Abstract
This paper proposes a socio-cognitive approach to how people assess the different neighborhoods of a city. The main objective is to show that beyond the meanings associated with each neighborhood, the way in which residents relate to and evaluate their own neighborhood and the city center influence how residents perceive and assess the other remaining neighborhoods of the city. The assessment of one neighborhood cannot be analyzed separately from the other neighborhoods. Cognitive processes of assimilation, contrast, contagion, and non-contagion contribute to the conceptualization of a city’s neighborhoods from the two main emotional and symbolic anchorages of residents. However, the implementation of these processes is conditioned by the socio-spatial situation of the interviewees. In this regard, a field survey of 320 residents was conducted in different neighborhoods of Besançon (in France), and allows us to show that the geographical anchorages of a resident’s own neighborhood and the city center are systematically more positively assessed than the other neighborhoods. The more these geographical anchorages are appreciated, the more the other neighborhoods are also positively assessed. The fact that it is impossible for a city’s neighborhoods to be autonomous is discussed in this paper in terms of socio-cognitive constructions of urban segregations.
Highlights
This contribution seeks to better understand the process by which residents assess neighborhoods, and to describe the relationships between residents’ home neighborhoods, the city center and the other socio-spatial neighborhoods in the construction of their opinion scale
For all the neighborhoods is even more robust when the analysis focuses on the home neighborhood rather than the residents themselves
The way residents of Besançon assess the different neighborhoods of the city follows distinct socio-cognitive processes that would probably be possible to identify in other cities of France or even the world
Summary
This contribution seeks to better understand the process by which residents assess neighborhoods, and to describe the relationships between residents’ home neighborhoods, the city center and the other socio-spatial neighborhoods in the construction of their opinion scale. This paper seeks to identify how the residents assess the city’s neighborhoods, and in particular how much they value them in a context of a segregated city (Najib 2017) These assessments cause cognitive processes of assimilation and contrasts on which the conceptualization of all categories is based, whether they concern physical objects (Tajfel and Wilkes 1963). Attachment and satisfaction vis-à-vis the residential neighborhood is part of the more general socio-spatial processes related to socio-spatial segregations These psycho-sociological variables do define individuals separately, but they participate in the construction of their relations and positioning in the physical and social space, as well as in the emergence of a socio-spatial structure at the city scale. Residential assessment seems to depend on a socio-geographical construction that, at least, maintains the existing socio-spatial segregation, rather than on a strict personal construction
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