Place-making, Policy, and Geographic Information: How People Respond to Urban and Rural Challenges in an Information Age

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Context: How people, communities, and policy-makers might create better futures for places is a complex question that can be informed by better geographic information to create more liveable places.Rationale: Recent smart-city initiatives (InnovateUK; Horizon2020) emphasize technological solutions in urban environments, potentially neglecting urban-rural differences and interactions, regional flows of people, employment, service accessibility, etc. There is simultaneous recognition that citizen engagement/stakeholders collaboration is vital (EUSmartCities Principles and Enablers for Citizen Engagement, 2015), as reflected in renewed interest in place-making. This approach, originating with Jane Jacobs, mobilizes community collaboration. Sustainable and inclusive planning creates a need to consider how individuals and communities value places and how geographic information can contribute.Aims: The project aims to develop knowledge and skills to involve citizens in developing more liveable places, realizing the nature and value of place-related information in integrated decision-making.Research Questions:What are the significant trends, drivers and challenges in urban-rural relationships, with what implications for place characteristics?How to effectively engage citizens in addressing local challenges through their sense of place?How can geographic information better integrate with processes of engagement between stakeholders, sharing information and representing place to inform policy-development and decisions affecting place?Scope: The project concerns the interrelationships between contrasting Welsh urban areas and their rural hinterlands. Cardiff, Swansea and Aberystwyth have different contexts and structures, with different relationships between urban centres, suburban peripheries, and rural surrounds. The project will examine such relationships, how they affect the places people relate to, and how places affect peoples expectations of local services and policies.Methods: An innovative methodology will combine ethnographic work to understand community contexts; GIS and space-syntax methods to understand connectivity between urban, suburban, and rural locations; and interviews/focus groups to verify and probe hypotheses derived from initial scoping. Engaging policy makers will provide opportunities to influence policy-making and public engagement and observe the results.Design: Immersion in literature on place-making, policy-making, and mixed-methods approaches (including Public Participation GIS) will refine the substantive and comparative aspects of the research design (effecting a trade-off between the thematic issues addressed and geographical areas included). Initial work will deploy ethnographic/focus-group methods to understand the urban and rural fabric in which people live. Policy-makers will be recruited to understand their views on the role of place in policy-making. A third strand will assemble digital geographic information to relate initial results to the physical and historical fabric of particular places.