Property regimes reshape cities through boundary making, subdivision, consolidation, and the allocation of development rights, yet the spatial traces of these operations, especially parcel geometries and their afterlives in built form, remain difficult to reconstruct and compare at scale. Evidence is dispersed across historical maps and plans, cadastral surveys, land registers, court and governmental files, and architectural traces, with discontinuities in scale, terminology, projection, and status. This paper presents a method-first spatial humanities workflow that treats property lines as spatial evidence and translates them into a comparable sequence linked to ownership indications and built outcomes.

Using Jaffa and Tel Aviv as a case study area, the method begins from about forty historical maps and plans spanning the nineteenth century to the present, assembled as high resolution scans and stabilized with identifiers and provenance records. Maps are georeferenced in GIS with documented ground control points, transformation parameters, and uncertainty notes. Parcel boundaries and subdivision lines are traced into vector layers using a minimal schema emphasizing provenance, date, feature type, and confidence. Traced parcels are then linked, where possible, to land registration and selected juridical and administrative documents, treating cartographic and legal materials as complementary registers of claim making. Parcel evolution is analyzed for morphological signatures, then read alongside planning approvals and building histories for selected sites.

Early results include a pilot boundary atlas that makes long term parcel change traceable and reveals lags between legal and physical change, enabling systematic connections between boundary operations and architectural form.