Perception Of Urban Space Research Articles

My neighbourhood: Studying perceptions of urban space and neighbourhood with moblogging

We describe a novel methodology that examines perceptions of urban space, and present a study using this methodology that explores people’s perceptions of their neighbourhood. Previous studies of spatial cues have involved a variety of tasks such as pointing and sketching to externalise participants’ internal spatial maps. Our methodology extends these approaches by introducing mobile technologies alongside traditional materials and tasks. Participants use mobile phones to carry out self-guided neighbourhood tours. We collected rich qualitative data from 15 participants during two workshops and a self-directed neighbourhood tour. Our study highlights the use of public and private landmarks, differences in spatial maps of rural versus urban dwellers, and individual variance in orientation strategies. These themes suggest guidelines for the design of technologies with personalised spatial profiles.

Non-auditory factors affecting urban soundscape evaluation

The aim of this study is to characterize urban spaces, which combine landscape, acoustics, and lighting, and to investigate people's perceptions of urban soundscapes through quantitative and qualitative analyses. A general questionnaire survey and soundwalk were performed to investigate soundscape perception in urban spaces. Non-auditory factors (visual image, day lighting, and olfactory perceptions), as well as acoustic comfort, were selected as the main contexts that affect soundscape perception, and context preferences and overall impressions were evaluated using an 11-point numerical scale. For qualitative analysis, a semantic differential test was performed in the form of a social survey, and subjects were also asked to describe their impressions during a soundwalk. The results showed that urban soundscapes can be characterized by soundmarks, and soundscape perceptions are dominated by acoustic comfort, visual images, and day lighting, whereas reverberance in urban spaces does not yield consistent preference judgments. It is posited that the subjective evaluation of reverberance can be replaced by physical measurements. The categories extracted from the qualitative analysis revealed that spatial impressions such as openness and density emerged as some of the contexts of soundscape perception.

The living city: Thirdspace and the contemporary geography curriculum

ABSTRACTWith the widening of the national curriculum, geography teachers in secondary schools can now develop their own curricula around a series of ‘key concepts’. This article describes how ideas from academic geography can be used to inspire and motivate students in secondary schools. Here, Soja's (1996, 2000) concept of ‘Thirdspace’ forms the basis of classroom-based activities for year 10 (14–15 year old) students. It focuses on perceptions of urban space which are conveyed through the ‘Thirdspace’ of illicit drug users in Edinburgh. The article indicates how those concepts and ideological traditions that underlie geography curriculum in schools, including the need to employ the ‘grammar’ of geography, have helped to inform the classroom-based action research described here. It also argues that introducing approaches such as Thirdspace in school geography may help to overcome the perceived irrelevancy of the subject by students and thus address the decline in the number taking geography at GCSE and A-level.

Public art as an educational resource

This article presents the results of a trans-disciplinary study focusing on public art and art education. It poses questions about public art as an educational resource, and acknowledges the need to clarify its educational role. The study investigated whether or not urban environments with numerous works of public art contribute positively to the development of visual literacy. A survey was conducted of fifth and sixth grade students in three schools located in urban spaces with a lot of public art and three schools in places with very little. A finding was that students who attended schools in environments with many public works were more skilled in the perception of urban space and more visually literate. This was due not only to their daily contact with them, but also to socio-cultural factors. Based on the results, the author produced an educational resource for teachers and parents interested in developing children's visual literacy.

Variation and Change in Land Use and Settlement Patterns in South Italy: Ascoli Satriano 1700–1990. The Making of a Southern Agro‐town

Based on both archival and contemporary fieldwork materials, this paper explores, over a 300‐year time span, changing perceptions of urban space and town–country relationships in the small north Puglian city of Ascoli Satriano. In particular, it examines the implications of the growth of an agro‐town economy in the late nineteenth century, and the short‐lived peasantization of a substantial part of Ascoli's rapidly expanding population. It argues that early anthropological attempts to delineate the main cultural and structural characteristics of southern Italian settlement patterns were premature, over‐generalized and failed to account for variation through time, and that the conceptual peasantization of the Italian south is, in part at least, the product of a historically foreshortened anthropological tradition that has habitually over‐privileged the longue durée.

Manuela: A social biography of war displacement and change in Angola

Until 2002 and for more than 27 years, Angolans lived through several wars that forced hundreds of thousands of rural people to leave their homes and seek refuge in safer urban areas. This paper tells the story of Manuela and of her family, the Silvas, who fled civil war in the Angolan rural interior to start a displacement journey that would take them to the city of Benguela. Their story provides an example of war displacement but it also shows how the experience of displacement and the way it evolves are not only marked by the immediacy of the events – the conflict, displacement camps, humanitarian aid, and so on. They are also framed by social, economic and cultural factors that have been historically constructed, such as rural–urban relationships and perceptions of urban space. The personal experience of Manuela in particular shows how these historical constructs shape experiences of displacement and frame choices and possibilities for action and change by the displaced.

Топика прославления города и восприятие пространства в Петербургском панегирике XVIII века

The article explores the representation of St. Petersburg in 18th-century Russian panegyric literature from the point of view of rhetorical topoi. The ancient and humanistic tradition of laus urbis provided established categories for the conceptualisation of the new capital that were first adapted by Gavriil Buzhinskii and Feofan Prokopovich. Following the development of specific St. Petersburg topoi in the 18th century the paper focuses on the perception of urban space both in panegyric literature and visual art. It shows how the point of view in the description of the city changes from Lomonosov's encomiastic prose and Makhaev's lithographies to Derzhavin's odes and Quarenghi's aquarelles.

Transdisciplinarity and its challenges: the case of urban studies

This article clarifies the distinction between unidisciplinary, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research about environment and human behaviour. One objective is to consider the challenges and opportunities transdisciplinarity offers in terms of the emergence of new ideas for theory and application. The costs and benefits, as well as the advantages and constraints of a transdisciplinary approach in the field of urban studies are then considered, and compared with multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. First, a brief history of the concept of transdisciplinarity is presented. Second, the scientific context (the unit of analysis, application and theoretical goal) is identified. Third, conclusions are drawn about the perspective that researchers need to adopt if a transdisciplinary approach is to be effective (looking for coherence versus paradoxes). All of these reflections on transdisciplinarity are supported by the research experience gained in studies on Canadian (Quebec) and French (Strasbourg) suburbs. The paper focuses on the representation and perception of urban space.

La perception des espaces urbains, essai sur les images de centres-villes

Perception of urban spaces : essay on the images of town-centre. Through many examples, the author tries to outline the images of town-centres. The contents of the image of a town-centre are not simple. Generally, its limits go beyond those of a centre defined by objective criteria. The perception of the centre plays a major part in the feeling of belonging to the town. But the image of the centre varies according to the individual's age and sex and his socio-professional category. There is often a discrepancy between the image of the centre and reality.