Elsevier

Land Use Policy

Volume 131, August 2023, 106740
Land Use Policy

Austrian Cadastre still in use – Example proceedings to determine the legal status of land property in southern Poland

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2023.106740Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The policy of the communist period led to the erasure of information about boundaries of individual property titles.

  • In Poland, Austrian cadastral maps are still used in court proceedings to establish property boundaries.

  • The Austrian cadastre makes it possible to reconstruct the extent of ownership rights to land.

  • Numerous examples of proceedings demonstrate the utilitarian character of Austrian cadastre documentation.

  • For years Austrian cadastre documentation was treated only as archival and used for scientific purposes.

Abstract

The cadastral map is a large-scale cartographic record of property ownership that preserves the dimensions and shape of an owned land parcel on the earth surface, but also the spatial relationship of all individual parcels to each other. There are hundreds of thousands of cadastral maps to be found all over the world. Cadastral maps aided land assignment and taxation, presenting statistics essential for territorial administration, or as a symbol of state control over land. The historical land cadastre introduced in the early nineteenth century in the Austrian Empire, was the foundation of many countries' land register systems. One of the areas it covered was Galicia, a southern part of Poland annexed by Austria in the eighteenth century during the Partitions. The study evaluates the use of old Austrian cadastral maps in southern Poland, mainly in matters related to property boundaries. The Austrian Cadastre lost its importance in Poland after the Second World War due to sociopolitical changes. Still, it became a source of data on real property boundaries once again after the 1989 transformation, which restituted and enhanced ownership rights. Today, modern court proceedings on boundary disputes, easement appurtenant decisions, release of property, grant of property title, or usucaption often need to refer to historical legal sources, including the Austrian Cadastre (cadastral maps and land tax registers) to determine ownership boundaries. The paper presents numerous examples of modern uses of historical land cadastre documents, including cadastral maps and land tax registers in land surveying and legal procedures in Poland. The results show that data from the historical land cadastre remain a source of information when determining ownership boundaries despite the time passed. Therefore, the cadastral documentation offers not only historical and research value but also a practical one.

Introduction

The cadastre was the primary tool for effective land management and tax collection already in antiquity (Kain and Baigent, 1992, Le Couedic et al., 2012). The goals of the cadastral system seem to be globally universal despite significant differences in legislation, regulations, and geodetic practices among countries (Comparetti and Raimondi, 2019, Grant et al., 2020). First of all, the cadastre was intended as a public authority tool (Scott, 1998). The circumstances under which people exercise their land ownership rights are dynamic and change as public, legal, and societal systems evolve. Historically speaking, titles in land were volatile. Their primary purpose was to preserve soil fertility, facilitate land transactions, and aid the sustainable use of natural resources. Globally, the main land-related rights are ownership and long-term lease (referred to as perpetual usufruct in Poland). These rights are usually controlled through cadastral systems. Other rights, such as easement appurtenant and mortgages are also often managed through land registration systems (Grant et al., 2020).

The role of cadastral systems has changed over time. In the West, this dynamics is described in four phases: feudalism (until 1800), the Industrial Revolution (1800–1950), the post-war reconstruction (1950–1980), and the information revolution (1980–) (Grant et al., 2020). The 1990 s saw the beginning of the construction of Digital Cadastral DataBases (DCSB) to establish an integrated spatial information infrastructure with land data. The land has been increasingly seen as a scarce public resource, hence the importance of its registration. Today, the cadastral system, often referred to as the multifunctional cadastre, collects information on land use and ownership. It is also believed to be the foundation of the effective functioning of every state (Dawidowicz and Zrobek, 2018).

Cadastral systems are classified according to their historical similarities and legal contexts in which they were established and used. The literature identified the German, English, and French cadastre types. The latter can also be referred to as the Latin or American cadastre.

The French (Latin/American) approach focused mainly on improving land taxation efficiency. More sophisticated of its subtypes, such as the Dutch cadastre, considered cadastral mapping the critical component in the land-management process. The German cadastre has two kinds of old, i.e. analogue, cadastral maps. The first group includes those that were integrated with the national network, while the others were made as ‘island’ maps using plane table measurements not tied to the national network. English-style cadastral systems were based on boundary measurements or topographic identification of boundaries. Analogue cadastral maps were used mainly to identify land ownership. The three types of land registration systems represent three different roles, past and present, of the cadastre (Grant et al., 2020). Still, they shared certain characteristics, such as cadastral maps and documents that represented the legal situation: boundary reports for cadastral municipalities, land and buildable plot specifications, and lists of possessors (Brovelli et al., 2012, Pivac et al., 2021).

