTAGE

2023

Historic roads are roads contributed to our culture in a meaningful way. They form a very interesting architectonic, technical and cultural linear system: not only the traces, but also the road features (walls, bridges, tunnels, drain wells), the connected buildings (churches, chapels, fortifications, customhouses, mills, forges, furnaces, mines) rose out of ancient religious, military, commercial or industrial functions with a relationship between villages, towns, landscapes. Speaking of historical routes we often refer mainly to lines of communication along which migrations, trade and pilgrimage activities took place. Famous are the so-called Silk Road or the pilgrims' itineraries towards Rome (Via Francigena) or towards Santiago de Compostela (Camino de Santigo). These itineraries have long been considered for their historical, cultural, commercial and religious, value. UNESCO has rightly taken them into consideration and aims to protect them. However, my communication addresses the problem of the conservation of road structures understood as engineering works and the buildings strictly connected to them either as a support to the road system or as they are attracted by the passage of travelers In short: I will deal here with the "historical substance" which was the physical support of the goods, ideas, religions and military or scientific expeditions that made use of it.

Visions of a modern-day road structure. Granada's Camino de Ronda

2011

View from the north of the city at the dawn of the twenty-first century 1. Vista des del nord de la ciutat a principis del segle XXI Juan Luis Rivas Visions of a moder n-day road structure. Granada's Camino de Ronda 02-2011 www.dur.upc.edu 2. Carrer ciutat i l'habitatge agrupat de la primera perifèria. En aquesta cartografia, sobre la geografia original de l'assentament, se superposen dos temps diferents: el sistema urbà associat al Camino de Ronda d'avui i els barris lligats als seus extrems al nord i al sud, La Chana i El Zaidín, consolidats els anys 50 i 60. 2. City street and cluster housing along the first periphery. Two different time periods are superimposed onto this map: the urban systems associated with the modern-day Camino de Ronda and the neighborhoods tied to its northern-and southern-most limits, La Chana and El Zaidín respectively, incorporated during the 1950s and '60s. Visions d'una traça moderna.

Re-theorisation of the Roads Heritage

Archaeology

Thanks to the opportunity of highway construction, a deep study has been conducted in order to understand the major influences that the Po Plain area had in the period 1800BC - 400 AD. Lack of basic ground items and a few but constant historical inconsistencies, have driven to a reconsideration of the commonly accepted and disclosed history. The analysis is based on a cross-reading of historical, artistic, literary preexistences, in a timeframe that concerns the period 1800 BC - 400 A.D. The paper gives a fresh look to the history of the area, from the evolution of Gallia Cisalpina, to the Galatians in Northern Italy and finally to Gens Cassia (previously named Elamites and Kassites) that introduced significant enhancements to the road technology and to transportation thanks to their deep knowledge in horse breeding, carriages construction and metalworks.

Mapping Sixteenth Century Spanish Transportation Routes: A GIS Approach

Historical GIS provides cognition-enhancing tools for exploring human data. A traveler’s handbook from 1546 supplies a transportation network data infrastructure for Spain, producing a spatial context for its political, economic, and religious history. This handbook lists 139 routes, with distances from one place to another. A gazetteer of modern counterparts of the historical place-names forms the basis of a GIS of Iberia’s sixteenth-century routes. Various other narrative sources list variants of the historical place-names, allowing a comparison across time and the various references. Employing GIS statistical analyses determines spatial variations in the measurement of leagues. A reconstruction of the population along the routes in the Castilian provinces produces a picture of urban life which gradually became increasingly centralized from 1561. Historical narratives highlight polycentric aspects of the routes and the places contained in them, and the economic, political, and religious polycentrism that arose partly because of this urban structure.

Complex networks to understand the past: the case of roads in Bourbon Spain

Cliometrica

The work aims to study, using GIS techniques and network analysis, the development of the road network in Spain during the period between the War of Succession and the introduction of the railway (1700-1850). Our research is based on a detailed cartographic review of maps made during the War of Succession, largely improving preexisting studies based on books of itineraries from the sixteenth century onwards. We build a new, complete map of the main roads at the beginning of the eighteenth century along with the matrix of transport costs for all the important towns describing the communications network. Our study of this complex network, supplemented by a counterfactual analysis carried out using a simulation model based on agents using different centralized decision-making processes, allows us to establish three main results. First, existing trade flows at the beginning of the eighteenth century had a radial structure, so the Bourbon infrastructure plan only consolidated a preexisting situation. Second, the development of the network did not suppose important alterations in the comparative centrality of the regions. Finally, the design of the paved road network was adequate for the economic needs of the country. These findings are in stark contrast with claims that the radial structure of the Bourbon roads was designed ex-novo with political or ideological objectives rather than economic ones. Our methodology paves the way to further studies of path-dependent, long-term processes of network design as the key to understanding the true origin of many currently existing situations.