Places, understood as meaningful locations, are important geographical components for people to organise their everyday lives. Over time and through recurrent experience, people build an emotional bond with places of varying spatial extent and ascribe meaning to them. This attribution of meaning to a location is referred to as the formation of a ‘sense of place’, and scholars from the fields of philosophy, sociology, psychology, and human geography are theoretically concerned with this concept. Largely unexplored, however, is how people translate a complex concept such as sense of place into reductionist representations of places like their geometric spatial footprints. Our planned contribution will explore this connection. Following an established operationalisation of sense of place from environmental psychology and using results from a web-mapping-based survey of Lisbon residents, our study will establish connections between geometric properties of recorded polygons and associated place-related survey responses. The geometric properties considered include shape and complexity measures such as the ratio of nodes to perimeter, the fractal dimensions of the polygons by estimating Minkowski-Bouligand dimensions, inferences about the level of detail of the mapped polygons, and other potential indicators. The results obtained in this way will contribute important insights to the ongoing and growing discourse on place-based information in geographic information science and will help planners and geographers to better understand the nexus between place and corresponding formal representations.

Albert Acedo, René Westerholt
Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, TU Dortmund University

 
ID Abstract: 448