Intro to Land Use Research

Land use research, as I practice it, sits between surveying and archive reading. GIS is the table both of them eat on.

A working definition

Land use research is the work of describing how a particular piece of ground has been used, claimed, drawn, contested, and re-drawn over time, in enough detail that a planning decision made today can take that history into account without pretending to resolve it.

What counts as a source

• Surveyed records — registry plans, cadastral maps, official survey reports, GNSS logs.
• Archival records — estate maps, plantation inventories, colonial dispatches, court records, newspaper notices, parish surveys.
• Planning records — current planning files, zoning maps, environmental impact reports.
• Field records — site visits, photographs, conversations with neighbours, walked paths, oral history that is not in any archive.

Where GIS sits

QGIS and ArcGIS Pro are the working surface where these sources get stacked, compared, and disagreed with. The software is not the research. The disagreement is the research. The software just lets you see the disagreement more clearly than paper ever could.

“GIS is the table the surveyor and the archive sit at. Neither of them is the table.”