An urban cadastre is the physical description of the land and real
estate tenure in a city. It contains graphic and textual information.
Graphic information includes the description of each individual parcel
and building, topographic features such as roads, rivers, contour lines,
additional information
such as cartographic grids, geodetic bench-
marks, etc. Textual information includes names of owners or occu-
pants, names of streets or areas of specific interest, main characteris-
tics of each parcel or
building such as the area, the fiscal value, the as-
sociated urban certificates, etc. Both types of information are linked
together and managed in a system known
as а cadastral information
system.
Most of the time, the cadastre is integrated with the property regis-
try, the legal registration of land and real estate property. Integration
of the cadastre with the registry creates a parcel based registry or a le-
gal cadastre. This guarantees the exact correspondence between phys-
ical and legal ownership.
In other words, wherever there is a parcel or
building, there are the corresponding titles or "legal tenure docu-
ments" registered in the property registry, and respectively, wherever
there
are registered titles, there is a unique parcel corresponding to it.
This is technically permitted by a unique identification number that
links unilaterally the parcel or the building to the title.
We can identify two categories of stakeholders involved in the
maintenance and use of cadastral information: information providers
and information users. Information providers include cadastral and re-
gistry services as well as private surveyors and notaries. The former
are responsible for the systematic production
and maintenance of the
information, the latter generally intervene for day to day individual
demands, such as private utility and facility companies that would
produce and need data for their own purposes like water tax collec-
tion. Information users include the private individual users, munici-
palities
and local communities, public and private investors, banks,
real estate and mortgage brokers, etc.
The successful urban cadastre depends upon legal frameworks, the
social assessment and participation as well as use of new technologies.
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