Digital Mapping, Cultural Heritage and the New Urban History of Milan

Mocarelli Luca, University of Milan Bicocca
Rocco Ronza, Catholic University of Milan

Italy’s most advanced city and the main site of the country’s digital industry, Milan has been recently the object of attempts to apply digital mapping, GIS and geovisualization technologies to the city’s history and historical heritage. In the wake of the 2015 Expo, which re-launched tourist flows towards the city, several projects involving the local academic community, corporate actors, and public institutions started attempts to create a comprehensive “H-GIS” digital infrastructure with the aim of reinforcing the identity of the city and boosting its global appeal. While these projects contributed to the resurgence of interest in Milan’s past and heritage among the local population, none of them managed to establish a permanent infrastructure that made the spatialized historical information on the city available to the research community and the general public. After exploring how technology-related and context-specific factors (like the fragmentation of urban governance) contributed to this failure, the paper presents how the debate over H-GIS projects has inspired a book-length publishing project on the modern history of Milan which was directly inspired by the conceptual innovation that digital mapping is bringing to urban history research.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 137. Geospatial Approaches in European Urban History