Facilitating Public Access to and Participation in Documentation of Historic Urban Landscapes through Traditional and Web-based GIS Technologies

Ref.: 197
Key theme: 03 Visual integrity of historic urban landscapes
Date of reception: 16/11/2008

AUTHORS (*Main author)

BARRIER, Catherine * (United States of America) - Widening Access to Historic Urban Landscape Documentation

ABSTRACT

The City of New Orleans comprises one of the largest Historic Urban Landscapes in the world. One hundred and thirty nine square miles (360 square kilometers) of the City comprised of over 40,000 buildings and structures lie within historic districts listed in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. These districts comprise over 77% of the land area of the city. Over sixteen thousand of these buildings are protected by local historic preservation design review ordinances. Until recently, historic survey information on most areas has been stored in paper based records. This has limited use of this data by City agencies and for academic research and analysis purposes. As importantly, survey images begin to lose value almost as soon as they are taken, due to the dynamic character of the urban environment. After Hurricane Katrina, the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency undertook a historic resource survey of 40,000 buildings and structures that make up the City's historic urban landscape. This survey has produced over 120,000 geotagged photographic images, linked to data on building types, styles, details, and other relevant information. In 2007, Tulane University funded the development of a white paper to outline best practices and opportunities available through new technologies to manage this information through Geographic Information System (GIS) technology.While a number of cities both in the U.S. and internationally have implemented some sort of GIS for the management of historic resource data, many of these systems are intimidating to the casual public user and difficult for non- governmental agencies to use in data analysis. Because these systems present information on individual structures, they frequently fail to convey the overall character of the historic landscape of the City. While integration of survey data into the current City GIS must be part of any data management plan, opportunities for innovative solutions based on web-based GIS platforms and applications were also identified in the white paper. Web-based GIS platforms such as Google Earth and Google Maps allow the display of geotagged photographs and associated data in a format increasingly familiar to the public. Some of the advantages and opportunities of these technologies include: * Increasing availability of this data to the local and international publics in a widely utilized formato * Tapping the increasing number of geotagged images produced by the local and visitor communities (currently numbering over 128,000 images in the online Flickr community alone) for updated images of historic resources * Facilitating the analysis of this information for research purposes through online GIS applications on Google Earth and similar mapping projects * Creating accessible solutions for developers seeking information on potential infill opportunities and neighborhood character to encourage contextually appropriate contemporary design.Tulane and the City of New Orleans are planning for the creation of such a web-based GIS solution for the management of historic resource data, one that can be easily used by other cities and states in the US and internationally, potentially making data on hundreds of thousands of historic resources accessible to a wide range of publics.

REFERENCES

City of New Orleans HDLC. "HDLC: HDLC Home." http://www.cityofno.com/pg-99-1-hdlc-home.aspx Eppich, Rand, et. al. (Getty Conservation Institute). "Geographic Information Systems and the State of Databases as they relate to Historic Resources." ICOMOS 2008 Conference.
Global Heritage Fund. Global Heritage--Mirador. http://www.globalheritagefund.org/globalheritagenetwork.html
Los Angeles Department of City Planning. Zone Infomation and Zone Access System 2008. http://zimas.lacity.org/
National Register of Historical Places - LOUISIANA (LA), Orleans County. http://www.nationalregisterofhistoricplaces.com/la/Orleans/districts.html
INTERVIEWS Rand Eppich, Senior Project Manager, Getty Conservation Institute. Gail Lazarus, Survey Manager, Federal Emergency Management Agency. Elliott Perkins, Executive Director, New Orleans Historic District Landmarks Commission. Andrew Turner, CTO, FortiusOne.