Lessons from two (contemporary) wide surveys on vernacular architecture and traditional settlements in Galicia and Asturias (Spain)

Abstract

[Abstract] For a long time, managing vernacular architecture has been a cultural goal. Just cultural reasons moved people to take care of our vernacular architecture. Now on, in Europe, economical crisis also reinforces the necessity of rebuilding, instead of building new dwellings. So a strong effort is expected to be developed in the next future to implement surveys to identify, protect, preserve and share built heritage. We pretend to expose in our paper how we managed Geographical Information Systems (GIS) tools to make possible affording large scale surveys and what they can offer to its users and the society as a whole regarding the futre of our past. Our surveys Catálogo de los Núcleos Rurales de Asturias (2007) [Inventory of Asturian Rural Settlements] and Estudio do Habitat Rural de Galicia (2009) [Survey of Galician Rural Habitat] were both built over a database related to more than 5,000 settlements each. This GIS surveys, for the use of Asturias and Galician governments, are able to be explored in a lot of different ways as we could imagine related to the presence of vernacular architectures in the territory: promoting tourism activities, managing ecological agriculture, acting in degraded areas, reusing traditional villages, etc. Motivations behind these studies could seem different, but as far as we know, we recognize the same workflow: a survey stage, an analysis stage, and a publication stage. Data collectors started the survey gathering together information and compile it in an data sheet, using mobile devices. In the analysis stage, a domain expert examines all the information collected. Finally, during the publication stage, the results of the study are published in interfaces that computers produce automatically upon request of each different “explorer”. Using GIS to survey vernacular architecture and rural hamlets has allowed us successfully to improve a wide variety of particular studies as it is easy to overlap and compare data with any other digital information. In this way, analysis processes and its rich and clear visualization help to find and understand dynamics that would not be discovered using non GIS tools.