Artemis-UA: the 'Blueprint of the City' - an open mapping infrastructure for research into past and present urban waterscapes. (Artemis-UA)

As recurrent flood disasters and countless policy plans demonstrate, we are in desperate need of more 'water-resilient' cities. This calls for changes in policy, infrastructures, but also in the way we interact with our natural and 'blue' environment. One of the roles the academic community has is to provide the fundamental knowledge to underpin well-informed decision making and to raise awareness within local communities. Gathering and analyzing the required data, however, is hindered by the lack of a common spatial infrastructure, which allows mapping the long-term evolution of urban waterscapes and analyzing the complex socio-ecological interactions that made them a product of centuries of human reconfiguring of river floodplains. Artemis-UA will create this open mapping infrastructure for research on cities and their blue infrastructure, in a long-term historical perspective (16th-20th centuries). It will do so based on a unique data-source, which sets us apart internationally: the extremely rich (but dispersed) historical map collections that Belgian archives hold and which document - often handwritten and in incredible detail - the human use and reconfiguration of (urban) rivers, river wetlands, water wells, sewers, drainage ditches etc. from the sixteenth century until today. Designed as the UA-contribution to the Artemis FWO-Medium Scale Research infrastructure (initiated at UA, but only funded at UGent), Artemis-UA unites specialists at the Centre for Urban History (CUH), the Centre for Research on Environmental and Social Change (CRESC), AntweRp Cultural HEritage Sciences (ARCHES) and the Urban Studies Institute (USI). These UAntwerp research groups are at the forefront of international and interdisciplinary research on urban waterscapes, its management and inherent risks and opportunities. Artemis-UA will focus on a study area that is in the heart of many of their research projects: the Scheldt valley, which was recently proclaimed as National Park and is part of the UNESCO Global Geopark Schelde Delta. For three cities within the Scheldt valley - Antwerp, Dendermonde and Lokeren - Artemis-UA will realize a 'blueprint' by 1) collecting relevant handwritten/local maps covering these cities and their (peri-)urban areas over the long-term, processing & enriching these maps by 2) crowdsourced georeferencing and 3) automated landscape feature extraction and 4) publishing the derived spatial data publicly via an Open Mapping Infrastructure. The long-term focus, the vast collection of ca. 300 highly detailed maps and the publication of both exactly located maps and derived 'research ready' geodata turn Artemis-UA into a truly groundbreaking and unique infrastructure. Artemis-UA will elevate the University of Antwerp to an internationally renowned knowledge hub for historically-informed analysis and decision-making on urban water challenges, further strengthening the leading position of UA-research in the (socio-)environmental analysis of rivers, river estuaries and flood management. More specifically, mapping and reconstructing long-term changes in the urban waterscape has huge valorization potential for any research on 1) urban planning and urban development; 2) inclusive water governance; 3) the unequal exposure to and awareness of water-related risks and 4) the integration of water heritage into climate adaptation strategies.

Keywords:HISTORICAL LOCAL AND HANDWRITTEN MAPS, OPEN MAPPING INFRASTRUCTURE, URBAN WATERSCAPES

Disciplines:Environmental and sustainable planning, Cartography, Geospatial information systems, Archival, repository and related sciences, Landscape and ecological history