Old cadastral maps still have significant potential and are used for many purposes (Roic et al., 2021). Historical cadastral maps are a fertile source for historians. They can be employed to investigate the societal and economic circumstances of changes in land use or ownership structure (Frajer and Fiedor, 2021, Fuchs et al., 2015, Hamre et al., 2007, Kim et al., 2014, Osgouei et al., 2022, Pindozzi et al., 2016). Biologists and ecologists can use them to look into transformations in forests and meadows (Kuhn et al., 2021, Marull et al., 2015, Zarzycki and Bedla, 2017) or changes in vegetation composition (Aggemyr and Cousins, 2012). Old cadastral data can also give insight into the mosaic of parcels (Fanta et al., 2022, Hermosilla et al., 2012), changes in cultural landscapes (Amici et al., 2017), anthropogenic pressure (Sobala, 2021), and other phenomena. When digitalised and georeferenced, old cadastral maps offer a significant research, geodesy, and legal potential (Roic et al., 2021). There are many geoportals globally where users can view old cadastral maps (Brovelli et al., 2012; Cuca et al., 2013).

The Austrian Cadastre was one of many cadastral systems across Western and Central Europe, all of which related to the specific needs of a state. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, cadastral maps and land tax registers were used mainly by the public administration to calculate taxes (Kain and Baigent, 1992). Land tax cadastre documentation was primarily a source of information about the location, area, use, and class of land, secured ownership title recorded in land tax registers, and facilitated property sale and access to loans (Fuchs et al., 2015, Przegon et al., 2017). After the fall of the Empire, its cadastral system was taken over by the new states, which adapted its various aspects to the new circumstances. After the Second World War, the cadastral system of the Habsburg Empire evolved in various directions in different countries that used to constitute it. To some extent, it became a source for modern cadastral systems in Serbia, Montenegro and the Republic of Srpska (Govedarica et al., 2021), Italy (Timar et al., 2013), Central Bohemia (Devaty et al., 2019) and Austria (Hernik et al., 2020). As a documentary and cartographical record, the Franciscan Cadastre is an irreplaceable and exceptionally valuable source of information (Bicik et al., 2001). These countries use the historical documentation of the Franciscan Cadastre inherited after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to various extents and in different ways. Thanks to their spatial resolution down to the level of individual plots or patches with different land-use types, old cartographic sources, as well as additional information about attributes, represent a vital source of information for land use reconstruction (Forejt et al., 2020) to trace the impact of human activity on the long-term land use development and management (Fuchs et al., 2015), and to evaluate features for landscape planning and forest extent (Kaim et al., 2016, Lieskovsky et al., 2018), land abandonment processes (Kanianska et al., 2014, Kolecka et al., 2017), or parcel fragmentation (Sklenicka et al., 2017). The Austrian cadastre has been used the most in countries not affected by the Soviet Union, such as Austria and Italy. Austria started to digitise available cadastral maps on the national scale in 1989. The project was completed in 2004. Until 2019, 83% of the current designations of land parcels still date back to the Franciscan Cadastre (Ernst et al., 2019). Therefore, the cadastral maps have been fully used, and the modern land and property register system is based on them (Abart et al., 2011, Hernik et al., 2020). The Franciscan Cadastre used in Lombardy, Italy, was adapted to the cadastral systems in other parts of the country to create a unified system (Timar et al., 2013). Croatia digitalised the cadastre from the 1990 s till 2008. Researchers believe that the original cadastral data from the Franciscan Cadastre were used in about 70% to create the current land register in Croatia (Ernst et al., 2019). The Franciscan Cadastre was digitalised in Slovenia and Czechia as well (Rakusa et al., 2021). Still, it is used mostly for research because the original parcel structure has been partially lost due to land enclosure processes during communism (Banski, 2017). Furthermore, the interest in using historical cadastral documentation has stimulated its digitalisation in other countries formerly belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Pivac et al., 2021).

In post-socialist countries, such as Poland, political and socioeconomic barriers slowed down or completely hindered free-market property trading and devaluated individual ownership rights (Banski, 2017) even though they were retained and legally founded on historical registers and cadastral maps. It was an effect of the communist government's effort to blur information about boundaries of individual ownership with a new legal system (the definition of the plot replaced the definition of the parcel) after the Second World War and with nation-wide expropriation, land enclosure, and division of large pieces of the property reserved for the nobility and residents of Lviv.

