Healthscaping Urban Europe - Project overview - Ghent part

Public health is often thought of as a by-product of modernity, yet historical evidence shows that numerous stakeholders in medieval Europe took steps to reduce risks and improve health incomes. The ERC project “Healthscaping Urban Europe: Bio-Power, Space and Society, 1200-1500” (grant no. 724114) explores this idea by bringing together a group of historians and archaeologists of the era to explore how urban residents in two of Europe’s most urbanized regions – Italy and the Low Countries – thought about and pursued population-level health. The project integrates written, visual and material sources with archaeological data to examine preventative health interventions in GIS, suggesting that these were well developed before the onset of the Black Death (1346-1353). This paper deals with the Ghent case study. It describes the datasets we created and the technical choices we made