Abstract
Landscapes are changing, with rural areas becoming increasingly urbanized. Children and adolescents are underrepresented in the sense-of-place literature. Our study aimed to understand how adolescent residents of a rural–urban transition area perceive and value their urbanizing landscape by examining sense of place and perceptions of landscape change. A Public Participation GIS approach, accompanied by a questionnaire survey, was applied to elicit responses from a sample of 747 students aged 12–18 in Colmenar Viejo, Madrid (Spain). Respondents’ sense of “self-in-place” or home range was small, around 1 km, although valued places were identified up to around 17 km away, and occasionally further afield. Most responses were associated with urban land, with clear difference between the urban core, strongly associated with emotions, and the suburbs, with activities. Functional locations (i.e. sports facilities) and places which were valued for their social meaning (i.e. shopping malls), could be differentiated. Students were perceptive about change processes in the urban area, but not about those on the peripheral semi-natural land. Younger children were less aware than older children of spaces outside of the town and carried out fewer activities there. Females carried out fewer outdoor activities than male adolescents. In contrast to the adult population, students were more strongly focused on urban areas than on their surrounding rural landscapes. Here, awareness-raising and incentives are needed, particularly those encouraging females into the use of areas beyond the urban land. Our results suggest a lack of meaningful integration between the core city and the periphery, with lessons for urban planners.
Highlights
Understanding young people’s perspectives is highly relevant given that it is their generation which will be the most strongly affected by the rapid, humansociety driven transformation of landscapes and ecosystems. This generation will be in charge of future decision making and holds strong potential for civic engagement (Gordon et al 2016) for instance in terms of landscape stewardship activities that may help steer human impact on nature in more sustainable directions. In view of these considerations, the study we present here used a participation geographic information systems (PPGIS) approach to elicit information from a sample of adolescents about the way they perceive and value an urbanizing landscape
Almost three out of four respondents (72%) had lived in Colmenar Viejo (CV) for at least 11 years; 41% of respondents said that they had no family member originally from the town
The points mapped by respondents were overwhelmingly located on urban land, with natural and agricultural land cover types underrepresented
Summary
For the first time in human history, more than half of the global population lives in cities. This trend is prospected to continue and even accelerate (United Nations 2014). Peri-urban areas around existing urban nuclei are dynamic, and typically see conversion of agricultural land to infrastructure and settlement areas and increasingly complex patterns of multifunctional land use (Simon 2008). Urbanization is considered one of the key global megatrends that modifies land use and land cover, with profound implications for biodiversity and natural resources (Plieninger et al 2016). It would be inadequate to discuss urbanization only in terms of its biophysical effects for land cover. Perhaps even more important is the intangible socio-cultural dimension, where urbanization plays a role both as a driver for and as an expression of changes in people’s relationship
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