The old Austrian maps were no longer updated in Poland after the fall of the Empire. The land register system of the new state, now under a socialist influence, was not based on the Franciscan Cadastre. A changed definition of the primary unit of area was among the primary causes of significant problems. In the old cadastre, it was the parcel, while the post-war land register system used the plot. They are defined further in the paper. The introduction of a new land register system map with new plot labels breached the link between the register system documentation and land and mortgage registers that define the legal status of real property. Another factor that led to the discontinuity between the cadastre and land register system was the change in boundaries. Legal boundaries were replaced by use boundaries. The land register system, established in the late 1970 s, was built based on the possession, meaning the person who farmed the land when the national survey was taken became its owner.

The discontinuity between the old cadastre and modern land register system in Poland made it necessary to draw up geodetic documentation to facilitate comparing plot labels in land register documents and land and mortgage registers with those in the old cadastre. Such a ‘synchronisation list’ contains a cartographical and text part. The cartographical part contains a register system map extract while the text part contains data from the land and property register documentation, land and mortgage registers, and other archived documents.

Old cadastral documents in Poland are now available as archive resources in Land Surveying and Cartographic Documentation Centres and the State Archives (Hernik et al., 2013).

The Franciscan Cadastre was introduced in 1817 in the territory of the former Austrian Empire and covered (partially or entirely) eleven current European countries. Those surveyed in whole are Czechia, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Poland, Ukraine, Serbia, Romania, Italy, and Montenegro were partially measured (Fig. 1.A.).

Emperor Franz I initiated surveys and mapping of the entire Austrian Empire on a scale of 1:2880. According to literature, the uniform cadastral system encompassed over 500 thousand square kilometres and more than 30.5 thousand cadastral municipalities (localities) (Abart et al., 2011). The land tax cadastre was introduced to the Austrian Empire for two reasons: for fiscal purposes as a base for calculating land tax and to register ownership titles and other rights to land (real property). Cadastral documentation consisted of two parts: graphics and description. The graphics included a 1:2880 cadastral map or, in exceptional cases, maps with multiplied scales 1:5760, 1:1440, 1:720, indication sketches, and field sketches. Field sketches were original documents drawn manually directly during the measurement. They contained the boundary marking methods. This way, they could be used as a minor control for supplemental surveys. The descriptive part included a parcel protocol, land property sheets, an index, an alphabetic list of land possessors, and mortgage records. Moreover, summaries of parcels, their classes, and net income were recorded for statistical purposes.

The cadastre surveys followed a uniform triangulation for defined basic units of area, cadastral municipalities, which were administrative units headed by the municipality administrator. The parcel, the smallest unit of area used to identify pieces of land was defined in the 1824 Instructions (Instruction zur Ausführung, 1817) as a continuous area of land use or its part that was an independent ownership or occupation subject matter (also as a specific unit of land larger than 25 square fathoms (ca. 90 square metres) and bound to the ownership and the type of cadastral culture. To measure detailed features for the original map, countries ruled by the Austrian Empire were divided into districts or regions.

Using a plane table and the combined intersection and resection methods, the surveyors determined the positions of main turning points of roads, water bodies, complexes of parcels and so-called farmland lines. Individual parcels (independent subject matters of ownership rights with uniform land use) were measured linearly and recorded in field sketches. This method improved mapping accuracy (Lisec and Navratil, 2014).

Studies on the use of maps from the historical Franciscan Cadastre demonstrated that plane table surveys exhibited levels of accuracy that were entirely satisfactory for land-use change research considering past surveying and reproduction methods (Frajer and Fiedor, 2021). Plane table measurements from 1844 to 1861 were nearly ten times more accurate than surveys from 1817 to 1830. Note that cadastral surveys took place in southern Poland from 1844 (in Krakowskie Voivodeship) to 1854 (Rzeszowskie Voivodeship), which puts them among the best in terms of procedural accuracy and diligence for the Austrian Cadastre.

The 1871 Land Registry Act introduced a dual land administration in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It remains the fundamental land administration concept in Europe and worldwide (Drobez et al., 2017). The combination of land cadastre and land registry supports legal processes and documentation of land ownership and mortgages. The land registry was structured into three parts: A – for real properties, objects where parcel numbers from the land cadastre were listed, B – for owners and ownership, C – for obligations.

