Visualization of the evolution and development of the tissue of urban concentrations. The case of the community of Siatista, Greece

Περίληψη

This paper deals with the temporal visualization of the ways the residential tissue of the community of Siatista (Fig. 1) evolves and develops. The aim of the study is the completion of the insufficient, so far, picture of this area. Such a depiction will be achieved through Geographic, Cartographic and Urban Planning tools, methods and techniques. In times of economic and therefore of social-spatial crisis, the analysis, comparison, superimposition and combination of capabilities offered by the scientific areas discussed above, together with the contemporary technologies, such as Geographical Information Systems (G.I.S.), constitute the basis of the documentation of the settlements’ and of the knowledge required to understand the factors that formed their structure and function. The study focuses on four - main axes: 1. Localization of all the settlements of Siatista’s community. 2. Multi-temporal monitoring of territorial changes, by making use of historical conventional charts, mental maps, diagrams and orthophotomaps of the area. 3. Processing and combine all the geographic and cartographic material in an integrated record and management system. 4. The above system was employed for: a) studying all the factors that influenced the organisation and the structure of the study area through time and b) the geographic and land planning typology and classification of the settlements. In this paper, a synthetic framework for the recognition of the settlements is proposed. The framework comprises: a) the optical interpretation of images and maps for the extraction of geographic and thematic information concerning the tissue of the settlements and b) the application of literary analysis methods in combination with the subtractive method in existing conventional maps. There is an established fundamental relation between the literature and the maps. Both of them assist humans in perceiving a location in space. According to Turchi [2004] the literature sketches the words from imagination on a page and maps portray the 3-D world on a 2-D piece of paper. Similarly the imaginary space of Siatistas’ community during the 18th and 19th century can be visualized and mapped with words or cartographic symbols, as described by Piatti and Hurni [2009]. Further to the above established research methods, the depiction of urban morphological developments and the development of the tissue can be studied on a specific ontology, according to Hubner and Golay [2007].