Preliminary Programme

The purpose of our work was to develop a model to measure the influence of railway accessibility on population evolution. The model was tested on a micro-region around the city of Covilhã, between 1878 and 1930. This was an isolated area on the north of Portugal, stretching from the mountain to the plateau, with a relatively rich agriculture and a long tradition of woollen industry.
In Portuguese census, population data is usually associated with parishes. However, in the region under consideration population distribution is not homogeneous and tends to be spatially aggregated. Therefore we preferred to work with settlements.
Accessibility of each agglomeration to the railway network was calculated using a Map Algebra methodology. The model takes into account variables such as rivers, topography, distance to nearest roadway and to railway stations.
We were able to observe how and in what way railway accessibility influenced changes in this region. We based our analysis on the comparison of historical and statistical data before and after 1893, the year in which this region was finally served by a railway line, allowing a long-term perspective. (Show less)

The Northern Ireland Troubles from 1968 to the end of the twentieth century and specifically its impact on the city of Belfast has been the subject of a huge amount of academic attention which has spanned a wide range of disciplines. The original ‘Troubles’ of the early 1920s, on the other hand, have received comparatively far less attention, despite the fact that this intense period witnessed far greater levels of violence, notable not only for its unashamedly sectarian tone but for the remarkable nihilism which characterised so much of its execution.

This paper will draw on original research which has mapped all conflict-related fatalities in the city during this period using a wide range of primary and secondary sources. It will relate these patterns to the microscale socio-economic and religious geographies of the city using individual-level data from the nearest available census, which has effectively repopulated a part of the city as it existed at its demographic and mercantile apogee in 1911, the year Titanic was launched.

In doing so, this paper will argue that the judicious application of Geographical Information Systems (G.I.S.) technologies in addition to the digitisation of under-utilised primary evidence can provide a powerful architecture which not only questions historical orthodoxies about the city’s development and provides a potential blueprint for ambitious historical repopulation initiatives elsewhere, but which also puts the individual back into our appreciation of historical analysis. (Show less)

Since 1945 Germany has witnessed substantial changes in the spatial distribution of its population. Eastern Germany, which had in average in 1946 a higher population density than western Germany, has lost 1/5th of its population. It shrunk from 20 Mio to 16 Mio inhabitants. Western Germany, on the other hand, has registered an increase of around 30% from 48 Mio to 65 Mio people. The GDR and its legacy played a substantial role in these trends. However, taking a look at earlier time periods shows that at least since the mid 19th century there was a general tendency that the eastern part of the German Empire was not keeping up with population increases observed in the western part. This suggests that beyond the GDR legacy there are more general factors existing, causing a West-East-gradient pattern in the population development.

The study of long-term population trends at small geographical scale in Germany is challenging, as there have been many changes in the administrative division of its territories over time. This study is able to account for these changes, as it utilizes a district-level historical GIS for Germany covering the period 1820 until today. This has been produced as part of the MPIDR Population History GIS Collection. It allows combining the population data with information about soil quality, location of mineral resources, distance to important transport and communication corridors and other socio-economic data. First results show that in the early 19th century the soil quality was at least in rural areas still an important predictor for the population density. This was also the only period, in which the East saw higher population growth compared to the West. But with industrialization and improvements in agricultural output and transportation progressing, other factors gained relevance in influencing population development. It seems that in this process, western Germany could benefit from its favorable position as part of the “blue banana arc” (Brunet, 1989), stretching from south-east England across the Benelux countries and the Rhine area to the regions north and south of the Alps. This area has already been in the 19th century an important centre of economic activity in Europe and has since then even gained relevance. From the mid 19th century on both western Germany and today’s eastern Germany saw much higher population increases compared to the territories east of the Oder-Neiße line. Since World War I also today’s eastern Germany could apart from Berlin not keep track with the population increases observed in western Germany. (Show less)

Patterns of population distribution in Portugal and Spain have always been an important research topic. Given the dramatic territorial imbalances registered in the last decades, population distribution became also a matter of concern for the whole society.
Nonetheless, most research produced so far has been focused on national contexts, thus missing an overall picture of the historical evolution of the Peninsula at large. In this paper we tried to overcome this limitation and, by enlarging the field of analysis, to put national and regional developments in a new perspective. Special attention will be given to cross-border areas and to the frontier effect.
The new insights on population evolution over a long period of time and at different spatial scales were made possible thanks to the construction of a Historical GIS on the Iberian Peninsula. The creation of this transnational system, capable of preserving information at micro level and the analysis of population evolution posed a series of methodological problems that had to be addressed, which resulted primarily from the fact that we were dealing with alphanumeric and cartographic data independently produced by two states, with important differences in their internal spatial structures.
This paper was prepared in the framework of the ESF collaborative research project The Development of European Waterways, Road and Rail Infrastructures: A Geographical Information System for the History of European Integration (1825-2005) and was funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). (Show less)