The project analyses the formal and informal structuring of the factor market of real estate as a prerequisite of its functioning and overcomes dichotomous patterns of interpretation (city vs. country, landed property vs. market, church vs. city). It is divided into three subprojects (TP) on the urban interest and rent market, on the semantics of the real estate market, and on the monastic management of urban landed property. The starting thesis for all TP is that the socio-cultural structuring of urban space and its actors determine the management of urban land and only thus constitute it as a "historical form" of an urban property market. This approach creates a common interpretative framework for the three subprojects, but at the same time can be adapted well to the different questions.

The project, which closely intertwines historiography and digital humanities, requires a dialogue across the boundaries of disciplines and scholarly cultures. At the same time, it contributes to a better understanding of premodern economies in precisely defined individual projects and understands them beyond neoclassical theorizing (homo economicus) in the analysis of practices, discourses and actors in their historically specific rationalities and interconnected constellations. In doing so, it continues a reorientation of research in economic history, which owes much to suggestions from cultural history, and develops it further.

In addition to this common conceptual orientation for the individual projects, the Historical Land Register of the City of Basel (HGB) forms the common ground on which the project is founded. Using digital technologies, AI-based methods and computer-assisted procedures, the project makes accessible the information on urban space gathered in the archive holdings from the 13th to 18th centuries and uses it for collaborative research. In the process, the transformation of sources into data allows for possibilities of analysis that were previously not possible. With the AI-based processing of the HGB in digital form, a source-based time-space matrix is created that can be used for the research questions outlined here as well as for future research. The sustainable use of this data is guaranteed by versioning documentation and by saving it at DaSCH.