Characterisation of the Historic Urban Landscape through the Aristotelian Four Causes: Towards Comprehensive GIS Databases

Rafael Ramírez Eudave,Tiago Miguel Ferreira

doi:10.3390/rs13101879

Abstract

The Historic Urban Landscape provides a basis to comprehensively study the city, considering the numerous agents and stakeholders involved in the urban phenomenon. However, the characterisation of the city is challenging, due to the numerous ways of reading and using the city. Although several theoretical approaches address the process of documenting the city, there is still a gap related to the design of a generalised, holistic, and comprehensive framework. This article aims to contribute to this purpose by discussing the concept of the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) and its implications for the characterisation of the urban phenomena. The Aristotelian theory of the causes is proposed here as a suitable approach for the description, characterisation, and analysis of virtually any entity by first discussing its theoretical basis and then testing it in a real building located in the historical city, Guimarães, Portugal. A set of tools related to Geographic Information System databases are comprehensively explored during the implementation process of the approach, allowing to identify and discuss a set of limitations, challenges, and opportunities.

Highlights

The documentation of any entity begins by recognising its representative attributes, the convenient code to be used, and how the codification will be conveniently organised and stored
The organisation based in the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) causal structure is expected to permit the localisation of virtually any potential attribute, metric, or query used to describe the elements of the HUL
It is possible to identify a series of intermediate steps that may have been considered between the HUL and the buildings

Summary

Introduction

The documentation of any entity begins by recognising its representative attributes, the convenient code to be used, and how the codification will be conveniently organised and stored. It is convenient to recognise that the whole documentation process is meaningful for determining the representativeness of the objects when decoded from the documental source. As an early-stage step in the process, the survey design and planning have a relevant role in obtaining representative models. These preparatory activities are sometimes underestimated when, for example, a determined set of attributes to be surveyed is given as a standardised model for a determined purpose. If there is a consistent truth condition in the real world, the sentence can be a reliable sign of reality [1]. The consistency between the real-word truth condition and the properties claimed by its sign is the key to a proper encoding

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