This project proposes to study city views from Ghent, created between c. 1500 and c. 1900, to trace long-term developments in the representation of the urban built environment. The case of Ghent is selected because of its rich corpus of city views and because since the early sixteenth century the city has been marked by a tension between medieval nostalgia and the realities of constant political, cultural and physical change. Borrowing a comparative perspective, we will test the hypothesis that Ghent city views can be read as visual comments on the city’s relation to its own past. Our methodology is twofold. On the one hand, we will use an object-oriented approach to analyze the production and reception of individual city views. On the other hand, we will study iconographies in the longue durée, thus challenging established historical periodization. In collaboration with the Ghent University Library, the city museum STAM and the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities we will build a digital corpus, both as a research tool and as the basis for an online exhibition that will present the relation between the physical city and its historical imagination in an innovative way.