Another Austro-Hungarian law, the Land Cadastre Act of 1883, required changes in cadastral municipality boundary lines, parcel owners, parcel boundary lines, or land cover, as well as corrections of errors on cadastral maps and supplementary documentation to be updated (Lisec and Navratil, 2014). Since then, the land cadastre and land registry have been updated continuously and synchronised. All the above suggest that Franciscan Cadastre documentation was kept with the top accuracy, detail, and reliability possible at the time.

After Poland regained independence in 1918, new acts of the law were aimed mainly at unifying the land registry systems in territories of three former invaders. The tax cadastre system of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was no longer improved or modernised. Nevertheless, partition-time documentation remained in use until a new land and property register system was created.

The Polish land register system was unified with the Decree of 1955 on the land and property register system and relevant executive regulations. The effort was divided into two stages. The first one involved the collection of land data from any available source. The other commenced after the 1956 Regulation on land classification was issued. The input data from the first stage were verified against surveyed data. This way, complete register documentation was created (Wolak, 2020).

Law on the land register system subject matter and stakeholders was unified with the 1969 Regulation of the Minister of Agriculture and Public Utilities on the land register. It introduced such notions as the register unit, precincts in municipalities, estates, cities, or city districts, plot, land use unit, record unit, or record group to the land and property register system.

New register system maps from the 1970 s were made on different scales than the Austrian ones: 1:500, 1:1000, 1:2000, and 1: 5000. The primary difference between a register system map and a cadastral map was the different basic units of area. The Franciscan Cadastre used the parcel as the main surface feature. In the new register system, the basic surface feature was a plot defined as a continuous area of land bound by pieces of land subject to a different occupancy. The plot could cover several land use units as opposed to the parcel (see Fig. 2).

Cadastral map designations were used in civil law contracts, agrarian reforms, or the 1971 Property Title Act implementation until new register system maps were introduced. Cadastral parcel identifiers were used in land and mortgage registers as well. Surveying documentation that facilitates juxtaposing plots in the new land register system with parcels from historical records together with their ownership statuses is referred to as the ‘transfer list from cadastral parcels into register system plots’ or the ‘synchronisation list’ and contains a cartographical and text part. The cartographical part contains a register system map extract, while the text part contains data from the land and property register documentation and land and mortgage registers (Kwartnik-Pruc, 2013).

The study evaluates the use of old Austrian cadastral maps in southern Poland, mainly in matters related to property boundaries. Numerous examples of administration and court procedures related to the determination of the legal status of real property and the boundary of the ownership title for usucaption, grant of title, expropriation, delimitation, or separation of a hypothecation body demonstrate the utilitarian character of Austrian cadastre documentation, which for years (for the sake of state propriety) was treated only as archival and used for scientific purposes. The study is founded on selected court proceeding examples where the author was an expert witness. This fact contributes to the originality and uniqueness of the analyses. The Franciscan Cadastre documentation is now used as supplementary material to determine the boundaries of ownership in order to resolve boundary line disputes, separate hypothecation bodies and grant easement appurtenant, grant property title, divide inheritance, and other procedures (cf. Fig. 3.). These problems are particularly relevant to surveyors who perform legal operations, common courts, and property owners in southern Poland, who should be aware that it is possible to determine the historical boundaries of ownership on Austrian cadastre maps with the accuracy equal to that of a base map if they are calibrated and interpreted correctly (Roic et al., 2021).

Because of the complex context of ownership transformations in Poland and usucaption, courts examine various motions related directly or indirectly to the determination of boundaries of ownership, including division of inheritance, determination of the subject matter of usucaption, or boundary line disputes. After the political transformation of 1989 and after years of relegating individual property rights to the background, now it is often necessary to support one's historical claim to land with past surveying and legal documentation, sometimes dating back to pre-war legislation and land tax systems (Hernik et al., 2013).

The paper presents examples of how the Austrian cadastre is used in surveying and legal projects by integrating surveys with analysis of archived materials. They are used because no other reliable sources are available to determine ownership boundaries.

