Preliminary Programme

This paper provides comparative results on the question of accessibility for England and Wales across time and space. It examines the likelihood that accessibility in these parts of Britain peaked earlier and earlier than in France because the private ownership of British railways led to a different cycle of development and contraction than in France where a state subsidized system was in operation. (Show less)

The development of a complete historical GIS including detailed quantitative information referring to the railways and urban agglomerations has allowed us to carry out an in-depth analysis of the spatial-temporal relationships between elements of population infrastructure and the urbanisation process. Specifically, we will focus on the spatial and temporal evolution of Spain, France and Portugal from mid-nineteenth century until nowadays.
Although the existing literature contains numerous references to local-scale approaches to this phenomenon, attempts to obtain detailed quantitative results have been fewer and less successful. It is not easy to determine the influence of the arrival of the railway on regional population patterns, even with the tools for spatial analysis offered by the GIS software. For this reason, it is important to introduce the figure of urban agglomerations; they can help us to make a simple, yet significant, differentiation between the effects of railways on large population nuclei and on lower level population centres that take advantage of their intermediate positions between their larger neighbours. (Show less)

The arrival of rapid, rail transport in the countryside offered new opportunities for the marketing of local agricultural products and, eventually, intensified competition at regional, national, and international scales. This paper uses GIS and spatial analysis to examine the ways in which this process led to a restructuring of agriculture and population change over time and geography in rural Britain and France. In adjusting to changes in transport, market demand, and competition, farmers pursued a number of alternatives, including a shift from cereal growing to stock-raising and dairy farming, from mixed agriculture to labor intensive market gardening, and, significantly, a return to small farming. The consequent “rural exodus” was a great concern to contemporaries even though the extent of depopulation was often exaggerated. The use of historical GIS brings the temporal geography of these interconnected changes in rail transport, agrarian restructuring, and rural population movements into sharper focus. (Show less)

Understanding the complexities of change over time and space is an important challenge for social scientist; indeed, during the last 10 years geographers and historians have endeavored to bring temporal analysis into Geographic Information Systems methods, but a good solution is still lacking. To move beyond the temporal limits of Spatial Data Analysis tools (ESDA) and such tools as the Geoda freeware of Luc Ancelin and his team, we propose in this paper to demonstrate a space-time analysis tool called “Geographer”. The space-time capabilities of this freeware will be illustrated using data on agriculture and demographic change in France from 1830 to 1930. (Show less)