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Place and city: merging our affective and social spatial dimension in the (smart) platial city
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Orientador(es)
Resumo(s)
We are living in (smart) cities that hold social-oriented promises but currently, most
of these cities disregard the humans. Although some alternatives are appearing such
as smart citizen-centric approaches, there is a lack of how promoting truly appealing
perspectives toward a common good or better social synergies. Thereby, smart cities,
with their associated Information and Communication Technology tools, are offering
new possibilities, but, unfortunately, citizens are not fully exploiting the opportunities
to empower themselves because, among other reasons, they are not aware of their
common spatialities. Currently, we are not able to operationalize the spatial humanurban
interactions regarding citizens’ cognitions, feelings and behaviors towards city
places (i.e., sense of place) and meaningful geographic human relationships (i.e., social
capital). Both concepts are significant as resources for an alternative landscape
based on human perception and organization of social interactions fostered through
the geographic place(s). In this research, we highlight the need to understand and
operationalize social concepts spatial dimension for a better understanding of a smart
citizen-centric approach which is mainly dependent on our capability to understand
platial urban dynamics. We conceptualized a (spatial) conceptual framework for sense
of place and social capital at the individual level to study their spatial relationship in
the urban context. We developed a web map-based survey based on the literature to
spatialize, characterize and measure sense of place, social capital and civic engagement.
Using the spatial data collected, we validated our framework and demonstrated the
importance to encompass the spatial dimension of social concepts (i.e., sense of place
and social capital) as pivotal aspect (1) to understand the platial urban dynamics; (2)
to provide useful social-spatial data to city processes (e.g. civic engagement); and (3)
to reveal the potential to include them in social theory and structural equation models.
Furthermore, we highlighted the crucial role of Geographic Information Science (GISc)
techniques to gather the spatial dimension of those social concepts. Although in this research we focus on the spatial relationship between sense of place and social capital
on civic engagement, the possibilities to relate our framework and methodology to other
city based-notions can bring to light new platial urban dynamics. This research wants to
open up the agenda for further research into exploratory place-based geography studies
and, simultaneously, sets up a common social ground to build other socially-oriented
conceptualizations or applications on top of it.
Descrição
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Information Management, specialization in Geographic Information Systems
Palavras-chave
sense of place social capital spatial dimension platial urban dynamic urban intelligence civic engagement