Cadastre

A cadastre is here defined as a parcel-based and official geographical information system that renders identification and attributes of the parcels of a jurisdiction. A jurisdiction is a named area in which the same statute law applies, for example, a country or one of the German Länder or a state within the United States. Likewise, a parcel is a named and contiguous piece of land of uniform ownership. This definition of cadastre bypasses the fact that persons are involved. Information on persons is recorded to describe their rights in land as owners, mortgagees, or holders of other rights. The cadastre thus reflects relations among people in their interactions with land and also the change in these relations, for example, in case of sale, inheritance, or compulsory sale. The information is recorded in the cadastre by means of professionals and others, who relate wishes of end users to the formal and informal norms of the jurisdiction and facilitate the updating of the cadastre. The essential human environment of the cadastre implies that development of the cadastre and its related rule set should focus on the social relations among people in their interactions in rights in land, rather than on technology issues.

The term cadastre is ambiguous, as the following section on “History” shows. The recorded facts and the processes that produce and disseminate them, in short, the technical core of the cadastre, may be conceived as a closed and predictable information system. Such systems can be designed and constructed through human agency. Research based on these assumptions is reported under the section on “The Cadastral Core.” The technical core is embedded in and exchanges information with a wider human society. The codes and norms of this exchange are assumed to be too varied to allow for a detailed description and as a consequence also too complex to control and change at will. The outcomes of dedicated efforts to introduce title and cadastral systems in developing countries supportŝ this position (see the section on “Development”). The research approach of the “new institutional economics” and related heterodox economics is used as a basis for recent investigations that aim at understanding the change process (see the closing section on “The Institutional Frame for Cadastral Development”).