Learning from Rome:Making Sense of Complex Built Environments in the Digital Age

To walk through a city, stroll down a street, and pause in a public square is to be enveloped in history.¹ But people typically pass through built environments without considering them as totalities of topography, architecture, and human history—like hiking a landscape without understanding its geology and ecology. Scholars, however, seek to grasp how and why humans have formed and re-formed built environments, preserving, altering, or destroying fabric over time. With the advent of digital, data-driven approaches and increasingly powerful mapping tools, can we better make sense of complex, historically rich built environments?

The case of Rome offers an ideal opportunity to address this question. Often compared to a palimpsest, the Eternal City has historical layers that span millennia. Consider, for example, the modern-day Piazza Navona, the proportions and curved northern end of which recall the ancient Stadium of Domitian still partially present underground. The city is a vast...