The main reason why it is necessary today to use Franciscan Cadastre maps in current administrative and court proceedings in southern Poland is the historical background of changes in the Polish legal environment. The land ownership relations in Poland are far from easy to interpret. The root causes can be found in the mid-nineteenth century when peasants were granted freehold and after Poland regained independence in 1918 following over twelve decades of partitions. Areas returned to Poland from the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian Partitions differed in terms of development, agricultural systems, jurisdiction, or land taxation. The Prussian Partition covered 48.1% of the area of Poland, Russian, 41.2%, and Austrian, 10.7% (see Fig. 1. B.). The cadastral system was not uniform as well. The Austrian and Prussian Partitions had cadastral offices. In the former Russian Partition, land tax was estimated based on data from the time of freehold grants and declarations made by taxpayers until 1918 (Busko and Meusz, 2014). Post-war Poland of 1918 had five different legal systems precisely because of historical circumstances. First, the existing ones were temporarily preserved. The socioeconomic systems in place in individual areas before the First World War remained active. Therefore, acts of private law differed among the areas of the former Partitions. In the former Congress Kingdom of Poland, civil law was governed by sections II and III of the 1804 Napoleonic Code and Polish mortgage laws from 1818 and 1825. Civil law in eastern voivodeships was regulated by the Digest of Laws of the Russian Empire, vol. X part 1. In Galicia, southern Poland, Civil Code from 1811 amended in 1914–1916 was used. In the former Prussian Partition, civil affairs followed the 1896 German Civil Code. Finally, the southern outskirts of the Second Polish Republic, in Spiš and Orava, were governed by Hungarian law (Płaza, 2001).

Other independent states that emerged after the First World War were better positioned than Poland. The Baltic States, for example, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland, inherited a single legal system from Russia. After the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czechoslovakia had two systems, Austrian and Hungarian. Serbia expanded by absorbing Croatia and Slovenia to establish the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia. France recovered Alsace-Lorraine and imposed its legislation there.

The land tax register system of the invaders was used virtually unamended in interwar Poland. In former Galicia, land tax registers were supposed to be regulated by the Act of 11 December 1906 on rectification of land tax registers. However, the institutions responsible did not manage to verify the hypothetical situation against actual possession. The land tax registers system was substantially outdated, particularly the cadastre on which the registers were founded. Property, especially land owned by smallholders, was traded without registering transactions in land tax registers. Only about 10% of real property was recorded in land tax registers in the 1920 s and 1930 s in Poland. The data in the registers were less than satisfactory because they were based on the cadastre, which did not always respond to current challenges. The discrepancies between the registers and reality were exacerbated by the tendency not to record transfers of rights to property for financial reasons.

The pivotal issue for the unification of the law in Poland in the interwar period was the resolution of differences in legal definitions. Poland inherited four main legal systems after the Partitions (Spiš and Orava as the fifth one) with different legal traditions. The primary task was to unambiguously define the Polish term hipoteka (hypothecation or mortgage), which had two meanings at the time in Polish – both the physical register where rights and encumbrances were recorded and any encumbrance or mortgage recorded there. Hypothecation was to be a lien, where the pledger remains the holder of the pledged goods. It drew on a former Polish legal tradition. Mortgage registers were to be called land tax registers. The term ‘land and mortgage registers’ (literally ‘perpetual registers’) was an official translation of the German Mortgage Act of 1897 but failed to reflect their actual function. Mortgage registers were constantly modified; there was nothing ‘perpetual’ about them as it used to be in the previous Republic of Poland. The subject matter of hypothecation laws in the Congress Kingdom of Poland (southern Poland) was referred to as ‘land property’ under the Hypothecation Act of 1818, while in the former Austrian Partition, it was the ‘hypothecation body’ or ‘register body’. In the former Prussian Partition, it was called a ‘piece of land’. Note that all of the terms mentioned above referred to the notion of ‘immovable good’ or ‘estate’(Górnicki, 2019).

Landed estates in the pre-war territory of Poland were broken up under the Decree of the Polish Committee of National Liberation of 6 September 1944. It was supplemented with the Decree on the agricultural system and settlement on the Recovered Territories and former Free City of Danzig in 1946. A State Land Fund was established with former German land and landed estates exceeding 50 ha (100 ha in western voivodeships of pre-war Poland). Most of its resources were distributed among smallholders, leaseholders, and agricultural workers to create new holdings or appropriately increase the sizes of existing holdings in line with the standard of 5 ha of agricultural land per a medium-sized family. The standards were increased in the western and northern parts of the country, where more land was available. Peasants took over land for a symbolic fee equal to the value of the mean annual yield of the piece of land. The areas that Poland gained in 1945 contained 3.7 million hectares of land for agricultural settlement, which gave the average holding size of 7.9 ha. The total area distributed among 1.1 million families was 6.1 million hectares. Even though peasants received significant amounts of post-landed gentry and post-German land, diminished holdings and smallholdings (up to 5 ha) constituted nearly 60% of the total number of holdings.

