The 1807 law ordered a parcel-by-parcel survey of the whole of France to give the land tax an equitable and verifiable base. Every commune was mapped at large scale and each of roughly a hundred million parcels was numbered, measured, classified and attributed to an owner in a register. The work took half a century and was carried into Belgium, the Netherlands, the Rhineland, northern Italy, Poland and, by imitation, most of continental Europe and its colonies.
The cadastre made landed property legible to the state, and so made possible expropriation with compensation, betterment levies, building-line legislation and eventually zoning — every instrument that needs to know exactly what it is taking or taxing. The cadastral parcel remains the atom of continental European planning law and of the digital land information systems built on top of it.
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