Abstract: The article discusses the debating urban dwelling area data as presented by the General Land Survey in the 18th century. The Russian city of that period was not mainly a commercial and industrial but an administrative center. Moreover, military and agricultural spheres played an important role as well. These factors predetermined rather free plans of Russian cities integrated in the landscape. An interesting opportunity for this comparison is given by the materials of the General Land Survey which recorded the state of most of the cities in European Russia before or during the urban planning reform of Catherine II in the 1770s-1780s. The article uses the materials of Economic Notes and city plans for four guberniyas of Russia's North and North-West: Vologodskaya, Novgorodskaya, Olonetskaya and Pskovskaya ones. The authors of these documents attempted to clearly define the boundaries of the urban dwelling area separated from various suburban lands. Thus, the ratio of the land "under a settlement" within urban dachas to a number of households can be an integral indicator describing urban dwelling area. On the basis of statistical analysis and data GIS cartography the authors conclude that the information about urban dwelling areas is better presented for old cities both in statistical and cartographic materials. As far as the cities founded during the gubernial reform of 1775 are concerned, the data are more likely to demonstrate the government's "projects" of the city development.

Abstract: The article characterizes the use of GIS-technologies in historical and geographical research based on statistical and cartographic sources of the late 18th – middle of the 19th centuries. These materials born by the process of General Land Surveying in the Russian Empire provide for mapping and analyzing economical and demographical processes on the micro level: uezd – vladenie (possession) – rural settlement. The research object is a spatial network of rural settlements and possessory dachas of Suzdalskiy Uezd of Vladimirskaya Guberniya – a territory in Central Russia that has long been developed. The main research aim was to carry out total mapping of the uezd. The article demonstrates the opportunities of combining data of the Economical Notes to the General Land Surveying of 1770s-1780s with those of 1850s Mende Atlas, describes the principles of attribute-value table formation and arrangement of GIS-layers by the research topic. The result of the work is a series of thematic maps demonstrating the main parameters of the region’s development in the late 18th century. These are population density, settlements network density and their size, arable land development degree. The results show that these indicators significantly varied even within a relatively small uezd territory. This allows the author to structure it into different northern and southern districts contrasting even as far as their development is concerned.