Les dépenses de pavage du Domaine de la ville de Paris au XV e siècle montrent que les axes qui mènent aux portes de l’enceinte de Charles V concentrent les investissements, même si d’autres rues, aux dimensions plus modestes, ont toutefois de plus en plus tendance à faire l’objet de réfections de pavage à partir de la seconde moitié du siècle. Par ailleurs, au même moment, chacune des opérations de la chaîne du pavage des rues (livraison des pavés, transports des matières premières, pavage) fait l’objet d’une spécialisation professionnelle, rendue peut-être possible par une amélioration du contexte économique, et à laquelle doivent s’adapter le receveur des comptes et les scribes en introduisant diverses innovations dans l’écriture comptable de ces dépenses de pavage.
This article argues that medieval urban authorities developed nodal spatial strategies to mitigate various risks—from accidents, floods, and military vulnerability to sickness and scarcity. Using digital methods (Geographic Information System [GIS]) to map public works during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in one large city (Ghent), it offers a fuller understanding of urban governance in dialogue with a city’s topography and environmental and sociopolitical challenges. Ghent’s authorities invested in gates, bridges, markets, thoroughfares, key buildings, and waterworks. Tracing their interventions reveals the city as an interconnected, moving system, an economy of movement. Attention concentrated on these points because several types of interests related to communal well-being converged there. The city was thus capable of absorbing shocks (war, floods) through regular maintenance and monitoring. Tracing public works that promoted mobility can therefore tell us much about power dynamics and how communities functioned in practice.
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