The early 1970 s saw the enactment of the so-called ‘Property Title Act’ of 26 October 1971 on the regulation of ownership of agricultural holdings (Polish Journal of Laws of 1971 No. 27, item 250 as amended), aimed at organising complicated ownership conditions. In legal terms, the goal was to confirm the actual state of farmers' autonomous possession of real property constituting their agricultural holdings. When the Act came into force, they automatically became owners of such land. Deeds of Land Ownership (DLO) issued under the Act concerned plots, i.e. redefined units of land that did not refer to previously used cadastral land parcels. In extreme cases, register system maps were made using cadastral maps directly. Only then was the definition of the land parcel identical to the definition of the register system plot. However, it was not uncommon to create one register system plot from multiple cadastral parcels in southern Poland. It was an attempt to completely disconnect the new land register system from the land cadastre as a record of ownership boundaries (cadastral maps) and a record of ownership titles (land tax registers). The deeds of land ownership were very often issued based on a declaration of the interested party. It was not required to provide proof of title to land or verify boundary lines of the property. Even the data of the person the deed was issued to were not verified.

The process of ‘organising’ the agricultural holding ownership of autonomous possessors was generally completed in 1982. The Property Title Act was repealed, and unfinished cases were handed over to courts. The effects of the communist agrarian policy on the agricultural land structure were reversed after 1989 only partially. This moderate success can be expressed in numbers with the 2-hectare increase of the average peasant holding size from 7.2 ha in 1989 to 9.2 ha in 2012. Additionally, significant fragmentation of plots in Poland drove large numbers of consolidation projects. They intensified after the Second World War (Janus and Markuszewska, 2019, Markuszewska, 2013).

Poland was the first Central and Eastern European country to start sociopolitical transformations in the late 1980 s. Communism introduced after the Second World War regularly destroyed and eradicated private ownership. Several dozen acts, decrees, regulations, and orders were enacted and issued in the effort (Banski, 2017). Stalin personally introduced some parts of these acts of law on the expropriation of land. Some decrees provided for capital punishment for landowners who did not observe the new regulations (for example, in the 1944 decree of the Polish Committee of National Liberation). Paradoxically, communist regulations under which citizens were deprived of their property have not been revoked to this day (Golob and Lisec, 2022). Not all expropriated owners may seek recognition of their rights under applicable laws originating from the Polish People's Republic. What is more, many properties claimed by rightful owners were sold to third parties after 1989 (Łaszkiewicz, 2014).

The legal and socioeconomic transformations detailed above concerning the registration of ownership titles – or, in some periods, attempts to erase it – are the reasons why old Franciscan Cadastre documents (such as cadastral maps and land tax registers) need to be thoroughly analysed even today.

Section snippets

Methods

The present research focuses on a specific area and specific topics. From hundreds of cases attended by an expert witness, those that involved real property in the region of Galicia in southern Poland were chosen. This region was part of the Austrian Partition from 1772 to 1918. Just like other parts of the Austrian Empire, it had a uniform cadastral system. The examples of court cases are limited to those that concerned the determination of the legal status of real property. Only those

Examples of court proceedings and relevant surveying operations where Austrian cadastre maps were used

After the Second World War, the land ownership structure in Poland was reorganised through real property nationalisation: the State Treasury took over private property. Numerous acts of law were adopted to support the takeover of real property, often with no compensation at all. The primary objective of the state at the time was to take over large landed estates and exert pressure to stimulate development on nationalised land regardless of previous ownership. The pressure was evident from 1948

Discussion

Among all the roles of cadastral maps in the world, several have slipped the limits imposed by space and time. Some of them are control and management of state land resources and taxation. According to Kain and Baigent (1992), resource control is always more effective when information is presented spatially.

The discontinuity between the old cadastre and modern land register system in Poland results from forcibly introduced ideological formulas to mould the reality to the concept of a socialist

Conclusions

The cadastral map may seem to be a historical curiosity or a nice antiquarian artefact to a naïve observer or an interesting source for historians. Historically speaking, it was an important tool of state policy that supported control and power. The driving force behind the cadastral map is economic, social, and political power (Kain and Baigent, 1992). The map offered power through information, which enabled control over land resources for taxation purposes, for example. This is because

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Bacior Stanisław: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The author declare that he has no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Emeritus Editor Prof. Guy M. Robinson for their thorough work with the manuscript and for providing constructive and insightful comments on this paper.

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