The city and the surrounding countryside on maps: on the history of a spatial differentiation

Abstract

The article deals with the history of a spatial differentiation that is becoming less and less important in the present: the urban-rural divide. For this purpose, a spatial analytical approach is chosen that questions how urban spaces are constituted, used and perceived— and how urban spaces, their perception and representation change over time. The sources are early modern town views and selected urban maps. The primary question is how city views and maps represent their city’s boundaries, the demarcation of suburbs and the surrounding countryside. This demarcation is understood as an iconographic construction that also shaped ideas of urban and rural territory, urban and rural lifestyles, i.e., urbanity and rurality. However, by closely analysing individual maps—in this case the Zurich map by Jos Murer, as well as a Paris map by Jean Delagrive—the article shows that the depiction of extra-urban territory or suburbs could have political or administrative explanations. At the latest in the eighteenth century, maps therefore also became an instrument of urban administrations, which sometimes tried to prevent the expansion of urban space.