Characterisation of the historic urban landscape through the Aristotelian four causes: towards comprehensive GIS databases

Abstract

The Historic Urban Landscape provides a basis to comprehensively study the city, considering the numerous agents and stakeholders involved in the urban phenomenon. However, the characterisation of the city is challenging, due to the numerous ways of reading and using the city. Although several theoretical approaches address the process of documenting the city, there is still a gap related to the design of a generalised, holistic, and comprehensive framework. This article aims to contribute to this purpose by discussing the concept of the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) and its implications for the characterisation of the urban phenomena. The Aristotelian theory of the causes is proposed here as a suitable approach for the description, characterisation, and analysis of virtually any entity by first discussing its theoretical basis and then testing it in a real building located in the historical city, Guimarães, Portugal. A set of tools related to Geographic Information System databases are comprehensively explored during the implementation process of the approach, allowing to identify and discuss a set of limitations, challenges, and opportunities.