EAA 2023: Abstract

In Central Europe traditional studies of urban architecture were focusing on artistic quality and functional changes of the house layout. Synthesis are usually limited to the most interesting buildings.Very rarely it is possible to characterise urban housing as a whole phenomenon. Most studies about inequality in pre-industrial society are based on written sources - mainly tax records. We would like to discuss some limitations of methods of evaluating inequalities, such as the Gini coefficient based on tax records and analysis of living space area in the case of preindustrial cities in Central Europe.
In our studies we test a model of wealth distributions based on analysis of houses based on written, architectural and archaeological sources and iconography. We developed a method of evaluating the city's residential space, in which location (quality of neighbourhood), architectural quality of the building (elements of art, building material, structural complexity) and access to the facilities were identified as the main factors of the utility value of the real estate. We verify the accuracy of the proposed model against tax records. The result suggests that it is possible to simulate distribution of wealth in the cityscape based on other indicators. Taking a problem of comparing wealth distribution in different towns, we assume that the scale of inequality may depend on the size of the city. The ways in which luxury is spread is correlated with urban morphology and cultural and political context.

inequality, preindustrial city, tax records, housing

Oral presentation

  Abstract (PDF)

Maria Legut-Pintal²

Mikołaj Grosel¹